Rio Ferdinand--Five Star--The Biography (2 page)

But the driving force behind Rio's search for a better life went beyond adoring football. Now, looking back on those childhood days, he admits: ‘I always wanted to be a footballer but, to be honest about it, I wanted to make big money – and, most of all, I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a singer – still do – an actor, a dancer and a gymnast. Whatever, I wanted to be famous.'

However, after being advised to quit gymnastics to concentrate on football, Rio became even more focused. ‘When I decided that was the thing to do, I became quite scared that I wouldn't make it. It was a pride thing. Even now, when everyone is telling me I've made it, I can't think of it like that.' So, initially, the young boy who was to go on to such dizzy heights was suffering from anxiety and a lack of self-confidence.

For the following couple of years, Rio played in the Blackheath and District Schools League. When he was 11 his skills were recognised by his uncle, Dave Raynor, who
ran a Sunday-morning under-12s football team called Bloomfield Athletic, in Peckham. ‘He was a natural,' Raynor said. ‘I didn't even have to teach him football, I just guided him. He knew how to read the game.'

Rio also caught the attention of Dave Goodwin, who ran the Blackheath and District Schools League. Goodwin knew how valuable football was to the community because sports were one of the few activities that could keep youngsters away from bigger temptations like drugs and crime. He still believes: ‘If you have something you want to do in life, if you have a goal, you can't afford to do silly things like go out late, smoking and drinking and doing drugs.'

Goodwin's reaction to young Rio's talents was instantaneous: ‘I first saw Rio at 11 in a trial and already he looked like a seasoned pro. There were three main things that stuck out – his ability to pass the ball, the sheer vision he displayed and the way he organised a midfield.'

Naturally, Janice was there at most games to urge her son on. ‘I knew all the rules because I'd been a Millwall supporter since I was a kid. My role was always shouting really loud from the sidelines. Lots of people came scouting and they all said what a great player Rio was – but I thought people would think I was biased if I agreed.'

J
ust before his twelfth birthday, Rio started attending Bluecoat Comprehensive School in Blackheath. Located just off a pokey backstreet and hidden behind a Shell petrol station, it was just two minutes up the road from unfashionable Charlton Athletic. Rio learned many of his basic soccer skills on the field next to the sadly neglected school sports hut.

That dilapidated hut, with its rusting radiators, crumbling, graffiti-covered walls and communal showers that were nearly always out of action, was where Rio and his teammates were expected to get changed for every home game. But they preferred to get changed at the school, and then walk 20 minutes through the south-east London streets to the playing field for a match.

Angela Rezki, Rio's sports tutor throughout much of his time at Bluecoat, remembers clearly: ‘Rio was so talented
and we all knew he would make it at football even though he was a bit of a Jack the Lad and fancied himself a bit.' She noticed that he knocked around with a group of rowdy older boys and for a while many people at the school feared that he could end up dealing drugs on the streets. ‘He got into a bit of trouble, like all kids do, but his mum kept him on the straight and narrow. Rio did get a few severe tellings-off and got detention for forgetting to bring his kit. The rest of the kids took the mickey out of him, but he didn't like having to stay late after school, so he didn't make the same mistake again.'

At Bluecoat, Rio's amazing natural ball skills helped the U-12s side win the Metropolitan Police's five-a-side competition in 1989. Striker Yung Chu is in no doubt that ‘Rio was always the star and the reason we had so much success'.

At that time the school team's other big ‘talent' was Tony Russell, who went on to do youth training with Rio at West Ham, although he was eventually released. Rio and Tony stood out and would run rings round the opposition, according to their teammates.

PE teacher Matt Delaney, who ran the team, recalled: ‘We didn't have a minibus, so everyone used to pile in the back of my VW camper for away games. Rio was a naturally gifted player, so he was a coach's dream and he was very serious about training.' Another Bluecoat teammate, Andrew Ashley, described Rio as ‘a cool chap, a bit of a comedian. We always knew he was going to do well and I'm proud to have played alongside him.'

Soon Rio's performances at weekends for his uncle and Dave Goodwin's Blackheath and District Schools League were the talk of the area. Here was a tall, awkward midfielder capable of some fine trickery on the ball. Scouts
from some of the London clubs started turning up at matches. Local coach and league organiser Dave Goodwin encouraged Rio to talk to them all, but told him not to jump at the first offer. ‘Dave became the biggest influence on my career. In terms of advice and encouragement, he and his family were really good to me.'

