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  A Hero and an Inspiration

  McIlvanney was to remain a close friend of Ferguson even after going into print with elegant advice to him to quit after United’s early exit from the Champions League in 2005. He had written of Ferguson that ‘his achievements are already so monumental that recent events could not conceivably cast a shadow . . . a personally choreographed exit would be bathed in the dignity and honour that are his due . . . he must never run the risk of being dispatched by remote control from Florida . . . there must come a time when the best and bravest of fighters shouldn’t answer the bell’. Although I have never been emboldened to consider myself a friend of Ferguson’s, let alone an intimate such as McIlvanney, I have known Ferguson for longer than most observers of the game.

  And to me, despite the odd professional kindness Ferguson has done, he has always been more of a hero and an inspiration than a chum. This is not to imply that the choice has been offered. One of my favourite stories about Ferguson is of the journalist sent to Manchester to take over the United beat for a tabloid. At the first Ferguson briefing he attended, he boldly advanced through the group of colleagues, shook hands and introduced himself. Afterwards, he quietly returned to Ferguson. ‘Alex,’ he said, ‘now that we’re going to be working together, I wonder if I could have your home phone number.’ Ferguson’s reply was more of a derisive snort and, as the chastened scribe withdrew, he added: ‘And don’t read too much into the bloody handshake either!’

  Ferguson is a hero and inspiration for a variety of reasons. Above all is his gift for time management. I confess that, when the day contains too much to contemplate, I find myself asking: ‘What would Ferguson do?’

  An especially memorable conversation with him took place towards the end of 2008, when a mutual friend was dying. Hymie Wernick was a car dealer in Manchester whom I had met many years earlier through a fellow journalist, Roy Collins. Hymie was not hard to like and yet, whenever I drove from London to Manchester on journalistic duty, I cursed myself for the common affliction of never quite having time to see him. Once I asked Ferguson how Hymie was. ‘Not good,’ he said, pausing before entering a press conference to impart every detail of Hymie’s medical condition, including, at length, the certainty that it was terminal. When he added that Hymie was in reasonably good spirits but occasionally forgetful, I realised that Ferguson had been a frequent visitor to his bedside. Ferguson, with infinitely more calls on his time, had proved an infinitely better friend than me.

  One of Ferguson’s friends in high places – at least when Tony Blair ran the country – was Alastair Campbell and often Ferguson would define ‘the real friend’ for him as ‘the one who walks through the door when the others are putting on their coats to leave’.

  Anecdotal evidence of his willingness to stretch the day for a good reason was frequent. Walking to Piccadilly railway station after United’s late victory in the derby at the City of Manchester Stadium in April 2010, I was assailed by a voice from a van halted in traffic: ‘Hey, lay off our Fergie!’ I guessed it was to do with an article linking the unpopular ownership of United by the Glazer family with Ferguson’s erstwhile friendship with the Irishmen – the racing people Magnier and McManus – who had sold out to the Americans in 2005. The piece had irked a lot of Ferguson’s admirers. So I walked over to have a chat with the man and only then noticed that the van had been converted; he and his companions were physically disabled. ‘Fergie’s brilliant’, I was told. ‘He’s always got time for us.’

  There are some, on the other hand, with reason to attest that time, tide and adulation have soured him. In 2008, though obviously comfortable in an extended television interview with Sir David Frost, he reacted with sudden aggression to a reminder that Gary Lineker had criticised him for maintaining a refusal to speak to the BBC. Lineker, he said, after what appeared to be a hasty search for a verbal weapon, ‘has had stuff stopped going in the papers’. Ferguson went on to claim that he never bore a grudge, adding: ‘What I’m doing to the BBC is a stance.’ Funny though it sounded, it was a genuine distinction to draw.

  A good man or not, Ferguson is very much his own man. This sets him apart. In more than time management, he makes his own rules. In the early years of the present century, the entire British nation seemed in a permanent state of astonishment; everything was ‘awesome’ or ‘amazing’. Ferguson, seldom bowing to fashion in words or anything else – his hairstyle remained as it was in his playing days and his dress sense owed much to the neat Crombie coat once proudly purchased with a Rangers wage – actually did amaze people. Even McIlvanney must have been surprised by the response to his well-intentioned piece in 2005. Ferguson had been beaten by José Mourinho to one championship and was to lose out again in 2006 – before winning three in a row, plus a second European title.

