by Ian Holloway
With Kim engaged, the tragic loss of Mickey, and Tim losing his boy, it put my life into perspective and I had to get things absolutely clear in my mind as to what I really wanted to do, where I wanted to go and who with. I got on with the 1984/85 season and channelled all my aggression and frustration into football and probably had one of my best seasons for Rovers, capped off by scoring the winning goal in the Bristol derby at Eastville. I thought of Mickey and Tim’s lad as the Rovers players and fans went mad and it clarified everything in my mind, and I decided I was going to dictate my own future as best I could from there on in. Dave Williams left the club and Bobby Gould returned as manager and after that I started having major rows at work. I told Gouldy about what was happening and how I felt about Kim and that it was destroying me, but he either didn’t understand or more likely didn’t care. “Go on holiday, get your head together and if you happen to catch anything from being with another girl, just get a jab in the ass. Stop being such a bloody soft arse.” Terrific. Cheers gaffer – next time I need good, solid advice I’ll know to keep walking when I come to your door. He offered me a new deal with my contract now expired, but any slim chance that I might have stayed disappeared when I was on the end of what I felt was a total stitch-up.
The lads who had come through the ranks a year ahead of me had been given a loyalty bonus of £5,000 for staying with the club and agreeing new deals after their initial contract expired. When it came around to my turn to sign again, the loyalty bonus had been taken out of the agreement. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been with Rovers since I was nine and was prepared to give them the best years of my career, but all of a sudden the loyalty payment is off the menu? I told Gouldy, “Look, Bob, I’ll sign the new contract provided I get the same as Geraint Williams and Mark Hughes did when they re-signed.”
He said, “We’ve changed that now. It’s not my fault, but we’re not doing it anymore.” I told him I wouldn’t be signing anything then, and he told me I couldn’t do that. “I can and I am because it’s not fair and it’s not right.”
My situation with Kim had come to a head anyway and I’d been thinking of moving because I hadn’t been getting on with Bobby Gould at all but that was just a minor irritation compared to the bigger picture. I can understand some of the things he did and said now, because I’m a manager, too, and it wasn’t anything personal on his part or mine – I’d just had enough.
Kim, as the song goes, was always on my mind, but instead of pining away for her from a distance and watching her slip ever more out of my life, I decided it was time to grab the bull by the horns and tell her exactly how I felt – how I’d always felt and that I was leaving. I plucked up the courage I needed and went round to Kim’s house, a little angry and very emotional and said, “I know you’re engaged and you won’t understand why I’m doing this, but Mickey Barrett died suddenly and I don’t want me to die or you to die without you ever knowing the truth. The truth is, I’ve always loved you – I always have and always will – and I know I can’t change things because you’ve chosen him, so I’ve got to leave. I can’t stay in Bristol with you still here and I want you to be happy, so I’m going. I just needed to tell you that.”
I left her standing at the door, turned and headed home. The time was right to move on. I asked Gouldy to be placed on the transfer list and hoped the move would come quickly. I didn’t like the person I was becoming and wasn’t going to stick around and make things any worse. A fresh start was what I needed and I couldn’t do that by staying with Rovers and living in Cadbury Heath. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was to be the beginning of an even more dramatic chapter in my life, when being away from home would actually be the last thing I needed.
Chapter 5: Holloway Prison (London)
I was placed on the transfer list and it wasn’t that long before Dave Bassett from Wimbledon came in for me with an offer of £40,000. Bobby Gould tried one last time to get me to stay and even said he could sort out the £5,000 loyalty payment, but I told him he could stuff it up his arse. He then accepted Wimbledon’s offer, thus creating a new Rovers transfer record in the process. I agreed a three-year deal, though I’d have probably signed for Hartlepool at the time, if it meant being out of Bristol. As it was, the Dons were in the old Second Division and had been moving up the leagues impressively during the previous few years so it looked like a reasonable career move. Lennie Lawrence’s Charlton had shown strong interest, too, but I spoke with Gordon Bennett, who was by that time Rovers’ chief executive, and he thought Dave ‘Harry’ Bassett would be a good man for me to work under, so that’s where I went.
Harry’s first words to me had hardly inspired me and in truth, left me wondering why he’d bothered to sign me in the first place. With his assistant manager at his side, he pointed to him and said, “He tells me you’re the next Brian Marwood, but I think I’ve already got him in Dennis Wise, but he’s away in Sweden right now with England. His arsehole is on fire because of you. I’ve seen you once and I didn’t think you did very well, but he tells me that after watching you 14 times, you’re the one we should get.” I just said, “Oh, cheers.” But it didn’t stop me signing because of the old I’ll-show-you streak.
Chairman Sam Hammam grabbed me on my first day at the club, got me in a headlock and punched me a couple of times in the ribs saying, “You gonna be all right with us, eh?”
