The PlayerBy Jonathan Vankin
Reprinted from Metro: Silicon Valley's Weekly, July 9, 1992.Page 2
PAUL MARINER WAS BORN on May 22, 1953 in Bolton, an industrial city whose roots are in the textile mills and coal mines of Britain's industrial revolution. The city sits halfway between Lancashire County's two better-known population centers, Liverpool, on the coast of the Irish Sea, and Manchester, inland. One English sportswriter, volunteering information on Mariner, kept repeating, "'E's from Lancashire. Lancashire," as if by that fact alone one should gain indelible insight into the man. Perhaps one can. British author J.B. Priestly, in his 1934 travel memoir English Journey, described the area this way: "Between Manchester and Bolton the ugliness is so complete that it is almost exhilarating. It challenges you to live there. That is probably the secret of the Lancashire working folk: they have accepted that challenge; they are on active service and so, like the front-line troops, they make a lot of little jokes and sing comic songs."
Mariner was raised in a traditional English working class family. His father worked shifts and his mother stayed at home to raise him. They rented a house on a council estate, a kind of British housing project, about six miles from Bolton's inner city. The estate provided a pastoral atmosphere, away from the urban grit. The Mariners were not poverty stricken, but they afforded few luxuries, took their holidays on Lancashire ' s beaches and when they did want to buy something special they saved for it, never buying on credit. Paul was an only child, but the council estate attracted young families and a dozen kids his age kept him entertained.
For the boys of Lancashire soccer offered an escape from the factories. Several of the Football League's most powerful clubs played in Lancashire: Manchester City , Manchester United, Everton and the almighty Livelpool- the New York Yankees of English soccer. Paul was the captain of his school squad, and he spent many Saturdays at a local stadium called Bumden Park, where he stood on terraces-seatless sections favored in many English football facilities-watching the Bolton Wanderers play their home games.
Like most of his schoolmates, he considered that his future would lie with one of the Lancashire clubs. Unlike many of them, he had enough soccer skills to interest professional scouts.
At the age of 16, the age pro clubs sign schoolboys to their apprentice squads, Mariner had stopped growing. He was a scrawny little specimen; not cast as a professional footballer. It's going to pass me by, he conceded. Disheartened, he swore off football. He took an engineering apprenticeship at a local factory , the Metal Box Company, manufacturing cans for oil, soft drinks-any substance with lack of viscosity sufficient to require a can. At the time, a job in the factories of Lancashire paid about 35 pounds per week. In his off hours, he developed his cricket game. Playing semi-professionally, he became, as he put it, a "useful" cricketer. He played no soccer for a full year until a local boy's team called St. Gregory , s coaxed him out of premature retirement. Hauling hunks of iron in the factory layered his body with muscle, and he grew a few inches. The team did well and won a local trophy called the Lancashire Shield. A nearby semi- professional team, Chorley, took an interest in Mariner, and he impressed professional scouts who prowled the Chorley grounds.
Opposing players also noticed. One night, they singled him out. Two players closed in on him, from either side. His right leg was in between them and it broke cleanly above the ankle. Temporarily hobbled, Mariner did not sign a pro contract until he was 20. He started with Plymouth Argyle, a third division club, located 350 miles southwest of Bolton, near England' s coastal tip. It was the furthest he had been away from home.
The Football League is divided into four divisions. The first division is best. Quality and, for the most part, economic viability drops after that. After each season, the league promotes the top teams in lower divisions-a lucrative and honorable proposition. The bottom teams are relegated-a disaster. Two years with Plymouth and Mariner had taken his third division game as far as it would go. Three first division clubs were inquiring about him: West Ham United and West Bromwich Albion, both major London clubs; and Ipswich Town.
Ipswich was a lesser-known club from a small country town about 70 miles northeast of London, in a county called Suffolk. Plymouth, as a third division team thirsted for cool cash, but Ipswich manager Bobby Robson was offering a package deal in exchange for Mariner: 100,000 pounds cash, two players worth another 100,000 pounds and a 20,000 pound bonus if Mariner played at least three games for England's national team.
A pound is worth a little less than two dollars.
Tony Waiters, the Plymouth boss who later managed the Canadian national side, went to Plymouth ' s board of directors and fought for the deal. Mariner remains appreciative of that.
"When I was 23 I wasn't the sort of bloke who could go to London and be successful," Mariner says. "I come from a countryside background and going going into the big city of London wouldn't've suited me." The total of 220,000 pounds was the largest sum Ipswich had ever paid for a player. He weathered the obligatory ordeal of handshaking and picture posing, but the attention that came from being a big money player made him uneasy. "I came from a background where I had to work very hard for a living, and I know what it's like for the lads going into the factories earning 60,70 pounds a week in those days," Mariner says. "To be transferred for that amount of money was a little bit embarrassing."
