Sunday 7 August 2005
Observer Sport Monthly
Observer Sport Monthly
One afternoon 28 years ago, a remarkable meeting took place over lunch at London's Howard Hotel, between one of the country's most famous pop stars and the finest English footballer of his generation. The pop star, Elton John, had recently taken over Watford football club and needed a new manager. The footballer, Bobby Moore, was in the final week of his playing career and, like so many players at that stage of their lives, was looking for his break in management. It seemed a perfect match and a deal was agreed in principle. The two men shook hands and John promised to call Moore to finalise the details. Moore's wife Tina thought it was 'a done deal'.For three weeks, Moore waited by his phone. The call never came. Then, in his morning paper, Moore read that the job had gone to Graham Taylor, then a young and successful manager with Lincoln City but, as a player, a fairly ordinary left-back in the lower divisions.
By 1993, 16 years later, Taylor was England manager while Moore was a commentator for London's Capital Radio. England were playing a midweek World Cup qualifier - turgid affair against San Marino - and Moore was there in the commentary box as usual. But that night was different: Moore was a bigger story than what happened on the pitch. The previous day, the world had learnt that he had cancer. The press cameras were trained on Moore, the collar of his leather jacket turned up, his face gaunt and pallid. A week later, he was dead. Before kick-off the following Saturday, football grounds across the country were hushed in memory. Moore had always been more than just a great player, more even than England's World Cup-winning captain. He was English football's answer to baseball's Joe DiMaggio, symbolising not only the game's great generation, but its dignity, elegance and decorum. In the United States, DiMaggio became the icon of icons because, as the baseball writer David Halberstam put it, he 'transcended the barriers of sports in terms of the breadth of his fame'. He left the plate in 1951; yet in the late 1960s, he was still celebrated in popular culture, most memorably by Simon and Garfunkel, asking 'where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?'.
By then, to an America shocked by political assassinations and riven by the Vietnam war, he represented the lost confidence and the lost innocence of the postwar era. Nobody asked where Moore had gone until it was too late. Between his last game for Fulham in 1977 and his death in 1993, he was an almost forgotten man, shunned by the football authorities, ignored by club chairmen, unwelcome even at West Ham, the club where he had spent his best years. Of the few men who have equalled Moore's greatness on the pitch, almost all were given a break at the highest level of the game after their retirement from playing.
Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff and Michel Platini all went on to manage their national teams. Alfredo Di Stefano, Bobby Charlton and Gerd Müller found roles with former clubs. Pelé, immediately after his retirement, was less fortunate but eventually became Brazilian Minister for Sport in1995 and, two years later, received an honorary knighthood from the Queen. Today, he is one of the wealthiest retired sportsmen in the world, feted wherever he goes. Bobby Moore never came close to gaining any such recognition. Only posthumously, it seemed, did people recognise his grace not just as a player, but as a man. Why was this? What went wrong with Bobby Moore's life? Why did he end up as no more than a Sunday Sport hack and local radio pundit?
Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore was born in April 1941 in Barking, a rough industrial town on the London-Essex border. The blitz baby had been a promising - though by his own admission, never outstanding - schoolboy sportsman, choosing football with West Ham rather than professional county cricket. He was never the quickest of players, nor blessed with any great aerial ability, and his critics would often accuse him of representing style over substance, but as his West Ham and England colleague Geoff Hurst later put it: 'They said he couldn't run, but he was rarely beaten to the ball. They said that he couldn't jump, but he was rarely beaten in the air. He recognised that he was deficient in some areas and compensated by working hard on the training pitch and focusing on his positional play.'
His early career was one of promise, but his inclusion in England's 1962 World Cup squad still came as a surprise. 'Uncapped, pedestrian, not up to much in the air, suspect stamina,' the Daily Mirror's Ken Jones later pondered. 'How could England select the 21-year-old Moore for the 1962 World Cup finals?' He played in all four of England's games in that tournament, but would go on to flourish under new manager Alf Ramsey.
Within six months of Ramsey's appointment, Moore had captained England; and the two east Londoners would form a formidable partnership. Captaining England to World Cup victory in 1966 is what Moore is best remembered for; but his walk to the royal box that July afternoon in 1966 was actually the third time he had collected silverware at Wembley. An FA Cup winner in 1964, and a European Cup-Winners' Cup winner a year later, he had also been named the Football Writers' Association's player of the year in 1964. Yet there is a sense that he under achieved in his domestic career.
He would never finish higher than sixth in the league with West Ham; and although he periodically agitated for a move to Spurs, the West Ham board always insisted on him staying. Finally, in March 1974, he was sold to Fulham. He played in the 1975 FA Cup final when Fulham were beaten 2-0 by his old club, West Ham. When he retired two years later, at the age of 36, he had won 108 England caps (a national record that stood until Peter Shilton broke it in 1989) and made exactly 900 appearances for his two clubs and his country. A distinguished post-playing career seemed inevitable. Only two months after the Watford job fell through, Moore wrote to the Football Association about the England managership, prematurely vacated by Don Revie: 'I have gained considerable experience in assisting with coaching both with my clubs in England and abroad during the latter stages of my playing career. I know you are aware of ... how proud I was of my years with the England team.' It would have been unprecedented for a newly retired player, no matter how distinguished, to become England manager, and Moore probably didn't expect more than an assistant coaching role. What must have hurt him was that the FA did not even reply.
Moore's first wife, Tina, who now lives in Florida, still expresses disbelief that no club came in with a managerial or coaching offer. 'How could anyone who had Bobby's knowledge and expertise be overlooked in that way?' she asks. 'Kids would have looked up to him and learnt things just by his presence. I can just never ever see to this day why it didn't happen.'
