Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  The House of Windsor has recently behaved like a dysfunctional family with both the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York displaying all the worst traits of our age of self-gratification. Even the most committed monarchists must have had their faith in the institution badly dented by the grisly pantomime cast of Major Ron, James Hewitt, Johnny Bryan, Steve Wyatt and Budgie the Helicopter. The mystique that is so essential to the monarchy has been exploded by the ill-advised parade of public confessionals from the younger members of the Royal Family. Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution, wrote that ‘we must not let in daylight upon magic’. With Dimbleby, Panorama and Hello!, we have had a blowtorch.

  The crowds that gathered at a respectful distance outside Westminster Abbey in June 1993 were mostly men and roughly of an age close to that of England’s fallen football hero. The crowds that hurled flowers at the hearse carrying Diana’s coffin away from the Abbey and up the M1 were mostly female and roughly of an age close to the princess. Bobby Moore might have been a celebrity but people didn’t load on to Bobby Moore the empathies that people thought Diana had for them. Without necessarily trying to do so, she convinced a lot of people that she was a warm-hearted, special woman who had suffered herself and that was why she understood their pain, wherever that pain had come from and whatever had generated it.

  For those football supporters who had followed the game in the immediate post-war years, Bobby Moore’s service was an elegy for their – swiftly passing – generation. They might have been loud, they might have been given to chanting at matches but they were not histrionic in the way that Diana’s people were. The Queen’s dignified retreat from the public gaze was not what her subjects appeared to want in 1997. The country had changed dramatically in the past few years and at the root of that change was television. It was television that began the elevation of David Beckham from footballer to cultural icon and it was television that dictated the second half of Gary Lineker’s professional life.

  The offer to Lineker to play in the J-League was part of a successful master plan to win selection as the co-host with South Korea of the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Nagoya Grampus Eight, sponsored by Toyota, was one of ten founder members of the J-League along with Nissan Marinos and Panasonic Gamba Osaka. There was very little attempt to disguise the essentially commercial nature of football in Japan. Lineker’s first flying visit to Nagoya lasted four days and was conducted with his now customary charm, efficiency and flair for public relations. The brief visit comprised two press conferences, seven magazine interviews and three television appearances. The recent England football captain became the first British footballer to exploit his talent and celebrity status to an extent that is commonplace in sport on the other side of the Atlantic. As in Barcelona, the Linekers would attempt to immerse themselves in the language and culture of their new home:

  Japanese was different. It was ten times harder. I could survive in Japanese but I couldn’t really have a conversation. I enjoyed my time at Grampus Eight, though. Everyone was very polite, it’s a very safe society but a very alien form of thinking. The food was great. I wouldn’t have wanted to have lived there for ever but for a couple of years it was an interesting experience. I could certainly have lived for ever in Barcelona.

  It was while he was in Japan that Lineker’s post-football career started to take more definite shape. He had been concerned for some time that he did not fall into the trap of failing to take due precautions against the day when his football skills were no longer in demand. He was also aware that the impact of unemployment after retirement after a life of constant, frantic action could have unfortunate social consequences.

  It’s not easy to find something else to do after football. There are only so many coaching and managerial jobs; there are only so many jobs in the media. The divorce rate of players between thirty-five and forty is astonishing – it’s over 70 per cent. Players who have finished miss the adrenaline rush you get when you’re playing, they no longer get the affection they used to get from people, they’ve become accustomed to a certain standard of living when they were earning well – and so have their wives. Several try a business and for one reason or another it goes wrong. Some turn to drink, then the divorce happens and another whole load of cash goes and suddenly they’re in trouble. A lot of players now are earning so much they think it’ll never happen to them and the sensible ones will put enough aside to be comfortable for a long time, but if you spend as much as you earn and then you stop earning at that level, life can get very difficult. Life after football is difficult. I was lucky enough to find something I could do and the industry is well paid. I’m one of the lucky ones. Obviously, others have gone into coaching or management and done really well but a lot of ex-players do really struggle. There’s a lot of life after thirty. Nothing lasts for ever, especially in sport. It just goes on without you. Somebody takes your place in the team and you’re dropped unless you choose to retire.

  His agent, Jon Holmes, had been applying his mind to the problem for even longer:

  The big leap forward for me was when we got They Think It’s All Over on to television. A man called Richard Edis rang me up and said he was doing a new sports quiz for the radio but he knew nothing about sport. ‘It’s a satirical sports quiz and we’re doing a pilot with Des Lynam, Rory McGrath and Rory Bremner. I’d like to get Gary Lineker involved.’ I said to him, ‘It’s obvious you don’t know anything about sport because if you did you’d know that he’s currently in Japan. But I can get you Will Carling and David Gower.’ He didn’t know who they were either but he was happy with those two. We recorded it in the Paris Studio in Lower Regent Street. It was good and two days later I was meeting Brian Barwick, who was then Head of BBC Sport, and I told him about it and suggested he got it on to TV but he said he’d already talked to Des and Des didn’t think it would work on television. I then met [Alan] Yentob and talked to him about it and in the end I was the one who brought Hat Trick and Talkback together. There was a big fall-out and Jimmy Mulville didn’t like [the producer] Harry [Thompson]. McGrath had been involved with Hat Trick at the beginning and he’d gone over to Talkback so there was all that history as well. They made various pilots, none of them successful, but eventually Lineker came back and it started to work. The sportsmen needed to be credible stars otherwise the jokes wouldn’t work. Being on that show taught Gary how to tell a joke and make people laugh. It was good preparation for his sign-off lines and his cheeky sense of humour.

