Red Machine

by Simon Hughes

  McMahon’s ire turned towards Grobbelaar.

  ‘Steve blew his top and swung a punch at me,’ the Zimbabwean continues. ‘So I head-butted him and bust his nose. He whinged to Kenny [Dalglish] and the boss tried to blame me. But the receptionist of the hotel confirmed that Steve was the aggressor.’

  Grobbelaar roomed with Craig Johnston.

  ‘The attitude from the decision makers was probably “Let’s put the two freaks together.” Craig was very temperamental and steadfast in his opinion. He was a constant moaner. After the fight, he refused to room with me.

  ‘“You know these Scousers,” he said. “Macca will try to get into our room and attack you.”

  ‘He must have been desperate because he moved in with Steve Nicol for the night. Nobody ever wanted to room with Stevie because he was a bloody nightmare. All he did was eat crisps and talk.’

  At 3.20 a.m. Grobbelaar was awoken by somebody knocking a lampshade outside his door.

  ‘I hid behind the door in the bathroom and watched the person creep in. Craig was right in his prediction – he was canny like that. I tapped Macca on the shoulder and smacked him across the nose for the second time in the night. He never messed with me again.’

  Grobbelaar, with his penetrating gaze, earring, handlebar moustache and peculiar accent, bursts into unruly laughter at the story’s end with all the intensity of Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining. Sitting there with a Peroni and wearing an unprepossessing suit, he contemplates his vertiginous rise from the troubled land of Rhodesia – a rise that is normally the preserve of Hollywood parables. For someone who endures a reputation as a jovial individual, his tale from the start is notably a dark one.

  ‘It is very true that my story is different to a lot of other footballers,’ he reflects, reaching for his beer with a right hand that could pass for a hydraulic press. ‘You couldn’t compare it to a Hollywood story, though. No, no. In Hollywood, when you’ve made it to the top – you’re there for life. In the UK, people look for a way to try to knock you down.’

  Speaking to Grobbelaar for just a few minutes would remind any supporter that being a Liverpool player isn’t always as wonderful as it is sometimes portrayed. ‘When the times are good, it’s a bed of roses,’ Jamie Carragher once told me. ‘But when times are tough, it becomes a bed of thorns.’

  ‘People think that because I was at Liverpool for such a long time – in a period where the club was very successful – that it was bliss all the way through,’ Grobbelaar says. ‘But at the start, because of poor performances, I received death threats. I played for the club through two stadium disasters then later was falsely accused of fixing matches. I loved my time there, but it would be a lie to say it was always a walk in the park.’

  Grobbelaar remains one of football’s most distinctive characters. I meet him inside The Monro, a pub that has had more facelifts than Pete Burns and which is close to Liverpool’s city centre. In the ’80s, it nestled amongst forbidding, abandoned warehouses. Now, the area has been gentrified and renamed The Ropewalks – a district meant for yuppies where in reality there are more empty faceless apartments than people.

  After our engagement, Grobbelaar – a natural raconteur – is spending his evening at a charity event being held at a cabaret lounge owned by Ricky Tomlinson. He’s been on the after-dinner circuit intermittently since 1983. ‘When I started, Bob Paisley told me, “Stop doing them – you’re not a legend yet.” To be fair to Bob, he was probably right. I took a lot of those kinds of things on at the time because I didn’t know when my football career was going to end, so I needed to make money and support my family. Having grown up in Africa, I understood that a working man’s life was precarious.’

  Grobbelaar was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1957. His father, Hendrick – a Dutch Boer – took a job as a railway engineer and moved the family to rural Rhodesia when Bruce was two.

  ‘My great-grandfathers had fought on opposite sides in the Boer War and my grandfather played the saxophone in a circus band. The surname Grobbelaar is roughly translated in English from original Dutch as “clumsy”, so I think I was struggling from the start to rid myself of the clown tag that plagued me throughout my career, especially during the early days at Liverpool.’

