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

a bringer-together. Football trumped everything else. We might not like these guys sometimes but we’d play together for hours at a time. And while we were playing we’d be knitted together. But you’d hear the odd racist comment, especially if we were winning. So then the question became: what are we going to do about this? Well, all we really could do was say, ‘fuck off.’ It wouldn’t go further. In my mind, I always had the ultimate back-up. If things got proper serious, I could’ve told my Dad and he’d have sorted them all out. But I never did, because I wanted to keep playing football against better players, with these guys. So we kept it in the background and never spoke about it.
    Of course it was different if anyone off the estate ever said anything like that. That was a fight straight away. Looking back, it seemed a weird way to deal with that situation. But when I was younger my first reaction when someone said something racist was always to fight. When I got older, I’d exact revenge in a different way. I’d think: right, I have to win this game now. Or I’ve got toscore. I remember going for my first training session at Charlton. One of their kids called me a ‘black bastard’ and we got into a fight immediately. The response of their coach John Cartwright was brilliant. He stepped in, took my side, made the boy apologise and banned him for a few weeks. I hadn’t even signed for Charlton. I was impressed.
    On the estate Mum was magnificent. My next door neighbour called me a ‘black bastard’ and when I knocked on the door for her daughter to come out and play, I heard her say, ‘don’t let that nigger in the door.’ I went back to Mum and said, ‘what’s a nigger?’ I didn’t know. I was only young. Mum went straight round, kicked the door down and dragged the woman out and made her apologise to me.
    Much later, I became aware of racism in professional football. I’d seen that picture of my hero John Barnes contemptuously back-heeling a banana some racist had thrown at him on the pitch. I knew players like Paul Ince, Brendon Batson and Viv Anderson were getting grief. I’d seen stadium racism first-hand too, when I went with a mate to see Millwall play Derby. Derby had four or five black players and they were all playing well. This geezer in front of us was going, ‘those fucking black bastards, send them back to where they’re fucking from.’ Then he turned around and noticed me. There was a policeman standing right next to me. I looked at the policeman and he looked through me like nothing had been said. Then the guy says: ‘not you, mate, just the ones on the pitch.’ I just got up and said to my friend: ‘I’m leaving, man. I can’t deal with this shit.’
    I never heard anything like that at West Ham. There never seemed to be a problem with being black and playing for West Ham. In the 1970s they had Clyde Best and Ade Coker. Paul Ince had come through there, so had George Parris. West Ham alwayshad a few black players. I felt very comfortable at the club. And by the late 1990s and 2000s things seemed to have improved all over the country. You weren’t hearing racist comments at grounds in England any more. If incidents happened abroad with the national team or the Under 21s, as happened in Spain and Serbia and other places, the FA responded strongly. The media seemed okay on the subject, too. I thought our game, and our FA, were doing well and should be applauded. Organisations like Show Racism The Red Card and Kick It Out seemed to be doing a good job too, and I did events for them. I remember doing a campaign with Thierry Henry and telling people: ‘I’m not seeing racism in the stands,’ and ‘England has done a great job.’
     
    Then, on 15th October 2011, Manchester United played Liverpool at Anfield. In the sixty-second minute, as Patrice Evra marked Luis Suárez at a corner, they started speaking to each other in Spanish. I was a couple of yards away and