#2Sides: My Autobiography by Rio Ferdinand Read Free Book Online

executive David Gill, and think: ‘He must be thinking the same thing.’ And I’d think the fans must be thinking the same thing. Going round and round in my head were the thoughts I thought people must be thinking about me. Even though they quite possibly didn’t think any of those things.
     
    And eventually … well, I got lucky.
    Just when I was getting really depressed, and thinking it was all over, the doctor at the club, Dr McAnally, found a clinic in Milton Keynes called the Blackberry Clinic. They specialise in doing scans so they can see how your back looks when it moves. There’s an injection they give you into a small area where the pain is and they use the scan to watch how your back moves under stress. They found that certain ligaments in my lower back were very weak and that was the reason for all these problems – the groin and hamstring and calf problems too. I’d been compensating for the back weakness by making all the forces going through my body go to the wrong place.
    The cure was surprisingly simple: injections. They injected a sugar formula to stiffen the ligaments. No cortisone, no drugs; just a sugar to strengthen the ligaments that attach the bones together in my spine. It was almost like an immediate ‘Eureka!’ moment. My back suddenly felt secure again: I didn’t feel the instability; I didn’t feel like my back was about to break. So I had a course of injections – six injections over six weeks. The pain was unbelievable. But you know me! Being the man I am, I coped – no problem!
    Actually it hurt like hell. But afterwards I was up and running, and it was the most fantastic feeling. I now appreciate things I used to take for granted – like being properly fit, playing at the highest level, and competing for titles and trophies. In 2010 I played a load of games, and the season after that I made the most appearances by any of our defenders – and we won the league. I still need painkillers occasionally and twice a year I have to have top-up injections. But the nightmare was over almost as suddenly as it began. I came back; I proved I could still play at the highest level; I proved the doubters wrong.
    I felt great again.

On Racism
    My Mum’s white
    My Dad’s black
    I see things from a white perspective
    And a black perspective
    Just respect each other
    That’s all I want for my kids
    I don’t think it’s a hard thing to ask for
1. LULLED
    My Mum and Dad’s story would make a film. They’d be walking together and passers-by would spit on Mum because she was walking with a black guy. Other times they’d be stopped by the police. Dad would be treated badly by the police and others on the estate.
For being with a white woman
. And Mum would get treated badly too. By the police.
For being with a black guy
.
    It sounds like a story from apartheid South Africa, doesn’t it? But that was London in the 1970s. That’s the kind of shit my parents had to go through to have my brothers and me. Now I’m a Dad and my wife is white. And I don’t want our kids to have to go through the same crap.
    When I was growing up in Peckham there was plenty of racism around but you never knew when you’d run into it, or how toxic it would be, or exactly how to react. My estate was a real mixture of people: Irish, English, African, Caribbean, Turkish. Mostly we all got on well and played together. But there was also an older set of guys we’d play with every now and again who were all white. They were mostly Millwall or Arsenal fans and you’d definitely hear racist comments from them sometimes. One time we were playing and these guys started making monkey noises at us.
Ubu babba, Ubu babba
… that kind of thing. We were much younger and smaller than them, so it really wasn’t a fight we could physically fight. But we had something in common as well. Football. They were good at football, and so were we. So we’d play against them. Or, to put it another way, we’d play
with
them. Football was