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Racism in football: Inspired by a bullet
BEFORE I made my England debut in February 1982, the papers were full of me being in the squad and likely to play. I remember walking into The Hawthorns after training and picking up a bundle of letters.
All the players got fan mail and I sat down in the dressing room and started opening them.
Clearly someone did not approve of my selection because they had cut out individual letters from a newspaper and stuck them on a sheet of paper to spell out a message that read, ‘If you put your foot on our Wembley turf, you’ll get one of these through your knees’.
I looked into the envelope and there was a cotton-wool pad wrapped round something. I took it out, opened it up and there it was: a bullet staring up at me.
I have still got it to this day. The letter soon got binned, but I kept the bullet as a reminder of the force of anger and evil some people had inside them back then.
For the rest of my playing days, it was also a motivation, a reminder that these people were not going to stop me.
For the rest of my playing days, it was also a motivation, a reminder that these people were not going to stop me.
I turned a negative into a positive.