Gordon Ramsay (4 page)

Gordon was born on 8 November 1966 and named after his hard-drinking, heavy-smoking father – a man who had swum for Scotland at the age of 15 and had seen life as a brutal competition ever since.

A PE teacher in a local school, Gordon Ramsay senior was as traditional and as chauvinistic as they come. His attitudes and rules were the only ones that mattered in the Ramsay household and from the start he made it clear that his elder son was never expected to do as much as boil an egg, let alone cook a proper meal. On the family’s council estate, the idea was that men were men, and women, only women, were expected to spend their lives in a kitchen.

What the men could do, however, was go out to find food – as long as they killed it first. So Gordon, his younger brother Ronald and their dad would sometimes leave the rough city streets behind for a weekend’s fly-fishing on the River Tay. They were rare peaceful days in a childhood where storms were brewing from the very start. Gordon says, even as a young boy, it was obvious to him that his father had an eye for other women, a problem with drink and a temper he could barely control. He was frustrated and angry at work and he brought all those feelings and more home with him – though it was to be many years before Gordon found out just how much his mother had suffered at his father’s hands on those long Glasgow nights.

Like most men of his generation, Gordon’s dad had two passions in life: music and football. Bored by the first, his son tried desperately to win his affection by sharing the second. The family were lifelong Rangers supporters and,
after two seasons of begging to go to a match, Gordon finally got taken through the gates of Ibrox Park just after his seventh birthday. It was one of Scotland’s big derbies, a sell-out clash between Glasgow Rangers and Hearts, and to this day Gordon remembers it as an ugly, dirty match played in front of a frightening, threatening and sporadically violent crowd. ‘And I loved everything about it,’ he says.

But thriving on that sort of experience at just seven years old wasn’t enough to impress Gordon senior – because he hadn’t been there to witness his young son’s confidence. Instead, Gordon had watched the match from his Uncle Roland’s shoulders and it was with his uncle that he would return to Ibrox again and again over the next two years. His dad, meanwhile, stayed at home brooding about the imagined slights he faced at work and the ways he could exact revenge.

Looking back, Gordon says he thinks staying in Scotland would have destroyed his father – and possibly everyone else in the family. But the Ramsays were to get a fresh start and a stay of execution. One day, Gordon’s dad quit the job that was making him so miserable and took the family 300 miles south to Warwickshire, where he was to become manager of Stratford-upon-Avon’s brand-new sports centre.

As far as young Gordon was concerned, their new home was another world – and hopefully a far safer one. ‘Stratford is the most English of places and it was a huge culture shock after Glasgow,’ he says. ‘There were none of those enormous Glasgow buildings and no tubes and trains running everywhere. Glasgow was fierce – up there we shopped at the Barras outdoor market, but Stratford
had supermarkets. It felt sophisticated, posh and a whole lot calmer.’

For a while, things were calmer at home as well. Gordon senior threw his energies into his new job and the whole family began to put down roots. Gordon grabbed the top bunk in the room he would share with Ronnie for much of the next decade and formed a gang of four with their elder sister Diane and younger sister Yvonne. With free access to their dad’s leisure centre, it is little wonder that the kids were soon obsessed by sports – Gordon more than any of them.

What he wasn’t as interested in was school. ‘I got bored easily because I’m a real hot pants and I can’t sit still for long. But I was fanatical about sport. In the afternoons, if I wasn’t playing football, I was fishing off the weir or climbing up the side of the theatre and doing moonies and jumping in the Avon. We hunted for conkers outside Anne Hathaway’s cottage and we all just had great fun.’

But, after a while, Gordon’s dad lost his early enthusiasm for work and started to go back into his shell. So nine-year-old Gordon tried once more to please him and pull him back out of it. The youngster had seen that going to football matches hadn’t worked. So he thought that some direct competition might do the trick instead. ‘Almost every day I would run up alongside the edge of the 25-metre pool to see if I could run faster than Dad could swim,’ he says. He never could – and Gordon senior never once thought to boost his son’s confidence by slowing down.