  Lineker is generous in acknowledging the significant influence Holmes has had on his career:

  Jon doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He’s been a huge influence on my career, not on the football obviously, and not just negotiating contracts but on career moves and guiding me in the right direction. He was extremely helpful when I moved from one career in football to the next in television. It was something I was always interested in, back to my mid-twenties. In the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, I spent a lot of time with the journos and I was always interested in how they wrote their copy. As with the radio and TV guys I was always happy to do interviews with them and I already knew I had no interest in becoming a manager or a coach. In 1990 during the World Cup, they named me ‘Junior Des’ and it wasn’t because I was going prematurely grey. In my time as a player we stayed in the same hotels so you bumped into them all the time. It’s all different today. Even then you knew who the one or two were who you couldn’t trust but then you wouldn’t sit with them. I talked to Jon and he was saying that I should do a bit of radio while I was still playing and write a few columns. I started writing for the Observer when I was in Japan. Before then I’d had a ghosted column in the News of the World. The Observer wanted something on the World Cup; I was a bit bored so I said I’d write it for them and they seemed to like it and I ended up doing a weekly column for them for a couple of years. I don’t write much now because I am so busy with other stuff. I write all my own TV scripts but writing columns in newspapers is quite time-consuming.

/>   Jon Holmes is as intrinsic to this book as our four England football captains. And that is not just because of his handling of Gary Lineker’s career, masterful though that has been. It is because of his vision that took root in the 1970s that he could create a company in England like Mark McCormack’s International Management Group in which the sportsmen he chose to represent were not only outstanding on the sports field but had the kind of character that he could finesse into an image that would attract commercial sponsors and broadcasters.

  It was a conscious exercise in the global marketing of a squeaky-clean image. He knew that if he got that right, financial success was assured. Unlike so many agents obsessed by the short term, Holmes never became infatuated with money. He was so appalled by how little David Gower earned from playing cricket that he took no percentage at all from Gower’s cricketing earnings. What interested Holmes was what he could do with Gower off the cricket field.

  Holmes was public-school-educated but the experience appears to have inculcated in him a taste for rebellion.

  I couldn’t get into Repton which became trendy because [the Yorkshire cricketer] Richard Hutton went there and I developed a grudge against Repton, so I went to Oundle, which was a rugby-playing school, but I got everyone playing football against the local youth clubs. This was all part of my rebellion against the establishment because I wouldn’t play organised rugby and I wouldn’t play organised cricket for Oundle. Mostly it was an excuse for drinking and smoking. It was definitely not a rebellion against the family. There was a strong rebellious streak in the family – my uncle was quite radical and went on Ban the Bomb marches. Another uncle, Eric, was a conscientious objector to National Service, having been Head Boy at Wyggeston School. The sixties was about Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Billy Liar. I identified totally with everyone who was rebellious. I was always in trouble at school for all sorts of insurrections. I was a conscientious objector to doing Latin. I wanted to go to a dirty northern university where Finney and Sillitoe and Barstow went. Then I prospered academically in history and politics because I was motivated. I had a teacher who was a jazz musician but converted to teaching history and he inspired me. The housemaster wanted to get rid of me but the headmaster was quite an enlightened, liberal man who abolished fagging and he liked me despite the mayhem I caused. Once I stole the school bell, which seemed to me the very foundation of the school. One night I got up, stole it and threw it in the river, went back to bed and stayed awake for the rest of the night awaiting the mayhem the following morning. And then the bell rang. I couldn’t believe it. They’d got a spare one and nobody batted an eyelid.

  This instinctive rebelliousness served Holmes well in later life. He was never overawed by the biggest names in sport and he had an instinctive scepticism about the establishment. He was, in his own way, a maverick but one with a great sense of responsibility to his clients and a vision of where he could take them. Holmes emerged from Leeds University with a more than respectable second-class degree in politics, even though following Leicester City’s cup run to Wembley in 1969 had caused him to miss vital tutorials. There followed a brief and unsatisfactory encounter with the Leicester Mercury: ‘I soon realised that these provincial sportswriters were losers and some of them were quite unpleasant – they hated graduates. I quickly got quite disillusioned with that. They wouldn’t let me write about sport. I was writing about dogs crapping on the pavement.’

