Michael Owen: Off the Record

Many of my strengths were honed in the park with my dad and brothers, or with my mates after school. At the time, though, I didn’t think of it as an academic process; I just saw it as fun. I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I’m not so good with my left foot so I’d better practise,’ or anything like that. I was so much quicker than everyone else as a small boy that I could run on to a through-ball and have endless time to set up the shot. I could put it where I liked. My right foot was the strongest, so I barely kicked a ball with my left foot until I was 16. The only technical area my dad worked on was my heading. On Sundays in the park he’d send in a few crosses for me to nod in. All kids hate heading the ball, and I was no different. But Dad used to love it when I scored a diving header, because he had scored a few himself in his own career. So I used to do it just to please him.

As a finisher, it was all about smelling blood, seeing the chance and seizing it. Verbally, I was a bit of a rebel. I was always answering back to referees. I had a temper on me. I was a tough tackler. I had a few good battles with centre-halves on the North Wales schoolboy circuit. My first real tussle, though, was with Richard Dunne, who was at Everton schoolboys when I was in my early teens and playing for the equivalent age group at Liverpool. Richard is a fairly stocky figure, and he wasn’t much different back then. He was the first opponent who really made me think the day before about what I was facing the following afternoon. He was the one I had my first real ding-dongs with. Around 14 is when things start to get serious physically. By that age you know what’s going to hurt someone. You wise up and start to understand what the game is all about. You’re no longer an innocent kid chasing the ball around. If someone kicks you, you know where it hurts and how it hurts, and consequently you learn how to hurt them back.

Not that Mum and Dad encouraged that side of things to blossom. Still, they weren’t rigid about family discipline. To be a ‘cheeky little bugger’ was fine up to a point, but if we were in the company of adults we would be expected to say please and thank you and to show respect. They wanted me to be my own person while also teaching me good manners and making sure I knew how to conduct myself. In fact, they wanted us all to have a personality, and they knew how to provide fun for us as we grew up. If my dad had a spare fiver, he would want to take us on a day out.

Mum was in charge of the day-to-day parenting and instruction. She knitted the whole family together, and she still rules the roost. To get into the Owen family you’ve got to get past my mum. She had five children and worked as well, so she was always a grafter – still is. Even though she worked eight till five, she always seemed to be there, every minute of the day. She, more than my dad, shaped my everyday behaviour.

If we got a rocket from Dad, it was once in a blue moon, which made you want to avoid it even more. He was never a shouter, though. With me, he would prefer to go quiet. He just wouldn’t speak to me. And that’s the worst thing in the world. There is no one you want to impress more than your dad. If he’s not talking to you, life’s not worth living.

I wasn’t a naughty kid, but if it was Halloween, say, I might be tempted to throw an egg at a window like any other mischievous young boy. I got up to my own tricks. If there was a weaker boy I might take away his ball. It’s embarrassing to remember that now. Of course I stepped out of line many times as a child. If I smashed a window with a football I might run off without owning up to it, and the owner would come knocking on the door. In the neighbourhood I was known as ‘the footballer’, so unfortunately it was always obvious that I was the culprit. But it would take a lot to push my dad so far that he would stop talking to me altogether.

After games, he had his own way of conveying his feelings about my performances. If I played badly, he might not talk to me about it until my next game. Now that I’m an adult I can see that had a very positive effect, but it didn’t half hurt at the time. It wasn’t deliberate on his part. Even now, if I play badly the level of conversation drops. He’ll try, but it’s in his nature not to speak quite so freely. I’ve talked to him about it and he’s assured me he doesn’t mean to go quiet. We have a laugh about what his silences were like when I was a kid, and he insists, ‘I genuinely didn’t do it on purpose.’ He just wanted so much for me to do well. If I played badly he was disappointed for me rather than in me. He knew I wanted to please, and I never experienced his occasional silences as pressure to succeed. It was just ingrained in me to try to please my dad.

I wouldn’t be allowed to touch my football boots. That was Dad’s job. He took great pride on a Saturday in me having the shiniest boots. If you’re proud of the way you look and feel, I suppose you’ve got more chance of doing something well; if you’re always scruffy you might play that way. Plainly, I didn’t think about life like that when I was a child, but now I can see the point in investing time and care in your appearance. As soon as I got home I’d take my boots out on to the patio and he’d get to work with the brushes. Right from the start that job wasn’t mine. For some reason Dad seemed to enjoy it.

These days he reads papers and listens to phone-ins to monitor what kind of coverage I’m getting. He feels proud when someone says something good about me and fiercely angry if anyone says anything bad. He knows me back to front and he sees me as a decent lad, so when people accuse me of being a cheat or dishonest in any way he must see it as a slight against himself. A few years ago people were calling me a diver and he just couldn’t accept people questioning my honesty. You could say that if we expect praise we should be able to take the reverse as well, but quite frankly he’s not asking for praise, and nor am I, so I’m not sure that principle stands up. I get paid so well I can’t ever complain about my job. Ninety-nine per cent of people will assume it’s great to be famous. I’m not so sure. I never ask for plaudits, and likewise I don’t welcome people having a go at me.

