Gordon Ramsay (5 page)

‘I was a pretty determined player and I was becoming pretty nasty,’ he says when asked to describe his game back then. ‘They called me “Flash” because I was fast and if I were to compare myself with any more recent footballers I’d say I was most like Stuart Pearce.’ Whose nickname, of course, was ‘Psycho’.

But after a few reserve-team games Gordon realised he wasn’t the only person in the squad with a temper. Whenever he is criticised for the way he treats his staff in the kitchen, he says what he does is nothing compared with the way managers and trainers treat their teams at half-time. And at Ibrox he met his first management role model: former player Jock Wallace. ‘He was fucking ruthless, a Scottish version of Mike Tyson. When he wanted to rip your arse out, he would crucify you,’ is how Gordon remembers the overall mood in the dressing room. And, while he admits the stress of fighting for selection made him physically ill, he was still thriving on the pressure and riding with the punches.

Now he really was on the brink of making it big. He got into the main 18-strong squad and by the end of his first season in Scotland he had played two first-team games, one against St Johnstone, the other against Morton – the club that years later he would be rumoured to be buying.

‘The St Johnstone friendly was the first time I played with Ally McCoist. Davie Cooper, Ian Ferguson and Derek Ferguson were just through in the year above me,
so even though I didn’t play the full game it was all a dream for a kid like me.’ But very soon it was all going to turn into a nightmare.

Just as Gordon was getting ready for his third first-team appearance and was cementing his position in the main Rangers squad, he smashed the cartilage in his knee and was out of the game for 11 long weeks. Then he made matters worse by ignoring the medical advice he had been given about letting the joint rest. ‘There was no such thing as keyhole surgery in those days and I tried to come back too soon after the accident. Seven months after it had happened, very stupidly, I played a game of squash. I tore a cruciate ligament and was then in plaster for another four months.’

For a professional sportsman, this kind of long layoff is almost unbearable. ‘So many things go through your mind, your confidence is wiped out and you become paranoid,’ Gordon said of his own experience. He was convinced that his former colleagues were moving forward while he was falling back. He was terrified that a newcomer might steal his place on the bench. And, worst of all, he was afraid that he might never regain his old match-fitness.

Unfortunately for Gordon, it looked like he was right about his fitness. When the plaster was taken off his leg and his rehab was finished, he threw himself back into training, desperate to prove that he could recover and pick up where he had left off. But deep down he knew his leg no longer felt the same. He spent hours in hot and then cold baths after training sessions, trying everything he could think of to dull the new pains and pretend they didn’t matter. Mentally, he was determined to be as tough as ever
and he was staking everything on a career-making third main-team appearance at Ibrox.

But, at the start of the following season, he was told it was never going to happen. Jock Wallace and his assistant Archie Knox called the 19-year-old into their office at 10 am on a Friday and broke the news. It was all over. Gordon was out of the main team and his contract wasn’t being renewed. He remembers the words hitting him like a physical blow – and to this day he refuses to hold business meetings on Friday mornings in case the memories of that initial rejection come flooding back. At the time, he just gripped the edges of his chair and tried to hide his feelings. ‘I sat and thought, You bastards, looking at them both, and while I wanted to cry I wouldn’t give them the pleasure of doing it in front of them. The whole meeting probably didn’t last more than five minutes but when it was over every dream I’d ever had had been taken away.’

And Gordon was convinced that the dream really was over. Wallace and Knox suggested he do more rehab, move down a league, join another club to get match-fit and then prove he was good enough to play for Rangers again at a later date. The door, they said, would always be open for him. But Gordon refused even to think about it. ‘I said no, straight away. I’m an all-or-nothing guy and I knew that, if I couldn’t play for Rangers, then forget it. I wasn’t about to scrape £45 a week for the next ten years. I didn’t want to play for some Sunday team somewhere else instead. I wanted to throw my boots away and to retire from football altogether.’

