Rio Ferdinand--Five Star--The Biography (11 page)

Meanwhile, Janice was telling anyone who would listen that toddler Jeremiah could be the next member of the Ferdinand football dynasty. ‘When I go to the nursery to collect Jeremiah, they are always saying to me that his ball skills are amazing for a two-year-old – but they don’t know who his brother is.’

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Rio transfer saga was the inclusion of an additional clause in the contract which meant that lump sums would be paid to
West Ham after each year he spent with Leeds. This would increase the entire package to a figure approaching £33 million, in addition to his salary eventually doubling to £66,000 a week.

Leeds had bought into a complex transfer deal. Meanwhile many of their fans wondered how long Leeds could afford to hold on to Rio if they didn’t start winning some silverware. It was also imperative they qualified for the Champions League each season.

The intrepid Pini Zahavi was still haggling with West Ham about Rio’s pay-off. Rio asked the Professional Footballers Association – the players’ union – to intervene after the Hammers offered him less than £200,000 as a severance bonus, even though he did not ask for a transfer. Rio was demanding a figure of £1 million.

Other football clubs were genuinely surprised that Leeds had splashed out such a vast amount on such a young defender. Rio took the 29 shirt at Elland Road, opting against keeping the 15 jersey he had had with West Ham. The only thing that really mattered to him was that the move would help him claim a regular place in the England team.

Many in Leeds expected Rio to take up the mantle vacated by the late, great Billy Bremner, who had retired from competitive football just a few months before Rio’s birth in November 1978. Bremner played for Leeds a total of 585 times between 1959 and 1976. He was the Roy Keane-style hardman at the core of legendary Leeds manager Don Revie’s successful sides of the sixties and seventies. Bremner was a skilful passer, but it was his never-say-die attitude that dominated his play, especially during his long reign as captain.

Rio was hailed at Leeds as the new messiah – the final piece in manager David O’Leary’s jigsaw, which would enable Leeds to mount a serious challenge for European and domestic honours. The Leeds players had all been impressed by Rio’s awesome display a couple of weeks before his transfer when West Ham beat Leeds 1–0 at Elland Road. O’Leary saw Rio and fellow central defender Jonathan Woodgate as the lynchpins of the team.

Rio immediately made a very good impression on O’Leary, who said: ‘Rio wants to improve himself, wants to be the best and, as a lad, I like him. His timekeeping and manners are impeccable and I like that in people.’

But although Rio had moved off his childhood manor, he swore blind he’d never desert it. Even when he’d been talking over his move up north to Leeds, he had made it clear it was a wrench to quit London. O’Leary told him to forget London. ‘The manager told me a few home truths and wasn’t scared of knocking me back, even though he didn’t know the kind of person I was,’ explained Rio. ‘A different kind of person might have taken offence at what he said, but I appreciated the honesty. What the manager was saying was right. I kind of agreed with it myself. I accept criticism from the people who matter to me. Other people are paid to make their judgements. That’s fine, fans have the right to criticise but their views don’t bother me. I listen to those who are going to try to enhance my game and that is the manager and coaching staff at Leeds.’

O’Leary made it clear that Rio was already earmarked for an even bigger role at the club. ‘A future captain of this club for certain,’ he said. ‘I mightn’t know much about this game but centre backs, I’ve an idea about them. To me, Ferdinand is quality.’

Rio’s new teammates were impressed by the ease with which he settled into Elland Road and they respected his readiness to accept responsibility. Rio was quickly doing his share of the organising and cajoling, reminding his teammates that, along with the easy elegance of his football, there was a definite desire to win.

T
he day after Rio committed his future to Leeds United, 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was murdered while he walked home through the very same estate where Rio grew up. Rio heard the news from a bunch of mates, who hit the phones within hours of the brutal killing of the Nigerian schoolboy on 27 November 2000.

Rio later recalled: ‘I thought to myself, Bloody hell, what is going on there? I was brought up a couple of minutes from where Damilola was killed and because you’re from there you want to get involved in some way, to get people to sit up and listen.’

