Culture
As Steve McMichael battles ALS, old friends visit with stories to tell
The doorbell rings, and it feels as if the sun has broken through the clouds. The dogs rush to the front door. There’s Blue, the yapping chihuahua, and Marshmallow, the Shiba Inu with a limp. And here comes Misty McMichael with a big smile and a big hug.
A visitor has arrived, and Steve McMichael is as buoyant as someone in his situation can be.
Whoever is at the door undoubtedly will bring up his upcoming induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and if he could still smile widely and proudly, he would.
For a while, McMichael derived pleasure from Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream in his feeding tube, but he was cut off because it made him vulnerable to pneumonia. For now, he can experience flavor only in ice chips — Pedialyte, cranberry and Coca-Cola.
These days, satisfaction is scarce and pleasure is mostly a memory.
Three years into a diagnosis of ALS, McMichael, the former Chicago Bears defensive tackle, is about one year beyond when doctors said he might expire. He can’t move his legs or arms. Misty, his wife, has rushed him to the hospital at least 10 times over the last few years, always with dire fear.
He hasn’t been able to communicate verbally for about a year, but he expresses simple sentences through a speech-generating device that reads eye movements. The machine has a few phrases saved that he uses frequently.
“Ass on fire,” he makes it say often, a plea to address a recurring pain.
“More meds,” is another.
If the visitor is expected, he often won’t ask for more meds to ensure he isn’t foggy. There is a lot that McMichael can’t do anymore, but he can still connect with the people who have been important to him.
Some people ring that bell once. Some do it every so often. Some ring all the time.
They experience humanity and intimacy in a way they never have.
In the living room is a gray reclining chair.
It was bought so Steve’s sister Kathy McMichael would have a place to sleep in 2021 and 2022 before he had 24-hour medical attendants.
As well as anyone, she can soothe his pain.
She holds his hand and talks about old memories, including games she saw him play going back to high school. Sometimes they watch a YouTube compilation their sister Sharon put together with videos of him playing football at various levels, wrestling, singing and more.
Staying with him for extended periods has been easy for her. Leaving, not so much.
“When I was there, I tried to be upbeat for him,” she says. “But when I was leaving, I thought he would die and I would never see him again. I would cry all the way home on the plane and spend the next two days in bed crying.”
Kathy McMichael, right, calls big brother Steve her hero. (Courtesy of Kathy McMichael)
When Kathy was a toddler, Steve — “Stevie” she calls him — played dolls with her. She had a Barbie; he had a G.I. Joe.
“I have the fondest memories of him,” says Kathy, who is a legislative director for the Texas attorney general’s office. “People don’t realize how kind and sweet he is. He’s always been my hero.”
For most of their lives, they talked almost daily on the phone. When Kathy went through a divorce at 26 and was so upset she couldn’t eat, Steve showed up with a U-Haul to move her, set her up in a new apartment and took her out for a meal every day for a couple of weeks. “He saved me and it turned my whole life around,” Kathy says.
She was with him in February for the announcement that he would be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Kathy thought he didn’t look good at the time. She couldn’t see the lovely green in his irises. She feared the worst.
Now, Kathy thinks differently. “He’s not ready to go,” she says. “We’ve talked about it. I don’t know that he ever will be. He doesn’t give up on anything. It’s not in his makeup.”
She’s looking forward to traveling to Canton, Ohio, for the induction, but if Steve can’t go, Kathy will be at her big brother’s bedside.
When Mike Singletary first visited McMichael after his ALS diagnosis, they prayed together.
“My hope was he could get healed,” Singletary says.
That isn’t happening, but the middle linebacker keeps praying with his teammate. Even now, there are blessings to be thankful for, and more to request.
Singletary tells stories, too, hoping to see that old spark in McMichael’s eyes. He talked about a 1984 game against the Raiders in which McMichael, Singletary and company knocked out quarterbacks Marc Wilson and David Humm. Next up was supposed to be punter Ray Guy — but he refused to go in.
“He loved it,” Singletary says. “It’s kind of like reading a bedtime story.”
One day Singletary told him how much he always appreciated him, how much he meant to him, and how he felt he could always trust him. When they were playing together, Singletary said, he always knew where McMichael was going to be.
McMichael tried to respond using his speech-generating device. He tried and tried, but he couldn’t get it to do what he wanted it to.
“He got so frustrated that he started crying,” Singletary said. “That was a tough moment.”
A world traveler, John Faidutti has been to Egypt, Russia, Thailand, China, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina and many other destinations. He has climbed Mt. Rainer and Mt. St. Helens.
But he hasn’t traveled in almost three years.
“I’m afraid of leaving because if Steve dies when I’m gone, it will kill me,” he says. “I have anxiety about that.”
Faidutti, an investor, met McMichael about 25 years ago at a party and bonded on summer afternoons at a swimming pool outside of the apartment complex where McMichael lived. When Misty gave birth to Macy 16 years ago, Faidutti was in the delivery room. Steve asked him to be her godfather and started calling him “Padrino,” Italian for godfather.
“Now you’re in the family,” Steve told him. “Once you’re in the family, you can’t get out.”
When Macy started talking, she couldn’t say “Padrino,” so she called him “Drino.” Now, everyone knows him as “Padrino” or “Drino.”
Before Steve lost the ability to speak, Padrino asked him what he could do for him in the future. “Just take care of Macy,” Steve told him.
As Steve has been progressively unable to do what a father usually does, Padrino has done more.
John Faidutti, left, has embraced his role as godfather to Macy McMichael, Steve’s daughter. (Courtesy of John Faidutti)
Macy is a shy girl, but not around Padrino. On “Macy’s day,” which happens once or twice a week, he takes her to a restaurant for food. They play video games together. He helped teach Macy to drive.
Padrino makes sure Steve knows everything that’s happening with his daughter. She’s very artistic, and she shows Padrino her creations. Padrino makes sure Steve sees them.
Padrino tied Steve’s shoes back when he wore them. He shares his Prime Video password. He’s removed Steve’s catheter. He’s changed his diapers. Giving his friend comfort is a privilege, not a burden. “I have no problem doing whatever he needs me to do,” Padrino says.
Many times, it has seemed the pen was almost out of ink for McMichael. But then it keeps writing.
Every time he’s had a medical emergency, they ask him to blink once if he wants to go to the hospital to be treated or twice if he wants to let it be. McMichael always has blinked once.
To Padrino, McMichael repeatedly has indicated he wanted to keep living.
On McMichael’s 66th birthday last October, Padrino told him, “Let’s make it one more year.”
In his eyes, Padrino saw determination.
Ric Flair hasn’t seen McMichael in about a month and a half because he’s been traveling. He plans to visit him soon.
When he comes, Flair tries to limit his time with McMichael to about 30 minutes because he can’t take much longer.
The visual can be unsettling.
Except for McMichael’s spirit, everything about him is withered.
“It’s very difficult for me to see him like that,” Flair says. “It’s so hard. My job when I’m there is to make him smile and laugh, and make him know people care about him. I walk away thinking I’m the luckiest guy in the world not to have something like that.”
