For any man, I imagine, reawakening his past can bring both pleasure and pain and certainly if this is true I am no exception.
For persuading me that this was a good time to tell my story, after shying away from the task for so long, I must thank the editorial director of Headline, David Wilson – and for his vision and his enthusiastic support. I’m also grateful for the help of my friend James Lawton, who appeared at Old Trafford as a young sports writer soon after I established myself in the United team. In his company I have tried to reclaim the years and make them live again.
In telling my story another hope is that along the way I have conveyed my thanks, above all, to the game of football which has given me so much.
PROLOGUE
NOW, WHEN I look back on my life and remember all that I wanted from it as a young boy in the North East, I see more clearly than ever it is a miracle. I see one privilege heaped upon another. I wonder all over again how so much could come to one man simply because he was able to do something which for him was so natural and easy, and which he knew from the start he loved to do more than anything else.
None of this wonderment is lessened by knowing that when I played football I was probably as dedicated as any professional could be, though I claim no great credit for this. Playing was, in all honesty, almost as natural as breathing. No, the truth is that, although I did work hard at developing the gifts I’d been given, the path of my life truly has been a miracle granted to me. Why, I cannot explain. But in Munich in 1958 I learned that even miracles come at a price.
Mine, until the day I die, is the tragedy which robbed me of so many of my dearest friends who happened to be team-mates – and of so many of the certainties that had come to me, one as seamlessly as another, in my brief and largely untroubled life up to that moment.
Even now, fifty years on, it still reaches down and touches me every day. Sometimes I feel it quite lightly, a mere brush stroke across an otherwise happy mood. Sometimes it engulfs me with terrible regret and sadness – and guilt that I walked away and found so much. But whatever the severity of its presence, the Munich air crash is always there, always a factor that can never be discounted, never put down like time-exhausted baggage.
I hope I do not say any of this in a maudlin or self-pitying way – how could I when I consider the lightness of the cost to me when I compare it with the price paid by the young men whose lives I shared so deeply and who so quickly had become like brothers? I confront Munich immediately only because the meaning of it, its implications, its legacy in my spirit, and the unshakeable memory of it, are still so central to my existence.
It would be possible to list a thousand good things that have happened to me before I deal with the moment I regained consciousness and faced that hellish scene at the airfield. With my first glance I saw that one beloved team-mate was dead after suffering injuries I could never bring myself to describe – and then Sir Matt Busby groaning and holding his chest as he sat in a pool of water. I could delve into so much that has been a joy to me before I come to the sight of seven of my team-mates laid out in the snow.
That, however, would be an evasion, a cosmetic device to obscure the truth I have lived with since 6 February 1958: that everything I have been able to achieve since that day – including the winning of the European Cup and the World Cup and being linked, inextricably, with two of the greatest players the world has ever seen, George Best and Denis Law – has been accompanied by a simple question: why me?
Why was I able to run my hands over my body and find that I was still whole when Roger Byrne, Eddie Colman, Liam ‘Billy’ Whelan, David Pegg, Tommy Taylor, Mark Jones and Geoff Bent lay dead, and Duncan Edwards, who I loved and admired so intensely, faced an unavailing battle for his life? Why had I been picked out to inherit so much of what they, in the first surge of brilliant youth, had achieved so beautifully?
One of the few certainties that replaced my original belief that anything could be achieved in the presence of such great footballers is that I will never stop asking that question – no more than I will be able to shed those feelings of guilt at my own survival which can come to me so suddenly at any moment, night or day.
For many reasons it is not easy to speak of these things, not least because of the sensitivities of those who were left behind by the disaster, all those loved ones whose lives suddenly became so hollow. Even now, when I happen to meet them I suspect they are asking the question, ‘How was it that you survived and the others didn’t?’ But then something I learned beyond all else, after the first shock had been absorbed,
