No, I’m not saying I am about to resign from the board of Manchester United, or that suddenly I’m going to find it easy to turn down a request to fly to Nairobi or Sarajevo, Johannesburg or São Paulo, and be able, at least one more time, to marvel at the power of football to enter the spirit and the language of every nation on earth. If you gave me the chance, I would probably argue for ever that in the sweep of its appeal, its ability to touch every corner of humanity, football is the only game that needed to be invented. But a man can make the point only so many times, just as he can get on only so many airplanes. There is surely a moment when he has to see that he should, as the great golfer Walter Hagen once advised, pause and smell the flowers.
This thought came to me quite strongly while locked in a Brazilian traffic jam – always a colourful affair, no doubt, but the kind which makes you think a little about how most sensibly to apportion some of the time left to you.
So much of it is owed to my wife Norma, my daughters, and my three grandchildren: Suzanne’s Robert and Andrea’s William and Emma; they have all given me a multitude of reasons for pride. Sometimes I think I should spend rather more time displaying this feeling that comes to me in some distant corner of the world and gives me a sudden yearning to be home.
Already I’ve had young Robert out on the Old Trafford pitch for a few minutes, just for him to get a feeling of the place. However, though he has shown talent for sport, including the display of a good golf swing and tennis stroke, no one will insist more fervently than his grandfather that his life is his own.
Sometimes I’m asked if I ever regret the fact that I never had a son, that there was no Bobby Junior with whom to kick around a ball in the back garden. My reaction is that you have to be rather conceited to think in such terms. I was given two girls and they have been the most precious of gifts. Ask for a lad? No, you do not ask for a boy, any more than you ask for the moon. You get what you are given and you thank God.
Suzanne was always fascinated by the weather. Norma and I sometimes wondered why; maybe it was because she went to school quite near Manchester airport, but who really knew except this determined young girl who announced she wanted to be a meteorologist? This meant, she pointed out, Reading University, which specialised in the subject. She studied pure mathematics and physics, and after joining the Ministry of Defence, which had been in charge of predicting the weather since the Second World War, she was sent on a special course in Germany, where she learned about how the layers of weather affect flying. She came back determined to learn how to fly herself, and though, because her job changed, she didn’t take her pilot’s licence, she did fly solo from the famous Battle of Britain station Biggin Hill. Eventually, she appeared on television for a while and our pride in her career was never diminished by suggestions that her place in the public eye had something to do with her family connection. Like any indignant father would, I pointed out that my girl was a qualified scientist.
Andrea went to university in Nottingham and then business school in London. She was just as emphatic as Suzanne about what she wanted to do: she wanted to be a high-powered businesswoman, and she landed a good job with Canon, the giant camera and film firm. However, she became frustrated working on budgets that were not always implemented, and wasn’t happy with her life, so she decided to do something different. She went to Manchester University and got a second degree. Now she is a qualified physiotherapist and enjoys her work as she never could in a business suit. In the end this, I believe, is what you want most for your children: an understanding that life is not something to submit to, but a challenge you must try to shape by your own efforts in some activity that truly interests you.
I suspect that I have made it clear enough in these pages that in my case football was more than even a vocation – it was a compulsion. Now, when for one last time I try to capture for you the meaning of all that part of my life so strongly interwoven with Manchester United, I see something more clearly than ever before. I see that if football has been my joy and my expression and sometimes my pain, it has also been my vehicle for understanding that other people’s lives and achievements do not receive the kind of attention paid to a spectacular goal in a big football match. I have had experiences that have carried me far beyond the boundaries of the games we play. When I say this I think of meeting men like Scotty Lee in Sarajevo and Peter Karanja in the second worst slum in Africa. I think of the commitment they have made to people much less fortunate than themselves, and how they do this day in, day out. In those moments of reflection I am grateful to football because, among all its other gifts, it has enabled me in recent years to help such men at least a little in their efforts to give a chance to young people who, without their efforts, would have nowhere to turn.
Scotty Lee drove a relief truck through the Bosnian mountains at that time when Sarajevo was a shooting gallery for snipers and artillery men whose job was