I moved to London and felt positive about the future and myself for the first time in what seemed like years. Training began in early July and was going well and the world felt all right again. I scored a cracking goal on my debut during a pre-season friendly, but Alan Cork was ruled offside. He was in an offside position but was nowhere near to interfering with play, but the ref wasn’t having any of it. I was gutted, but the other lads just thought it was funny, but I suppose I should have known what the infamous Crazy Gang would be like. Then, in the same game, I burst through and was pulled down in the box, but the referee, fellow Bristolian Roger Milford, waved play on. Those two decisions – a goal and a penalty – could have changed my time with my Wimbledon, I’m a big believer in the path of fate and destiny, but as it was, the road ahead would be as bumpy as the Plough Lane pitch. I actually scored seven goals in pre-season – and all of them from right wing – so from a playing point of view, things had still started positively. I went home to see my family whenever I got the chance because it had been the first time I’d ever lived anywhere other than the family home. I’d been a Wimbledon player for no more than a month and I drove back to Bristol to see mum and dad and was hit with a sledgehammer as I settled down for a cup of tea.
“I’ve got to tell you Kim’s not very well, Ian,” Mum said.
“What do you mean she’s not very well?”
“Well I bumped into her mum and dad and they told me she’s got a problem with one of her lungs.”
It turned out that she’d been on holiday with her folks and her lung collapsed, but they couldn’t work out why. She’d been out of breath and tired all the time and even needed a piggy back up a gentle slope because things had got so bad, so she was admitted to hospital to undergo tests and it was decided that she had to have her lung
drained off.
The news that she was ill made my mind up – I had to see her and sod the consequences. I made my way to the hospital with mum and found out which ward she was on. I just wanted a few moments alone with her, but as I walked in the room, her fiancé’s brother was sat there. Kim looked really pleased to see me (she later told me the one person she wanted to walk through that door was me, silly old sod), but I think she was a little embarrassed that I was there, too. It’s fair to say that this lad’s brother and I didn’t see eye to eye because he’d been round to warn me from seeing Kim in the past, but I told him I would only stop if she asked me to stop seeing her. “Would you give up on her if you were in my position?” I asked. Of course, when they became engaged, I stopped the visits myself and took it tha
t Kim just hadn’t had the guts to ask me not to see her again. I told his brother that I was only visiting Kim because she was poorly and he said that his brother wouldn’t have a problem with that – not as though it would’ve stopped me because in all honesty, I didn’t give a toss what he thought. Still though, this guy was there in the room with us and the private moment I wanted and needed so badly just wasn’t going to happen. He started chatting and laughing with Kim and I looked at her and realised I didn’t know what had been happening in her life for the past few months and I felt I didn’t know her anymore, a feeling that absolutely killed me at the time.
I had to leave Bristol and head back to Wimbledon knowing that there was nothing I could do about the situation, which, of course, had all been originally instigated by my immaturity a few years before. It’s fair to say I was in bits and up to that point had never felt so bad in my life. My whole world had stopped, but my mum was brilliant, as ever, and she said, “This isn’t about you, now. Hopefully she’ll get better and you can go in and see her again.” I said I couldn’t, not while her boyfriend was there – how could I? I wasn’t even part of her life anymore. About a week later my mum called saying I had to go back home because Kim had asked to see me and her mum wanted to see me, too. Then, the words that I’ll never forget, as she added, “She’s finished with that lad and wants to start seeing you again.”
“What do you mean finished with him?” I asked.
“She’s given him the ring back and doesn’t want to see him anymore.” Apparently Kim had tried to end it before she’d fallen ill, but he’d blackmailed her by saying he’d kill himself or suchlike, but now her life was on the line, his threats didn’t seem to matter and he was gone, exit stage left as they say. So I drove home to see her and she asked if we could start seeing one another again and that was it – it was the easiest question that I’d ever been asked.
I’d go back to Bristol whenever I could while the doctors tried to get to the bottom of what was wrong with her. She was allowed to go home and to go on days with me and one occasion, Kim turned her head to look at something and I noticed two lumps on her neck. “What are they, then?” I asked, and she touched them gently.
“I don’t know,” she said, but whatever they were, they didn’t look right. The following day, the doctors did a biopsy on the lumps and the results revealed she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I’d just got Kim back after nearly losing her to another bloke and now I had the very real possibility that I could lose her to cancer. It was unbelievable.
The focus and clarity Kim had from that moment on was utterly inspiring because she told me she was going to deal with this illness and meet it full on. She started her treatment once a week and I’d travel home and be there as often as I could while she underwent the course of chemotherapy. On each occasion we tried to make the most of our time together because we never knew whether or not each meeting would be the last one. We had some fantastic times, sharing moments neither of us will ever forget, not knowing if the future we yearned for together would ever become reality or not. Kim later told me that those days we planned had given her a target to aim for and no matter how poorly the treatment made her feel, she knew that the next course would also be just a part of another day for us to be together. She looked forward to it as much as I did, though I felt incredibly guilty that I wasn’t on hand all the time, and tried to get home as much as possible. It was hard to travel back and forwards all the time because all the while, I was trying to carve out a career with Wimbledon and during the season, your time’s not really your own. My energy levels were in the red and I was running on fumes. I was tired all the time and had little or no strength, something I’d never suffered from before, but it would be a while before anyone would actually diagnose my condition not as exhaustion, but as glandular fever.