Moore was not the only hero of England's 1966 World Cup victory who seemed to be shunned by the FA. It was as if football, after the national team twice failed in the 1970s even to qualify for the World Cup finals, was embarrassed to be reminded of its past glories, rather than looking to draw strength from them. No favours were granted to members of the winning team, no ambassadorial roles handed out, nor were clubs ever nudged towards granting them managerial or coaching opportunities. Only Alan Ball and Jack Charlton went on to manage in the top flight; of the rest, only Nobby Stiles built a substantial career as a boss elsewhere in the game. The faltering managerial career of Geoff Hurst primarily came about because he had a patron in Ron Greenwood, another West Ham man who succeeded Revie with England; Martin Peters lasted less than a year at Sheffield United; Bobby Charlton for two seasons at Preston. As for the rest, there was nothing.
Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt worked on the pools panel; Ray Wilson became an undertaker; George Cohen, struggling with cancer, didn't watch a football match for years. Even their manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, sacked at the age of just 53 - at least as much because of internal FA politics as because of the results on the pitch - never found a new role, except for a brief caretaker spell at Birmingham in 1977.
Moore got a chance in the end, but it wasn't a good one and he had to wait a long time. 'In those days,' recalls John Mitchell, with whom he played at Fulham and later entered a business partnership, 'there just weren't the same opportunities or the same structure that would give former players a chance ... there would only be one or two positions at each club, and that was it.'
It was the same in the media. This season, 138 Premiership matches will be broadcast live (as well as countless European and FA Cup matches), providing punditry opportunities for numerous old pros; in the pre-Sky days of 1983, say, just 10 were shown. The increased opportunities allowed one of Moore's successors at West Ham and England, Trevor Brooking, to build parallel careers as a pundit and in sports administration, with Sport England and the FA.
Moore left West Ham on bad terms and was never again fully welcome at the club. The dispute went back to 1966 when he had sought a move to Tottenham; he believed that, with Spurs, he would have a better chance of winning the title. West Ham refused to sell - as the club was entitled to do in the era before freedom of contract - and Moore's determination to go almost prevented him from playing in the World Cup.
When his contract expired on 30 June, he was not only unattached to a club, but unaffiliated to the FA and ineligible to play for the national team. Alf Ramsey had to summon Moore and the West Ham manager, Ron Greenwood, to the England squad's base at Hendon before the two sides agreed to resolve their differences.
The dispute simmered on and, when Greenwood vetoed another transfer to Spurs four years later - which Moore, then 29, saw as his last chance of a big move - the relationship between the two deteriorated further. Finally, Moore was told he could leave on a personally lucrative free transfer at the end of the 1973-74 season.
West Ham reneged even on that promise and sold him to Fulham for £25,000. Although he still held the affection of the fans, Moore never went back to Upton Park, except for work. A friend told me how, driving through east London, Moore gestured towards the ground and said 'that's West Ham over there' as if it were somewhere he'd visited once, rather than the scene of so many of his triumphs.
Spurned by England, West Ham and even Watford, Moore was offered only occasional opportunities in football in the years immediately after his retirement: a trip to the US here (he played for Seattle in the US soccer league), six months coaching in Hong Kong there. From time to time, an ambitious chairman would call, seeking a publicity boost for an otherwise unknown club.
In spring 1978, Moore banked £24,000 (a huge sum by the standards of the time) after coaching the Jutland based side, Herning, through 10 matches. But the crowds soon dwindled back to the couple of hundred that usually circled the Danish Third Division club's roped-off pitch, and Moore released the club from its contract. Twelve months later, he joined Oxford City as manager, but a team in the eighth level of football's league pyramid was no fit stage for a World Cup winner. Moore was in charge for barely a year and the period was most notable for marking Harry Redknapp's entry into management as his assistant.
'I feel a lot of people, particularly at smaller clubs, might have been a little bit in awe of him,' says Frank Lampard, who was Moore's room-mate at West Ham. 'I think that some people might have been a bit threatened by him because of what he was, and who he was and how he was.'
Tina Moore recallst hat her husband found the struggle to build a post-playing career increasingly hard to take. 'I could see that the man was being torn apart,' she says. 'He was wondering what the hell was going on. Self-doubt started to creep in. Mentally it was a very dreadful thing.' She will not say whether Moore's sense of rejection had anything to do with the break-up of their marriage. Tina and Bobby were football's golden couple in the 1960s and 1970s; the Posh and Becks of their day, though with less glamour and less tabloid scandal. But in 1979, on a tour of South Africa, Moore met a 29-year-old British Airways stewardess, Stephanie Moore (they shared the same surname). By 1984, he had separated from Tina and moved in with Stephanie.
A year earlier - by which time Graham Taylor had taken Watford to second place in the First Division (then the top tier) - Moore had at last received a break with a league club. Southend United made him chief executive, then manager. It was only the Third Division, but it was something. But even that went wrong, as we shall see.
Did people think, rightly or wrongly, that there was something not quite straight about Bobby Moore? Was he, to put it bluntly, thought to be dodgy? Was this why he was repeatedly overlooked when he finished playing? This, after all, was a period when English football had been embarrassed by the disclosures of Don Revie's shady dealings at Leeds and his decision to walk out on England to coach in the Middle East.
It couldn't afford more scandal. Certainly, Moore had a reputation as a wheeler-dealer. 'Everyone,' wrote Hunter Davies in The Glory Game, his account of the year he spent with the Spurs squad in 1971, 'seemed to be a business partner of Bobby Moore'. He was one of the first footballers to realise his commercial value, and for a time Bobby Moore Ltd - the company through which he ran his enterprises - had been a lucrative concern.
But as he diversified his interests, they ran into trouble. Enterprises such as Bobby Moore Jewellery and Bobby Moore T-shirts yielded him nothing. Worse was to follow. In the early 1970s he was part of a consortium that bought Woolston Hall, an Essex stately home, with the intention of turning it into a country club. When the project collapsed, Moore not only lost his investment but was sued by creditors in high-profile court proceedings. It is thought that the costs and legal fees cost him most of his career earnings.
Sometimes he just suffered bad luck. When a successful leather goods manufacturer he co-owned was unable to operate profitably in Britain during the three-day week, Moore moved his factory over to northern Cyprus. Weeks later, Turkey invaded and he lost everything.
Whatever the reasons, Moore gained a reputation as a poor businessman, even though his partnership with John Mitchell - through their sports marketing company, Mitchell-Moore Associates - proved highly successful. Among other dealings it went on to arrange Mastercard's sponsorship of the World Cup.