Within days of the murder – which made headlines across the world – Rio was asked if he’d help by presenting a TV appeal for information which might help catch the killers. The interview was filmed at his new club’s training centre at Thorp Arch, and Rio was given a set of scripted
answers beforehand. He glanced down at the answers, carefully folded the piece of paper up and put it to one side. ‘You ask the questions,’ he told the interviewer. ‘I’ll be okay.’ What followed were a lot of highly emotional, unscripted answers that seemed to get to the core of the problem. They were delivered with an earnestness which made people sit up and take notice back in south-east London.

Damilola’s murder highlighted a genuine fear on the Friary Estate about gangs of youths ruling certain corners of the estate after dark. At Damilola’s nearby school, his classmates said they were frightened to walk home from school because they might be attacked and they didn’t trust the police to help them.

Rio took the Damilola murder to heart. For him the tragedy reflected so badly on the place he loved – Peckham. He explained: ‘I love Peckham. It’s, like, my place. When I was young and went to school outside Peckham I made sure everyone knew where I was from. I know my life now is a long way from all that, but I can still remember what it’s like to want things and to walk down to the shops and wish you had what’s in them.’

Rio turned up on his old manor and took a group of journalists on a tour of the estate, where he soon found himself listening to kids airing their views on subjects that were very similar to what he experienced as a youngster. Children complained of being harassed for money, being threatened verbally and physically. Rio even heard that in the weeks before Damilola’s murder many of the kids on the Friary Estate witnessed a build-up of problems from certain gangs of youths but residents were too scared to tell the police. Just like Rio many years earlier, most of them had concluded that the police did not care about them because they were black. Many youngsters said that even if
they were in trouble they would never ask a white policeman for help.

Rio had two cousins who attended the Oliver Goldsmith School, where Damilola had been a pupil. ‘It’s a terrible tragedy and the nation has been forced to wake up to what’s happening in places like this because of such a horrible, horrible incident,’ he told reporters as they toured the estate. But deep down, Rio knew there was nothing new about the Damilola tragedy and he even admitted to the journalists: ‘It would be absolutely awful if people believed this was just a one-off incident.’ He had seen many examples of this when he was a kid.

After the Damilola tragedy Rio made some very substantial donations to charities in Peckham, hoping that in some small way his contributions might help residents on the breadline. He was furious about what he perceived to be numerous politicians sitting on the wall afraid to get involved in the inner-city problems plaguing Britain. He wanted the outside world to realise that what happened in Peckham was normal life and something had to be done quickly before another similar incident happened.

Rio even tried to get an audience with Tony Blair on behalf of the residents of the Friary Estate ‘to sort a few things out’. ‘I want to explain to him about the area’s problems,’ he said at the time. ‘The politicians need to start talking to the people who live and work in the area every day.’ But the Prime Minister never responded to Rio’s offer.

For Rio the situation perfectly summed up what was happening. ‘A lot of young kids in these areas are from single-parent families or ones where both parents have to work. By the time the kids finish school at half-past three, they’ve got three hours to roam the streets while mum and dad are out working trying to put food on the table. When I
was younger, I used to go to an adventure playground or I’d go to my mum’s friend’s house but many people aren’t in a position to do that.’

He was appalled by Education Secretary David Blunkett’s attempt to link Damilola’s killing with today’s so-called get-rich-quick society epitomised by the hit TV show
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
‘I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. He can’t ever have been down to Peckham – you have to live there to understand why people don’t get involved. Say you saw someone lying there with blood on the ground – you just don’t know what the situation is. There could be someone coming down the stairs with a gun ready to finish off the victim. That’s the kind of thing you’ve got to worry about in those situations. It’s not as simple as just going to help someone in areas like mine.’

Rio loyally made a point of mentioning his childhood pal Gavin Rose, who was by this time running the Layton Adventure Centre on the Friary Estate. But he pointed out: ‘People like Gavin can only do so much because they have very little cash. It sickens me when I consider all that money the Government spent building the Millennium Dome.’