  When he was twenty-two, a year or so after graduation, a chance encounter at the golf club with a man who started talking to him about what Mark McCormack was doing with his sports management business led to Holmes joining Peter McGarvey at Benson McGarvey, which specialised in the growing field of financial services:

  He had got connections at Leicester City who were a good side – Worthington, Weller, Birchenall, Shilton, then Gower came along. I am quite good at not being overawed. I just felt at home in that world. The players seemed to accept me quite quickly because they realised that I was street smart in the way they weren’t and I’d been educated to a higher standard than they had been. I could talk their language, that was key. I never had a public school voice despite my mother’s attempts to send me for elocution lessons. That was a complete failure. She blamed my father for taking me to football matches which was where I learned how to speak ‘like that’.

  Holmes believes that footballers are not as thick as they are usually portrayed, but that most of them are ill-educated and unsophisticated. He was aware from the start that the end of a footballer’s career frequently meant the end of their significant earning power. He did not believe that this had to be the case:

  Mind you, there are plenty of people you can’t educate but the smart ones like Lineker respond. Footballers didn’t have to open post offices, work in pubs or own newsagents. They were dreadfully exploited by the clubs. I saw lots of examples of managers saying, ‘OK leave that to me, I’ll make sure it’s in the contract’, and when we came to sign it wasn’t there. There was no proper pension system, there was no proper injury insurance so as soon as you were injured and no use to the club you got booted out – just like what happened to Brian Clough at Sunderland.

  Holmes was interested in those footballers who were likely to rise to the top of their profession and would respond to being managed. His first client was Peter Shilton, a man of enormous professional ambition, to which Holmes responded. Shilton was the obvious heir to Gordon Banks and he was on his way up as Holmes was starting in business.

  I always thought that Brian Glanville was the top man in his profession so, at the start of my representation of Shilton, I rang him up and said I wanted to bring Shilton to have lunch with him. I thought that if Glanville came out and pushed Shilton to be the England no. 1 goalkeeper this will have an impact. I think it possibly did. Shilton was the best goalkeeper I’ve ever seen and most people who played in that era would agree. I can remember seeing him play for Leicester Boys and talking to him afterwards. I was trying to manipulate the press by getting the players and the media together. There was a producer called Jock Gallagher at BBC Pebble Mill and he agreed to put Shilts on one of Terry Wogan’s very first shows for Radio 4, called Wogan’s World. At that stage Shilton was more articulate than he later became and Gallagher said to me that he wasn’t too bad. I said I’d like him to do more radio and get better at it because this was putting into practice what I had learned from studying McCormack. What made me think that McCormack was really clever were things like the Big Three, capturing the sport and turning it into a television programme. Superstars was a perfect example of what I called ‘junk sport’ – sport made specifically for television. And Pro-Celebrity Golf. You only became a big star by being on television and most footballers weren’t on TV. I would ring up [DJ and radio presenter] Pete Murray’s producer and offer to bring Shilton down to London to appear on The Pete Murray Show. At that time, I’m talking about the 1970s, they only had showbiz people on programmes like that, they didn’t have sportsmen. I said to Shilts that when he finished he could become someone like Jimmy Hill or Richie Benaud or someone like that. Shilts was a star and there were few of them around at the time. It didn’t work and I suppose I got fed up with him because he wasn’t as professional off the pitch as he was on it. Gary was. I remember looking at Shilton’s autobiography and he said something like ‘Robert Maxwell offered to pay off all my debts but I turned him down and Jon finally got fed up with me and went off to manage Gary Lineker whose personality was much more suited.’ There’s no harm in Shilton at all but it didn’t work because he has his own well-documented personal demons.

  Shilton turned into a trial run for the succession of high-profile clients who adorned Holmes’s short but select list. Apart from Lineker, there was Tony Woodcock, David Gower, Michael Atherton, Will Carling, Neil Webb, Lee Chapman, Gary McAllister and John Barnes. Holmes was never the sort of agent desperate to get himself on to Sky Sports News. He was much more comfortable on BBC2 app
earing on The Money Programme when it produced a segment on the relationship between Gary Lineker and Walker’s Crisps.

  As Holmes’s plans went into operation, Lineker is happy to acknowledge that he enjoyed a fair amount of good fortune along the way to becoming a television professional:

  I was blessed with an ability to score goals and blessed with an ability to be calm enough to do the job I do now. Calmness probably links the two. I’ve got the ability to cope with pressure and I got the breaks. I didn’t get injured until right near the end of my career, I scored goals at the right time; when I went into TV, the training worked. I got the opportunity because of what I’d done in football but then I really had to work hard. I had to work much harder then than I had done in football in many ways. I presented on radio and I was a pundit on television; then Bob Wilson left the BBC to go to ITV so I slotted into Football Focus and three years later Des Lynam leaves the BBC just as I felt I’d done enough to justify being given that role. So I’ve been lucky with timings and what other people have done to influence my career.

  Jon Holmes was not the first agent to look for commercial opportunities for his clients away from the sport that had made them famous. That honour belonged to Bagenal Harvey and his representation of Denis Compton. After Harvey came agents like Harry Swales who represented Kevin Keegan and Ryan Giggs with some success, and Ken Stanley, who looked after George Best from a small office in Huddersfield. Best was the first player to be confronted with significant opportunities to build a career off the field, which turned the self-effacing Stanley into a figure of curiosity for Holmes.