Pro wrestling great Ric Flair, right, with Misty and Steve McMichael, calls Steve “one of the greatest guys I’ve ever known.” (Courtesy of Misty McMichael)
Flair and McMichael started out as enemies. In 1996, McMichael was a commentator for WCW wrestling when Flair hit on his then-wife, Debra. McMichael, with former NFL player Kevin Greene, subsequently challenged Flair and Arn Anderson to a tag-team match. But instead of exacting revenge on Flair, McMichael took a heel turn, attacking Greene and joining forces with Flair, Anderson and Chris Benoit as “The Four Horsemen.”
“When he came on board, his personality won me over in five seconds,” Flair says. “It’s bigger than life. He’s one of the greatest guys I’ve ever known.”
To Flair, McMichael was more than a wrestling partner.
“We hung out every night, partied and drank,” he says, laughing. “You kidding me? I spent New Year’s Eve one year with him and Lawrence Taylor in Las Vegas. Tell me about it. Steve can be something else. He gets away with it because he’s Steve.”
Not many could hang with the legendary “Nature Boy” after hours. But Flair claims to have struggled to keep pace with McMichael, who showed up every Monday for five days on the road with $15,000 in cash in his pocket, saying, “I’ve got more money than I’ve got time.”
They were bonded in the wildest of times. Now they share the most tender moments.
Flair looks forward to partying with McMichael again in Canton at McMichael’s induction.
“If they bring him up on the stage, I think that will be one of the most emotional, fulfilling moments,” he says. “It will be one of the most powerful things I will have seen.”
During his playing days, McMichael hired Michael Kinyon, a friend of teammate Kevin Butler’s, to hang mirrors at his house. Kinyon owns Michael’s Glass and also takes sideline photos for the team.
Their relationship grew, but it took time.
“I was a little afraid of the guy initially, honestly,” Kinyon says. “For an outsider like me, it probably took a year and a half of hanging around with him almost every week before I felt comfortable.”
The turning point came when he was with a group of Bears players in a private room at a golf outing and a photographer from the event came in to take pictures. McMichael charged at him and told him to leave.
“We’ve got our own photographer,” he told him, punching Kinyon in the chest, sending him stumbling and leaving a bruise.
Butler turned to Kinyon and said, “You’re in.”
After McMichael was stricken with ALS, Misty asked Kinyon to install mirrors so she could see him in his bedroom from her bedroom.
Kinyon often brings liquid CBD and THC to put in McMichael’s feeding tube. It helps with the pain and anxiety.
On a recent visit with former Bears equipment man Gary Haeger and defensive tackle Jim Osborne, they brought up a 1984 game. Quarterbacks Jim McMahon and Steve Fuller were injured, and Mike Ditka had no choice but to play Rusty Lisch.
Then McMichael set his eyes on the screen of his speech-generating device and worked diligently. Minutes passed.
And it was McMichael who dusted the cobwebs from the tale and delivered the zinger.
“Ditka cut him on the plane ride home,” he said through the machine.
Laughter, loud laughter.
Dan Hampton often brings mutual friends to visit McMichael.
In numbers, there is comfort.
They go around his bed and try to bring him cheer.
“Normally, his eyes are laden and sad,” Hampton says. “But if you tell a good story, his eyes light up.”
Lifting his spirits is one thing. Lifting his body is another.
When he still could speak, McMichael sometimes asked to be held upright to stretch. But lifting him was like lifting a 175-pound sandbag, and hardly anyone had the strength and assuredness. Hampton, who still looks like he could bull rush through a double team, would do it for close to a minute. He can’t do it anymore because McMichael, who now weighs about 150, doesn’t have enough core strength. “I’d have to squeeze him so hard to pick him up, I’d be afraid I’d break something,” Hampton said.
McMichael has called Hampton his big brother.
Steve McMichael has called former Bears teammate Dan Hampton his big brother. Hampton built a wheelchair ramp at the McMichaels’ house after Steve’s ALS diagnosis. (Courtesy of Michael Kinyon)
When McMichael arrived in Chicago to sign his first contract with the Bears, Hampton was sent to the airport to pick him up. They came together like two pieces of flint, and the fire they created burned spectacularly.
They raised hell between the tackles and then did it between sips of Crown Royal.
Hampton and McMichael became the true colonnades of Soldier Field, and the dominating Bears were built upon them. The night before Super Bowl XX, an emotionally charged McMichael threw a chair at a blackboard with such force that all four legs stuck. Then Hampton bashed a film projector to pieces.
In another era, it seemed as if they controlled everything around them. Things have changed.
After McMichael’s diagnosis, Hampton had a load of lumber delivered to the house and board by board, nail by nail, he built a wheelchair ramp from the laundry room to the garage. Former teammate Richard Dent helped.
Between them, the flame remains. You can feel it when Hampton is at McMichael’s bedside.
“I hate going,” Hampton says. “Hate it. I hate to see him in this condition. I hate being a part of this phase of his life. But after leaving the house, I always realize it means something to him. That’s all that matters.”
During their playing careers, McMichael and Hampton were part of a band called the Chicago Six, which included Walter Payton, Dave Duerson and a few Chicago Blackhawks players. In 2013, they wanted to revive the concept. At a corporate appearance, they met Johnny McFarland, a construction equipment salesman who played guitar on the side.
Hampton and McMichael asked him if he would be interested in a reimagined Chicago Six. McFarland, Hampton and McMichael joined forces with former Bear Otis Wilson and two other musicians, playing at local fests, fundraisers and the NFL Draft.
McMichael gave McFarland a new name — “Johnny Guitar.” He also encouraged him to take over the stage during guitar solos — McMichael would step to the side — even though everyone was there to see the former Bears.
“Make it sing, Johnny, make it sing!” he would say.
After Johnny Guitar and the other band members who were not former Bears finished their day jobs, they rehearsed at Hampton’s house. McMichael always came with an extra-large pizza, a bucket of wings and a case of Bud Light. When he found out Johnny Guitar preferred Stella Artois, he brought those.
“He’d say, ‘I know you guys are coming straight from work, so I got something,’” Johnny Guitar said. “And he refused to take money.”
Now Johnny Guitar brings his two-stick guitar to McMichael’s house, and he and the other band members perform songs for McMichael that he once took part in. They play “Baddest Team Alive” and “Ready to Roll,” two Hampton compositions about the Bears of the 1980s.
Just before Christmas, they played “Feliz Navidad” around McMichael’s bed. His nurses sang along.
When McMichael joined the Bears, Jim Osborne was the venerated elder statesman. In Jim’s mind, McMichael still is the young, boisterous life of the party.
Now they watch cowboy movies together and both doze off like two little brothers after a long day. But it’s OK. “Sometimes it’s just being there, letting him know, ‘I’m here,’” Osborne says. “And as long as I’m able to be there, I will be.”
One day, Osborne left his room so a nurse could clean his tracheotomy tube. McMichael signaled to his nurse that he wanted Jim in the room.
“I thought, ‘I don’t like seeing that, but if he wants me to watch, I will,’” Osborne says.
He did, and then it hit him.
“He was giving me a message,” Osborne says. “He was telling me if he could endure this, then I could endure anything. His willingness to hang in is an example for anyone who’s encountering something difficult.”