It wasn’t all football. Dad was an avid golfer. As a kid, if I didn’t have a football match I wanted to do what my dad was doing. On Sundays he would go off to play with a few mates and I would be his caddy. Sometimes he probably wanted to be away from the family, just with his friends, but more often than not he would take me along. Afterwards I would sit in the corner with a glass of Coke and a packet of crisps while he played snooker.

I used to love looking for lost golf balls. Sometimes I would be 50 yards down the fairway rummaging through the bushes while he was taking his shot. We had a ritual: late on a Sunday afternoon, after the football, we would go up to the course and head straight for the rough; we would spend two or three hours looking for golf balls and would be disappointed if we didn’t find 20 or 30. He used to play games with me, saying, ‘Oh, I’m sure I can feel something under my foot. Oh, maybe not.’ On the way home we’d stop for a can of Lilt at the local garage. Later I became quite competitive about it. Whoever found the most balls would get first pick after we’d scrubbed them clean with Fairy liquid. When they were bright white we would lay them out on the patio and take turns to choose. I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend a Sunday evening than doing all that with my dad. With my own son I will do those sorts of activities. I didn’t want to be taken to Spain to lie on a sun-lounger. Hunting for golf balls, or feeding horses, are the priceless things you remember from childhood.

Through those early experiences on the course I learned a few lessons about the etiquette of golf – where to walk, where to put your bag and so on. It was a good grounding, because golf is a gentleman’s sport with lots of etiquette. I soon progressed to wanting to hit balls myself. ‘Go on, Dad,’ I would say, ‘just give me one go.’ Eventually, on warm Sunday evenings, he would let me play a few holes, all the while still looking for lost balls. Dad then got me a membership at Hawarden Golf Club, the local course, and my friends began to join too.

There were so many new juniors that the club began to send us away on courses. During the school holidays we were there morning, noon and night, playing 36, sometimes 54 holes. It’s an incredible thought. These days, I can’t walk 18 holes without feeling knackered. By the age of 13 my handicap was down to nine, and I began taking lessons from David Vaughan, a professional based at Llangollen. At one stage Dad became a bit concerned about the number of hours I was spending with a club in my hand. He was worried that I was starting to prefer golf to football. In the summer it was golf, golf, golf. He didn’t stop me playing, but he did remind me a couple of times, ‘Football’s your game, don’t get too distracted.’

The snooker club was another of our regular haunts. We’d pay £2 for an hour of light above the table. We would always have black-ball games because Dad would let me get close to winning so there would be a decent climax. Every game was tense. The people who owned the hall must have been sick of us because every time I would run down the stairs with 50p to ask for 15 more minutes’ worth of light just so we could squeeze in the end of the frame. I’m sure Dad paid for an hour just to add to the drama; he knew how excited I’d be getting when the sixtieth minute was approaching. When the lights went out, you were in pitch darkness, so I was constantly badgering him for that extra 50p.

I’m not sure whether he went through these routines to encourage me to be competitive or whether it simply amused him to see me getting so worked up. But certainly, if I didn’t find as many golf balls as my dad I would be fuming. I’d still remember it as a great day, but there would be something missing. To get first pick of the washed balls was, to me, a major prize. I’d like to think he shaped me as a man, but not by waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘Right, how can I form Michael’s character today?’ It was much more natural than that. All the activities he wanted to do I fell in love with too. And every time I played I wanted to win. It’s the fierce nature I’ve always had.

I’ll give any game a go. I played for Hawarden Cricket Club and made it into the senior side at 13. I love darts and bowls, too. Once a month we’d go to the tenpin bowling alley in Chester. Boy, was that competitive. My dad used to be brilliant, with a smooth action that helped him hit the middle pin every time. Now his action has gone, and we always take the mickey out of him for it.

I’m proud to be able to summarize my childhood as fun and character building, with family life to the fore. My parents gave us everything they could. I can recall plenty of examples. In my early teens, Dad wanted to take me to visit a few clubs to open my eyes to how football worked. One day we were invited to Sheffield Wednesday to have a look round, and as we were about to leave the youth-team manager stopped us and said, ‘Right, here’s your expenses.’ Twenty quid, I think it was. So off we raced, straight past home and on to Rhyl pleasure beach to spend the money on rides before returning to the house. I’ll never forget that day.

When I look back on my childhood, that incident sums up my parents. Any spare penny they had was spent on the kids to make them as happy as could be. They never spent a thing on themselves. Sometimes I wonder whether Mum wore the same clothes for 20 years.

