The Fashion of Football:

From Best To Beckham, from mod to label lover ...

EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT - STEVE PERRYMAN

He's One of Us!

In June 1979, I had my first music review published in a national newspaper. Since then, I have interviewed a considerable number of major
musicians including (he said not a little proudly) Marvin Gaye, Smokey
Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone.
Through my job, I have travelled the world, met hundreds of interesting and funny and charming and inspirational and extremely obnoxious people. I've had some amazing experiences. I have written 11 books, been on TV countless times, same with radio. But when Steve Perryman came through the door of the City wine bar Mark and I were sitting in, I was rendered speechless. It was . . . Steve Perryman.

I began supporting Spurs in 1967. I was nine years old. Steve Perryman
joined Spurs the very same year. He was seventeen years old and would
become an essential part of a Spurs team that in the '70s and early '80s
would win two FA Cups, two League Cups and two UEFA Cups.

Perryman was the spirit of the team. By his own admission, he was not a
Gazza or a Hoddle, outrageously talented footballers, but his commitment
just couldn't be faulted. Actually, scrap that last sentence. It implies
the man was a journeyman footballer, a blood, sweat and tears guy but
without talent. Not so, not so at all. Steve Perryman was a tenacious,
defensive midfielder with fine passing skills and a sharp football brain.
He drove the Spurs team forward relentlessly and did so with strength and
imagination. That's why Perryman would feature in most people's all-time
Spurs 11, including mine. Perryman put as much into the game as any fan on the terraces. He was as exultant in victory as we were, and similarly as
crushed by the punch of defeat. In 1981, the club's centenary year, this is
what he had to say about Tottenham: 'I enjoy Spurs because at this club
everyone, from the humblest backroom boy to the highest paid player, is
treated with equal respect. They're all equally important to our success.
That's what makes Tottenham Hotspur a great football club.'
So sad that such sentiments are almost unrecognisable today, yet the words say much about the man dubbed 'the Baby-faced Assassin' a million years before the same title was bestowed upon Manchester United's Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. (In fact, Perryman discovered the young Solskjaer in Norway when the boy was just 18. He automatically rang Spurs. 'You got to sign this boy, he's amazing,' he told the powers that be - this was during the Alan Sugar and Gerry Francis era. They ignored him. Just as they ignored Dennis Bergkamp when he became available. Foreign players? Having a laugh, aren't you? Bunch of bloody Carlos Kickabouts.)

Keith Palmer had arranged the interview. He knew Perryman, said he would persuade him to come for a chat. 'The day he came out onto the pitch with a Skinhead cut is legendary,' Keith told us. 'We were Skinheads and he looked like one of us. For that reason alone, you have got to talk to him. I'll phone him. I'm meeting him next week. We can hook it up then.'
Both Mark and I said that would be great but privately never thought it
would happen. 'Can't see it myself,' Mark said over the phone. We had heard a lot of promises throughout this journey and Mark in particular had been taken aback by people's flaky attitudes. As far as he was concerned, if you said you were going to do something, you did it. Full stop. If you can't do it, don't lie.

Lying, conniving and cheating upset Mark's sense of graceful living.
However, Keith was as good on his word as Perryman was in a Spurs shirt.
Two weeks later, he phoned and told us to be in a certain bar at a certain
time. We arrived and, a few minutes later, he walked in with Perryman.
For five minutes as we sat around the table, I just looked at my glass and
let Mark do all the talking. He could explain to Perryman what the book was about. I couldn't. I just kept thinking to myself, it's . . . Steve
Perryman, the man who played over 800 games for Spurs, who scored twice against AC Milan in 1972's UEFA Cup semi-final first leg, the man who played with his sleeves rolled up, the perfect symbol of his absolute
commitment to the Tottenham cause. Although he had filled out a little,
Perryman still looked the same, still had that little-boy face, the short,
dark hair I remembered so vividly from his playing days.

'So, son,' Mark said, finally. 'We going to put the tape recorder on? Ask a
few questions, maybe?' Mark knew what I was going through, knew what
Perryman was doing to my head at that precise moment in time. I needed a
question to buy me a bit of time. 'Yeah, Steve,' I said, putting on the tape recorder, 'thought we could start with a bit of background,' I said.
'No problem,' he said kindly. Steve Perryman was brought up in Northolt,
London with two elder brothers who played football. 'Because of them,'
Perryman explained, 'I was always playing football with people older than
myself and therefore it became very easy when I played with my own age
group. It was soon obvious that I was better than my age group. I was
playing with the fourth-year team in second year.