Osborne often visits McMichael with his wife, Wanda. Soon after McMichael’s diagnosis, McMichael told Wanda he had read her book “Away: A Children’s Book of Loss” and wanted to know if she would consider writing a book with him. He wanted it to be a story about an athletic boy who has his physical gifts taken from him. And he wanted the book to be about him, with appearances from his brother Rick McMichael, Wanda’s husband and Hampton. That’s all he told her.
Within a week, Wanda had a draft written, though she wasn’t sure how. “I truly believe God blessed me with the thoughts to create the storyline Steve wanted to relay,” she says. “I can’t take the credit because I didn’t even like literature in school.”
When she read the draft to Steve and Misty, both were in tears.
After a few tweaks, they had an inspiring story about a boy who is paralyzed after a run-in with a bully but whose spirit cannot be quelled — “The Golden Life of Little Steve.”
Broadcast executive Larry Wert once fired McMichael from his job as a television sports analyst, but he remains a welcome visitor to the McMichael house.
During his playing career, McMichael delighted in crossing lines he wasn’t supposed to cross. He duct-taped radio host Kevin Matthews to a chair and brought him outside so passersby could sign him. And he forcibly administered a fake HIV test to sportscaster Mark Giangreco after implying the two of them were lovers.
When Wert fired McMichael, it wasn’t as shocking as McMichael’s gags were.
Wert comes often, sometimes with McMichael’s former teammates. He’s been there with Butler, Hampton, McMahon, Tom Thayer and Keith Van Horne. Many other teammates have visited frequently, including Jim Covert, Gary Fencik, Mike Hartenstine, Bruce Herron, Jay Hilgenberg, Tyrone Keys, Jim Morrissey, Matt Suhey, Dent and Wilson.
Larry Wert, left, and John Vincent, right, share a laugh with Steve McMichael. (Courtesy of Larry Wert)
Because of what McMichael is going through, their arms are locked in a way they never were before. “Their loyalty has been nothing short of extraordinary,” Wert says. “They haven’t always gotten along perfectly, but they are together over this.”
During a recent visit, talk about the old days drew an unexpected reaction from McMichael.
“He couldn’t speak, but there was no question he was laughing, really laughing,” Wert says. “And it was rewarding.”
It made Misty tear up. “Her support has been amazing,” he says. “She keeps the environment uplifting and fun, with a positive energy. I don’t know how she does it.”
Jim McMahon tries small talk, even when he knows there will not be responses.
It can be awkward.
It can feel empty.
“It breaks your heart,” McMahon says. “He was a larger-than-life character. And he always had my back. He was a great teammate. To see a guy who was that big and strong wilt away is tough. It reminds me of when Walter (Payton) was sick.”
McMahon can’t watch football anymore. It bores him. But he watched a Texas game with McMichael last fall. Anything for his friend.
McMichael continues to surprise him.
“I thought maybe after he heard he was being inducted into the Hall of Fame, he’d be happy and just let go,” McMahon says. “But the guy’s always been a fighter and I know he wants to be there for his induction. There’s going to be a big party in Canton, and I’m looking forward to it.”
In a scene that once was beyond imagination, the rebel quarterback gently kisses the forehead of the wild defensive tackle they called Ming the Merciless.
A little over one year ago, John Vincent leaned into McMichael and told him how much he meant to him. It was emotional.
McMichael still could talk a little then. His final words to Vincent were, “Tell your story.”
It inspired the singer.
As a boy on the Southwest side of Chicago, Vincent had obsessive-compulsive disorder and was bullied. He felt anger, confusion and a lack of confidence.
Even though he could sing like Frank Sinatra, Vincent doubted himself. He had suicidal thoughts.
Then he met McMichael, who started calling him “Faux Frank” and brought him into his circle with other Bears players. McMichael introduced him to Ditka, who hired him to sing at his restaurant, employed him for 20 years and became a surrogate father.
“Steve made me feel safe,” Vincent says. “He changed my life.”
Vincent became the kind of person others can lean on, and he now tells his story to youth groups with an anti-bullying message.
McMichael once lifted Vincent in the air when Vincent weighed 440 pounds. The singer has lost 114 pounds and wants to lose another 80. He believes he is capable partly because of confidence Vincent never had before he met McMichael.
“You see him in that bed, and I miss seeing Steve the way he was,” he says. “But he’s still Steve in his head. I say, “Shame on you, John.’ It’s still Steve, and I have to talk to him like I talked to Mongo.”
Tom Thayer would like to forget his indoctrination with the Bears in the summer of 1985.
“The first couple weeks of camp was absolute hell,” Thayer says. “Absolute hell. Ming would come out to practice with game-day attire, sleeves rolled up, just bringing it. He would say, ‘Hey, Tommy, you’d better strap it up today. I’m coming off the ball. I ain’t playing no brother-in-law.’ And then he’d go all out.”
As time passed, he saw another side, and McMichael became a mentor. McMichael told him how to block more efficiently and pushed him to his highest highs in the weight room.
“The more I got to know him, the more I loved him, appreciated him and respected him,” Thayer says.
Steve McMichael made life hell for Tom Thayer when he joined the Bears, but they became lifelong friends. (Courtesy of Misty McMichael)
For a long time, McMichael was resistant to using the speech-generating device. Thayer, Kathy and others talked to him about how important it was that he use it.
On a recent visit, Misty told Thayer that Steve wanted to show him something.
McMichael had used his speech-generating device.
“Tommy,” it said, “I love you.”
There are unexpected gifts.
One of McMichael’s favorite shirts was a Tommy Bahama that features Ditka’s likeness and has a patriotic theme. He knew he would never wear it again, so he wanted Hampton to have it.
Kathy attended the Bears’ 44-0 victory over the Cowboys in 1985, so her brother gave her his game ball from that day.
A figurine set from his wrestling days was given to the son of Brandon Hiatt, who hosts a podcast with Misty.
Wanda was given a signed jersey, which says she will hold dear forever.
He gave his last Steve McMichael ESPN bobblehead to a writer.
Everyone walks away with something, even if it isn’t anything they can touch or hold.
“You always left a better man than you went,” Singletary says.
All come to give.
They leave having received.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Jonathan Daniel /Allsport; Peter Brouillet / Getty Images; Brian Cassella /Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images; courtesy of Misty McMichael and John Faidutti)
In 2004, the four boys’ Grand Slam titles were split between two 17-year-olds.
Three went to the one considered the most talented, the final one to probably the next best player — who, even then, was not prepared to accept being second-best.
The first went on to have a very good career: a regular in the world’s top 20, peaking at No 6, with two Grand Slam semi-finals. The second player, the inferior junior, had an outstanding career: three major titles, two Olympic golds, a Davis Cup win, the world No 1 ranking. He did it by maximising every last drop of his talent, while the other player was seen as not quite realising his potential.
Twenty years on from those junior triumphs, both are nearing the end of their careers. The more successful player is eight months younger but closer to retirement — seven years battling injury have pushed his body to its absolute outer limits.
The other player is enjoying a late renaissance, having battled injuries of his own for a couple of years, but now ranked 37 at age 37, the oldest player inside the world’s top 50. Loved for his showmanship and shotmaking ability, he is also one of the biggest draws for crowds wherever he goes — especially at Roland Garros, in his home city of Paris.