MARINER'S AFFABILITY, his knack for making little jokes and, one imagines, singing comic songs, helped assuage any potential conflicts with teammates engendered by his transfer fee. Mariner had a touch of the class clown in him. He became a locker room cut-up, given to hiding teammates' shoes and similar stunts. Alan Brazil, who played on the front line with Mariner for four years at Ipswich, and whose own goal-scoring profited from Mariner's ability to hold the ball safe from defenders then pass at precisely the right moment, characterizes the naif Mariner as "always full 0' beans." Brazil often accompanied Mariner to Newmarket, a center of English horse racing that was a short 40 mile jaunt from Ipswich. As football stars, they got to know most of the jockeys and trainers at the track. "We' d never come away without backing a winner," assures Brazil.
Mariner, a confirmed metalhead (likes: Iron Maiden, Metallica, The Cult, AC/DC; dislikes: Guns 'N' Roses), also struck up a friendship with Ian Gillan, the former lead singer of Deep purple. Gillan performed in Ipswich with his eponymous post-Purple ensemble. The Ipswich players got in free to most of the local shows, and a not-normally starstruck Mariner took his concert hall connection aside and shyly inquired about the prospects of getting backstage. There he found Gillan, slouching on a couch flanked by border collie and girlfriend, blurting, "Bloody 'ell, I'm so pleased to meet you. I'm a big football fan!" Later that evening, Mariner was on stage with Gillan's band, whacking bongos. A month later, Gillan played at Hammersmith Odeon, a venerable venue in London, and he invited his new football-playing mate on stage again. Mariner stood in the back, singing along with some rousing chorus, and was delighted when he looked into the audience and saw astonishment on metal fans' faces.
"You could see people going, 'What the hell's he doin' on there?" In subsequent years, Gillan has teamed with Mariner in exhibition football matches for charity. "So he's gone on my stage and I've gone on his stage."
With the media, however, Mariner was developing a reputation as, in his own words, "a bloody brat." One writer who covered the team remembers Mariner refusing for a while to be interviewed. Another, Bob Harris, now sports editor of the 3 million circulation tabloid Sunday Mirror, tells of a Mariner who was "a bit arrogant," when graced with the first laurels of celebrity.
"As a young player his attitude was to make a pile of money and get out," says Harris. "Later he'd say he'd do anything to stay in the game, even play goal."
"I got a little bit carried away with myself, early on, because I was going so well it was unbelievable," says Mariner, looking back from a distance of a decade-and-half. "I started to believe me own press which is one of the worst things you can do. They build you up to knock you down in England and I was in the process of being built up and built up. When I was 25 I was at me worst. I didn't like myself back then. You know, you're young and you have an opinion. You think you know everything about the game and you don't. It came down to one or two sensible teammates, senior players, who had a word with me. They just said you've got to give and take a little bit."
Calming down, Mariner transformed into something of a media darling, with ghostwritten columns in the papers. When journalists would travel abroad, they'd often form their own teams to take on the football press corps from other nations. Mariner came in as a ringer for the English press side, says Harris, and "took that game as seriously as a regular game." He was also helpful to younger players, easy with advice, shunning the hazing rituals beloved of veteran athletes when rookies join the team. Mariner settled comfortably into Suffo1k. At home, he lived with his wife, Allison (called Ali) whom he'd met in Bolton and married in 1976. They bought a small farm in Preston St. Mary , a tiny village about 20 miles from Ipswich, where the locals invited Mariner to be president of their local gardening club.
"I thought, 'Aw, sod it, I've got to get into the community,' " Mariner says. "So I learned to grow a few tomatoes. Nothing big. My wife's the one for gardening. I'm good at destroying. I'm good at cutting grass. I'm good at chopping weeds down. I'm good at sawing trees down. But as far as the cultivation side, I'm a little bit iffy ." Nonetheless, he took his presidential responsibilities with some seriousness. Mel Henderson, the Ipswich club's PR man who helped Mariner write a "Paul's Postbag" column in the team's fan newsletter, remembers the star striker once complaining of problems organizing a bus to the Chelsea Flower Show, a horticultural event in London.
"Not many footballers would get involved with that," offers Henderson.
The farm is 10 acres and an old house. "Old," by the English defmition of old. In California, an "old house" was probably built in 1930. Tn~ M(irlll~r abode was constructed in 1390. The house is wood, with a wood-fired stove for central heating. Several years later, when Mariner was no longer with Ipswich and was away from home, the fire got out of control. Firefighters praised Ali Mariner for quick action that may have saved the lives of the couple's two young sons.
On the road, he roomed with another star player, John Wark, a Scotsman four years younger than Mariner. They became close friends. The first day they roomed together, Mariner woke up at 7:30 fretting about his Ipswich debut later that day. Wark slumbered for another three hours. Mariner needn't have worried. Ipswich annihilated West Bromwich Albion 7-0. They were roommates for the eight years Mariner played at Ipswich, and Mariner served as best man at Wark's wedding.
In the town of Ipswich, people still talk about the era of Mariner, Wark, Brazil and the manager Bobby Robson. Their 1980-81 side is remembered as the best ever to wear the club's blue and white jerseys. It won the European championship for club teams-the UEF A (Union of European Football Associations) Cup, cinched with a decisive goal by Wark against a team from the Netherlands-and placed second in the league. The League championship is decided on the basis of won-lost record alone, with no playoffs, and is a prize that Mariner's Ipswich teams never grabbed. They finished three-time runners-up.
