the truth is that I wasn’t being homophobic, I was merely trying to exploit a known weakness in an opponent who had done me a number of times.’
It’s an interesting line of defence. According to Robbie’s rationale, then, it’s okay to call a black man a ‘nigger’ on the pitch and pretend it’s all in the line of duty. I don’t think so. I don’t think even Robbie would try and argue that. Maybe he just didn’t think about his argument. It’s more likely he didn’t really have any defence and that that was the best he could come up with. It wasn’t a very good effort.
The television and radio presenter Nicky Campbell produced an article about what Fowler had written: ‘I bet what Fowler did that day at Chelsea made thousands of youngsters feel pretty crappy about themselves,’ he wrote. ‘Imagine if he had performed a craven Uncle Tom shuffle of subordination to a black player. A bit of name calling never hurt anyone?
‘But it is unfair to blame Fowler. The insular and impenetrable culture of football is the fundamental problem. There, difference is frowned upon and intelligence scorned. This is the world of the institutionally incurious.’
A month after Robbie offered me his backside, we both found ourselves in another England squad. There was another awkward reunion at Burnham Beeches. By now, Kevin Keegan was the manager and we were preparing for his first match in charge, a home European Championship qualifying tie against Poland. Kevin summoned us both to his room. He wanted us to stage a public reconciliation for the press. Robbie didn’t have quite as much bravado in that situation. He looked like a naughty little boy. He seemed shy and tongue-tied. Kevin wanted us to do a photo-call for the media but I said immediately that unless Robbie apologized to me first, that wasn’t going to happen. Otherwise, there was no way I was going to go out there and pretend we had resolved the situation – no chance.
I made it clear that I didn’t want a public apology from Robbie; just a private word would do. But he refused. He said he had done nothing wrong, that it was just a bit of a laugh. Keegan started to back off at that point. He wasn’t qualified to deal with it but I felt more confident about it. By now, I felt bolstered by the debate the incident had caused, and in a strange kind of way I felt relieved that the issue was totally out in the open. Now, at least, everyone knew the kind of taunting I had to put up with from the fans every week. Now, they could guess at the routine abuse I had to deal with on the pitch. From that moment on, there seemed to be less animosity about the chants that were directed at me. The debate about the incident with Fowler took some of the mystery out of it all and exposed it for the puerile cruelty it was.
I don’t feel any animosity towards Robbie now but you cannot do that to people. Because of the kind of stuff that he sought to justify, sometimes during my career it felt as if the whole world was against me. It was hard to deal with. It’s starting to sound like a sob story now, I know, and that’s not my intention. But this was like bullying, out and out bullying.
I was determined to stand up for myself. I confronted Robbie about it while we were in Keegan’s room. I pointed out to him that if he’d taken the piss out of someone like that in the middle of Soho where all the gay clubs are, he would have got chased down the street and beaten up. Even then, Robbie couldn’t resist it. When I mentioned the gay clubs in Soho, he muttered: ‘You’d know where they are.’ I laughed, I admit it. He can be a funny guy. I told him I’d be professional with him on the training pitch but that there was no way I was going to shake his hand.
On 9 April, six weeks after the original incident and six days after Robbie had got himself in more trouble by pretending to snort the white lines on the pitch at Goodison Park during a goal celebration in a Merseyside derby, we were both told to attend our separate FA disciplinary hearings at Birmingham City’s St Andrews ground. I took a barrister called Jim Sturman with me to act in my defence and the Chelsea managing director, Colin Hutchinson, came along to support me. Jim had put a dossier together to show the disciplinary committee which detailed the homophobic abuse I had suffered from crowds over the years. We had video footage of some of the more extreme incidents and Jim also brought some of the hundreds of letters of support I received from members of the public.
Jim presented my case very eloquently and the panel seemed surprised by our approach. It wasn’t so much punishing Robbie that I was after. I didn’t want to get him into more trouble. He seemed to be doing pretty well by himself without any extra help from me. It was more about illustrating to them the problem with homosexual abuse that still existed in English football and the extent of what I had had to deal with.
If they had given me a punishment based on what I did, I would not have accepted it. I felt it was important to make a stand. I also saw it as an opportunity to get the whole thing off my chest. I had put up with it for so long and this was like a chance to exorcize a demon. In my mind, it wasn’t about Robbie Fowler. It was all about me. It didn’t matter who had done it to me. It wasn’t personal. It was about the victimisation and the lies.
I expected a token punishment for the fact that I had done something wrong on the pitch. If they had tried to make an example out of me, though, I would have taken it further. I would have made the FA accountable for what had happened. In the end, they banned me for a game and gave me a £5,000 fine.
They hammered Robbie. He was suddenly dealing with the fall-out from his mock-cocaine-snorting antics as well as what he did to me. In a way, it got the FA off the hook over confronting the issue of homophobia in football. But in another way, it was a fascinating glimpse of the governing body’s moral code. They gave Robbie a much harsher punishment for making what was clearly a joke about snorting cocaine than they did for his attempt to humiliate me and encourage homophobia everywhere – both serious issues.
I wonder if Robbie appreciated the irony of that. He did something as a retort to malicious rumours that had been spread about him and yet he had been happy to exploit a malicious rumour that had been spread about me.
Robbie got a two-game ban for taunting me and a fourgame ban for his goal celebrations at Goodison. So a joke about cocaine was twice as reprehensible as a gay taunt. I wasn’t angry about that, but it was interesting. It was indicative of the continuing ambivalence that exists about homophobia in sport. The American sports agent Leigh Steinberg once said it was easier to get an advertising deal for a player who was a convicted felon than a player who was gay. Nothing’s changed.
But I felt that the debate about what Robbie had done and the FA hearing gave me a form of closure on the whole thing. It was a watershed for me. After that, I still got the taunts from the crowd but some of the venom seemed to have gone out of them. Some of the seriousness had gone because what Robbie had done had underlined the absurdity of what was happening to me.
It didn’t completely get rid of it – I had people singing at me and abusing me for the rest of my career – but it did get it out in the open. It did change something. Perhaps it was because what Robbie had done had actually always been my worst fear. It represented my dread of the most extreme humiliation anyone could visit on me. Now it was over, I knew nothing could be worse than that ordeal. So no one could offend me any more. It was a necessary evil. After the hearing, the distress I had always felt about the taunts I had to endure began to ebb away.
The episode still causes me some problems, particularly over the way I reacted to Robbie’s provocation. When Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final, I was asked to talk about it many times because people drew comparisons with what had been said to him and what Robbie had done to me. I found that very difficult because I felt Zidane was totally wrong to do what he did and that he set a poor example. I can understand there is part of his psyche that is weak because he has suffered abuse all his life and that is why he snapped. Whatever was said that night in Berlin was between him and Materazzi, not between him, Materazzi and every supporter in the stadium. So it was a different affair entirely to what happened between me and Fowler. Zidane had just missed a header that he would have thought he should have scored. It was his last game for France and emotionally he was probably in a bad place.
The first time we played at Anfield after the incident with Robbie, the Chelsea boss Gianluca Vialli put me on the bench. On that day of all days, he put me on the bench. Robbie was God at Anfield and there I was having