Mitchell and other friends insist that Moore was not in any sense greedy. If anything his great failing was not being able to say no. Moore's fame also worked against him when things went awry, says Mitchell. 'Because of his high profile, whenever Bobby was involved - even just as a shareholder - it attracted a lot of attention,' he says. 'But that doesn't necessarily reflect on how good he was as a businessman. Because the business might not have done as well as he would have expected - or it failed - it doesn't mean to say that he was responsible for it.'
But there were darker rumours. There was the notorious affair of the bracelet when, on the way to the 1970 World Cup finals, Moore was arrested and accused of stealing from a jeweller's shop in Bogotá, Colombia. The case against him was ludicrous and he was soon released, but full details of how he was framed surfaced only many years later. In some minds, the mud stuck. There were suggestions, too, of involvement with East End gangsters. Woolston Hall had been tinged with rumours of underworld intrigue. A fellow director had pulled out of the venture after a shotgun was fired at his home from a moving car; and before the club could open there was an attempt to burn it down. Later, the Black Bull pub in Stratford, east London, was burnt down the night before it was to be relaunched as 'Mooro's' under the footballer's direction. In both cases Moore seemed to be the victim; but as any East Ender will tell you, there's only ever one reason why a pub burns down in their manor. Even journalist Jeff Powell, a close friend, mischievously recorded in his biography of Moore that the player had seemingly 'attracted a personal arsonist'.
Jonathan Pearce, Moore's colleague at Capital Radio in the final years of his life, agrees that 'there were too many rumours about Bobby for him ever to be given the sort of role that he should have had'. Moore would never talk about his business dealings, says Pearce, 'and the only time I brought it up in conversation he was stand-offish - as if to say "leave alone ".'
But he doesn't believe Moore did anything wrong. According to Stephanie, he never seemed bothered by the rumours but they 'certainly irritated' her. Pearce thinks that being West Ham captain and an East Londoner led inevitably to innuendo. 'I don't think he was ever involved with the wrong sort of people. But all that lot knew the Sixties London people. That came with the patch. That came with playing for West Ham - it was that sort of territory. They were bound to meet the wrong people. All the players did. Bobby met the Krays. I don't know about the Richardsons but he also knew all the stars - Frankie Vaughan and so on.'
History will always consider Moore a managerial failure, and his record at Southend was unimpressive: relegated to the Fourth Division in his first season, barely staving off the humiliation of having to seek re-election to the Football League in his second, mid-table anonymity in his final year. But backroom disruption always left him facing an impossible job. When Moore joined, Southend had just been taken over by the Essex builder Anton Johnson, who had ambitions to turn it into a grand sporting club. Inviting a rugby league team, the Maidstone-based Kent Invicta, to share the Roots Hall stadium was one of his wheezes. But Johnson was short of both money and fans. Debts rose to £700,000 and even the fans' Christmas loan fund was purged of £70,000. At this point, the Serious Fraud Squad was called in. In December 1985, the Football League banned Johnson from any further involvement in football and he was later declared bankrupt with hundreds of thousands owed to creditors.
Moore's role in all this remains sketchy. His position as chief executive was seemingly titular under Johnson, as he was never implicated in any of the police or FA investigations; he went on to serve Vic Jobson, Johnson's successor as chairman. Indeed Moore, as much as anyone, could be credited with saving Southend. Not only was he left to unravel the mess left by Johnson, but he also stepped in as manager following the sacking of Peter Morris in February 1984. As if by accident his break into management had finally come.
'It must have been very stressful for Bobby working there,' says Stephanie Moore. 'They didn't know how they were going to pay the players. They'd get to the end of the week and somebody would say, "Oh, we've got a game tomorrow". Bobby was involved in all this other stuff , the last thing he was allowed to do was really pay much attention to the team. He was too busy trying to keep the club afloat.'
By the summer of 1985, Jobson was in full control of the club and, for the first time since Moore's arrival, there was some stability. Frank Lampard, another former West Ham player and the father of the current Chelsea star, became player-coach and there was money to sign new players. Lampard describes Moore as 'an excellent, excellent manager for the players', who never really lost his temper. If he did throw a tantrum, 'it didn't really look like him, it didn't have that same effect'.
Moore's grace on the football field had once exuded a natural authority, says Lampard - an 'aura', something you couldn't quite put your finger on. Instructing lesser players wasn't so easy. 'He would often talk about great players not making good managers because they played through instinct,' says Pearce. 'I don't think Bobby was ever going to be a football manager. He wasn't a success when he dabbled in it because he was a player of such great ability. I'm not sure he was able to coach players of poor ability and make them great players - or even better players.'
Moore's time at Southend ended with further backroom arguments. Jobson had already objected to Moore moving back to live in central London so that Stephanie would be closer to her workplace. Then they fell out over team selection. 'There were one or two players,' recalls Lampard, 'and Vic wanted them to play, but they weren't in the starting line-up. Bob was very hesitant about what to do about it. Once that happened, that was the end of me being there. I can't even remember whether Bob changed the team, but it left such a bad taste. Two weeks later, Bob left too. And that was it.'
When Moore left Southend in April 1986, it was effectively the end of his managerial ambitions. A couple of months later, he had a new job: as sports editor of Britain's newest tabloid, the Sunday Sport, a product of the technology-led expansion of press titles. Its owner, David Sullivan, had made his fortune from pornographic magazines.
Moore was to head a high-profile team that included famous footballing names such as Ian St John, Pat Crerand and Charlie George. But early sales figures were disappointing and the paper swiftly plunged even further down market, aiming, in Sullivan's own words, 'to out-Sun the Sun'. Its new formula was based on low overheads, large breasts and outlandish stories . Most of the high-profile names were fired. But Moore was kept on, collecting - according to a history of the newspaper, Babes, Boobs, Orgies and Aliens, by its editor Tony Livesey - £25,000 a year for 'less than three hours work a week'. This, wrote Livesey, was 'at the insistence of the hero-worshipping Sullivan'.