In the middle of the Damilola tragedy, Rio even made a nostalgic visit to his junior school, Camelot, for a Christmas fête. His appearance reinforced the affection in which he was held. ‘He has always been true to where he came from,’ said one staff member. ‘Recently, when some people who owned the shop across the road from the school moved out, he made a point of coming back to say goodbye. We have incredible pride in Rio and his achievements and it’s nice a young lad has got the break he deserves.’

When Tony Blair did finally make a much-publicised trip
to the Friary Estate, Rio wasn’t able to make it because of Leeds’ playing commitments. Some of Rio’s oldest friends were deeply offended by what they called the Prime Minister’s ‘emotional exploitation of schoolchildren’. According to 16-year-old estate resident Leana Davis, Blair was so busy looking at the cameras that he did not pay attention to the kids.

Back in the Premiership, Rio’s career at Leeds could not have got off to a worse start when the team were on the receiving end of a 3–1 thrashing by Leicester at Filbert Street. The critics immediately started baying for the golden boy’s blood. How could he be worth so much money? Rio himself later admitted: ‘You don’t want hiccups when you join a new club, you want to be 100 per cent right from day one. The Leicester game was the worst nightmare. I am asking myself, Have I made the right move? I didn’t know. I found myself looking at West Ham’s results and thinking they were going okay. Then I went training with the lads and the anxieties began to ease. I could see I was among some of the best players in the country and I knew I was in the right place.’

Rio eventually moved into a new house in Wetherby, near Leeds, together with his 2,000-plus collection of CDs, which were to be given a room of their own. His musical tastes were even more eclectic than before and included rhythm and blues, soul, rap, garage, reggae, funk and anything vaguely similar.

Although he still occasionally went out to clubs in Leeds and enjoyed dancing, Rio said: ‘I’ve settled down a lot more. I’ve got the right people in my life now. My best mates are back home; they aren’t on the other end of the phone saying we’ve got a bop to go to just around the corner. It’s a couple of hundred miles now.’

He missed his mum, brothers and sisters but Janice travelled up north to look after Rio at least once a month. And he insisted he was now more interested in playing computer games than chasing girls. He claimed to be virtually unbeatable on a PlayStation.

Rio remained deeply concerned by the lack of arrests in the Damilola Taylor case. He even made a fresh appeal in newspapers: ‘It would be nice if whoever did it came forward or if somebody would drop the police a line and let them know who the killers are. It won’t bring young Damilola back, but it would help his family to come to terms with what has happened.’

Peckham was, and still is, in Rio’s blood. He knew what sort of stuff went down there. Only a few days before Damilola’s murder, one person Rio knew ended up dead and another on a life-support machine. Rio didn’t claim to have any of the answers to the problems, but he tried his hardest to keep in contact with his mates in the community who knew exactly what was happening on the ground. ‘I was talking to my mate Gavin Rose, who works on the adventure playground in Peckham, and he told me some of the things that the kids talk about now. It’s like crazy stuff. We definitely weren’t talking about those kinds of things when we were that age. It’s the community workers and the social workers we should be listening to, not people in suits who’ve never lived in Peckham, who have never been there and who have never experienced a week in the life of somebody who lives in Peckham, Harlesden, Brixton or somewhere like that.

‘They don’t know what is going on, then they come up with all these solutions and the people of Peckham sit there and think, What the fuck are they talking about? This is
doin’ nothin’ for Peckham. I love Peckham. I have a Peckham T-shirt here and it’s, like, my place. When I was young and went to school outside Peckham, you made sure everybody knew you were from Peckham. Then I got some money and I moved my family out to a quieter place, which was good for my little brothers and sister. But I used to go back, three or four times a week. Obviously, I have left now. From Leeds, it’s no longer a bus ride.’