'My school was particularly football-minded. They'd have six-a-side
competitions before it was normal to do that. So I'd get pulled out of my
classroom. I was like a star but without wanting to be one. I played for
the district team early and ended up going to a grammar school.'
Unfortunately, the school had made basketball their main sporting activity.
'They'd had problems playing the competitive games, fighting with other
schools, so they decided to give up football.'

Fortunately, a new sports head teacher was appointed and the imbalance was corrected. 'He said, we have some good players here, and got six of us into the Under-15s district team, Ealing District,' Perryman related. 'I played my first game against Harrow. We won 9-1. That was on a Saturda. The Sunday, Charlie Faulker, the chief scout of Spurs, knocks on the door, come for a trial.'

The Perryman family knew of Faulker. Steve's brother had written to him a year earlier alerting him to Steve's talents. Faulker, then a scout for
QPR, never replied. At the Perryman household, the family gave him an
earful for his negligence and then persuaded Steve to start training at
Spurs.

'We went training Tuesday and Thursday nights,' Perryman recalled. 'My
schoolwork went completely downhill. I could only ever see football from
that moment onwards. Fulham got interested but I didn't sign with Fulham
because of my brother's influence. Signed on for Tottenham really for the
honesty of the manager, Bill Nicholson.

'Other people, like Tommy Docherty at Chelsea, were saying like, we're in
the Cup final [Spurs v. Chelsea 1967]. We'll pick you up in a limousine -
your mum, dad, brothers, fucking uncles, aunts, they can all come. Then
there's the after-match do. Just join us. And Bill Nick would say, are you
going to sign for us or not? Because if you're not, I'll give your ticket
to someone else. Forget the limousine. Forget the treatment. Just
absolutely to the point. Which is lovely. And so I went for that sort of
approach. Liked that. That was a long way from where I lived in west London and so it was taking me two hours a day to get there and two hours home again. Eventually, got in the team, when I was 17.'

That must have been an incredible experience, I suggest. Perryman shrugs
his shoulders. Like all '70s footballers, the excitement of their achievements is now tempered by the wish to have been born 20 years later.

What they could do with the money today's players are pulling.
'We certainly weren't overpaid,' he stated. 'I mean, I earned eighteen quid
a week in the first team. End of the year, Bill Nicholson pulled you in.
You sat in a little seat below him. He's up there and you're down here. And
he'd just tap his fingers like that and he's offering you a score [£20],
which I suppose is a percentage increase from eighteen quid to a score, but I said to Bill, those shoes cost fifteen quid. You didn't play for
Tottenham for the money, that's for sure. Of course, I was earning more
than people of my own age and I had more money than them but it was not
like today. If you get in the team now, you get a five-year contract and,
by the time you finish, you've got mega money.'

Keith now joined in, bringing up that day when Perryman ran onto the White Hart Lane pitch with a short-back-and-sides and a razored parting. The reaction was palpable and felt across the whole ground. He's one of us, the fans said and, in that very moment, player and fan became as one. Such is the power of football.

Perryman smiles. 'I remember Keith talking about my haircut. My haircut was down to one particular barber who was the barber of all the local boxers.

Not that I was a boxer but I used to go to him and, of course, boxers have
their hair cut short because that's what you do. It was really following
the boxing fraternity rather than what some people thought, a Skinhead or
whatever. It appeared to be the same thing but it wasn't meant to be.'
'It went right round the terraces,' Keith commented. 'I mean, you could
hear it. Everyone's going, he's one of us.'
Steve shook his head in gentle amazement. 'That's a surprise to me. I
wouldn't even believe that you could have that effect.'
'Everybody looked at each other,' Keith continued, 'and went, they've got a Skinhead on the team. You could hear it right across the terraces. And then everyone naturally assumed that you'd had it done because we had had it done on the terraces.'