  Ferguson time somehow permitted hobbies. There was the horse-racing, to which he gradually returned, mixing business with pleasure, after recovery from a chastening defeat in his court case with Magnier and McManus over the stud rights to Rock of Gibraltar. There was wine, in particular French red, in which he took a keen interest after being introduced to the nuances of its character by an hotelier while in France to watch Montpellier before a European tie in 2001; coincidentally or not, his favourite wines often turned out to be very expensive ones. And there was politics.

  Michael Crick, the distinguished broadcaster, journalist, United fan and chronicler of Ferguson’s life, once described his politics thus: ‘Like Alastair Campbell’s, Ferguson’s socialism is pragmatic: like a committed football fan, his prime concern is to see the team win.’ To that I should add that he is tribal. His responses are less those of an intellectual than a partisan. In an interview with Campbell for the New Statesman in 2009, he declared: ‘I grew up believing Labour was the party of the working man, and I still believe that.’ The first reader to respond emailed from Glasgow: ‘Ferguson is remembering a dream.’

  Nor, despite his disparagement of Margaret Thatcher – ‘Don’t compare me with that woman,’ he once snapped, after being told that each of them got by on a few hours’ sleep a night – has his stewardship of Manchester United involved much restraint on the extremes of capitalism, as the Glazers and, before them, Magnier and McManus, would delightedly testify.

  But then Ferguson might be quite happy to accept a definition of a football club as a profit-making dictatorship. In a Times article about Mourinho’s pre-eminence after success with Inter Milan in the 2010 Champions League final, Matthew Syed wrote: ‘Ferguson’s tendency is more towards megalomania than narcissism, but the consequences are the same. The central tenet of life at Manchester United is the primacy of Ferguson.’ This was hardly unique; ‘Arsenal’ could have been substituted for ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Arséne Wenger’ for ‘Ferguson’. But the subtle difference between Ferguson and Mourinho was identified: Ferguson’s is a dictatorship of conviction rather than ego.

  You get a sense of it in his fondness, perhaps unwitting, for the phrase that leaves no room for argument; he often suffixes an assertion with something like ‘there’s no doubt about that’. The more substantial a man, however, the more he must be challenged and it is precisely because of the tirelessly sharp-eyed predatory tendencies that have helped him to thrive – to Ferguson, referees and all other incarnations of footballing authority are so many mice and voles – that we must watch him like a hawk.

  The Rich Loam of Home

  There may never be another Ferguson. There will certainly never be another football environment like that which nurtured him.

  By the time of his arrival at Aberdeen, where he was to complete his journey to a wider recognition, he had spent two decades in the Scottish game. He had played for six clubs and managed a further two. Yet today you could take a car after breakfast and with a bit of the planning required to avoid traffic delays, complete a tour of his career to that point before returning for supper. For the Scottish football in which he grew up had a wonderful intensity. You got an awful lot
of passion and commitment to the acre.

  It was embodied by Hampden Park, the great Glasgow arena where world attendance records had been set. Ferguson had contributed to one. As a teenager he had joined the crowd of 135,000 who watched Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 in the European Cup final of 1960, a match of unforgettable spectacle and significance: everyone who saw it (Ferguson and his fellows on the slack-jawed slopes, we who could only gape at our monochrome screens) fell deeper in love with football, just as we were to do when colour television brought us the majesty of Brazil in the 1970 World Cup.

  Yet the 135,000 had rolled up that May evening in 1960 not knowing what they were to witness. Scots in the overwhelming majority (relatively few, in those days of more carefully limited tourism, would travel from Germany or Spain for even such an occasion), they had come out of a pure and simple desire to appreciate the game’s finest. There was no national or sectional interest, no cause to support except the game itself. It was just that Real had become champions of Europe in each of the previous four years since the competition began and Eintracht had looked such promising challengers in disposing of Scotland’s champions in the semi-finals, beating Rangers 6-1 at home and, as if that were not swashbuckling enough, 6-3 at Ibrox.