Rio also played for a Sunday-morning outfit called Eltham Town, whose coach Paul Caldwell explained: ‘The thing about Rio which was very unusual is that, apart from being the best player by far, he also had the best attitude. Normally, if you get the really skilful players, they can let it go to their heads and they think they are God's gift at a young age – that's when they fall down. But Rio was never like that and I don't think he will ever become that way, either.'

Before long Rio noticed that although the teams he played for were made up mainly of black kids, they nearly always found themselves playing predominantly white sides. A lot of the dads would come down from the pubs after lunch to cheer on their kids, but the problem was that many of them started talking about ‘black this' and ‘black that'. Rio had heard all sorts of insults on the streets of Peckham, but it seemed even more out of order to hear them on a football pitch. He tried to blank out all the insults and then say to himself, ‘Yes, I'm black and proud of it.' But there were certainly times when he was tempted to lash out at the bigots.

Back at home, trouble was looming. Rio's mum Janice was notorious on the Friary Estate for always having her finger on the pulse. Every evening around 6.30 she'd walk out of her front door, lean over the balcony and start hollering across the estate: ‘REE-OOH! REE-OOH!'

A brief period of silence would follow then Rio would tell
his mates he had to go. ‘Come on, Rio,' one of them would often plead. Rio would then hesitate.

‘REE-OOH! REE-OOH!'

By the time he'd heard Janice's voice for the fourth time, Rio knew he had no choice and would scarper off in her direction. But one evening he got a bit rebellious and didn't answer his mum's rallying call. ‘Then my dad came for me. We could see him walking through the estate, my mates were going, “Oh no, Rio, there's your dad. Oh my God, your dad.”

‘I saw my dad and, when he saw me, he just turned back towards home. He knew I would follow. You can imagine what happened when I got home. But if it wasn't for Mum and Dad, maybe things would have gone a bit different.'

Rio has never denied that he got a few clouts at home. He looked on it as part of growing up in that tough environment and believes to this day that a few clips round the ear did him more good than harm in the long run.

As Janice herself explained: ‘I didn't want Rio leaving the estate and if he wanted to go anywhere he would have to ask. I didn't want him hanging around on corners getting into trouble. Some nights his friends would try and hide him from me but he always did as he was told when he heard my footsteps. It is about respect and he probably appreciates that now.'

Rio puts it this way: ‘I have a very strong family and when I was younger they kept me under wraps. Looking back, that's been great for me. I've grown up with some good mates and there's no way any of them would let me get too cocky.'

Rio's dad, Julian, also encouraged his son's interest in the arts, particularly drama. ‘Mum and Dad kept telling me about how many doors were going to open to me,' Rio
recalled. ‘They were afraid of me getting in with the wrong crowd and going down the wrong road.' Rio loved being the centre of attention, so acting was a natural development.

It was certainly true that Rio was hanging around with a much older, tougher crowd of youths, many of whom had already broken the law on numerous occasions. But Rio remains convinced to this day that ‘my mates were good, they kind of protected me; they smoked but they wouldn't let me smoke, and if they were going off the estate to do, like, bad kind of stuff, they tried to leave me behind'. It's likely that ‘bad kind of stuff' meant burglaries and muggings.

The arguments between disciplinarian Janice and Rio sometimes reduced the youngster to tears. But he admitted: ‘Those rules were for my own good. My parents never said to me, “Don't smoke. Don't take drugs.” They just left that to me. Still, if I had tried it, I'd have had to answer to my dad. But there was never anything in it for me. I was always so into sport I couldn't understand why you'd do something that wasn't good for your body.'

One night not long after his twelfth birthday Rio and his six-year-old brother Anton were tucked up in their bunk beds when their parents started one of their regular shouting matches. Rio lay there trembling as the yelling got louder and louder. Anton was fast asleep on the bottom bed. Rio's dad sounded completely out of control. He heard his mum dashing out of the lounge. The old man was on her tail, towering over her.

He seemed like a giant to Rio back then. Rio heard them start ranting and raving at each other again. Then Julian turned around and walked towards the bedroom. The flat went deathly quiet. A few moments later he emerged from
the bedroom with a sports bag in his hand. ‘I gotta go, I've had enough,' he told Rio's mum, who was standing hands on hips watching him from the kitchen doorway. Rio stood back and observed the scene. He cried himself to sleep that night but made sure no one saw his tears. That was Rio's way of dealing with things – however painful they might be.

The truth is, Rio's mum and dad hadn't really got on for years. These days they're friends. ‘You gotta remember he was a young dad with lots of kids,' Rio pointed out. ‘The pressure must have been unbearable in many ways.' A few days later Julian came round to tell his two sons exactly what had happened and why he'd left, but it didn't make it any easier to handle.