For a few hours on Monday night, Gael Monfils again delighted Court Philippe-Chatrier in the prime night session slot. It wasn’t just that he beat Brazilian 24-year-old Thiago Seyboth Wild in four sets, it was also the way he did it, a cavalcade of running forehand passing shots, jumping backhand volleys, and interactions with the crowd.
Twenty-four hours earlier, his erstwhile junior rival — Andy Murray — entered the same court to face Stan Wawrinka. Murray, back from his latest battle with injury, competed gamely for a couple of sets but succumbed 6-4, 6-4, 6-2. It’s expected to be his last French Open.
Monfils playing against Murray during the first round of Roland Garros in 2006 (Eric Feferberg/AFP via Getty Images)
For a long time, Murray could be used as a stick to beat Monfils with; the contemporary who showed what could be done with extra application. Over time, though, that comparison has become facile. The idea that Monfils doesn’t properly apply himself is fatuous — he’s got 12 titles of his own — and their divergent careers stand on their own terms.
Murray, defined by dedication levels that would make most mere mortals wince, managed to infiltrate the top of men’s tennis at its contemporary peak and stay there. Monfils, without the promised major titles, is still one of the most popular players on the tour, packing out stadiums across the world. No wonder, when he does things like this…
HE SWITCHED HANDS WITH THE VOLLEY 😱@Gael_Monfils goes left-handed!#RolexMonteCarloMasters pic.twitter.com/PWRFcPK3Oh
— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) April 10, 2024
Monfils certainly has no regrets.
“Impossible,” he said to The Athletic in a conversation on the eve of the tournament.
“So many people forget where I’m from, who I am. No one knows me. Who I am now, I couldn’t even predict this for a second. I’m one of the luckiest people to have made it. This career, I never expected it. My mum’s a nurse — working night shifts to try to help me play tennis. My dad worked in telecoms back then because he was a soccer player but had to stop quite early.
“Living in not the best area of Paris, I had this dream. And now here I am, talking to you. You know my name. It’s impossible. I made it.”
Back when Monfils was the all-conquering junior, Murray was asked at Wimbledon in 2004 whether the Frenchman was the boys’ equivalent of Roger Federer.
“No, I don’t think so,” a 17-year-old Murray said, with a soon-to-become customary contrarianism.
“He’s done really well, winning in Australia and the French. But last week, I had a tight match with him, and he struggled through his match today. I beat him last year at the French Open 6-4, 6-1. So he is beatable.”
Monfils won that year’s junior Wimbledon, but Murray got on the board by winning the U.S. Open. Monfils’ hopes of becoming only the second player — after Stefan Edberg in 1983 — to complete a calendar boys’ Grand Slam ended in the third round at Flushing Meadows.
Monfils after winning junior Wimbledon against Britain’s Miles Kasiri (Phil Cole/Getty Images)
This might all feel like ancient history now, but the pair go even further back. “It’s crazy because I played Andy the first time when I was 11 and he was 10,” Monfils recalls.
Monfils made the jump into the pro circuit before Murray and reached the second round of the 2005 Australian Open. Both he and Murray made the third round of that year’s Wimbledon, and Monfils was named the ATP newcomer of the year at the end of the season.
The pair’s paths crossed again the following year, when they met in the first round of the French Open. Monfils won in five sets, avenging a win for Murray in their first meeting on the pro tour, in Hamburg.
Surprisingly, the pair have only met six times on the main tour, Murray leading the head-to-head 4-2. Their most recent meeting at that level was a decade ago, as close to their dominant junior days as now. The match, a French Open quarter-final, could be seen as the early part of their careers in microcosm, with Murray toughing it out to win in five sets.
Before that match, Murray said: “He’s a great athlete — maybe the best we have had in tennis. Of the Grand Slams, he’s played his best tennis here by far. He loves playing in front of a big crowd. Gael has always been a great entertainer and he’s great for the sport.”
Murray was, by this point, a two-time Grand Slam champion, and Monfils hadn’t been to the semis of a major since the French Open in 2008. Monfils did reach another semi-final, at the U.S. Open in 2016, but Novak Djokovic beat him in a bizarre match defined by the Serb ripping his shirt open, a topsy-turvy scoreline, and heat and humidity so intense that it appeared to addle both players.
That’s still the furthest Monfils has gone at a Grand Slam, but in the eight years since, he has reached two major quarter-finals (one at the 2022 Australian Open, aged 35) and has won six more titles to double his career total. None has come at Masters (1000) level.
Murray has 14 of those, on top of all his other significant successes.
Monfils and Murray after that Roland Garros quarter-final (Kenzo Triboillaurd/AFP via Getty Images)
“Everybody’s different,” Monfils says of his one-time junior rival. “We have a different purpose. I’m a big fan of Andy. His achievements, his career, the guy he is. He is a really respectful guy and a cool dude. A legend of the sport.
“I never judge anyone else, everyone thinks differently. I try to learn from him and what he’s done is crazy good. I’m trying on my own to not make similar decisions, but to do decisions that are best for me.”
Monfils also rejects the notion that his talent meant he didn’t work hard or could have applied himself more. “(People say) ‘Ah, Monfils is not disciplined’,” he told the Guardian this month. “Guys, don’t think this because I’m enjoying myself on the court. The work I do outside is big.”
Watching Monfils in front of his home crowd remains one of tennis’s most enjoyable experiences. There’s a symbiosis in how they feed off the other’s energy.
On Monday night, it didn’t take long for the Chatrier court to start to crackle. The brass band was already in full swing when, in the seventh game, Monfils somehow chased down a volley and flicked away a forehand passing shot winner. He asked the crowd to make some more noise — they duly obliged. It was a spectacular ending to a rally that showcased Monfils’ supreme defensive and shot-making skills. The way he was moving, it felt hard to believe that he had been forced to pull out of Geneva with illness last week and had been on antibiotics.
At the start of the second set, a drop volley on the way to an early break had his main cheerleaders singing: “Allez allez Gael” to the tune of ‘Everybody Dance Now’.
But he ended up losing that set in a tame flurry of errors, being broken to love in a demonstration of the fallibility of concentration that has probably prevented him from reaching the very top of the game.
Even during that set, there was a jumping backhand volley and a beautifully disguised drop shot; both had the crowd on their feet.
“I love you, Gael!” roared one supporter. “Me too!” called out another.
A brilliant backhand pass helped Monfils break back in the third set having fallen behind, and a Mexican wave soon followed. Monfils won the third set, and took the fourth too — sealing it in a satisfyingly on-brand way: ace, ace, botched smash, ace, winner. The final shot was a typically graceful flying smash — a version of the ‘slam dunk’ Pete Sampras used to do.
Monfils roared in delight, performed a short dance, thumped his chest and performed his trademark Black Panther celebration to all four sides of the court. The victory made him the French men’s player with the most Grand Slam match wins, 122, ahead of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
🙅♂️#RolandGarros @Gael_Monfils pic.twitter.com/nV39WQieSm
— Roland-Garros (@rolandgarros) May 27, 2024
The line between college and the NFL has been blurred in recent years with run options and run/pass options (RPOs) becoming a legitimate part of NFL schemes, but there is still a chasm between what college and NFL coordinators have to prepare for each week. However, that hasn’t stopped teams from tapping into the college ranks to fill coordinator positions. In fact, four coordinators hired this offseason came from the NCAA: Buccaneers OC Liam Coen, Chargers DC Jesse Minter, Packers DC Jeff Hafley and Seahawks OC Ryan Grubb.
