Some reviews of Alex Ferguson’s My Autobiography have been on the negative side. But it’s even worse than you’ve heard.
Only give it as a present to somebody you feel under intolerable pressure to buy for but intensely dislike.
I have trudged through all 400- plus pages to save busy readers the effort and can report that there’s scarcely a paragraph of interest to anyone other than the 20 million Man U fans in Asia and the 37 in Manchester.
The book includes a number of recycled anecdotes – the flung-boot assault on David Beckham, Roy Keane’s climactic outburst, Rio Ferdinand’s failure to show up for a drugs test etc.
All of these little tidbits of tosh were re-heated and spoon-fed to the press prior to publication as a means of drumming up sales. It’s only after you’ve coughed up a pony that you find there’s nothing more.
The word on the terraces, so to speak – ah, the terraces! – is that Ferguson has held back the juicier bits for a second volume, which might just be acceptable if we weren’t being charged over the odds for the first (Morrissey’s brilliant Penguin Classic can be picked up for less than a tenner, and he wrote it himself).
Since retiring – although he can be seen at every game, discommoding David Moyes – Ferguson have been raking in a fortune giving “motivational” speeches to the sort of corporate drones who provoked Keane to kick off... “For a plan to work, you must maintain focus...”
“It is vital that leaders have sound instincts”… “If you rush a project you risk making bad decisions.” It might be argued that if Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern can persuade people to pay them bewildering amounts to mouth this sort of stuff, why not Ferguson? But that doesn’t mean it’s not shite.
One point which ought to have attracted more attention concerns Rio’s reluctance to pee into the bottle. He cannot have been on drugs, says Ferguson, because, “We would have known. It shows in their eyes…”
So this wasn’t the first time he’d had to deal with a player with a drugs problem. Now that would have been a tale worth the telling. But not a dicky-bird.
What comes across most clearly is that the behaviour hailed by a craven media as “the hair-drier treatment” was straightforward bullying.
The most egregious example of crawling obeisance was the willingness of the BBC to accept assistant manager Mike Phelan for post-match interviews after the Glasgow boor had refused to speak to the corporation for dodgy reasons which had nothing to do with what happened on the pitch. The Beeb should have told him to take a running jump. But they didn’t have the bottle.
The Ferguson book marked the low point of English football in 2013. The highpoint has been the rise and rise towards the Premier Division of one of the grand old teams of the association game, Burnley FC. It’s not the club’s fault Alistair Campbell is a fan.
Do remember again before buying an adorable doggie that while Jesus is only for Xmas, a puppy is for life.
She stood five foot nothing in a beehive haircut and when she walked into the room I thought she was an ice-cream girl who had lost her way. No offence to ice-cream sellers, but I’d expected someone a bit bigger and older than 15.
This was my first-ever proper journalistic assignment, more years ago than I care to remember or relate. The first sentence above was my intro. I think it still works. She was Brenda Lee. I always think about her this time of year.
From a dirt-poor background in Atlanta - her family lived without running water until she became a star - she was a singing prodigy, performing for pennies in local stores when she was three. Aged six, she was a regular on radio. Plumbing had been installed in the family shack. By nine, her father having died, she was the family of four’s only bread-winner.
She had a sensational voice, sweet, powerful, wonderfully expressive, pitch perfect. Made her network debut at 10, recorded ‘Jambayala’ for Decca at 12. It sold only modestly, but attracted attention… such a huge voice from a 4’9” girl.
The hits came in her teens, ‘Sweet Nothin’s’, ‘Everybody Loves Me But You’, ‘Rocking Around The Xmas Tree’, ‘I’m Sorry’, In my own biased view, her ‘I’m Sorry’ is one of the great singles. I did the interview when she included the Opera House in a British tour. I thought then that she was an absolute dote and imagine she still is today.
She’s living in Flordia now, aged 69, still does a bit of singing, has duetted along the way with the Oak Ridge Boys, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, George Jones and a roster of other pop and country stars, has been married for 51 years to Ronnie Shacklett, has two daughters, three grandchildren. A couple of weeks back, I came across a quote to the effect that she really doesn’t have to work because ‘Rockin’ Around The Xmas Tree’ is played off the airwaves every year. She giggles at the size of the royalty cheques when they arrive in the post.
You’ll hear ‘Rockin’ on radio over the next few weeks. But ‘I’m Sorry’ is the song. Gives me an ache of sad satisfaction every time. Check it out.