Steve smiled wider now, and ruefully too. 'That would have been clever if
it was that way but it weren't. That was too clever for me.'
As for clothes, Perryman claimed he felt happiest wearing suits, had worn
them since the '60s, could remember when you had a suit made for Sunday
best. Steve's were made by a tailor in Mill Lane, Acton; shiny mohair
numbers and (nice touch, this) he always ordered two of the same trousers.
'Travelling on coaches ruined the crease,' he explained, thus a spare pair
always came in handy. With the suits, he wore Oxford brogues and clothes
that were a mix of Mod, Skin and Suedehead. Put that with a college-boy
haircut and 100 per cent devotion to the cause, no wonder Steve was a
player whose relationship with the fans is both deep and lasting.

His next brush with fashion came with the Steve Perryman sports shops, a
business venture he and his brothers embarked upon. 'My second brother,
Bill, had the wheeler-dealer silk cap,' Perryman says, smiling again. 'We
were in a cup final or whatever [if only today's Spurs players could be so
blasé about cup finals] and he said, crap sports shops around here, we
can't ever buy anything we want, let's open one. I thought, yeah, go on
then. We'll have a bit of that.

'We started in Hayes and ended up with seven shops, all run by him. We'd go to like a trade fair in London and see Pringle sweaters and think they're nice, rather than they're fashionable - that they're good. So we were sort of on it, about six months before anyone else. Fred Perry was round the corner from Tottenham, factory there in one of them sort of side streets.

We could always go in and pick it all up and see the stuff. It didn't help,
though, because it came again 20 years later. Which is fine but it didn't
happen when we were trading.'

It is only recently that the Perryman family sold the last lease. 'It was
never our way to borrow half a million from a bank and open up 30 shops,'
Perryman states. 'We literally wanted to keep it small, family-run and
manageable.'

When I asked him who he considered the best-dressed player at Spurs
throughout his time there, Perryman selected the full-back Joe Kinnear:
'Big ties, the flares, long hair, flowing locks.'

What did Bill Nicholson have to say about long hair? I wondered. 'He didn't like it,' replied Steve.
'I bet he didn't,' Keith said.
Perryman laughed. 'When I had my hair a lot longer, he used to sometimes
get hold of my head and say, think you look good? You think you look good like that? Because you fucking don't. Actually, my older brother was more of an influence. He used to sort of say the same thing. How can you run about? That fucking hair's in your eyes.'

I interjected here. 'Must have been a bit easier than Ralph Coates's hair,
though,' thinking of the long strands of hair that continually flapped
across that man's face as he hared down the wing. Memories of Coates and Kinnear brought to mind the other greats, the Chiverses, the Gilzeans, the Greaveses, the Peterses, the Archibalds, the Ardileses, the Hoddles, the Gazzas . . .

So, what did Perryman make of Spurs these days? 'It's the blind leading the blind,' he said, screwing his face up in annoyance and disgust. He still
felt for the club in a huge manner. Since quitting as a player, Perryman
had gone into management. His most notable spell was in Japan coaching
Shimizu S-Pulse with friend and fellow legend Ossie Ardiles. In 1999,
Shimizu lost the J League play-off final on penalties to Jubilo Iwate.
Strangely, the game was played in Dubai. Prior to the kick-off, Perryman
was offered a bribe, a good bung, to throw the game. He refused and lost
anyway.

'I'll tell you this story before I have to dash off,' he said, and it was a
story that confirmed his enduring loyalty to Tottenham. Perryman knew that by his team Shimizu reaching those play-off finals, his success would
generate a lot of British media interest. He persuaded his club to arrange
a press conference. It was the mid-'90s. Perryman walked into the
conference, sat down and the first thing he did was to start lambasting
Spurs' chairman, Alan Sugar. Many Spurs fans still believe that Sugar was
the man responsible for Tottenham's woes in the '90s. Perryman was one of them.

'I knew that everything I said would go right back to him via the back
pages,' he said, gleefully. And it did. The next day, Perryman got a phone
call from a furious Sugar and the two men argued for hours. And that was
Steve Perryman. Twenty years on and he was still defending his club to the
last. When Perryman stood up, shook our hands and left, I had a glow inside of me. Mark and I had another drink, then we too made tracks. As we walked through the London cold, Mark announced, 'I clocked you at the start. You couldn't say a word, could you, son?'

'Mark,' I said, 'it was . . . Steve Perryman.'

'I know, son,' he said kindly. 'I know.'