Is this hiring cycle an aberration or a sign of things to come? Understanding what NFL teams adopt and don’t adopt from college systems, schemes and procedures might offer clues to answer that question.
NFL teams will still prefer to hire college coaches with an NFL background over those who mainly have only college experience. Of the four coordinators coming from college, only Grubb doesn’t have NFL experience.
Minter was a defensive assistant with the Baltimore Ravens for four seasons before becoming the defensive coordinator for Vanderbilt (one season) and Michigan (two seasons). After putting together one of the best defenses in the country and winning a national championship last season, he followed Jim Harbaugh back to the NFL.
minter on the mic pic.twitter.com/0HEgFICzwB
— Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers) May 23, 2024
Hafley was a defensive assistant for various NFL teams from 2012 to 2018 before becoming the defensive coordinator for the Ohio State Buckeyes and then taking the head coach job at Boston College.
Coen spent most of his career as a college coach but recently went from being an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Rams to offensive coordinator at Kentucky for a season. He returned to the Rams as their offensive coordinator, then returned to Kentucky for a season in the same role before finally landing with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this offseason. In his one-year stint as offensive coordinator with the Rams, Sean McVay was the play caller, so this season will be Coen’s first season calling plays in the NFL (he called plays in one game for the Rams).
Though offensive schemes have trickled up with more frequency than defense in recent years, it could be rare for coaches without NFL experience to get immediate opportunities to call plays in the league. Too many such coaches have struggled to make the transition. College offenses rely more on running quarterbacks, breaking tackles, tempo and volume than in the NFL where every play is carefully schemed up and there is more of an emphasis on trying to get into the “perfect” play calls.
NFL offensive coordinators will certainly steal creative play designs from the college level but the game planning and play calling are more intricate in the pros. Grubb seems to be the rare example of a coach who has no NFL experience and will have an opportunity to jump straight to play caller at the next level.
However, Grubb’s Washington offense looked like an NFL offense. The Huskies split between under center and shotgun, they had many ways to run the same concept, and he did a creative job of using motion and shifts. An area that college coaches typically struggle with in the league is protection. College protection schemes are often simplistic, and when coaches like Chip Kelly got to the league, they didn’t have enough tools to handle some of the pressure schemes in the NFL. Grubb will have an advantage working against Mike Macdonald’s defense every day in practice — Macdonald’s scheme tests the rules of offense as much as any in the league — but that doesn’t automatically mean he will have a sophisticated protection scheme.
For years, the spread offense was the dominating scheme in college football, but we’re starting to see a trickle-down effect with teams adopting the outside zone/play-action scheme that has been so successful in the league. Kentucky hired Coen to implement McVay’s system, and he did so successfully. Defenses weren’t used to stopping that style of offense, and last season, Coen’s unit averaged 29.1 points per game despite being consistently overmatched talent-wise in the SEC. It’ll be interesting to see how his college experience influences his version of the McVay system with the Buccaneers.
Liam Coen worked with Baker Mayfield when Coen was the Rams offensive coordinator in 2022 after Mayfield was claimed by Los Angeles midseason. He’s reunited with the quarterback in Tampa Bay. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)
I believe we’ll see more assistant coaches in the NFL go to the college level to get experience as play callers at big schools and parlay it into opportunities in the league. The Ravens have had success hiring coaches that did exactly that. Macdonald was an NFL assistant coach for years before going to Michigan to coordinate for a season. When he returned, his way of teaching and implementing his system helped the Ravens become the best defense in the league last season. He was hired as the Seattle Seahawks head coach after just two seasons as defensive coordinator.
Minter followed in Macdonald’s footsteps and ran a similar scheme at Michigan. Both ran pro-style schemes and applied lessons from their time in the league to their college defenses. They ran classic four-down fronts and presented problems for offenses with simulated pressures from different presentations. Minter did an excellent job of situational play calling, which will serve him well at the next level.
For example, on the Gaylor Family Benefit Whiteboard Clinic, Minter did a fantastic breakdown of how he looks at second-down situations.
“The goal on second-and-7-plus is to create third-and-6 or more. It used to be, ‘Hey, on second-and-8, let’s hold them to half the yardage.’ Now you’re in third-and-4,” Minter said. “If you look at the third-down percentages of winning, third-and-6 or more is where you can dictate more on that D&D (down and distance). We’re trying to really attack on this down and distance. We’re playing tight coverage. We’re trying not to give up the quick game, the get-back-on-track plays.”
When talking to NFL coaches, they were adamant that college defensive schemes don’t influence NFL schemes much. The current trend in college is the “tite” front (three defensive linemen) with match coverage behind it to combat the spread.
One of the best defenses last year was the Arizona Wildcats.
Here’s an excellent example of how the Tite Front fits Counter GY from their 3-High package.
#5 will ‘travel’ with the TE, #13 leverages the kick-out, while #44 races to take on the kick-out. #ArtofX pic.twitter.com/TptVgiE2Oc
— Cody Alexander (@The_Coach_A) April 30, 2024
Though NFL teams will dabble in those concepts, it’s much harder to run this type of defense as a base. Another key difference between NFL defenses and college is that college defenses play a lot more match quarters coverage in which defenders’ eyes lock onto routes rather than the quarterback as they would in spot drop defenses. Though NFL teams have been more willing to play quarters coverage, it’s a watered-down version.
“So I wouldn’t say that it’s wholesale quarters, but you need split safety … variations of it,” an NFL defensive coach told The Athletic. “I don’t know if it’s just wholesale quarters. It may be quarter, quarter, half to the boundary, maybe half, quarter, quarter to the field, which is Cover 8. The difference is that you’re trying to stay in that shell, you know, to try to limit explosive plays on the back end.”
Essentially, colleges play quarters and aggressively match routes and NFL teams will play it with more zone technique and soft coverage.
Since being hired, Hafley and Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur have made it clear they will be a spot drop team.
“More vision on the quarterback because he’s ultimately going to take you to where the ball is going to go,” LaFleur said. “And it’s hard to do that when you’re playing with your back to the quarterback … not to say that we won’t be that. There’s certainly going to be circumstances when you want to man up and play some match coverage. I would say a big part of what we’re going to do, especially from a coverage standpoint, is going to be have vision on the quarterback.”
GO DEEPER
New Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley draws raves from former players
Sources in the league say they expect Hafley’s defense to look more like the San Francisco 49ers and New York Jets defenses, which originated from Seattle’s Cover 3 system. Hafley was a defensive backs coach for then-coordinator Robert Saleh in San Francisco. He used more one-deep safety looks than colleges typically do, and he talked shortly before the Packers hired him on “The Next Up” podcast with Adam Breneman about how it’s the base of his system.
Ultimately, LaFleur is going away from Vic Fangio’s system that heavily trended around the league in the last few years and back to a Cover 3 system that was trending out of the league. The Packers struggled to defend against the run under former defensive coordinator Joe Barry, and Hafley’s system will naturally put the strong safety in the box more often, which should help shore up the Packers’ run defense.