What also drove Gordon forward was a sense that he was always one step behind his younger brother in the quest for
his father’s affection. ‘Ronnie was always Dad’s blue-eyed boy. He was Number One. Definitely the favourite.’ So Gordon decided to run faster, climb higher, do whatever it took to overtake his brother. ‘My big thing was cross-country racing on the edge of town at Coughton, which was one of Warwickshire’s toughest races. The course was nine miles and covered all terrains: forests, fields, streams, country lanes, corn, sheep, farmyards and suddenly back into the school grounds. It was tough but I was desperate to win it.’

But, even if he had come first, Gordon reckons his dad would hardly have noticed. There had to be something else, he thought, some other talent he had buried inside him which would make his father sit up and pay attention. Kicking a football around their housing estate one day, Gordon reckoned he might have found it. Every boy in the country kicks a football about as a child. Probably every boy hopes he’s better than all the other kids on the estate. But Gordon suddenly realised that in his case it was true. He really could kick the ball harder, faster and more accurately than anyone else. He could keep possession of it even when the older kids tried to steal it from him. He could pass the ball wherever and whenever he wanted. He could run like hell with it. He could score goals. If I train harder, he thought, this has got to be something Dad will approve of.

But Gordon senior didn’t seem to notice his son’s new obsession – or his talent. Because he had a new obsession of his own: he wanted to be in a band and he didn’t care what effect this dream would have on his family. ‘You’d come home on a Saturday afternoon, having played
football, and Dickie Davies would be on telly, and while you tried to watch the results Dad would suddenly be trying to show you he was a better guitarist than Hank Marvin,’ says Gordon, able to laugh at the early days of his dad’s transformation. ‘Then every Sunday Dad had the music blaring out. It was that council-house thing of the windows open, the fucking speakers were on and who has got the loudest stereo.’

But bigger problems started to build up when Gordon senior joined a local band. ‘We’d have to go to these social clubs where he was playing gigs. We’d be bored stiff, then we’d have to help lift all these amps and speakers down the stairs and into the van. And I knew what would have happened along the way. Mum would have got agitated because someone would have eyed Dad up, and then when he had a drink he was like a different person and everything changed. The hell he put my mum through back then …’ Gordon’s voice tailed off, still unable to share some of the worst memories of his childhood.

What seemed clear to everyone in the family except Gordon senior was the fact that his dreams of music stardom were always going to be dashed. Before he was even a teenager, Gordon reckoned he could smell failure – and he hated it. ‘Dad was never going to be a professional musician. The best he managed was working men’s clubs – playing alongside Marty Wilde on a couple of occasions. I would sit in all those smoky rooms listening to him playing on a stool with a synthesiser, strutting his stuff, and I knew it was never going to be.’ Gordon senior, however, would go on trying to keep his dream alive – whatever the consequences for his wife and kids.

‘At one point he sold the family car to pay for a ticket to Texas, where he had planned to spend three months playing with a band. The first everyone else in the family knew what he had done was when the finance company turned up to collect the keys.’ The event had been a big wake-up call for the family. ‘You just don’t forget those kinds of situations,’ said Gordon later. ‘Mum struggling to pay the bills and putting up with all this shit. It was embarrassing when the school had a holiday trip as well. There was no point in my bringing a form home to ask if I could go because then the rest of the kids would have to go and there was no way we could afford it. You learn, even at 12 and 13, that this is not the way to go in life. My father taught me a lot, without telling me anything at all.’

Over the years, the Ramsay family have rarely talked about their other, far lower points. ‘There was violence and sadness and happiness combined in one house,’ was all Gordon would offer when asked about it years later. But, when trying to raise money for women’s refuge centres and for helplines for child victims of domestic violence, Gordon has also described the pain of seeing his mother wearing a pair of sunglasses in the middle of November after saying she had tripped on the stairs or walked into a door. And the times she dragged the whole family out of the house at 2.30 in the morning to get to a secure housing unit to escape any further beatings.

But what Helen Ramsay also did, for so many years, was to go back to her husband time and time again. Today Gordon says he can only applaud what may seem a dangerous and self-destructive decision. ‘The reason she seemed so weak was because she was defending our arses.
You have to admire the loyalty of a woman who puts her children first. And that’s where I get my determination from. From her, without a doubt.’

