How NOT to be a Football Millionaire - Keith Gillespie My Autobiography Read Free Page A

know that the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’ dated back to 1887, when the British Prime Minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury), was accused of nepotism for appointing his nephew to the position of Irish Chief Secretary, but I don’t know how a Premier League footballer, who considers himself to be a smart guy, managed to turn £8 million into nothing.
    I wish I could adequately explain how he chose the wrong friends, failed in two marriages, and wound up in a Mental Health Assessment Centre, looking for solutions from a strange man in a white jacket.
    So, back to the original question. Where did it go wrong?
    Let me try and explain.

2
    Having A Ball
    FOOTBALL was my childhood. I grew up in a country ravaged by the violence of the Troubles and yet, long before my profession gave me a protective shell, I was unaffected by it. Some people don’t believe that could be possible in Northern Ireland, but it was my reality.
    My Dad, Harry Gillespie, worked as a prison officer in the Maze, the notorious home for paramilitary prisoners, during the height of the violence. A year before he got the job there were hunger strikes; a year after there was a prison break where one of the other officers died. But he never took the stress from work home with him; it must be in our genes. Sitting down and revealing our deepest thoughts to our loved ones is the last thing the Gillespie men are likely to do. Instead, we just try and block it out and move on to the next day. I think my Dad wanted his kids to have as normal a childhood as possible and I appreciate why he did that. I’ve no doubt that he encountered some terrifying people, but we barely talked about the pictures that were on the evening news every night.
    It helped that Bangor, a wealthy Protestant town, largely escaped the unrest. There were a few incidents in the early ’70s, long before we moved there, but while other parts of Northern Ireland constantly suffered, I led an idyllic existence by comparison. At least that’s how I remember it anyway. We were 13 miles from Belfast and one day a bomb went off with such force that we felt the reverberations in our kitchen. Truthfully, I couldn’t tell you when that happened. I could look it up and pretend I remembered every second, and suggest that it had a huge impact on me. But that wouldn’t be honest. I occupied my own, happy world, aware of bad things without really paying too much attention. Sure, security checks were a way of life, and I knew I had to be careful on my trips to Belfast. Yet, I was born into that environment, so this was normal. I never knew any different.
    I spent my early years in Islandmagee, a quiet peninsula seven miles from Larne, a seaport on the east coast of Northern Ireland. Dad is from Larne. My mother, Beatrice Thornberry, hails from Kilrea in County Derry. When I was born on February 18, 1975, I already had a two-year-old sister, Angela. Three years later, Heather arrived.
    Both my parents came from the Protestant community. Mum’s father, Robert Thornberry, was in the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and moved around a lot with his job. She lived on the same street in Kilrea as a budding Catholic footballer, a young Martin O’Neill. They weren’t friends, although I remember my grandad speaking a lot about the O’Neill family – especially after the 1982 World Cup when, against all the odds, Billy Bingham took our wee country to the finals in Spain, with Mum’s old neighbour right at the heart of it.
    That tournament is my first vivid football memory. Before that, Dad watched football on Sunday afternoons and I used to cry because I wanted the Muppet Show so we had to rotate on a week to week basis until, all of a sudden, I tired of Kermit and wanted the football instead.
    Dad was a Manchester United fan, going right back to his memories of the coverage of the Munich air disaster and the Busby Babes. Then, George Best came along and the connection between