A somewhat better break came in 1989, when Moore's Sunday Sport contract ran out. Capital Radio's controller Richard Park off ered Moore the chance to work as Jonathan Pearce's co-commentator. 'Richard was of the mind that Bobby was being abysmally used and wanted to see what he could bring us,' says Pearce. 'So the approach was made and Bobby jumped at the chance to come on board.' The two travelled all over the country following the London clubs, and even further covering England internationals. Moore's presence, says Pearce, opened doors. 'There's only ever been one England World Cupwinning captain. Players were more willing to talk to us. You'd have England players at that time asking, " What did Bobby say about me in the commentary? What did Bobby think about me?" '
Yet the resources at Capital were limited. Even for a weekday match in Sunderland, the two would be expected to drive back to London the same evening. 'You're never going to be wealthy as a pundit working for independent radio sport,' says Pearce. 'How much would he have earned a match? I don't know, £150 plus expenses.'
But money was never the point for Moore at that stage of his life; rather, he wanted to be part of the wider footballing community, he wanted to feel engaged. Pearce remembers how Moore paid out of his own pocket for a young reporter, who had been recalled by his offi ce when England were knocked out, to stay at the European Championship in Sweden.
Capital provided a respectable route back into football and Moore thrived. 'Bobby loved working with Jonathan,' Stephanie recalls. 'Jonathan was the first to do the sort of reporting he did in this country - the Brazilian-type. All the other reporters would be there talking quietly into microphones and Jonathan would be there screaming and shouting and leaping around. He made the dullest games sound absolutely fantastic.
Was Bobby his quiet man? Yes, I think he probably was. They loved working together.' In 1991 Pearce and Moore picked up a Sony Radio Academy Award. But by then, there was a new threat in Moore's life. As long as ago as 1962 - months after making his England debut - he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He made a successful recovery, and the public never knew about it. 'Back in the Sixties,' recalls Stephanie, 'there was still a tremendous amount of stigma attached to cancer.' And any hint of health problems could wreck a player's chances of a big transfer or international recognition. 'It was early in his career,' she continues. 'It was before the World Cup win and he didn't want to dwell on it. He wanted to get on with life.'
Moore kept up a vigorous training programme in retirement, jogging every day and playing golf, tennis and squash regularly. Though always a great socialiser, he never seemed to gain the post-footballer's physique - the paunchy belly, the extra chin. But health problems had long troubled him . Soon after starting at the Sunday Sport, he had collapsed in the office. He started visiting doctors, including a Harley Street specialist. In 1991 he was finally diagnosed with bowel cancer, and it was terminal.
'It was very late in the day,' recalls Stephanie, 'and he had secondaries in both lobes of the liver. So we knew he wasn't going to survive, but we didn't know how long he had to live. He decided not to make it public because we didn't want to have journalists crawling all over us. We only had two years as it turned out - and we wanted to lead our lives as privately and as normally as possible in that time.'
He and Stephanie married in December 1991 and travelled widely during the final months. 'Bobby was never a complainer, and he never criticised the cards that had been dealt him,' Stephanie says. 'Even when he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, he was never angry - it was never in his nature.'
The news remained a secret, even to close friends and colleagues. 'I had a cancer scare that year,' Pearce says. 'Bobby helped me through it, speaking to me every day, reassuring my wife, telling me everything would be okay, but he never once let on about his own illness, even though he knew that it was terminal.'
But the rumours reached the press and, in February 1993, Moore issued a statement, confirming the illness. The next evening came the San Marino game. 'He was really unwell,' Stephanie tells me, 'and the press were hungry for pictures - it just wasn't right. But he was there because that was the sort of focused, disciplined man he was. If he said he was going to be somewhere, and do something, he would have done it.'
Moore was still determined to cover the West Ham match against Newcastle the following Saturday. 'I think he must have known that it was probably the last time he would go to West Ham,' says Pearce. 'But Stephanie called me on the Friday saying that she didn't want him to go, that it was too much for the family after all the attention during the week. I phoned Bobby up and told them that I didn't think it was a good idea that he came - I didn't mention what Stephanie had said. What he said will stay with me for ever: "If that's your decision I'll respect it, but I must admit that I'm very disappointed ". It was the only time I ever disappointed Bobby. And that's the last time I ever spoke to him.'
Moore died at home on 24 February 1993, a week after his stricken appearance at Wembley. He was aged just 51 and the nation had barely known about his illness. Only when he was gone, it seemed, did people appreciate what they had lost. English football was then in a dismal state - the national team would fail to qualify for the 1994 World Cup - and Moore recalled a lost, pre-hooligan era of pride and achievement. Upton Park was turned into a temporary shrine and West Ham belatedly invited Stephanie, and Moore's daughter from his first marriage, Roberta, to attend a match. The following year, the club renamed the South Stand after their former captain, and Moore's close friend, Harry Redknapp, was appointed manager, with Frank Lampard as his assistant.
In Lampard's view, Redknapp would 'definitely, definitely, definitely have got Bobby involved in some way'. As ever, it seemed, events had moved too slowly for Moore. Yet 'he never viewed it as a cruel life after he gave up professional football,' says Stephanie. 'Many people would have been very envious of the sort of lifestyle that we had. Wherever we went, he was recognised and people would want to come up and shake him by the hand or pat him on the back. He was always loved. I think - probably - people are very angry that he was never properly recognised for what he achieved, but I don't think Bobby ever looked back and thought, " This is just not fair". He thoroughly enjoyed life and appreciated everything that he had.
He used to say - relatively speaking - that football had given him a very, very good living. A sort of lifestyle he would never have attained if he had never been a footballer.' Pearce agrees that his colleague and friend was not, at least in his later years, notably disappointed with his lot, but strongly believes that the football authorities were foolish to overlook him. 'This huge effect Bobby had on people - whether it was for 30 seconds or 30 years - to have lost that in life is tragic enough, but for the game never to have employed that and to have never benefi ted from that is a scandal.