The Seattle system fell out of favor because it could be predictable and requires an elite four-man pass rush to work. So how will Hafley complement Cover 3? What kind of coverages will he use? He could employ some of the split-safety looks he used at Boston College or maybe he’ll draw from his experience working with Mike Pettine, LaFleur’s first defensive coordinator with the Packers, and run more simulated pressures.
“We’re gonna attack.” 😤
Jeff Hafley joins the coaching staff going into the 2024 season.
1-on-1 with the new #Packers defensive coordinator 🎥 pic.twitter.com/T8AZzS0lhQ
— Green Bay Packers (@packers) April 20, 2024
Again, NFL teams are very willing to borrow bits and pieces from college schemes, but coaches believe they are two different games. For example, a handful of NFL teams used some three-safety structures, popularized in college a few years ago, to disguise on passing downs, but they’ll never be a base defense in the league.
“I don’t think they can take much schematically, more so than the relations with younger players and learning to be better teachers,” an NFL defensive coach said when asked about what NFL coaches can learn from coaching in college.
Macdonald seemed to streamline his system and make it easy for players to learn, communicate and execute in part because of his college experience. NFL play calls can get lengthy, which can be hard to communicate in college because of the offenses’ tempos.
“Talking to Mike (Macdonald), that was how people first really tried to attack him when he came to college,” Minter said. “It was like, ‘Oh, he’s going to run this elaborate NFL system … the best way to combat that is to go fast.’”
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Macdonald had to streamline his system and how he communicated his play calls at Michigan and it’s helped him create a unique malleable system in the NFL. Though his experience in college has certainly made him a better coach, there are things you learn in the league that aren’t emphasized in college.
For young assistant coaches in the league, going to college to call plays and get experience coordinating is invaluable, but in the NFL, there is a bigger emphasis on attacking matchups, manipulating protection schemes and situational play calling. Having those skills as a foundation is critical to being a successful coordinator in the league.
There will be a lot of college coaches clamoring to make the jump up to the NFL during the name, image and likeness era as they’d prefer to get away from the increased recruiting responsibilities, but this year’s hiring cycle with four college coaches getting coordinator jobs might be something of an anomaly.
(Top photo of Jeff Hafley, Ryan Grubb and Liam Coen: Dan Powers / USA Today, Steph Chambers and Cliff Welch / Getty Images)
He was the tallest player. Even at the age of 16, Jimmy Aggrey stood well over six feet. The big lads went at the back. Line up and smile for the camera, please.
Chelsea liked him. They thought he had a good chance of making it. For such a tall kid, Aggrey had quick, skilful feet. His future was bright at a time, in 1995, when Chelsea were re-establishing themselves among the most glamorous football clubs in England.
“When I joined Chelsea, Glenn Hoddle was the first-team manager,” says Aggrey. “Ruud Gullit arrived later. The place was full of superstars: Gianfranco Zola, Frank Leboeuf, Roberto Di Matteo. So I can understand why many people might think it’s a great photograph. They should have been the greatest times of my life.”
Aggrey was in his fourth year in Chelsea’s youth system when that photograph was taken at their home ground, Stamford Bridge. So how does it feel, all these years later, to look at it now?
“You can see it in my face,” he says. “It’s full of stress, there’s no joy. I’m not smiling.
“I look at that boy and I just want to tell him, ‘You’re all right now, you got through it’. Because I know what he suffered. I wouldn’t want to go back to my life at that time.”
Jimmy Aggrey, circled in yellow, with Chelsea’s youth squad and the coaches who bullied him — Gwyn Williams (middle row, circled) and Graham Rix (bottom row, circled) (Courtesy of Jimmy Aggrey)
This is the first time Aggrey has spoken publicly about the culture of racism and bullying at Chelsea that led to an independent inquiry by children’s charity Barnardo’s and prompted the Football Association to bring in the police. It was, in Aggrey’s words, a “feral environment” in which he and other young black footballers were subjected to what the FA’s safeguarding investigation described as “vile abuse”.
In speaking to The Athletic, Aggrey has waived the anonymity that was granted to him by the High Court in 2018 as the first of four ex-players who launched civil action against Chelsea. On the night before it was due to go to trial, Chelsea agreed out-of-court settlements. The club do not accept liability but have apologised for “the terrible past experiences of some of our former players”. A number of players have received damages in follow-up cases.
The two perpetrators are on that team photograph, circled in red, and the most shocking part is that they were the coaches who had been entrusted to look after boys as young as nine.
One is Gwyn Williams, who spent 27 years at the club and was found by Barnardo’s to have subjected boys to a “daily tirade of racial abuse”. The other is Graham Rix, a former England international who was allowed to keep his job as Chelsea’s youth-team coach despite being sent to prison for under-age sex offences.
“Between them, they took away a large part of my childhood,” says Aggrey. “They were a tag team, every bit as bad as one another. And yet, I look at them now and I just feel pity. I refuse to let them keep me in some kind of mental jail.”
He is 45 now, a father-of-three happily settled in a part of Devon, in England’s south west, that likes to call itself the English Riviera. He has a charity, which has the Chelsea Foundation as a partner. Life is good. Waiving his anonymity, he says, is another part of the healing process.
In 2018, Aggrey was listed only as AXM in the High Court action against Chelsea that exposed one of the worst racism scandals in English football. Three weeks ago, The Athletic successfully applied to the court to overturn the anonymity order, including a written submission from Aggrey and a supporting letter from Chelsea.
“I’m ready to talk,” he says. “I’m proud of who I am and the resilience within my DNA and soul. But it’s not just about me. It’s about trying to help others and, if telling my story helps only one person, I’ve done my job.”
Jimmy Aggrey has a new life in Devon (Daniel Taylor/The Athletic)
If you want just a tiny insight into the culture Aggrey had to endure, it can be found in the glossy pages of Chelsea’s matchday programme for their game against Ipswich Town on January 20, 2001.
It was the day Zola made his 200th Chelsea appearance. Claudio Ranieri, the manager, paid tribute in his programme notes. So did Dennis Wise, as vice-captain, and chairman Ken Bates. Chelsea won 4-1 with Marcel Desailly and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink among the team’s A-listers.
On page 61, meanwhile, there was an article that briefly mentioned Aggrey, who had moved to Torquay United, and the observation from his time at Chelsea that he was “almost too nice to make it in football”. Aggrey, according to the author, was a “very tall, very lean, black guy who was the butt of a lot of jokes”.
It was a strange choice of words — why even mention the player’s colour? — and it would need a warped mind to portray what Aggrey encountered as innocent humour.
“I’d never experienced racism before,” says Aggrey. “I knew it existed. I’d seen it on TV and heard my parents speaking about it, but nothing had ever been said directly to me. Then I arrived for my first day at Chelsea and my first encounter with Gwyn Williams. His first words were, ‘Who’s this lanky f*****g c**n?’. That was my welcome to Chelsea. I was 12 years old.”
Aggrey, the youngest of three children, had been raised by Ghanaian parents a short distance from Griffin Park, Brentford’s old ground. He went to the same boys’ school, Isleworth & Syon, as Mo Farah, the future Olympic and world champion runner, and started attracting attention from football scouts while playing for West Middlesex Colts under-12s.
