Always Managing: My Autobiography (8 page)

If I try to piece together why the people at the top in football seemed to reject Bobby, I can only think that it was his reputation for liking a night out that played its part. Ron Greenwood was manager throughout his time at West Ham, but he didn’t involve Bobby after his retirement as a player, not even when he went on to manage England. I don’t think Ron approved of Bobby’s lifestyle, really, the drinking culture that existed in football in those days. He knew Bobby was part of the little group that would be in the Black Lion by 5.30 p.m. after home games, and that we wouldn’t leave until we could barely walk home. Ron put up with it, but he didn’t like it. I imagine it drove him mad to see the boys get well beat somewhere like Newcastle and then pile on the train and drink all the way home. A lot of clubs had similar sets – even the successful ones, including Liverpool – but we were a real handful at West Ham, and I don’t think Ron forgot that. I remember one night away at Stoke City when we were absolutely useless. We were staying up there after the match and Ron was so angry he wouldn’t let us out of the hotel. We weren’t having that, so a few of us climbed out of the window and went into town to a nightclub. We got back at about 4 a.m. and found the gates around the hotel locked. There was nothing to do but climb. By now, however, we were rather the worse for wear and Bob slipped and caught his foot on a spike. It took ages to get him free. The next day, we made sure he stayed well clear of Ron on the train home, and he came in the next afternoon and claimed he’d had an accident in the garden. He didn’t play for two weeks.

Another night, we had played up at Wolverhampton, got back early and ended up in the Blind Beggar, where Ronnie Kray shot
George Cornell. Frank and I were going off to meet our girlfriends and Bobby was going out with Tina, but we thought we’d have a few before we went. We stayed for a while, but it was close to empty, and we were just about to leave when a huge bloke followed me into the toilet. He had a big black overcoat, short black hair and a scar running the length of his face. He might as well have had ‘gangster’ tattooed on his forehead, you couldn’t have drawn one better. ‘Tell your mate Bobby Moore that I’m going to cut him from here to here,’ he said, indicating a scar like his own.

‘What for?’ I asked. ‘What’s he ever done to you?’

‘I don’t like him,’ he said. ‘He thinks he’s a film star.’

I got out of there as quickly as I could. ‘Come on, Bob,’ I said, ‘I think we’d better leave.’ I was looking across to the other little bar, and I could see this bloke waiting in there.

‘I’m coming,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve just got to go to the toilet.’

‘No, don’t go to the toilet, Bob,’ I said. ‘Let’s get a move on.’ I didn’t want to worry him by telling him what I had just heard. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ I said, as we left. I hoped that would be true and this bloke was not going to follow us home.

The next day Bob arrived, face intact, and I told him about the threat. ‘The bloke looked like a nutter,’ I said. ‘That’s the last time I go there.’ But Jimmy Quill, who owned the Blind Beggar with his brother Patsy, was a big pal of Bob’s. He was a lovely bloke, Jimmy, but as hard as they come. I’ve seen a fight start between two giant fellas, and Jimmy come over the bar and knock out the pair of them. He was an ex-boxer, like Patsy, and when he heard about the warning to Bobby he was furious. Jimmy wasn’t having it that his mate couldn’t use his pub. He said he knew the bloke and would sort it out. I wasn’t there when their little pow-wow happened, but
I’m told the next time Scarface came in, Jimmy took him to one side, said they needed to go round the back to have a chat about Bobby Moore – and smashed him to pieces. ‘He’s a mug,’ he told us. ‘He won’t talk to you like that again.’ And he didn’t – because we never saw him after that.

Jimmy also had another pub called the Globe that Bobby would use. I remember we were all in there after training one Christmas Eve, and the girls from the local factory were having their holiday drink-up. There was music going and it was quite lively, but the phone rang and it was Tina, Bobby’s wife, who had finally tracked him down. He was supposed to be home to take her out and she had been ringing around his favourite pubs. We could all hear Bobby promising Tina that he was about to leave and then he came back and had another one, and the phone went again, and it was Tina. Bob assured her he was getting a cab and would be home in forty-five minutes. Well, that was nonsense, too, and there was a third call, by which time she was fuming. Tina said she was going to phone his mum and she would come and collect him. Bob came back to us laughing about it, but the next thing the doors burst open and there was the formidable Mrs Moore, with the raving hump. She marched over, grabbed his arm like that of a naughty schoolboy, and said, ‘Right, Tina’s waiting for you, and you’re coming with me.’ Just as he was getting unsteadily to his feet, she rounded on the rest of us. ‘And one of you has mixed his drinks – because he doesn’t get drunk like this, you know!’ And off Bobby, the World Cup-winning captain of England’s football team, went: dragged out of the boozer by his mum. As the doors of the Globe were closing behind him, all we could hear was, ‘But, Mu-um, I’m 29.’