  Ferguson had been to the second Rangers match and, as a young aspirant with Queen’s Park, who played at Hampden, was admitted free to the final. He recalled that the Queen’s Park boys had trained at adjacent Lesser Hampden the night before and taken the opportunity to gaze at the stars during their final pre-match session: ‘It was fairytale stuff. I’d been to the semi-final and, as Rangers fans and young boys, we thought, “The Frankfurt players are gods, they must win”. They got slaughtered 7-3! This game epitomised all the dreams of European football.’

  So fitba’ for its own sake drew Ferguson and his horde of compatriots and never in the world, surely, had so many turned up to watch clubs play a match on a neutral ground. Nor, given the small and diminishing number of stadiums with a capacity of 135,000 (Hampden now holds 52,000), can it have happened since. Scotland is entitled to be proud of that and to cite it as evidence when people ask why the nation has spawned so many football managers of distinction: not just Ferguson but Jock Stein and Matt Busby, who preceded him in guiding teams to the summit of the European game, but Bill Shankly, who laid the foundations at Liverpool. Even after the flow of players to England began to slow in the 1980s (the widespread presumption was that the youngsters who used to practise for fun had found other things to do, including nothing), Scottish managers continued to affect the great issues of the English game: Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool and then Blackburn Rovers, George Graham at Arsenal.

  Scots care about football. Ferguson was raised in an environment of nurture. It was like putting a seed in rich loam. To that extent, he was lucky.

  It used to be said of the French that, if they could play football as well as think about it – Frenchmen were fundamental in conceiving just about every form of international competition – they would be unstoppable. Between 1984 and 2000, they won the European Championship twice and the World Cup, hushing the gentle jibe.

  Only briefly could the Scots swat away accusations that, for all the achievement of their managers, their players seldom obtained a close view of the glittering prizes. Stein’s Celtic put paid to that for a while. In 1967, seven years after young Ferguson had marvelled at Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskás in the all-white of Real, the green and white hoops of Celtic thrilled in Europe in sweeping aside Internazionale in a Lisbon final that seemed to establish verve and adventure as the height of footballing fashion.

  And, for all Celtic’s Irish tradition, they did it with a team drawn from within a thirty-mile radius of Glasgow. West Central Scotland also produced the great managers. Not just Stein but Busby and Shankly, all of whom flourished as Ferguson grew up. Only one other bit of Britain could offer a challenge to its status as a breeding ground: the relatively short stretch of England’s north-eastern coastline that, having given us Bill Nicholson, came up with Don Revie and then Brian Clough.

  You could have a sense of the intensity of Scottish football even in the rural east of the country, where a bike ride into Dundee’s hinterland might take you to a crossroads with a signpost bearing mileages that might be mistaken for a slightly implausible set of lower-division results: Arbroath 7, Brechin 4, Montrose 6, Forfar 8. But the heavily industrial West of Scotland, Ferguson’s country, was always different, harder, special, and somehow those Lisbon Lions of Stein’s came to represent it, to embody its potency.

  For all the beauty and greatness of Real, which was to survive all the changes of a half-century that encompassed globalisation, Celtic on their greatest day had no need of an Argentine-born Colombian who was later to represent Spain (Di Stefano) or a galloping major from Hungary (Puskás). Celtic were the glorious harvest of the loam in which Ferguson grew and Ferguson saw it all burgeon at close quarters, even becoming a close friend of Stein’s. In 1983 he was himself to lead a team of Scots into conflict with Real in a European final in Gothenburg and prevail, before reaching the outer limits of what could be done at Aberdeen and graduating to the wider world in which borders were there only to be crossed and cultural differences so taken for granted that Ferguson’s players came to Manchester United from almost every ethnic source.

  Almost. I write with fingers trembling in uncertainty, for this is 2010 – but thus far United have yet to sign an Inuit.