I either slept after training or was spending every spare minute travelling back to Bristol and that didn’t go down too well with the Crazy Gang, who regularly had little get-togethers, partly why their team spirit was strong back then. I was ostracising myself away from the other lads, unintentionally – though I couldn’t honestly give a shit about that, even to this day. I had something much more real and important to deal with and if they saw me as an outsider who wasn’t going to come in, so what?
My brother John lived close to Wimbledon and as I was in digs at first, whenever Kim was well enough to come up, we stayed at his flat. We were just about getting by, but I felt physically weak and mentally all over the place but I had to keep going. What other choice was there?
Wimbledon Football Club was quite a strange place to be and the Crazy Gang were suitably led by Harry Bassett, who was crazier than anybody. Harry was an open and honest bloke whom I really liked. They had a good squad, too, with the likes of Dennis Wise, Lawrie Sanchez, Wally Downes, Stuart Evans, Nigel Winterburn, Alan Cork and Kevin Gage. I was finding training difficult because of the fatigue I was suffering from and I’d wake at night sweating, with my sheets soaked through. Harry told me to ease off a little in training, thinking that the effort I put in was exhausting me.
“No, I’m fine and that’s how I’ve always trained,” I told him. “There’s something wrong with me.” Behind my back, however, the physio was telling Harry that there was nothing wrong me and that it was more likely to be down to the fact that I couldn’t handle playing at a higher level, cheeky fecker. They told me I was dehydrated, had a chest infection and also diagnosed me with several other ailments, but basically the truth was my immune system was knackered by the glandular fever, which nobody had yet picked up on or even considered. Geoff Taylor was on the coaching staff and he was a big help during my time there. The lads used to call him ‘Ballbag’ because after every training session he’d shout, “Put them bloody balls back in the bag will you?” He’d been with Harry for years and also worked with the kids a lot and he was probably the only person who showed me a little bit of sympathy regarding what was happening in my life at that time. Mick Smith and Lawrie Sanchez were different class, too, because they would do anything to help me and stayed out of the piss-taking and wind-ups. I made other good friends in Kevin Gage, Glyn Hodges, Nigel Winterburn and Stevie Galliers, but the fact I couldn’t really socialise with the squad and get to know them better meant I was viewed as some kind of outsider. I wasn’t a country bumpkin, but I just thought some of their antics and humour went over the top. I became the butt of a couple of the lads’ jokes and though I’ve always believed I’ve got quite a good sense of humour, some of them went too far. I felt it was a London thing, if that makes any sense.
“What’s it like dating a baldy bird,” was one of the comments in reference to Kim’s chemotherapy. Wally Downes and a couple of others found that really funny and in later years I would confront him about it. He has since apologised, but it was clear we were never destined to be great mates. There were a lot of piss-takers and banter always flying around and they even had their own pub, The Plough, at the end of the ground. They’d arrange little get-togethers there but I never went along to any of them because I didn’t have the time and I’d put any one of them in my shoes and I bet they’d have done exactly the same thing.
The one occasion I did go out with the lads, I realised not being out with them regularly was a bonus after one of them spiked my drinks. The next day I had to be brought off at half-time, but none of them told Harry why I was struggling and that it hadn’t been my doing. There was definitely a bullying culture at the club and if you were on the receiving end, as I was quite often, you’d better have thick skin otherwise they’d destroy you. Wally liked to dish it out and he could be quite ruthless with some of the things he said, and you either came through it and became one of them – or you didn’t. I wasn’t used to it because it hadn’t been like that at Rovers, but I accepted that was their way. Harry had a couple of chats with me about it, saying I was too honest and had to lighten up, and then came out with the classic line, “You’
ve got to be more like Wally.” I didn’t want to be anything like Wally because I cared about people, and for my manager to tell me that, it was a bit much. I understood what he meant, thinking I had to be crafty and have a bit more about me – or at least more than I was showing at the time, but he was the last person I wanted to be like. Some of the things the lads did to each other, like cutting the bottom of your jeans pockets so your money falls through or cutting out the crotch of your pants so when you pull them up they go right up to your chest, just didn’t make me laugh, even though it was happening to other lads. Even if I had been in the right frame of mind, I still would think it was childish at best, because it’s not my type of humour. Lawrie Sanchez was on the end of a lot of Wally’s wind-ups but he wasn’t having any of it and just let it wash over him. He’d read a book, listen to music or concentrate on the successful wine bar he owned – he didn’t give a toss what they thought and I admired him a hell of a lot for it. Lawrie was in the team, though, and doing well, so he also had that to fall back on – I had nothing. But, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I learned from those experiences, and even though I initially wanted to fit in and be one of the lads, I don’t think I was ever accepted in that respect and it was a hard time for me.
Chapter 6: Bee Stung
All the travelling and worry was exhausting every bone in my body, but the love of the game drew me in, even though I felt like death warmed up, and on one occasion I could’ve got into serious trouble with Wimbledon – had they ever found out.