This determination was what made the teenage Gordon work even harder out on the football pitch. He still believed it wasn’t too late to break through to his father and, like many children from a violent home, he believed that if his dad was proud of his son his mother might get left alone. So Gordon aimed high. He wouldn’t just stop at the school and county teams he had been targeting so far. Instead, he would fight his way into the family team back in Scotland. He made a vow to get signed for Glasgow Rangers. Surely nothing could make his dad prouder than that.

At 14, Gordon took a huge step in that direction, starting to travel up to Glasgow every school holiday to train with the club in the hope of being taken on as part of the full Youth Training Scheme. He was entitled to wear an official club blazer on each visit and found out how it feels to run out into a stadium that can seat more than 51,000. But he didn’t get called back when the last of the holiday sessions were over and he braced himself for the disappointment, contempt or worse he knew he would see in his dad’s eyes at the news.

What he didn’t do, though, was give up. He had fought his way into his school team years ahead of most of the other players and he carried the battle on until he represented his county as well. He then tried out and was signed for various local semi-professional teams as he prepared to leave school at 16. ‘I was naturally aggressive, a left-back and a cut-throat tackler. You may have got past
once but there was never, ever a second occasion. And I was fast, a great 100-metre sprinter. I did well.’

Well enough to catch Rangers’ eye again. A scout watched him play in a local youth game and called him back up to Ibrox for one final shot at the big time. As he walked back into the club grounds that day, Gordon knew the next few hours would be the most important of his life. Already coming up to 16, he was at the upper age limit if he wanted to break into the professional game. This was make or break time and he was going to give it everything he had.

‘Even if they didn’t like my game, they must have still liked my attitude,’ he told his uncle afterwards.

But the Rangers staff had given him no clues about how well he had done, so he headed back down to Stratford to wait. And to wait. In the end, just over four weeks passed before a letter with a Glasgow postmark landed on the Ramsay doormat. Gordon says that at first he was too nervous to open it and the rest of the family were too nervous to force him. But, when he did, the news was good.

‘They had invited me to come to Glasgow on a year’s apprenticeship, then, if it went well, as a reserve-team player,’ he says.

He wasn’t being given a contract or any real commitment. But he was on his way and he wasn’t going to be left on his own. Despite everyone’s objections, his parents decided that the whole family would have to leave their home, their friends, their jobs and their schools. Everyone would move back north to support Gordon. It turned out to be a decision that would ultimately destroy
the family and leave Gordon repaying psychological debts for most of the next decade. And almost immediately the cracks began to show.

‘I was acutely aware of the responsibility I was carrying for the whole family having been uprooted and for the first three months I absolutely hated my new life. My mother wasn’t happy either and I could see that my father had a growing problem with alcohol now he was back in Scotland. He could no longer have just one or two glasses – he always had to finish the bottle. He would drink himself into a stupor and then the country and western music would go on. They were not good times for any of us.’

The irony of this only intensified the depression and insecurity Gordon was already feeling. Just as he had finally started to do something he thought his father would have to be proud of, the older man started to retreat from the world and blot it all out. Far from halting the violence Gordon’s mother suffered at home, as her son had hoped, the move back to Glasgow seemed to have made matters worse. And things weren’t a lot better at training. ‘I got the shit kicked out of me at Rangers,’ he admits. ‘They didn’t believe I was born in Glasgow because of my Stratford accent, and I didn’t fit in with their lifestyle of playing pool, getting pissed and eating pies.’

Meanwhile, Gordon’s elder sister, Diane, had persuaded her parents that she should be allowed to stay at college in Banbury, near Stratford, after all. The family was falling apart. And Gordon thought it was all his fault. The only way he could make amends, he believed, was to make it into the first team and become a success. Failure suddenly
wasn’t an option. He had to make it so he could buy houses for his parents, his brother and his sisters, the way you read that other footballers did. Gordon Ramsay, always in a hurry, was more ambitious and resolute than ever.