Humble Pie. Gordon Ramsay

       Chapter Two Football

      It was football, not cooking, that was my first real passion.

      Football was one way I thought I could impress Dad. He and my Uncle Ronald were huge Glasgow Rangers fans, and I could see that this might be a way to reach him. I must have been about seven when I went to my first Rangers match. I remember being up on Ronald’s shoulders and the amazing roar of the crowd. It was quite frightening.

      Back in Stratford, I was chosen to play under-fourteen football when I was just eleven, and at twelve years old, I played for Warwickshire. Did I enjoy it? Yes, I loved it. And if Dad came to watch, it was a special relief, because at least that meant he wasn’t at home giving Mum a hard time. He didn’t always come to watch, though. Sometimes, he didn’t even ask you the score. I got used to it.

      Then, when I was fourteen, I went up to head a ball, and a miracle happened. The ball went straight into the back of the net. Unhappily along the way, the goalkeeper had managed to punch me in the stomach. I went down, and the referee came over, sat me up, and made me do all these sit-ups. I felt dizzy and weird. So he sent me off to get some water. I went to pee, and suddenly I was peeing blood, and two minutes later, I collapsed.

      In the hospital, they thought it was my appendix. Then they thought it was a collapsed lung. That night, I was doubled-over in pain. I was in fucking agony. They took me down to surgery, and my spleen had been perforated. They managed to repair the damage, though they took my appendix out as well.

      Two weeks later, an abscess developed internally. So it was back into hospital. This time, I had blood poisoning. All told, my recovery took three months from start to finish. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t jump and I couldn’t train. And then, when I started kicking the ball again, I was nervous about going into a tackle. I had lost my confidence.

      I remember my first serious game like it was yesterday. Dad was away, and you don’t take your mum to football, do you? It was an English Schools competition – Oxfordshire County against Inner London – held at Loftus Road, the ground of Queens Park Rangers, in London. It was amazing, and all the London players were from the youth teams of Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal. I thought we were going to get hammered, but we beat them 2–1. However, it was a dirty game. I was taken off after a bad tackle to my knee – another injury from which it took me ages to recover.

      After I’d recovered, I played in an FA Cup youth game, and it was there that a Rangers scout spotted me. They asked if I’d like to spend a week of my next summer holiday with the club. Fucking hell! It wasn’t just the fact that it was a professional club, it was RANGERS, the one club that would have an impact on the way Dad felt about me – or so I thought. By then, I was sixteen and was pushing the upper age limit for breaking into professional football. It was make-or-break time.

      That first week was hard. I had an English accent, so they kicked the shit out of me for that. And they also made me use my right leg, which was fucking useless. We weren’t allowed to rely on only one foot, in much the same way as, in the kitchen, you must be able to chop with both hands. Anyway, after that first week, I just hated Rangers.

      I was called back three times. The process was horrible, and I was in two minds about begging for a fucking contract out of Rangers. I was settled in Banbury in the flat with Diane, and I was enjoying my freedom. I had my first serious girlfriend. I’d started working in a hotel. I had a bit of money, and there was always Banbury United if I wanted football. I got about £15 a game.

      Mum phoned. She told me to contact my Uncle Ronald.

      ‘Look, things have moved on,’ he said. ‘Rangers are going to invite you back up.’

      He gave me a number to call. I phoned one of the head coaches.

      He said, ‘We want you back up. Can you bring your dad to training on May seventeenth?’

      At that point, I wasn’t even allowed to call the house. The trouble was that the people at the club wanted to know that I was properly supported.

      I was thinking, ‘Fuck, am I properly supported? No.’

      I rang Mum and asked her to tell him. I couldn’t face doing it myself.

      So she did tell him, and, all of a sudden, he was…not nice, exactly, but smarmy. He was going to enjoy my success as though he was me.

      I played for the first team twice, in preseason friendlies, but it was a bad time for me. Dad’s deceit was really getting to me.

      Then they said, ‘We’re going to continue watching you. We’re really excited. We are going to sign you – but it’ll be next year, rather than this year.’

      By this time, I’d been offered a cooking job in London. It was in a new 300-seater banqueting hall that had opened at the Mayfair Hotel. They were looking for four commis chefs: Second Commis, Grade Two. I don’t know what the fuck that means, even now. It’s a posh kitchen porter, basically, but the salary was £5,200 a year. Anyway, I told them that I could not start yet, and went back up to Rangers for the third year in a row.

      This was the summer of 1984. Half the players weren’t there because they were travelling in Canada, so everything was focused on the youth players. They were deciding who was staying and whom they were going to sign that year. Ally McCoist was there, and Derek and Ian Ferguson. They’d been involved with the club since they were boys, and I suppose that’s all I ever really wanted to do, too: to stay put in one place, play football, and become a local boy.

      The training went very well this time. I remember playing in a reserve team game against McCoist, and I had a good game. I was hopeful. I was feeling positive. The following week, we were playing a big charity match in East Kilbride. I couldn’t believe it. I was in the squad, and I got to play. The trouble was that they kept moving me around the pitch. And then, to make things even worse, I got taken off fifteen minutes before the end. They must have made at least seven substitutions that day. Never mind. I trained for another two weeks, and then I played in another youth team match – another really good game. I was starting to think that I might be in with a chance.

      Then came a disaster. In a training session, I seriously damaged my knee, and, stupidly, I tried to play on. We had to take penalties with our right feet. We each had to put a trainer on our left foot and a football boot on our right. The idea was to make your right foot work constantly. It must have been nearly four o’clock when they divided us into two teams and told us to play fifteen minutes each way and to give it ‘everything you’ve fucking got’. By the time we finished, I was in serious pain.