Rio feared that Damilola’s murder would make people treat places like the Friary Estate as virtual war zones. ‘I don’t want Peckham to be abandoned,’ he said. The murder spurred Rio on to get even more involved in the problems of inner cities. He was determined to give something back. In the rundown Chapeltown area of Leeds he helped launch a cybercafé for underprivileged children. He also joined RABS – the Revolutionary And Breaking Stereotypes football academy – which encouraged kids in Leeds to grow in confidence. ‘I’m somebody who can make a difference simply because I’m a famous face. People take you much more seriously when you come from a poor background. They respect you because of your roots,’ he explained. He was realistic enough to know that he couldn’t solve all the problems of the world, but he had a lot of very valid points to make and no one could deny his personal knowledge about the problems of living in the inner city.

Meanwhile Harry Redknapp still sung Rio’s praises even though he’d joined another club. ‘It made me laugh when people said Leeds were paying all that money for potential,’ Redknapp told one reporter. ‘Absolute rubbish, they paid it for a world-class player. David O’Leary knew it, I’d known it since Rio was at school and now it seems the rest of the world is realising it.’

Just a couple of weeks after finally signing for Leeds United, Rio received racist hate mail from fans purporting to follow West Ham and Leeds. He told one journalist: ‘I’ve had a few letters since the transfer. Some have been nice, but I don’t want to go into the others.’

Rio had heard rumours about the racist problems that had plagued Leeds for many years but these vicious letters made him even more curious about the details behind the coming court case involving Leeds players Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate, accused of attacking an Asian youth outside a nightclub in the city centre. Also, there were reports that Rio’s close friend Kieron Dyer had turned down a move to Leeds because he feared he would be targeted by Elland Road racists. Leicester’s Emile Heskey, too, was alleged to have refused a move to Leeds for similar reasons. He went to Liverpool instead.

In purely footballing terms, Rio’s £18-million transfer to Leeds was still questioned by many fans. Rumours that Ronaldo, of all people, was being lined up to play at Elland Road at least gave the fans something else to talk about. It was claimed that Inter Milan had offered Leeds injury-plagued Ronaldo with a view to getting the player rehabilitated following his long layoff with knee problems. Most considered the rumours to be nonsense since the Premiership seemed the last place for a player to try and mend a damaged knee.

The appointment in autumn 2000 of Sven-Goran Eriksson as England’s first foreign football coach was of major importance to Rio because he knew the Swede was a long-time admirer of his skills. The new England coach was very different from the paranoid Hoddle and the heart-on-his-sleeve Keegan, who’d walked out after a disastrous home
defeat by Germany in a World Cup qualifying-round game. Eriksson exuded calmness and was even nicknamed by the Italian press ‘the rubber wall’ because when manager of Lazio he soaked up everything they threw at him so softly and then bounced back a gentle answer.

Not only had Sven heard much praise about Rio, but he had a soft spot for Leeds United after visiting their training camp as a would-be coach more than 20 years previously. And, to cap it all, Leeds were to play Eriksson’s club Lazio in the Champions League on 5 December. Eriksson was working out his notice after Lazio had struck a deal with FA bosses that he would not join England until later the following summer. That game would have been the perfect stage for Rio to show Sven what he was made of except that he wasn’t eligible for the Champions League until the following February, when the second stage began. As Eriksson explained before the game: ‘I think Leeds have an extremely good mentality, always running, always fighting.’

Leeds impressively beat Lazio 1–0 in Italy, which, ironically, forced Eriksson to conclude that ‘working out his notice’ at the Italian club was not a very practical idea. Within weeks he’d joined the England set-up full time.

Now happily settled at Leeds, Rio was hoping the next stage of his career plan – a regular place in the full England team – would soon follow. He told one reporter at the time: ‘As long as I feel I’m doing alright with Leeds, I think things should fall into place. A few of us, Kieron Dyer, Frank Lampard and myself, sat down and picked an England under-23 team. There’s massive talent. You look at Liverpool, West Ham, Man United, Leeds, and there’s players from other clubs too.