An absolute scandal. He had this great ability to make people feel good about themselves and make people feel their opinion of football was a valid opinion. I don't care if he wasn't a Uefa coach and badge holder, to pass up on that ability is a huge miss, a massive own goal by football.
Surely West Ham could have used Bobby Moore more than just naming a stand after his death? Surely England could do more than just naming a urine-filled underpass after him at Wembley Stadium? Why was he never used in an educational role? Or a figurehead role? Or a [Trevor] Brooking role? What a waste.'
By 1993, 16 years later, Taylor was England manager while Moore was a commentator for London's Capital Radio. England were playing a midweek World Cup qualifier - turgid affair against San Marino - and Moore was there in the commentary box as usual. But that night was different: Moore was a bigger story than what happened on the pitch. The previous day, the world had learnt that he had cancer. The press cameras were trained on Moore, the collar of his leather jacket turned up, his face gaunt and pallid. A week later, he was dead. Before kick-off the following Saturday, football grounds across the country were hushed in memory. Moore had always been more than just a great player, more even than England's World Cup-winning captain. He was English football's answer to baseball's Joe DiMaggio, symbolising not only the game's great generation, but its dignity, elegance and decorum. In the United States, DiMaggio became the icon of icons because, as the baseball writer David Halberstam put it, he 'transcended the barriers of sports in terms of the breadth of his fame'. He left the plate in 1951; yet in the late 1960s, he was still celebrated in popular culture, most memorably by Simon and Garfunkel, asking 'where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?'.
By then, to an America shocked by political assassinations and riven by the Vietnam war, he represented the lost confidence and the lost innocence of the postwar era. Nobody asked where Moore had gone until it was too late. Between his last game for Fulham in 1977 and his death in 1993, he was an almost forgotten man, shunned by the football authorities, ignored by club chairmen, unwelcome even at West Ham, the club where he had spent his best years. Of the few men who have equalled Moore's greatness on the pitch, almost all were given a break at the highest level of the game after their retirement from playing.
Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff and Michel Platini all went on to manage their national teams. Alfredo Di Stefano, Bobby Charlton and Gerd Müller found roles with former clubs. Pelé, immediately after his retirement, was less fortunate but eventually became Brazilian Minister for Sport in1995 and, two years later, received an honorary knighthood from the Queen. Today, he is one of the wealthiest retired sportsmen in the world, feted wherever he goes. Bobby Moore never came close to gaining any such recognition. Only posthumously, it seemed, did people recognise his grace not just as a player, but as a man. Why was this? What went wrong with Bobby Moore's life? Why did he end up as no more than a Sunday Sport hack and local radio pundit?
Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore was born in April 1941 in Barking, a rough industrial town on the London-Essex border. The blitz baby had been a promising - though by his own admission, never outstanding - schoolboy sportsman, choosing football with West Ham rather than professional county cricket. He was never the quickest of players, nor blessed with any great aerial ability, and his critics would often accuse him of representing style over substance, but as his West Ham and England colleague Geoff Hurst later put it: 'They said he couldn't run, but he was rarely beaten to the ball. They said that he couldn't jump, but he was rarely beaten in the air. He recognised that he was deficient in some areas and compensated by working hard on the training pitch and focusing on his positional play.'
His early career was one of promise, but his inclusion in England's 1962 World Cup squad still came as a surprise. 'Uncapped, pedestrian, not up to much in the air, suspect stamina,' the Daily Mirror's Ken Jones later pondered. 'How could England select the 21-year-old Moore for the 1962 World Cup finals?' He played in all four of England's games in that tournament, but would go on to flourish under new manager Alf Ramsey.
Within six months of Ramsey's appointment, Moore had captained England; and the two east Londoners would form a formidable partnership. Captaining England to World Cup victory in 1966 is what Moore is best remembered for; but his walk to the royal box that July afternoon in 1966 was actually the third time he had collected silverware at Wembley. An FA Cup winner in 1964, and a European Cup-Winners' Cup winner a year later, he had also been named the Football Writers' Association's player of the year in 1964. Yet there is a sense that he under achieved in his domestic career.
He would never finish higher than sixth in the league with West Ham; and although he periodically agitated for a move to Spurs, the West Ham board always insisted on him staying. Finally, in March 1974, he was sold to Fulham. He played in the 1975 FA Cup final when Fulham were beaten 2-0 by his old club, West Ham. When he retired two years later, at the age of 36, he had won 108 England caps (a national record that stood until Peter Shilton broke it in 1989) and made exactly 900 appearances for his two clubs and his country. A distinguished post-playing career seemed inevitable. Only two months after the Watford job fell through, Moore wrote to the Football Association about the England managership, prematurely vacated by Don Revie: 'I have gained considerable experience in assisting with coaching both with my clubs in England and abroad during the latter stages of my playing career. I know you are aware of ... how proud I was of my years with the England team.' It would have been unprecedented for a newly retired player, no matter how distinguished, to become England manager, and Moore probably didn't expect more than an assistant coaching role. What must have hurt him was that the FA did not even reply.
Moore's first wife, Tina, who now lives in Florida, still expresses disbelief that no club came in with a managerial or coaching offer. 'How could anyone who had Bobby's knowledge and expertise be overlooked in that way?' she asks. 'Kids would have looked up to him and learnt things just by his presence. I can just never ever see to this day why it didn't happen.'
Moore was not the only hero of England's 1966 World Cup victory who seemed to be shunned by the FA. It was as if football, after the national team twice failed in the 1970s even to qualify for the World Cup finals, was embarrassed to be reminded of its past glories, rather than looking to draw strength from them. No favours were granted to members of the winning team, no ambassadorial roles handed out, nor were clubs ever nudged towards granting them managerial or coaching opportunities. Only Alan Ball and Jack Charlton went on to manage in the top flight; of the rest, only Nobby Stiles built a substantial career as a boss elsewhere in the game. The faltering managerial career of Geoff Hurst primarily came about because he had a patron in Ron Greenwood, another West Ham man who succeeded Revie with England; Martin Peters lasted less than a year at Sheffield United; Bobby Charlton for two seasons at Preston. As for the rest, there was nothing.