  The family soon relocated again, this time to the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury (now Harare), where they lived in the comparative luxury of a three-bedroom semi-detached house.

  ‘There was another addition to the family by then,’ Grobbelaar remembers. ‘My mother, Beryl, decided to take on an African houseboy called Lummick, who acted for us as a poor man’s au pair. To British people, this may seem like black slavery, but in Rhodesia it was an accepted way of life. A family’s wealth was often judged by the number of houseboys they had living in what would usually be an extension built into the garage at the bottom of the garden. We had no garage in our semi-detached house and a very small garden with just one houseboy. I suppose that tells you where our family stood in terms of wealth.’

  Hendrick Grobbelaar eloped with a mistress when Bruce was ten.

  ‘My mum brought us up alone in a duplex flat. She was a single parent with three kids, including my older sister and baby brother. It was tough. She was a good bookkeeper and worked in a shoe shop. She’d often take us with her and we’d act as stock-takers – just to instil how important it was to look after your money. It was an eye opener, because I had no male role model in my childhood. If I look back now, I’d say my mother was my hero.’

  In his early teens, Grobbelaar was a rebel.

  ‘My mother was going out with this chap that I didn’t like. He was a very dominant person. So one night at 11.30, I decided to escape. I jumped out of my window, climbed down the drainpipe from the third storey of a tenement block with my haversack and headed towards the main road that would take me the 175 miles towards the town where my father was. I was so desperate to get out that I took the bus, which was exclusively used for blacks, at a time when trouble in the bush was starting. I must have been completely crazy, because blacks were killing farmers and I was travelling through a farming area on a black bus. But I didn’t think about that.

  ‘I arrived at 4.30 in the morning. My stepmother answered the door and gave me a bed. Then before my dad went to work the next morning, he woke me up, took me outside and tied me to a tree before beating me with a hosepipe. He said, “Never run away from your mother again – you only have one mother.” It was a harsh lesson.’

  After three months, Grobbelaar returned home and resumed his education.

  ‘I wasn’t as conscientious as I should have been,’ he concedes. ‘My O level equivalents were mediocre, and that is mainly due to the fact that I more interested in chasing girls. It’s the oldest thing in the world – men think they’re invincible and can go all over the place. My father was one of those said people. I was the same. I saw how my father was with women and I followed. My sister was older and she had good-looking friends. That was when I started the chase.’

  Grobbelaar regularly received the strap in school: ‘As many times as it was permitted by the teachers’ union – sometimes more’, and was threatened with expulsion on several occasions, notably for once winking at an attractive-looking female student teacher. Most days, his mind drifted towards the fields outside where he played cricket, rugby and baseball as well as football. Later, he was offered a scholarship in America at the North Adams State College for his baseball skills. By then, though, he had aspirations to forge a career in another sport.

  ‘The first time I touched a football was when I was a baby,’ he says. ‘My mother put me in a harness with elastic, almost like a bungee cord, and I’d sit down and kick the ball against a wall while she played hockey in goal for her team. I wondered why she spent so much time stopping goals rather than scoring them. I think that’s why my instinct was to become a goalkeeper.’

  Soon, Grobbelaar’s efforts for the school team encouraged an approach from a local boys’ club in
Salisbury.

  ‘Three thousand would turn up for our home games,’ he recalls. ‘All of the players were white, and whenever we played the blacks they would bring busloads of people and the attendance would shoot up. When we went out to the townships, there would be more than 30,000 there.’

  Racism was on every street corner, but it was something Grobbelaar only began to analyse when he started to play football competitively.

  ‘From an early age we were taught in school that there was a fundamental difference between black people and white people – that we were superior. This view was made even more clear by the way blacks and whites went to separate schools and there were higher standards in the latter. Integration was absolutely not encouraged. This all meant that, eventually, the better jobs went to the whites, because they were educated, and the cycle perpetuated itself. I had no choice in where I was born and brought up, so the sight of Lummick and his children walking around with no possessions was normal to me. It was only later through travel and experience I learnt that this was all wrong.’