Janice was determined to keep her kids on the rails. Young Rio was about to hit his teens and it was essential he avoided trouble if he was going to work his way out of the ghetto. Rio has never explained the precise reasons behind his dad's departure but he did say: ‘My dad said it would only be for a while. But I knew he was lying and that he wouldn't be coming back. I heard my parents arguing, but I pretended I didn't hear. I cried by myself. I didn't show how sad I was. I wanted them to stay together for ever.'

Growing up on one of the toughest council estates in Europe was never going to be easy for Rio. At school he still got picked on a lot because of his mixed-race background and appearance. A few black kids hated him as much as the white ones because he simply didn't fit in. But Rio ignored the tension and made an effort to get along with everyone, whatever their colour, race, creed or opinions, which helped him thrive in that tough environment.

Janice was, and still is, a strong woman and she went out of her way to educate Rio, especially since she was now a lone parent. She'd say things like, ‘You may look different
from some of the other kids but you're just the same inside and don't you forget it.'

As one of Rio's classmates said: ‘It wasn't easy for kids like Rio. Some kids called him a “bounty”, which meant he was black on the outside and white on the inside and all that really hurt.' In fact this was untrue because Rio was immensely proud of his black heritage and in his usual way he shrugged off the name-calling. It made him and his mum even more determined he'd find a route out of the ghetto.

When Rio sang as a chorister at Bluecoat it prompted even more insults, especially after he performed a solo in a carol service one Christmas at St John's Church in Blackheath. But Rio had a potent secret weapon. ‘Rio's good with words,' says one of his oldest friends, Leon Simms. ‘The guy knows how to survive because of what happened when he was a kid. He could always talk his way out of any trouble.' As Rio grew up he learned to parry the taunts and criticism from other kids. He could handle anything the bullies threw at him and it seemed to make him a stronger person as a result.

But there were times when he felt genuinely scared once he was outside the perimeter of the Friary Estate. He was frightened by what might lie around the next corner. That's when he encountered the police, local white and Asian gangs and lots of temptations, like drugs and crime.

He was disturbed, too, by the sheer weight of hatred against people of his colour and poverty, and promised himself he would never pass on those prejudices to his own kids. But as a result of that inner fear, Rio tended to stick to his own little patch near the estate and rarely wandered beyond it. That caused a few problems as he grew older because many of his best friends refused to
venture out into the big, wide world and mingle with people of all colours, races and creeds. He noticed that some of those same friends carried the scars of racism into adulthood.

Rio's ability to get on with his life undoubtedly stemmed from the collision of his parents' genes and the fact he was carefully nurtured through a difficult environment. ‘My parents used to build us up. I was called Rio because they wanted me to be an individual. They made us think we were the best; not the best in an ignorant way but that we had talent and we should use it. They told us not to be scared to try things and we're not. But the bottom line for them was that nobody was ever better than us and we weren't to accept anything else.'

One night Janice was fearful for Rio's safety after her customary shouts of ‘Ree-ooh! Ree-ooh!' got no response around the estate. There had been a spate of vicious muggings by gangs of older youths in recent weeks and the parents of all younger kids were being extra vigilant. So Janice began roaming the shadowy, badly lit estate trying to find her beloved Rio. Eventually she bumped into one of his friends who told her that he was ‘at Ahmed's house'.

Janice takes up the story: ‘And sure enough there he was, watching a really important game of Italian football. I couldn't believe it – he hadn't asked me if he could go out. Well, he couldn't get off the chair; you could see he was scared because he knew I'd smack him. He was rooted to the chair, lost in the game of football.' Not even Rio the charmer, who'd been so outgoing since a young age, could talk his way out of this little spot of bother.

The threat of violence often reared its ugly head in Rio's
childhood, but that was the way it was back then. As one of Rio's oldest mates said: ‘Mums on the estate were always clippin' their sons. It was the only way to keep some of them under control – and most of them deserved it anyhow.'

When he was at Bluecoat, Rio's favourite book was
The Twits
by Roald Dahl. Years later he explained his love of reading by saying: ‘You can learn more about people by reading about them than just by looking at them.' He knew from an early age that reading was vital to his education, especially for boys, who tended not to bother with such pursuits. ‘I'd always ask other kids what were their goals in life – you need to be able to read for all walks of life – if you want to be a policeman – or a singer … you need to look at the lyrics! When I was little, I only liked a handful of books. I'd find an author I liked and then read all their books. I also liked biographies. Today I read when I'm travelling, on the coach or the plane. I also read in the toilet! Reading is fun because you get to find out about people.'