But first he wanted to get over the shock of being rejected. ‘I went home, sat down and finally started to cry.
I wanted to attack the whole world. I really thought I could make it with Rangers because I knew I was one of their better young players. It was devastating and I had a serious breakdown. I was too upset to talk to anyone and bawled my eyes out in private for the whole weekend. I thought, Christ, that’s it. All my mates know. What do I do now? The sense of rejection was humiliating, awful, and I took the failure very, very badly, like any 18-year-old would. I couldn’t move on and I wanted to forget about it.’

What he needed more than anything was support from his dad. But he didn’t get it. ‘Dad had been sitting in his van just outside the grounds when I got the news from Wallace and telling him was the worst thing I had done. Again I wouldn’t give him the pleasure of seeing me cry. He never said anything good, and from the moment we left Ibrox his attitude was clear. “You get yourself into another club,” he said. “You continue hounding Rangers. You get your knee working, start kicking with your right foot and stop putting so much emphasis on being a naturally left-footed player.” Even though he had hardly come to watch any of my matches, Dad wanted me to continue living the dream. He would have been happy to have me playing in a lower league – part-time footballer, part-time insurance man or something. But I’d learned the football was never really going to work. I was always going to be stuck with the label “gammy knee”. So I had to let go of what I loved first, and that was hard. I’d been so close. And I felt so bitter for so long.’

The embarrassment of seeing his dad try and fail to make it in the music business was another reason why Gordon was determined to make a clean break from
football. ‘He had followed a dream everyone knew was never going to come true and I already knew that I didn’t want to turn out like him. I dropped football like a fucking lead balloon because I knew it wasn’t going to come true either.’

And, while Gordon tried to work out what the hell he could do instead, he saw his family and his personal life start to fall apart. His dad’s drinking had hit new heights, while the way he treated his wife and family had hit new lows. He was having an affair at work and was refusing to contribute to the housekeeping budget even though the final reminders were piling up. Unable to shake off his own depression, Gordon split up with the girlfriend he had been dating for nearly four years.

‘Although the football pressure was gone I felt the family pressure more. Dad was still doing nothing but criticise me – at one point, he even suggested that I was exaggerating the injuries. Now I look back and wonder how any father can be so unsupportive and unloving towards his injured son. I know it’s an awful thing to say but I was beginning to despise him. A month later, our relationship had deteriorated so much that I knew I had to get out and I went to stay with my sister Diane down in Banbury.

‘Shortly after that, I got a call from Yvonne to tell me that Mum was having to wear sunglasses again to disguise the bruises on her face. As if that wasn’t enough, Dad had also stopped paying the mortgage, so the building society repossessed the house – the home of her own that my mother had longed for all her life. She was humiliated again, and her dream was shattered.’

Amazingly, the family stayed together. They all moved to
a five-bedroom council house in Bridgwater, in Somerset, and Gordon’s mum found new work – ironically, in a women’s refuge run by social services which Gordon still supports financially to this day.

Meanwhile, Gordon had stumbled upon an idea of what he might do next. Before moving up to Glasgow, his mother had worked at the Cobweb Tea Rooms, in Sheep Street in the middle of Stratford. With their oak beams, low ceilings and traditional menus, the tea rooms were the ultimate in hushed English gentility. But, when he had visited his mum there on Saturday afternoons, Gordon had found out that behind the scenes it was a completely different story. In the kitchen, there was activity, panic, energy. Everyone seemed to be moving at once, everyone had a role and everyone was simultaneously an individual and part of a team. It’s a football team, Gordon had realised, in a moment of revelation. If I’m not going to be a professional sportsman, I’d be happy to work here, he thought at the time – which was one reason why he’d enrolled at a catering college in Oxford just before being called up to Ibrox at 16.

Nearly four years later, he wondered if he would get the same buzz out of that kind of environment. After he left Rangers, the Police and the Royal Navy had both turned him down on finding out he had failed all but two of his O levels, and now he was struggling for both money and direction. Desperate for cash, he got a part-time job in a restaurant and fell in love again with the environment. It would change his life. ‘That year, I had six weeks of being a waiter, which was a disaster. I only lasted four days working the tables and spent the rest of the time in the
kitchen. And I loved it. I loved it instantly, big time. The boisterousness, the hassle, the shouting, the screaming, the activity. I found a sense of freedom there.’