  Segregation in Rhodesia was made even clearer in social situations.

  ‘Africans were not welcomed in white bars, and though they could stay the night in certain hotels, they could not eat in the same restaurants. In cinemas, a black could show a white man to a seat but not sit in it himself. The rules on public transport followed a similar pattern.’

  The biggest social problem Grobbelaar noticed in his younger days was not, however, the black and white issue.

  ‘Most of the problems were with the coloureds,’ he insists. ‘They were the offspring of black and white parents – what everybody called the “half-caste” kids. There was a team in the league called Arcadia, and they were all mixed-race boys. Whenever we played them, it was a war; and whenever the black teams played them, it was even worse. Whenever the blacks played against the whites, it was a simple game of football.’

  Later, Grobbelaar joined a predominantly black side called Highlanders on loan from Salisbury County.

  ‘It made me appreciate who I was and who other people were. Just like when I jumped on the bus to travel to see my dad years before, the creed and colour of skin wasn’t something I thought about. I used to ride my bike from school to the townships, and all of my white student friends thought I was nuts. Most of their parents wouldn’t allow them anywhere near them, and even my mother wasn’t keen at first.’

  Upon signing for Highlanders, Grobbelaar was given an interesting signing-on present.

  ‘They offered me a cow, a goat and a sheep,’ he smiles. ‘Then the second question was whether we wanted them alive or to collect them at the abattoir. We took the goat alive and the other two dead. My mum went with me to pick them up and for the first time genuinely started to talk with the blacks. She realised they were just as normal as us.’

  Grobbelaar impressed at Highlanders. So much so that his parent club, Salisbury, decided to cash in on the teenage goalkeeper.

  ‘They sold me to a team called Chibuku for $15,000. The money paid for a new cocktail bar at Salisbury’s social club. Chibuku was a brewery side, and they gave me a job as a junior draughtsman and a sheet metal worker. I didn’t like the manager of the football team, though, so after six weeks I told my mum I was coming home, with the idea of going back to South Africa to find a football team. It was fate that the day after I made the decision to leave I received a call from the army informing me that I was required for military service.’

  With the Bush War raging in the provinces of Rhodesia, Grobbelaar was on patrol on the Mozambican border by the end of that month. The conflict was in its eleventh year by the time Grobbelaar became a part of it, and tensions were as high as ever.

  Grobbelaar admits that he found it easier to look on the enemy as ‘terrorists’.

  ‘The terrorists hid in border countries like Zambia as well as Mozambique. They were backed by the Soviet Union and trained by North Korea, so they knew what they were doing. The motives were simple – their opposition to Ian Smith and his white government – but the situation was complex because of the sheer number of different terrorist groups. Mugabe and his ZANU PF party was one of the biggest, then there was Nkomo with the PF-ZAPU and Sithole with ZIPRA. To us, they were terrorists, but it was clear they thought of themselves as revolutionaries.’

  The next two years would change Grobbelaar’s outlook on life.

  ‘How could you forget seeing many of your best friends killed? How can I forget or forgive myself for killing a fellow human being, even if it was in a war? I still have nightmares about it. Everything else in life seems insignificant compared to my years in the forces. When you’ve had to track terrorists down and kill them, watch people take drugs because they’ve gone crazy … when you’ve eaten insects because you’ve run out of rations … football is hardly a matter of life and death. If you lose in a cup final, you can still go home to your family and eat a nice meal. If war teaches you anything, it teaches you how to appreciate life and all the good things that come with it.’

  At first, the prospect of death seemed a long way off.

  ‘During bayonet training, our superiors tried to make it more serious by making us scream, “I’ll kill you, you black bastard,” as we stabbed the bag. It made it all feel very surreal and, personally, I thought that the worst thing I’d need a bayonet for would be to open a ration can.’

