a natural man trapped by conventions
by
Douglas Messerli
John
Carey and Adam Darke (directors) Forbidden Games: The Justin Fashanu Story /
2017
For
US citizens who are not involved in soccer, the name Justin Fashanu probably
means very little, but for the British he was, and for some still is, a remarkable
footballer who was the first black player to be offered a £1m fee to join the
renowned Nottingham Forest team coached by the then highly respected Brian
Clough.
Fashanu, who had long been recognized as a
young footballer in the county where he had grown up, Norfolk, with his younger
brother John, had become famous through the British telly when he scored a nearly
impossible goal against Liverpool by kicking the ball into the left corner,
slipping it deftly beyond the goalie’s reach, for which he won the 1980 BBC
Goal of the Season Award.
Like dozens of other footballers, past
and present, Fashanu, as Screendaily critic Fionnuala Halligan notes, “He
was flash, and he liked to splash the cash, a charming, natural talent….” And
like many another soccer star, once he reached the premier leagues, his scoring
slowed disastrously and let to a serious knee injury that might have argued
against him ever playing again. A trip to California, where he suffered through
a great deal of reparative surgery and strenuous restorative exercise—the costs
for which nearly bankrupted him—allowed him to begin replaying the game, but
never with the aplomb of his early career.
Meanwhile, Justin’s beloved brother who
was nearly fathered by Justin as he was growing up, far less talented that the
elder, continued to work his way up the leagues, playing soccer with lesser teams,
but becoming a solid scorer and came to be respected by all.
If Justin Fashanu’s story were nothing
more than this, it might have represented yet another version of the often-told
stories of figures such as Norman Maine in A Star Is Born or even Terry
Malloy in On the Waterfront, the latter of whose elder brother asked him
to throw a boxing match (Fashanu began his life as an upcoming boxer), ruining
his career and life.
Yet
Fashanu’s career as a footballer is almost insignificant given all of the
myriad other difficulties and he and his brother John faced. First of all, when
their Nigerian father left their mother Pearl to return to Africa, leaving her
in near poverty and unable to raise her large family, she left the two boys at Barnardos
orphanage, while taking her other two children into her own home.
The young boys could never comprehend nor
forgive her for that act, despite the fact that they eventually became foster
children to what apparently was a loving and sustaining white family, Alf and
Betty Jackson, in the small Norwich village of Shropham. Throughout their growing
up Pearl attempted to explain to them that what she had to offer was far less
that the life they were living; yet, even as she puts it, Justin never could accept
it, the facts simply not registering in his brain.
As the only two black children for miles
around, Justin and John, we can be certain, in those days of institutionalized
racial hatred felt deeply isolated, to say the least, particularly living within
a world that when Justin and his brother began to play soccer for Norwich
filled with the air with racist epithets, along with banana skins they regularly
tossed onto the playing field.
When his career began to nosedive,
moreover, Justin became a born-again Christian, preaching and proselytizing, somewhat
hypocritically we can perceive in hindsight, for a religion that were he not
still a kind of celebrity, might otherwise have refused entry to their
congregation. His sister, who claims she was not even a Christian, remembers
Justin even trying to convert her.
Several times throughout this film, interviewees
and even the directorial narrators, suggest that Justin was simply unknowable,
a person who one day could be open and personable, but the next distant and
inscrutable.
I am not at all surprised by this given
the fact that underneath these numerous levels of pain and confused identity, Fashanu
was also gay, not just passively or occasionally as a man who was abashedly attracted
to other men, but as a kind of predator, who loved rent boys and even had
affairs with an MP. Although Fashanu’s behavior was not generally known at that
time, his fellow on-field players clearly knew he was gay, particularly such he
often brought some of his younger lovers into the dressing rooms.
Much of his problem at Nottingham had to
do with highly respected Clough, who was also homophobic and wouldn’t even let
Fashanu work out with his fellow players. As the directors also make clear
through their rewinds of many of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s
speeches, she and most of her British Empire were still highly homophobic, lashing
out, particularly with the advent of the AIDS epidemic, about their hatred of
all things homosexual, disparaging even the idea that proper people might allow
a gay man even to enter their homes. The laws, moreover, which might be said to
be slightly more open than the days that even being suspected of having gay sex
might have landed you in jail, still weighted unequally homosexual and
heterosexual behavior. The legal age permitted for heterosexuals was 16, while
it was higher for gays, and sex with someone of 16 was still subject to years
of imprisonment.
In 1990, desperate for money to pay off
his debts, Justin Fashanu leaked the story to one of the most vicious of English
tabloids, The Sun, that he was gay, making him the first British
footballer then and still today who has ever openly admitted his homosexuality.
The terrible backlash which he might have
foreseen, but claims he could not have imagined, made him later to backtrack some,
claiming after that he was bisexual and, at one point, desperately in love with
actress Julie Goodyear, while Justin also—in the terrible days when Prime
Minister John Major was Leader of the Conservative Party at a time many of his
party members were being accused of having homosexual affairs—made his own
allegations against parliamentary members.
John, by this time an honored soccer
play, refused to any longer even speak to his now endlessly beleaguered
brother. Although Justin continued to hope that one day the two would again sit
down to have a loving conversation, John reports on screen: “The closer the
blood, the bloodier the situation.” Joining his voice with the millions of homophobes
Justin had had to deal with, John added his taunts “I wouldn’t want
to get changed in his vicinity.”
Even a little empathy might help us to
realize why this man, who the directors summarize, was “never at peace.” With
all the levels of hate leveled against him, by the nation, his fellow players,
and even his brother, with rejection to his way of thinking by his father and
mother, and now the many teams for which he had since played, it must have
seemed like a lovely respite when he was invited to coach youth soccer in
Maryland, where, as the police where later to remind him, “Homosexual acts are
illegal.”
Fashanu, as a dear friend tells us,
loved teaching, and seemed to be settling in quite nicely until a young 17-year
old, having shared with others and evening of partying at Justin’s Ellicott
City apartment, reported to police that he had been raped, after probably
having been drugged by the ex-soccer player. The police visited Fashanu’s home,
but did not arrest him. And the film suggests that the young man in question
was well-known by his peers as a habitual liar, who made stories up so often that
they literally ignored him.
Like director Roman Polanski—although
under different circumstances, Polanski’s sexual partner having been only 13, while
the boy Fashanu was said to have raped was 17—Justin fled back to England,
where after visiting a local gay sauna, he was found dead on May 2, 1998 of
strangulation in a small garage, evidently a result of suicide. He was only 37
years of age.
While John Carey and Adam Darke’s
understated telling of this said tale asks as many questions—a bit disingenuously
I suggest—than providing answers, may help us see through to some truths about
Justin Fashanu, and is certainly a good starting place for an understanding of
this complex athlete, I can only wish for something like a full tragic opera or
sincere drama worthy of this man’s mostly innocent dilemmas. Not only were the “games,”
both athletic and sexual forbidden this haunted man, but his entire life seemed forbidden
by the prejudices of the time.
Los
Angeles, July 10, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2010).
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