  IN THE BEGINNING

  A Govan Childhood

  There can be no doubting Sir Alex Ferguson’s affection for the Govan of his youth. His autobiography paints such a touchingly romanticised picture – streets bustle with organ-grinders, singers, fruit-sellers and bookies’ runners – that the reader is sorely tempted to accept his comparison with a movie Manhattan. But to state that he was a product of his upbringing would be simplistic.

  The Govan of Ferguson’s happy childhood, after all, produced countless men who were to make no discernible mark on the world beyond the shipyard cranes, men for whom ambition, as he writes with admirable sensitivity, was practically synonymous with survival. A proportion are deemed by Ferguson to have wasted their lives through excessive drinking (and again he makes the point without a trace of loftiness or scorn) or even to have gone to prison. Others have advanced with equanimity and been casually insulted, throughout Ferguson’s career, by the ascribing of fiery lapses to his background; to them it is no excuse for a belligerent or bullying manner.

  Ferguson was born on New Year’s Eve 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, more than two years into the Second World War (lest there be any assumption that, with an early outburst against perceived injustice, he started it). He and his brother, Martin, a year his junior, grew up in a modest but respectable tenement household, sharing one of two bedrooms. There was an inside lavatory but the bath, a zinc tub, had to be used in the sitting room. The boys were scrubbed once a week and given simple principles, which, far beyond childhood, they remained touchingly eager to follow. Ferguson was sixty-seven when he told Robert Phillip in an interview for the Scottish newspaper the Sunday Herald: ‘The greatest fortune in life is to be born into a loving family.’ His parents had instilled ‘all their traditional working-class values – discipline, good manners, honesty, decency’. When his father said something, he meant it, but he was ‘a very, very fair man’. He was ‘a stickler for punctuality’ and one of his favourite sayings had been that ‘if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well’.

  Ten years earlier, in Managing My Life: My Autobiography, Ferguson had written: ‘Basically, you are what your parents are.’ His father, Alexander Ferguson, though an introvert, was given to eruptions of the temper that referees, journalists and even fellow managers were to experience later from his elder son. Lizzie Ferguson, who loved to dance, was strong. Ferguson described her as ‘our rock throughout our lives’. On her death from lung cancer he was mining his own quarry of resil
ience. It was during the early years at Manchester United.

  Between them his parents, with help from their own parents and other members of a family as close as was the custom in those post-war days, did their best to guide the boys away from the trouble always available in a Glasgow notorious for its gangs. ‘My parents suggested things to keep me out of trouble,’ he said, ‘like joining the Life Boys and later the Boys’ Brigade.’ Alex and Martin still got into fights. Yet when they came home it was to an unlocked door; often his mother would return from work to find a note from a neighbour who had borrowed tea or sugar.

  Both of his parents had to work (and both served as shop stewards, a tradition Ferguson was to maintain), so he and Martin spent a lot of time with their grandparents. ‘You never had a lot,’ he recalled, ‘but I wouldn’t call it poverty. You always had your meals, you never missed school, you were always clean and tidy.’

  Somehow, too, it symbolised the values the boys received that Alex Ferguson, nominally a Protestant like his father, was to marry Cathy Holding, a Roman Catholic like his devout mother (such aspects of a marriage were remarked upon in the West of Scotland then, and occasionally they still are). In doing so Ferguson benefited from the local habit of mating early and for life: Cathy was to provide a classic example of the creative power of female selflessness.

  Not that anyone she married would necessarily have gone on to become a gloriously successful manager of Aberdeen and Manchester United. Not that Martin Ferguson, for all the parental exhortation to do his best, could have been expected to achieve parallel fame and fortune.

  Martin did forge a playing career as a creative midfielder with Partick Thistle and Greenock Morton in Scotland and Barnsley and Doncaster Rovers in England’s lower divisions. He became player/manager of Waterford Town in Ireland and then manager, briefly, of East Stirlingshire – following in his brother’s footsteps – and Albion Rovers. He was a part-time assistant to Alex Miller for three years at another of his brother’s former clubs, St Mirren, and a further ten years at Hibernian.