They were funny times. It wouldn’t happen – it couldn’t happen – today; but in the sixties, sessions like that were the norm. It was no different at Chelsea or Arsenal, but maybe Ron Greenwood took against Bobby because of it. He was certainly more likely to talk football with Geoff Hurst, who was a good lad, but not part of any drinking team.

After Ron stepped down, John Lyall succeeded him and I think that was the end of Bobby at West Ham, really. John was a young manager, an unknown, trying to make an impression, and he didn’t want a huge presence like Bobby around overshadowing him. I know Bob left West Ham at the end of his career and went to Fulham – and even played against West Ham in the 1975 FA Cup final – but it would have been the easiest thing in the world to get him back. If John had said to him, ‘Come over, Bob, come over to the training ground, just drop in, let the kids see you about, watch their training, maybe put on a session for them,’ I’m sure he would have done that and the kids would have loved it, too. But John didn’t want him anywhere near the place. I think he felt he might be undermined. Maybe John thought that Bobby would be too big, that the players would start looking to him – and maybe some of the other managers around at that time thought the same, too. They probably thought if they brought Bobby in he would be a threat to them. That didn’t make any sense to me. Bobby wasn’t like that. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body.

It’s a shame that some people are scared of a big name. How could they not make Bobby Moore welcome at West Ham? It happens, though, doesn’t it? You would have thought that Tony Adams would have a job for life at Arsenal, but Arsène Wenger
has never given him a chance as a coach, has he? Great character, great leader, great captain of Arsenal, wants to get into coaching: you would have thought it was ideal. But no, Tony ended up in Azerbaijan – and Bob ended up at Oxford, with me.

It was the summer of 1980, not long after I’d seen him get thrown out of Upton Park, that Bobby called me to be his assistant. Not at Oxford United – incredibly Bobby couldn’t land a job in professional league football – but Oxford City. They had an owner called Tony Rosser, who had previously been a director at Oxford United. He had a big fall-out and left the club and now it was his ambition to take Oxford City from the Isthmian League to the Football League, and stick it up his old club in the process. It all seemed very bitter and personal. ‘Give it a year, Harry,’ said Bobby. ‘If we do well, we could get picked up somewhere else.’ As if the great Bobby Moore should be doing auditions in non-league football.

Getting Bobby in was a big coup for Rosser, and he needed to show he meant business. He was doing the ground up and wanted a coach on site, full-time, even though the players only used to come in to training on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I was paid £120 per week, with a little Ford Fiesta as my company car, to sit in a Portakabin on a building site on my own. Sometimes another bloke, supposedly our chief executive, would sit with me. ‘Right,’ he’d say, ‘let’s go and have a look at the new training ground.’ And we’d drive up the road and stand in this empty field and say, ‘We’ll put the dressing rooms there, and pitch number one there,’ and then we’d drive back and sit looking at each other for the rest of the day until Bobby and the players turned up at 7 p.m. And
because the owner was playing at the fantasy of running a big club I had to be there every morning at 9 a.m. – which meant leaving my home in Bournemouth at 7 a.m. I’d get in very late at night, exhausted, having done precisely nothing for most of the day.

Sometimes we’d be at an away match somewhere like Aveley, in Essex, in the driving rain and I’d think, ‘What am I doing here?’ And then I’d look at the bloke sat next to me and think, ‘“What am
I
doing here?” – what is
he
doing here?’ It was a hard slog for us, because in that company we were fish out of water. We’d spent all our life in the professional game and we just didn’t know the league or what was needed. We got some older ex-professional players in, thinking they would be a class above, but they couldn’t hack it. As for the rest, they had already done a day’s work by the time they got to training. They were knackered, and we weren’t used to that either. We were ordinary, mid-table at best in the league, and then when we played Oxford United in the local Cup final, and we couldn’t live with them and lost 5–0. To make matters worse, Tony’s business was beginning to struggle and, when the results didn’t come straight away as he’d hoped, he began to lose interest. Within a year, the Oxford City project was over.