"That still sticks in my throat," Mariner says.
The most prestigious trophy in England is the FA (Football Association) Cup. Any team on the isle, amateur or professional, can enter the tournament which runs from August until May. In 1978, Ipswich won the Cup.
Odds-makers gave Ipswich Town no chance in the final at Wembley against Arsenal, one of the richly pedigreed London teams that could be described without undue exaggeration as British institutions. A psyched-up Ipswich dispatched Arsenal 1-0.
"Wembley is like a bowl, an oval," Mariner describes. "We came out at one end. Usually you come out at the halfway line at most stadiums. All our supporters were at that end, maybe 40,000, banked in, blue and white, banked in to that end. And when we came out of that tunnel -- you know the saying, 'the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end?' It's absolutely true, cause this wall o' sound hit us. It reached a crescendo just as we came out and it hit you right in the back of the head. All the Arsenal supporters were at the other end, about 150 yards away. So I think that gave us another little jab to go and take it to 'em. Which we did."
The winning side gains custody of the cup for 11 months. One night an fawning Bobby Robson slept with the sacred silverware under his bed. Robson succeeded Ron Greenwood as manager of the England national team following the 1982 World Cup. Under some obscurantist regulation, England was eliminated from the tournament despite an undefeated (with one draw) record in four games; scoring six goals and allowing only one. Robson' s tenure at the English helm was not a joy ride. The media roasting was relentless, as Robson was ensnared in one of the vicious circulation battles that flare up among England's tabloids like border skirmishes along the West Bank. British tabloids are national, with circulation well into the millions. Stakes are high. The royal family, sex and soccer are their mainstays. Robson was "slaughtered like nobody before or since," says Bob Harris. Robson has since taken his football acumen across the Bay of Biscay. He manages Sporting Lisbon, football giant of Portugal.
Alan Brazil departed Ipswich after complaining that he felt scapegoated for the team's slumps. At first, management refused his request for transfer. Later, Brazil moved to Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur. He played on a Scottish national side that lost to England, 1-0, the goal by Mariner. A bad back cut Brazil's career short. He retired in 1987 and made his home in Ipswich where he owns a 400 year-old pub called the Black Adder. Speaking on the phone from his nightspot, the Dire Straits are clearly audible, on stage in the background.
In 1983, Wark and Mariner went to the Ipswich front office seeking raises. Mariner was making 1,000 pounds per week, according to the English press. English athletes have never made megabucks, by the American measure of megabuckdom. In 1992, the highest paid footballer is John Barnes of Liverpool who pulls down the equivalent of about $1 million per year. In Major League Baseball, roughly 30 percent of the players make that much or more.
The English public measured Mariner and Wark's salary demands not against the extravagance of American athletes, but against their own bleak circumstances, and responded with understandable indignance. Unemployment was high throughout England and football clubs were feeling recessionary pressure, as was the rest of the English economy. The Ipswich situation was more severe than many. The team had recently purchased anew grandstand. English football clubs tend to be cash operations run by working folk made good, not tax write-offs to benefit multi-millionaires, the nonn for American pro sports franchises. The new stand left the team short on cash, so the team sold its two stars rather than pay them.
"It was the start of players breaking out into the big money situation," Mariner says." And I caused a bit of a stir because I was playing on the national team and there were players there earning twice as. much as me. So I went in and asked for more money. They said, 'We can't give you any more money.' So I said, 'I'm going to have to go.' I wanted another 10,000 pound a year, which is like piss up the wall, you know. I tried to work a compromise out at Ipswich. I would have liked to finish me days there."
Wark departed for Liverpool; Mariner set off to Arsenal. The Ipswich franchise never fully recovered. Wark and Mariner played part of the 1983-84 season while waiting for the team to receive suitable offers for their services. No one questioned their effort, but, perhaps distracted, the team faltered. After Mariner and Wark left, Ipswich plummeted to 2Oth place. Only a hot streak of five wins and a draw in its last six matches saved the hobbled team from demotion to the second division. Within a couple of seasons, it ended up there anyway.
The contract dispute still irritated certain segments of the public, or at least the press, years later. In May, 1989, a year after Mariner's retirement from English football, the Daily Telegraph ran the following sardonic brief: "Remember when Paul Mariner left Ipswich because he couldn't manage on 1000 pounds a week? Not much changes it seems. ...Mariner recently rejected a tasty offer from a leading Northern Ireland side. Why? He had an even better offer to play for Nasser Lions in Malta. How good? About 1000 pounds a week, according to Irish sources. Sound familiar?"
Wark returned to Ipswich for one season, left again, then returned again. Pushing 35, he is the blue-and-white's elder statesman-past transgressions forgiven. He preserves his body by playing the defender's position, which involves not nearly so much running. Last season he was named player of the year on the team, and a newspaper picked him as the second division's best defender. Ipswich played well enough to earn promotion back the first division. Still, every now and then, John Wark gets a postcard from Paul Mariner asking him to spend a summer in America.