Gordon Banks and Roger Hunt worked on the pools panel; Ray Wilson became an undertaker; George Cohen, struggling with cancer, didn't watch a football match for years. Even their manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, sacked at the age of just 53 - at least as much because of internal FA politics as because of the results on the pitch - never found a new role, except for a brief caretaker spell at Birmingham in 1977.
Moore got a chance in the end, but it wasn't a good one and he had to wait a long time. 'In those days,' recalls John Mitchell, with whom he played at Fulham and later entered a business partnership, 'there just weren't the same opportunities or the same structure that would give former players a chance ... there would only be one or two positions at each club, and that was it.'
It was the same in the media. This season, 138 Premiership matches will be broadcast live (as well as countless European and FA Cup matches), providing punditry opportunities for numerous old pros; in the pre-Sky days of 1983, say, just 10 were shown. The increased opportunities allowed one of Moore's successors at West Ham and England, Trevor Brooking, to build parallel careers as a pundit and in sports administration, with Sport England and the FA.
Moore left West Ham on bad terms and was never again fully welcome at the club. The dispute went back to 1966 when he had sought a move to Tottenham; he believed that, with Spurs, he would have a better chance of winning the title. West Ham refused to sell - as the club was entitled to do in the era before freedom of contract - and Moore's determination to go almost prevented him from playing in the World Cup.
When his contract expired on 30 June, he was not only unattached to a club, but unaffiliated to the FA and ineligible to play for the national team. Alf Ramsey had to summon Moore and the West Ham manager, Ron Greenwood, to the England squad's base at Hendon before the two sides agreed to resolve their differences.
The dispute simmered on and, when Greenwood vetoed another transfer to Spurs four years later - which Moore, then 29, saw as his last chance of a big move - the relationship between the two deteriorated further. Finally, Moore was told he could leave on a personally lucrative free transfer at the end of the 1973-74 season.
West Ham reneged even on that promise and sold him to Fulham for £25,000. Although he still held the affection of the fans, Moore never went back to Upton Park, except for work. A friend told me how, driving through east London, Moore gestured towards the ground and said 'that's West Ham over there' as if it were somewhere he'd visited once, rather than the scene of so many of his triumphs.
Spurned by England, West Ham and even Watford, Moore was offered only occasional opportunities in football in the years immediately after his retirement: a trip to the US here (he played for Seattle in the US soccer league), six months coaching in Hong Kong there. From time to time, an ambitious chairman would call, seeking a publicity boost for an otherwise unknown club.
In spring 1978, Moore banked £24,000 (a huge sum by the standards of the time) after coaching the Jutland based side, Herning, through 10 matches. But the crowds soon dwindled back to the couple of hundred that usually circled the Danish Third Division club's roped-off pitch, and Moore released the club from its contract. Twelve months later, he joined Oxford City as manager, but a team in the eighth level of football's league pyramid was no fit stage for a World Cup winner. Moore was in charge for barely a year and the period was most notable for marking Harry Redknapp's entry into management as his assistant.
'I feel a lot of people, particularly at smaller clubs, might have been a little bit in awe of him,' says Frank Lampard, who was Moore's room-mate at West Ham. 'I think that some people might have been a bit threatened by him because of what he was, and who he was and how he was.'
Tina Moore recallst hat her husband found the struggle to build a post-playing career increasingly hard to take. 'I could see that the man was being torn apart,' she says. 'He was wondering what the hell was going on. Self-doubt started to creep in. Mentally it was a very dreadful thing.' She will not say whether Moore's sense of rejection had anything to do with the break-up of their marriage. Tina and Bobby were football's golden couple in the 1960s and 1970s; the Posh and Becks of their day, though with less glamour and less tabloid scandal. But in 1979, on a tour of South Africa, Moore met a 29-year-old British Airways stewardess, Stephanie Moore (they shared the same surname). By 1984, he had separated from Tina and moved in with Stephanie.
A year earlier - by which time Graham Taylor had taken Watford to second place in the First Division (then the top tier) - Moore had at last received a break with a league club. Southend United made him chief executive, then manager. It was only the Third Division, but it was something. But even that went wrong, as we shall see.
Did people think, rightly or wrongly, that there was something not quite straight about Bobby Moore? Was he, to put it bluntly, thought to be dodgy? Was this why he was repeatedly overlooked when he finished playing? This, after all, was a period when English football had been embarrassed by the disclosures of Don Revie's shady dealings at Leeds and his decision to walk out on England to coach in the Middle East.
It couldn't afford more scandal. Certainly, Moore had a reputation as a wheeler-dealer. 'Everyone,' wrote Hunter Davies in The Glory Game, his account of the year he spent with the Spurs squad in 1971, 'seemed to be a business partner of Bobby Moore'. He was one of the first footballers to realise his commercial value, and for a time Bobby Moore Ltd - the company through which he ran his enterprises - had been a lucrative concern.
But as he diversified his interests, they ran into trouble. Enterprises such as Bobby Moore Jewellery and Bobby Moore T-shirts yielded him nothing. Worse was to follow. In the early 1970s he was part of a consortium that bought Woolston Hall, an Essex stately home, with the intention of turning it into a country club. When the project collapsed, Moore not only lost his investment but was sued by creditors in high-profile court proceedings. It is thought that the costs and legal fees cost him most of his career earnings.
Sometimes he just suffered bad luck. When a successful leather goods manufacturer he co-owned was unable to operate profitably in Britain during the three-day week, Moore moved his factory over to northern Cyprus. Weeks later, Turkey invaded and he lost everything.
Whatever the reasons, Moore gained a reputation as a poor businessman, even though his partnership with John Mitchell - through their sports marketing company, Mitchell-Moore Associates - proved highly successful. Among other dealings it went on to arrange Mastercard's sponsorship of the World Cup.
Mitchell and other friends insist that Moore was not in any sense greedy. If anything his great failing was not being able to say no. Moore's fame also worked against him when things went awry, says Mitchell. 'Because of his high profile, whenever Bobby was involved - even just as a shareholder - it attracted a lot of attention,' he says. 'But that doesn't necessarily reflect on how good he was as a businessman. Because the business might not have done as well as he would have expected - or it failed - it doesn't mean to say that he was responsible for it.'