I enjoyed being with Bobby, but not all the people I met in grassroots football were as charming. We frequently saw a poor side of human nature that year. I think a number of the other coaches were jealous of Bobby for what he had achieved in the game. Beating him became the story they wanted to live off for the rest of their lives – score against us, and they would get completely carried away. I got used to an opposition manager or coach jumping out of his seat and running over to celebrate in front
of Bobby. They seemed to delight in sticking it to him and yet, once the final whistle had gone, they would be over wanting his autograph or a picture with an arm around his shoulder like they were best mates. I thought it showed a complete lack of respect and was very distasteful. Yet Bobby let it all wash over him. He never allowed the aggro to get to him, never once took the bait or sunk to their level. He was just above people like that. He posed for all their pictures and signed every autograph, while I stewed in the background, quietly seething. What was it with people? Why were some so spiteful?

I guess Bobby was used to it. I remember when we were at West Ham, we drew Hereford United in the fourth round of the FA Cup, 1972. They had just knocked out Newcastle United in one of the most famous upsets in Cup history. Their players were suddenly big names: Ronnie Radford, who had scored a spectacular winner, and Dudley Tyler, a winger who ended up signing for West Ham for £25,000, which was a record for a non-league player at the time. They had a big centre-forward called Billy Meadows, who used to be at Barnet. He had plenty to say for himself – and plenty to say to Bob. The game got postponed a couple of times, and we ended up playing it in midweek on a really heavy pitch. As soon as the match kicked off, Meadows started abusing Bobby. I’d been around, but this was really beyond the pale. Stuff about Tina: really nasty, personal insults, it was disgraceful. We drew 0–0 and ended up playing the replay at Upton Park on Monday 14 February, with an afternoon kick-off because of the power cuts caused by a miners’ strike. The gates were closed two hours before kick-off. There were 42,000 inside and another 10,000 locked
out – the tie had caught the public imagination and everyone was up for seeing it. We were in a hotel having our pre-match meal when the entire Hereford team walked in – more master planning from our secretary, as usual – including the lovely Billy Meadows. Up he strolled to Bobby, big as you like, ‘All right, Bob – no hard feelings about last week. Sorry if I was a bit out of order.’ Bob nodded at him, as if to say forget it, and off Meadows went. Then the game started, and he was at it again – except twice as bad this time. Even then, Bobby wouldn’t bite. He should have said to him, ‘Piss off, you mug.’ In fact, he should have said that in the hotel before the game. But that wasn’t his nature. He was too classy to react, too classy to even ask, ‘Who the hell are you?’ He didn’t even crow when Geoff Hurst scored his hat-trick and knocked Hereford out, 3–1.

I helped get Bobby his only job in league management. It was at Southend United in 1984. Anton Johnson, who was my chairman at Bournemouth, confided in me that he was going to buy Southend but didn’t know who to put in as manager. I had already turned him down. ‘There’s only one man for the job,’ I told him. ‘Bobby Moore.’ Anton liked the sound of that and later in the season went for it, but Bobby couldn’t stop Southend being relegated and this was another football-club venture that sadly ran out of steam. Anton left quite quickly after the first season relegation fight, and Bobby was on the cusp of building a decent side when he departed, too. He didn’t hit it off with the new chairman and was gone at the end of his second season, with Southend finishing ninth. David Webb took the core of Bobby’s team up the following year. I hear people say that Bobby failed
as a manager, but it is difficult to achieve at that level. You’ve no money and if you don’t make a success of it immediately, people are quick to judge.

It was tougher for Bobby than most managers, too, because all eyes were on him, wherever he went. Bad result at Southend, no surprise there – but bad result at Bobby Moore’s Southend and suddenly it was news. And the club wasn’t really going anywhere at the time. Frank Lampard went down to Roots Hall, Southend’s ground, with Pat, his wife, and they sat in the directors’ box as Bobby’s guests. Southend were losing and Frank told me that one of the board starting shouting down to the dug-out so that everyone could hear: ‘Is this why we’re paying you all this money, Moore, to watch a load of crap?’ He sounded a complete wrong ’un. I almost regretted helping put Bobby in there, after the way it worked out. It is embarrassing to think of him being treated like that. I’ve worked at the lower level and unless your club is ambitious and you have a chance to achieve success, it becomes a dead end.