Football was his dream, but even at a young age he also knew it was a way to help his family to a better life. His mother was a cleaner, working long hours to provide for her children. His father ran a security company based in Wembley, north-west London.
Jimmy Aggrey, aged 11, with his youth football team Middlesex Colts (Courtesy of Jimmy Aggrey)
So the young Aggrey realised, early on, that if he wanted to fulfil his dreams he may have to learn how to deal with the abuse from his own coaches.
“How does a 12-year-old boy react to an adult in that position of power? He (Williams) calls you a lanky black b*****d. He refers to how dark you are. ‘Can you run like Linford Christie (the British sprinter)? Do you rob grannies on your estate? Are you keeping fit so you run drugs round the tower blocks?’. He would look at me in this way I’d never experienced from anyone. I didn’t know how to deal with it. All I wanted was to play football.”
Williams joined Chelsea in 1979, running their youth system for 20 years and taking huge influence at all levels of the club. He was racist, hard-faced and so divisive there were times when he arranged whites-v-blacks training matches. It was, to quote one player, like a “mini Apartheid state”.
Yet Williams somehow managed to keep it away from some of the key personnel at Chelsea even when, in Aggrey’s words, “we had a manager (Ruud Gullit) rocking dreadlocks”. Williams went on to become assistant manager to Ranieri and formed part of Jose Mourinho’s scouting staff before leaving Chelsea in 2006.
“I used to dread getting picked up for training,” says Aggrey. “We would go into the changing room. He’d walk in: ‘Hey, look at the f*****g blackies in here … f*****g rubber lips’. Let me tell you something, that was the most demoralising feeling you could ever have.
“I remember walking to the training ground and I’d be thinking, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing? I can’t wait for this day to be over’.
“It was relentless, and it got physical, too. Gwyn would give you a slap. He’d flick your scrotum. Or if he was really mad and thought you’d had a bad game, he’d give you a crack round the side of the head. It was hard, a man hit. ‘You little black b*****d… you w*g’. I was 13. It took a lot out of me. He addressed me that way every single time he saw me.”
Gwyn Williams, then Chelsea’s assistant manager, at the 2000 FA Cup final (Neal Simpson/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Some people might wonder why the players never reported it at the time. Why, Aggrey is asked, did he not speak out? But that would be to underestimate Williams’ position at Chelsea and the sport as a whole.
“That guy had power. You’re scared of people with power. It was said he had the biggest black book in London,” says Aggrey. “There was no proper safeguarding back then, anyway. If I said I wanted to raise an issue, guess where I would have been told to go: Graham Rix or Gwyn Williams. Go to the top of the club? But that was Ken Bates, the chairman, and Williams was his right-hand man. So you’re helpless, you’re cannon fodder. I was a minor. And that guy (Williams) was the governor.
“He could make or break you, not just at Chelsea, but break you when you leave — ring another manager and say, ‘Don’t touch him, he’s just another aggressive black guy’. I wouldn’t have had a career.”
Aged 15, Aggrey tried to find another way. He got a number for the FA, rang it from his home phone and asked to speak to the chief executive, Graham Kelly.
“I told the person on the other end of the line what it was about. She said, ’Can you hold the line?’. Then she came back a few moments later. ‘No, he’s too busy to speak to you today’. It was a brush-off.”
Terrorised by his own coaches, Aggrey started to develop a stutter. He was playing, he says, with “strings of confidence”. Every day was an ordeal.
“I’ve got diaries that I wrote at the age of 13, 14 and 15 and they’re harrowing. It’s a cry for help from someone who didn’t want to be alive. I was coming home quiet, all my confidence stripped away. It affected my life, my self-worth, my self-love. Even in my twenties, it affected my relationships. I didn’t really care about whether I lived or died until my kids came along.”
A former schoolteacher, Williams’ working relationship with Bates was so strong he followed him to Leeds United, taking on the role of technical director, in the years after Roman Abramovich’s 2003 takeover of Chelsea.
Williams, credited with discovering the young John Terry, ended up being sacked by Leeds for gross misconduct after he emailed pornographic images to colleagues, including a female member of staff. He had three years scouting for Hull City and, now 76, he is permanently banned from the sport after a FA safeguarding investigation into the bullying and racism claims ruled he posed “a risk of harm to children within affiliated football”.
Although he denies ever assaulting a player, Williams has accepted that he used extreme racial language. In his evidence to the High Court, he said it was never his intention to cause any hurt or offence, on the basis that “it was just the typical banter that would have been found in almost any male environment at that time”.
As for Rix, he was sentenced to a year in prison, serving six months, and put on the sex offenders’ register after admitting, in March 1999, two charges of unlawful sex with a 15-year-old girl.
Rix was reinstated by Chelsea immediately after his release. He was the first-team coach when Chelsea, under Gianluca Vialli’s management, won the FA Cup in 2000 and had a spell as caretaker manager after the Italian’s sacking later that year.
Rix, who won 17 England caps as a player for Arsenal, was suspended for two years while the FA investigated the complaints of bullying and racism. He was allowed back on condition he attended a series of educational courses. Up until a fortnight ago, Rix, 66, was the manager of Fareham Town in the Wessex League, but banned for life from under 18s’ girls’ football.
Graham Rix (right) with Gwyn Williams at Chelsea’s 2000 FA Cup final against Aston Villa (Mark Leech/Offside/Getty Images).
“How that man is still in football, I will never know,” says Aggrey. “What other profession do you know where someone can be put on a paedophile register and go back to work in that industry within six months? It’s scary. I find it hard to understand how he’s still allowed in football.”
Rix has always denied any form of racial, physical or emotional abuse. A seven-month police investigation concluded without him or Williams facing charges and the Barnardo’s report, published in 2019, concluded that Rix could be “aggressive and bullying” but, on the evidence presented to its inquiry, not racially abusive.
Aggrey’s evidence to the High Court, however, depicted Rix as a racist bully with violent tendencies.
On one occasion, Aggrey says he was cleaning one of the first-team player’s boots when Rix started abusing him and, according to court documents, threatened to “lynch (his) black arse”. Tired of the constant harassment, Aggrey made a retaliatory comment. Rix’s response, he says, was to go red with anger and throw a cup of hot coffee into his face.
Rix, he says, assaulted him more than once, with punches and kicks and one incident in a training match when the ball went out for a throw-in.
“They (Rix and Williams) had this stereotypical idea that a big black guy should be mouthy and forever smashing people,” says Aggrey. “They thought I was soft. I liked to read, I could write poetry. I was a gentle person. My feet were my gifts.
Jimmy Aggrey, aged 17, featured in a Chelsea matchday programme (Courtesy of Jimmy Aggrey)
“I was 16, in the first week of my YTS (youth-training scheme), and Rix used to join in with training. He went to take a quick throw and I was standing directly in front of him. So he has just gone — bang — and thrown it as hard as he could into my face.
“There was no reason for it, just all that anger and hate inside him. Those balls were pumped up hard. My nose popped, there was blood everywhere. I was on the floor and Rix was shouting for me to ‘f*****g get up’.”