  Everything changed on Christmas Day in 1975. Grobbelaar was 18 years old.

  ‘They started mortaring us, so we had to shell-scrape bunkers for us to live in. From there, we became a mobile unit like the SAS. Some people went away to train as medics, others as snipers, drivers and bomb experts. I was a tracker.

  ‘The war for me became evil. I thought about life. Why couldn’t these people sit around a table and sort it out in a civilised way? When a prime minister [Ian Smith] comes out with a statement saying that there will never be black rule in Rhodesia – not in his lifetime or his children’s lifetime – it makes you wonder how that can be morally possible. There were only one million whites in the country and more than ten million blacks. If you take the women and children out of the scenario, we were outnumbered one to three in the bush. We were sent out for slaughter. We were cannon fodder.’

  Grobbelaar was ordered to kill.

  ‘When you’re eyeball to eyeball with the enemy, you know that one of you is going to die. But that doesn’t make it any easier in dealing with the guilt. My time came when we were helicoptered into a village on the Mozambican border with the sole instruction of shooting anything that moved. It was a terrible scene. When we landed, the stench of the dead made a lot of guys throw up. There were charred bodies everywhere from the incendiary bombs. Within seconds, the snipers were firing on us and one of my best mates was paralysed from his waist down. One of the enemy came at me and I shot him. I felt nothing but relief at the time.

  ‘I’m not proud of what I did in the army, but when the military tells you to do something, you have to do it. Any military person will tell you that. What I saw on both sides was horrific – the nature of war. What is happening on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan is no different to what happened on the borders of Rhodesia and Mozambique. Although I think it would be good for teenagers to go into the military to learn discipline, I wouldn’t wish anybody to go into a combat situation when it’s not your choice. I lost a lot of friends.’

  Grobbelaar witnessed the outcome of a mutilation.

  ‘One of our group was shot and killed, so his best friend lost it and started firing his machine gun up into the trees. Instantly, one of the terrorists fell to the ground, followed by another who was still alive. The episode seemed unreal – as if I wasn’t there. Our man chased after the terrorist, and by the time we caught up to him he had already cut off his genitals.’

  Death made the prospect of eating Mopane worms, flying beetles and snake steaks seem easy.

  ‘To say it changed my life is an understatement. From then on, I set out t
o live life to the full.’

  Grobbelaar was discharged from the services in 1978, having not played football for two years.

  ‘I soon got engaged to a girl and she gave birth to a boy,’ he says. ‘They needed provisions and I wanted to support them. An offer came from Durban City to go and train with them with a view to signing, so I took it straight away without thinking about it. For 18 months, I sent half of the money I earned back to Bulawayo where my mum was living then to try to help her out as well.’

  Grobbelaar found out the child wasn’t his.

  ‘It was my best mate’s. They’d got together while I was in the Bush War. That was the end of that.’

  After this, Grobbelaar, still waiting to play his first game for Durban, guested for Amazulu in a minor cup competition.

  ‘They were the local black team, and for the tournament I was playing in the authorities encouraged multi-racial teams. Like a lot of these events, it was done for cosmetic reasons as they tried to reduce racial tensions. The chairman at Durban City didn’t like me playing for a black side.’

  To supplement his modest income, Grobbelaar worked in a clothes shop before becoming a car salesman with Toyota. ‘The Durban fans loved me because I gave the biggest discounts in town. It meant they all came to buy their cars off me and the company made a lot of money off it.’

  But the military came calling again.

  ‘The South African army said I had six months to make up my mind whether I stayed in the country and did military service with their army in Angola or go elsewhere. They found out my record with the Rhodesian army as a tracker and felt I could be of some use to them. That’s when I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.”’

  Problems with visas and work permits meant that trials at West Brom under Ron Atkinson, or ‘the Incredible Hulk’ as Grobbelaar calls him, and then Derby came to nothing. Instead, he agreed to sign for Vancouver Whitecaps in the North American Soccer League.