But there were darker rumours. There was the notorious affair of the bracelet when, on the way to the 1970 World Cup finals, Moore was arrested and accused of stealing from a jeweller's shop in Bogotá, Colombia. The case against him was ludicrous and he was soon released, but full details of how he was framed surfaced only many years later. In some minds, the mud stuck. There were suggestions, too, of involvement with East End gangsters. Woolston Hall had been tinged with rumours of underworld intrigue. A fellow director had pulled out of the venture after a shotgun was fired at his home from a moving car; and before the club could open there was an attempt to burn it down. Later, the Black Bull pub in Stratford, east London, was burnt down the night before it was to be relaunched as 'Mooro's' under the footballer's direction. In both cases Moore seemed to be the victim; but as any East Ender will tell you, there's only ever one reason why a pub burns down in their manor. Even journalist Jeff Powell, a close friend, mischievously recorded in his biography of Moore that the player had seemingly 'attracted a personal arsonist'.
Jonathan Pearce, Moore's colleague at Capital Radio in the final years of his life, agrees that 'there were too many rumours about Bobby for him ever to be given the sort of role that he should have had'. Moore would never talk about his business dealings, says Pearce, 'and the only time I brought it up in conversation he was stand-offish - as if to say "leave alone ".'
But he doesn't believe Moore did anything wrong. According to Stephanie, he never seemed bothered by the rumours but they 'certainly irritated' her. Pearce thinks that being West Ham captain and an East Londoner led inevitably to innuendo. 'I don't think he was ever involved with the wrong sort of people. But all that lot knew the Sixties London people. That came with the patch. That came with playing for West Ham - it was that sort of territory. They were bound to meet the wrong people. All the players did. Bobby met the Krays. I don't know about the Richardsons but he also knew all the stars - Frankie Vaughan and so on.'
History will always consider Moore a managerial failure, and his record at Southend was unimpressive: relegated to the Fourth Division in his first season, barely staving off the humiliation of having to seek re-election to the Football League in his second, mid-table anonymity in his final year. But backroom disruption always left him facing an impossible job. When Moore joined, Southend had just been taken over by the Essex builder Anton Johnson, who had ambitions to turn it into a grand sporting club. Inviting a rugby league team, the Maidstone-based Kent Invicta, to share the Roots Hall stadium was one of his wheezes. But Johnson was short of both money and fans. Debts rose to £700,000 and even the fans' Christmas loan fund was purged of £70,000. At this point, the Serious Fraud Squad was called in. In December 1985, the Football League banned Johnson from any further involvement in football and he was later declared bankrupt with hundreds of thousands owed to creditors.
Moore's role in all this remains sketchy. His position as chief executive was seemingly titular under Johnson, as he was never implicated in any of the police or FA investigations; he went on to serve Vic Jobson, Johnson's successor as chairman. Indeed Moore, as much as anyone, could be credited with saving Southend. Not only was he left to unravel the mess left by Johnson, but he also stepped in as manager following the sacking of Peter Morris in February 1984. As if by accident his break into management had finally come.
'It must have been very stressful for Bobby working there,' says Stephanie Moore. 'They didn't know how they were going to pay the players. They'd get to the end of the week and somebody would say, "Oh, we've got a game tomorrow". Bobby was involved in all this other stuff , the last thing he was allowed to do was really pay much attention to the team. He was too busy trying to keep the club afloat.'
By the summer of 1985, Jobson was in full control of the club and, for the first time since Moore's arrival, there was some stability. Frank Lampard, another former West Ham player and the father of the current Chelsea star, became player-coach and there was money to sign new players. Lampard describes Moore as 'an excellent, excellent manager for the players', who never really lost his temper. If he did throw a tantrum, 'it didn't really look like him, it didn't have that same effect'.
Moore's grace on the football field had once exuded a natural authority, says Lampard - an 'aura', something you couldn't quite put your finger on. Instructing lesser players wasn't so easy. 'He would often talk about great players not making good managers because they played through instinct,' says Pearce. 'I don't think Bobby was ever going to be a football manager. He wasn't a success when he dabbled in it because he was a player of such great ability. I'm not sure he was able to coach players of poor ability and make them great players - or even better players.'
Moore's time at Southend ended with further backroom arguments. Jobson had already objected to Moore moving back to live in central London so that Stephanie would be closer to her workplace. Then they fell out over team selection. 'There were one or two players,' recalls Lampard, 'and Vic wanted them to play, but they weren't in the starting line-up. Bob was very hesitant about what to do about it. Once that happened, that was the end of me being there. I can't even remember whether Bob changed the team, but it left such a bad taste. Two weeks later, Bob left too. And that was it.'
When Moore left Southend in April 1986, it was effectively the end of his managerial ambitions. A couple of months later, he had a new job: as sports editor of Britain's newest tabloid, the Sunday Sport, a product of the technology-led expansion of press titles. Its owner, David Sullivan, had made his fortune from pornographic magazines.
Moore was to head a high-profile team that included famous footballing names such as Ian St John, Pat Crerand and Charlie George. But early sales figures were disappointing and the paper swiftly plunged even further down market, aiming, in Sullivan's own words, 'to out-Sun the Sun'. Its new formula was based on low overheads, large breasts and outlandish stories . Most of the high-profile names were fired. But Moore was kept on, collecting - according to a history of the newspaper, Babes, Boobs, Orgies and Aliens, by its editor Tony Livesey - £25,000 a year for 'less than three hours work a week'. This, wrote Livesey, was 'at the insistence of the hero-worshipping Sullivan'.