It was a month after his release from Chelsea that Aggrey tried to take his own life. He was 18 and free, finally, of the two men who had made football so hard and unforgiving. But he was lost, broken.
“I had a massive argument with my dad. He felt I’d wasted my life and that I could have gone to university. I went to my sister’s, bought two bottles of wine with whatever money I had, and got smashed. I was there, drunk, and I saw some tablets on the side. I just thought, ‘F*** it’. I grabbed a load and dashed them down the back of my throat. Then I just went to sleep.”
His sister, Lillian, saved his life. “She had been out that night and came back to find me. She literally dragged me to the toilet and put her fingers down my throat. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was puking up. All I can remember is waking up and her saying we needed to go to hospital.”
Jimmy Aggrey with his sister, Lillian, who found him after his suicide attempt (Courtesy of Jimmy Aggrey)
Aggrey was taken on by Fulham, then a fourth-division side, where the manager, Micky Adams, could never understand why a talented and dedicated midfielder from one of England’s top clubs had been “stripped of self-confidence”.
Adams submitted a written report as part of Aggrey’s legal submissions to the High Court. Aggrey, he wrote, was “a good professional with a beaming smile, but I always felt behind that smile was a person who clearly had his confidence knocked out of him at Chelsea. Whoever was responsible for that, I don’t know. He never gave me a problem. He was always on time and always gave his all”.
Aggrey moved to Torquay where he reinvented himself as a centre-half and won the supporters’ player-of-the-year award in 2001. Life on the south coast suited him. But the trauma was still there. There were nightmares, flashbacks and panic attacks, waking up drenched in sweat, swinging punches in his sleep.
He played with fire burning behind his eyes. “If I came up against an opposition player who had the same accent as Rix, or spoke like Williams, they were triggers. I’d try to take them out, two-foot them. I ended up being one of the most booked players in Torquay’s history. I was trying to play the role of henchman because they (Rix and Williams) used to say I was too nice.”
Jimmy Aggrey with a player of the trophy award at Torquay (Courtesy of Jimmy Aggrey)
Over time, he came to realise he had post-traumatic stress disorder. It is the same for a lot of the kids at Chelsea who understand why Barnardo’s referred to a culture in which “the ongoing and repeated use of racially abusive language appears to have created an atmosphere in which abuse was normalised”.
These kids are now in their forties and fifties. Some find it too difficult to watch Chelsea on television. Others cannot go anywhere near Stamford Bridge. Aggrey has learned how to manage his own issues. But he can remember how “unnerving” it felt when he was invited to the ground in 2019 to meet Bruce Buck, then Chelsea’s chairman.
A psychiatric report, presented to the High Court, talks of him, as a younger man, experiencing “very severe distress and feelings of isolation and humiliation, all of which totally undermined his confidence in his footballing ability and as a young person at a critical age”.
He spent the rest of his playing career drifting through a variety of non-League clubs. There was an enjoyable spell with Welsh club TNS, lining up against Manchester City in a UEFA Cup qualifier in 2003. Overall, though, Aggrey’s love for football had diminished in his youth. He retired at the age of 27.
“I felt relieved,” he says. “But as a father of young children and, with the 2008 financial crash around the corner, the timing couldn’t have been any worse.”
To spend time in his company now is to find a man who is entirely comfortable in his own skin. Aggrey has a big smile and a big personality. The thought occurs more than once that football’s anti-racism organisations should want to tap into his knowledge and experience.
But it is only in the last 10 years, he says, that he has been able to shift the “heavyweight burden of unpacked mental trauma”. It was a long battle to get through “the internal, intrusive day-to-day thoughts that played on a loop. ‘What could I have done? Why did I let them do that to me?’. The self-blame, guilt and anger”.
There were other issues, too. Aggrey never earned the money associated with Premier League footballers. At the age of 28, his house was repossessed due to being unable to keep up with mortgage payments and arrears.
“One of my friends let me use his car, a Volvo S40, and that became my house. I’d find car parks where I wouldn’t be recognised and I’d sleep in the back seat. I spent my 32nd birthday sleeping in my car.”
Other friends gave him food. If he was in London, he would go to Brentford leisure centre for a shower. The woman at reception knew him from when he was a boy and waved him through. Or returning to Torquay, he would go to the Grand Hotel on the seafront and sit in an alcove where he knew there was an electricity point.
“I’d plug in my phone, ask for a glass of water and make it last, sometimes four or five hours. Then I’d get back in the car, park round the corner and try to keep warm and get some sleep. This went on for months. I felt like a failure. But these experiences have helped make me what I am today.”
It is an extraordinary story even before we mention that Aggrey has worked as a football agent, had a role in the Sky One series Dream Team and has written an eight-part TV series of his own. ‘Jimmy’ tells the story of his life — powerful, gritty, yet also uplifting.
His foundation, set up with the backing of the Professional Footballers’ Association, is dedicated to helping young people in marginalised, poverty-hit communities. TNS are one of the partners via his friendship with the club’s owner, Mike Harris, and their kits have been distributed to kids as part of one project in Cape Town, South Africa.
It is easy to understand why Aggrey talks so passionately about the Homeless World Cup, which will be held in South Korea in September. He became involved via his friend, Kasali Casal, a former Fulham player who became the football director for TV series Ted Lasso.
“Playing football after being homeless is dear to these people,” says Aggrey, “and it matters to me greatly after everything I have experienced.”
His father, James Sr, died in 2021. So much went unspoken and it will always be a source of pain that they never healed a rift that, at its heart, stemmed from a boy trying to protect his family from the brutal realities of Chelsea’s youth system.
“He had dreams of me becoming a lawyer or a doctor,” says Aggrey. “Because I was strong academically, he didn’t understand why I was embarking on a journey to be in a sport where I wouldn’t be accepted.
Jimmy Aggrey, pictured aged 13, had anger issues as a result of his treatment at Chelsea (Courtesy of Jimmy Aggrey)
“I didn’t want to tell him what was happening. Mum, as well. That was a heavy coat to wear as a kid. But they weren’t ones to confront institutions, so it would have been internalised and affected the whole house.
“He saw the changes in me. I had temper issues, getting into fights. I was going out too much. I think he saw an unobliging kid who had wasted his gift of academia.”
Life continues to have its challenges. Aggrey is coming to terms with the recent death of his aunt Irene. Last week, it was the funeral of Paul Holmes, his friend and ex-Torquay teammate.
Overall, though, he is in a good place, radiating warmth, signing off emails with “love and light”. He has learned to heal. And, in a strange way, it feels therapeutic for him to share his experiences, no longer living a secret.
“I feel blessed how my mind, my resilience and unwavering hope has kept me alive and going,” he says. “The line was thin and I can’t change the past. But I have to use my experiences for good and be grateful I’m still here.”
The Athletic asked Gwyn Williams and Graham Rix to comment, but neither has responded. Fareham Town have also failed to respond. Graham Kelly, who left the FA in 1998, said he could not recollect being told about the telephone call from Aggrey.
Whatever you’re going through, you can call the Samaritans in the UK free any time, from any phone, on 116 123.
(Top photos: Daniel Taylor/The Athletic; courtesy of Jimmy Aggrey; design: John Bradford)
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