Some of the kitchen staff suggested he reconsider full-time catering training and found him details of a foundation course he could try. And the more Gordon learned about it, the more he thought they might be right. But this time he knew he had to be sure before signing up. ‘Now the football had ended I knew that I couldn’t afford to mess up a second time. That very first day after I had been kicked out of Rangers I can remember sitting down and thinking to myself, OK, the next thing I do, I’ve got to get it right. I was obsessed with never again being told that I’m not good enough. I had failed once in life. I swore I would never fail at anything ever again.’

If the 19-year-old Gordon Ramsay was indeed going to become a chef, he wanted to be the best chef in the world. ‘If I can’t have an FA Cup winner’s medal, I want a third Michelin star,’ he said years later when he realised how he could prove himself and be measured against the best in his new industry. Back in Bridgwater, Gordon had a few more hurdles to cross before he got on to the HND course in catering management he was interested in. All of them were about the way other people would treat his decision. The main one, not surprisingly, involved his father – the man who years ago had put extra salt on his son’s porridge ‘so as not to produce a wuss’.

Even after so many disappointments, so many examples of how not to behave, Gordon still felt he needed his father’s blessing. He never got it. ‘Dad was a very stubborn man and for him it was always football or nothing. He’d
had a tough time with his own father, a butcher. And when I tested the water by saying, “Dad, I get excited by being in a boisterous kitchen, I want to be a chef,” he flipped his lid. He was a very macho man, the toughest, and he thought catering was for poofs. It was one thing to tell his mates that his son was playing for Rangers, but quite another to say I was training to be a cook. “Stay away from catering,” he said to me at one point. “It’s girly and effeminate.” I don’t think he ever really forgave me when I ignored him.’

Unfortunately, the same message was coming from many of Gordon’s friends as well. And it was coming through especially loud and clear from his former teammates at Rangers. ‘I knew it would be hard to go from wearing that amazing strip to putting a pinny on,’ he said. ‘But I never thought it was girly, even though Ally McCoist and a whole load of the big-name players said I was a poof.’

With the decision made, Gordon enrolled on his course, swore he would make the best of it and got an immediate boost. ‘The day our lecturer started screaming at us all because we weren’t showing enough interest, I was hooked. I also got excited when I found out the amount of freedom involved around food – each and every season is different, each and every customer is different. It became my obsession. My escape from watching Mum and Dad waste their lives and witnessing him trying to destroy her mentally. I had no idea I was going to be good at it but I loved it from day one.’

Customers, however, may have had different ideas about his suitability for the job – and Gordon is happy to admit that his first ventures weren’t entirely successful. ‘I
remember one day I made apple pie to be served with Sunday lunch. The pastry had shrunk – a bit of a disaster. I made mint sauce but by mistake used washing-up liquid instead of vinegar – a total disaster.’

Even so, after a year’s study, he gained his HND in catering management while working part-time in a small country house hotel just outside Stratford. He was on his way – and people who knew him realised he was going to move fast. William Murray, immediately nicknamed Minty by Gordon, was at Banbury Technical College with him and also cooked with him at the army barracks at Folkestone in the summer of 1984. He says Gordon had long since got to grips with what you had to achieve to succeed in the restaurant world. Second best was never going to be enough for him, so working away in a distinctly average restaurant was never going to be on the menu. ‘Even then Gordon made it clear he wanted nothing less than his own place with three Michelin stars. He was quite prepared to put in the 16-plus-hour days and take the abuse young chefs get in order to fulfil his ambitions.’

But William admits there were never any guarantees that it would work out for Gordon. ‘He was a bit of a nutter even then and I knew he was either going to end up in prison or make a million. I’m just pleased it was the latter,’ he told the BBC years later.

Other people were also pleased to see their faith in Gordon repaid that summer. The local branch of the Round Table had stepped in to help when Gordon realised he couldn’t afford the chef’s clothes, knives and other kit he needed for his year at college. ‘They paid for the whole
thing and if it hadn’t been for them I wouldn’t be where I am today.’