A somewhat better break came in 1989, when Moore's Sunday Sport contract ran out. Capital Radio's controller Richard Park off ered Moore the chance to work as Jonathan Pearce's co-commentator. 'Richard was of the mind that Bobby was being abysmally used and wanted to see what he could bring us,' says Pearce. 'So the approach was made and Bobby jumped at the chance to come on board.' The two travelled all over the country following the London clubs, and even further covering England internationals. Moore's presence, says Pearce, opened doors. 'There's only ever been one England World Cupwinning captain. Players were more willing to talk to us. You'd have England players at that time asking, " What did Bobby say about me in the commentary? What did Bobby think about me?" '
Yet the resources at Capital were limited. Even for a weekday match in Sunderland, the two would be expected to drive back to London the same evening. 'You're never going to be wealthy as a pundit working for independent radio sport,' says Pearce. 'How much would he have earned a match? I don't know, £150 plus expenses.'
But money was never the point for Moore at that stage of his life; rather, he wanted to be part of the wider footballing community, he wanted to feel engaged. Pearce remembers how Moore paid out of his own pocket for a young reporter, who had been recalled by his offi ce when England were knocked out, to stay at the European Championship in Sweden.
Capital provided a respectable route back into football and Moore thrived. 'Bobby loved working with Jonathan,' Stephanie recalls. 'Jonathan was the first to do the sort of reporting he did in this country - the Brazilian-type. All the other reporters would be there talking quietly into microphones and Jonathan would be there screaming and shouting and leaping around. He made the dullest games sound absolutely fantastic.
Was Bobby his quiet man? Yes, I think he probably was. They loved working together.' In 1991 Pearce and Moore picked up a Sony Radio Academy Award. But by then, there was a new threat in Moore's life. As long as ago as 1962 - months after making his England debut - he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He made a successful recovery, and the public never knew about it. 'Back in the Sixties,' recalls Stephanie, 'there was still a tremendous amount of stigma attached to cancer.' And any hint of health problems could wreck a player's chances of a big transfer or international recognition. 'It was early in his career,' she continues. 'It was before the World Cup win and he didn't want to dwell on it. He wanted to get on with life.'
Moore kept up a vigorous training programme in retirement, jogging every day and playing golf, tennis and squash regularly. Though always a great socialiser, he never seemed to gain the post-footballer's physique - the paunchy belly, the extra chin. But health problems had long troubled him . Soon after starting at the Sunday Sport, he had collapsed in the office. He started visiting doctors, including a Harley Street specialist. In 1991 he was finally diagnosed with bowel cancer, and it was terminal.
'It was very late in the day,' recalls Stephanie, 'and he had secondaries in both lobes of the liver. So we knew he wasn't going to survive, but we didn't know how long he had to live. He decided not to make it public because we didn't want to have journalists crawling all over us. We only had two years as it turned out - and we wanted to lead our lives as privately and as normally as possible in that time.'
He and Stephanie married in December 1991 and travelled widely during the final months. 'Bobby was never a complainer, and he never criticised the cards that had been dealt him,' Stephanie says. 'Even when he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, he was never angry - it was never in his nature.'
The news remained a secret, even to close friends and colleagues. 'I had a cancer scare that year,' Pearce says. 'Bobby helped me through it, speaking to me every day, reassuring my wife, telling me everything would be okay, but he never once let on about his own illness, even though he knew that it was terminal.'
But the rumours reached the press and, in February 1993, Moore issued a statement, confirming the illness. The next evening came the San Marino game. 'He was really unwell,' Stephanie tells me, 'and the press were hungry for pictures - it just wasn't right. But he was there because that was the sort of focused, disciplined man he was. If he said he was going to be somewhere, and do something, he would have done it.'
Moore was still determined to cover the West Ham match against Newcastle the following Saturday. 'I think he must have known that it was probably the last time he would go to West Ham,' says Pearce. 'But Stephanie called me on the Friday saying that she didn't want him to go, that it was too much for the family after all the attention during the week. I phoned Bobby up and told them that I didn't think it was a good idea that he came - I didn't mention what Stephanie had said. What he said will stay with me for ever: "If that's your decision I'll respect it, but I must admit that I'm very disappointed ". It was the only time I ever disappointed Bobby. And that's the last time I ever spoke to him.'
Moore died at home on 24 February 1993, a week after his stricken appearance at Wembley. He was aged just 51 and the nation had barely known about his illness. Only when he was gone, it seemed, did people appreciate what they had lost. English football was then in a dismal state - the national team would fail to qualify for the 1994 World Cup - and Moore recalled a lost, pre-hooligan era of pride and achievement. Upton Park was turned into a temporary shrine and West Ham belatedly invited Stephanie, and Moore's daughter from his first marriage, Roberta, to attend a match. The following year, the club renamed the South Stand after their former captain, and Moore's close friend, Harry Redknapp, was appointed manager, with Frank Lampard as his assistant.
In Lampard's view, Redknapp would 'definitely, definitely, definitely have got Bobby involved in some way'. As ever, it seemed, events had moved too slowly for Moore. Yet 'he never viewed it as a cruel life after he gave up professional football,' says Stephanie. 'Many people would have been very envious of the sort of lifestyle that we had. Wherever we went, he was recognised and people would want to come up and shake him by the hand or pat him on the back. He was always loved. I think - probably - people are very angry that he was never properly recognised for what he achieved, but I don't think Bobby ever looked back and thought, " This is just not fair". He thoroughly enjoyed life and appreciated everything that he had.
He used to say - relatively speaking - that football had given him a very, very good living. A sort of lifestyle he would never have attained if he had never been a footballer.' Pearce agrees that his colleague and friend was not, at least in his later years, notably disappointed with his lot, but strongly believes that the football authorities were foolish to overlook him. 'This huge effect Bobby had on people - whether it was for 30 seconds or 30 years - to have lost that in life is tragic enough, but for the game never to have employed that and to have never benefi ted from that is a scandal.
An absolute scandal. He had this great ability to make people feel good about themselves and make people feel their opinion of football was a valid opinion. I don't care if he wasn't a Uefa coach and badge holder, to pass up on that ability is a huge miss, a massive own goal by football.
Surely West Ham could have used Bobby Moore more than just naming a stand after his death? Surely England could do more than just naming a urine-filled underpass after him at Wembley Stadium? Why was he never used in an educational role? Or a figurehead role? Or a [Trevor] Brooking role? What a waste.'
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