Amid all the talk of the racial barriers that were broken down over the remarkable lifetime of Muhammad Ali – a few of them with his help – young Ireland defender Cyrus Christie admits to having been no stranger to abuse relating to his colour as he made his up through the footballing ranks in Coventry.
The 23-year-old recalls “one time we played a team and it kicked off between the parents, someone calling someone the ‘N’ word, and she kept repeating it. I must have been 11 or 12 at that time.
“It got better,” he says, “but it was still quite racist at the time. Where I went to school it was bang in the middle of two racist areas. There used to be a lot of race wars. A lot of people jumped in over the fences with knives and machetes.
“At one time someone tried to spray detergent in a lad’s eye and tried to stab him to blind him. That’s just the way it was. It is a lot better now. There’s a lot more diversity.”
Christie gets a bit of racist abuse to this day he says, mostly through social media, but he brushes it off for the most part and readily acknowledges that he was not been around in the really dark days.
He tells the remarkable tale of his uncle Errol, the amateur boxing champion whose 1985 professional clash with Mark Kaylor is still occasionally recalled with wonder these days, and not entirely for what happened over the course of the lively eight rounds that the fight actually lasted.
The two men disliked each other intensely, with Christie alleging racism by his opponent and at the pre-fight press conference they came to blows both inside and outside the casino where the event was being staged. The Guardian recently described the encounter as "dripping in the racial tension that existed in England in 1985".
Bananas
Christie lost and his career never quite recovered, but the night is clearly still talked about within the family, with the
Derby County
star mentioning the tales of bananas being thrown at a man who spent a good deal of his life battling racism, one way or another, wherever he found it, including the streets of his home city where the British National Party was a malign and violent presence.
Errol, whose brother Lloyd was a British light-welterweight champion at one point around the same time, actually sparred with Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard when they visited the area and the family's albums include some remarkable pictures, says the right back.
“He’s a wonderful character; a really nice guy. He’s very funny. He knew what he wanted in life and worked really hard to get where he was. He never drank or smoked a day in his life, and doesn’t eat bad.”
But now he is terminally ill with cancer, says the player and “the way it came out was a bit weird”.
“He got jumped by a bunch of armed police,” he says, “mistaking him for a criminal. He was struggling with his breathing for a couple of weeks.
He wanted to beat up the police officers,” he says, with a slight chuckle at the irony of it, “but he should be thanking them really for mistaking him for a criminal.”
That is because Christie eventually went to the local hospital to have his breathing checked out where the disease that was actually causing the problem was finally diagnosed.
He battles on, says Christie and “he’s always following me, asking what I’m doing. He goes on about how good a footballer he was, but goes on more about the fights than the actual playing. But he loves to see people doing really well.”
Big task
He will, his nephew hopes, get to see the him do well in France although he is well aware of his place in the pecking order.
"I've got a big task in front of me with Séamus, who's been probably the best right back in the Premier League for the past few years, but I'm not here just to make up the numbers. I want to play. And I want to be putting thoughts in the manager's mind."