Whatever your mum and dad say or do, for most people that’s the gospel. I would never want to spoil my kids because giving in to every wish or demand was something my parents never did. But any time I get a spare minute I want to spend it with my children, to make them as happy as we were. Now, of course, I’m scoring goals for England and having a great life, yet being a kid is really hard to beat, if you’re lucky enough to have grown up in the kind of parental environment I experienced. It’s wonderful to have such a comfortable existence now, and to live in such a nice house, but if somebody said to me ‘You’ve got to give it all back and live the life you had as a child’, I could think of worse things. I would have no problem with my daughter Gemma or son James growing up that way. If money is tight in a family things are given to kids only for the right reasons; no child is going to get anything just because they cry for it. It’s easy to brush problems off with money (‘here’s a couple of quid, go and buy some sweets’), but the best things in life are free, as everyone knows. For my dad to take me, on the back of his bike, to feed some horses in a field for half an hour was my idea of a treat; Dad spending £40 on one activity, or paying for an expensive holiday, just didn’t have the same appeal. Give me a simple train ride any day.

I won’t deny that my wealth from football has enabled me to help the whole family financially. When I was 18 and building a house a mile from the family home, a new estate with some really nice houses was being constructed nearby. It was always my intention to buy homes for members of my family, and it was just coincidental that a chance to do so arose so close to where I was building on the plot of land I had found. Mum and Dad liked the show house we went to inspect. Initially I bought two show homes because my brother Andy has always liked his own space; the idea was that the family would live in one while Andy took the house next door. At first I didn’t think any further ahead than that, but soon I started to feel it was unfair on my other brothers and sisters. So I bought the next two houses along, for my older sister Karen and my brother Terry. Lesley was very young, so I didn’t need to buy one for her, but subsequently the next one in the close became available and I acquired that one as well. The next house along also came on the market, but we didn’t have enough family members to fill it. So there is one non-Owen in the street. He’s a very nice fella and doesn’t seem to mind sharing the close with my whole family. The arrangement probably won’t last for ever. If Lesley’s boyfriend or Karen’s boyfriend moves away through work it’s possible that one or both of them will move on. But at least it has given them a start on the property ladder. If they wanted to move, obviously I wouldn’t take offence.

I’ve always liked investing in property. In 2003 I bought a couple of plots of land in the Algarve, near where Paul Ince has a place. Having poured all my energy into my new home in North Wales, initially I didn’t make much headway in terms of building on the land in Portugal, but it’s an exciting project for the future. The house will be open to all the family, and I like the idea of us going there in the summer with all the kids for a major holiday. I’m also buying a place on The Palm in Dubai. When we visited the city before the 2002 World Cup, members of the England team were offered the chance to buy in the resort. Half a dozen of us said yes.

But I don’t see myself as special in any way. One of my brothers drilling the wrong hole on an aeroplane wing is a much more serious issue than me having a bad time in a football match. When I pick up an injury I don’t expect a stream of sympathy from them. Missing a goal is part of the job; being a hero or a villain is part of the job. We’re all good at something. It just happens that I’m good at football and that has a high public profile, so everyone notices what I do. I’m skilled at football, my brothers are skilled at engineering. Neither talent is more valuable or important than the other. In the Owen family we just get on with life and look out for one another.

2 Little Big Man

From my earliest days as a footballer I was up there with the big boys – we’re talking size and age here, not fame. Almost from my first serious kick I left my own generation behind to take on older lads – perhaps starting a trend that ended with my World Cup goal against Argentina when I was only 18.

My first memories of my life in football date from when I was seven. I started properly with Mold Alexander, five miles from the family home, though people often trace my beginnings to Hawarden Pathfinders, who were my local cub side. They played every few months, so fixture congestion was hardly a problem. When Dad took me to Mold he was told that the youngest age group was Under-10s, which didn’t look too promising given that I was still only seven. But after a couple of training sessions I managed to force my way on to the substitutes bench, from where I would often come on and score.

Things started to get serious when I was chosen, at the age of eight, to represent Deeside Schools under the management of Bryn Jones and his assistant Dave Nicholas. Their motto was ‘first to the ball’, which they stuck to the dressing-room door. Though playing for Deeside seemed a huge promotion at the time, I realize now that you don’t really leave an imprint in football until you become a professional. How many people, for instance, could name the record goalscorer for England Under-15s? (It’s me, by the way.) Still, for me to be the youngest boy to be picked for Deeside Schools felt like an immense achievement at the time, even if it doesn’t now. I beat Gary Speed’s age record and then, in my third year, Ian Rush’s highest total for the number of goals in a season. To be in the local papers at 10 or 11 in the same sentence as Ian Rush was about as good as it could get.

For a while, then, I was an eight-year-old playing in an Under-11 county side. I could score goals at that age and at that level, but I think Bryn Jones and other administrators of Deeside Schools felt they needed to be fair to the older boys in that age group and not allow them to be ousted by an eight-year-old kid. For my second season, however, I was made captain and I played every game. I scored 50-odd goals in 30 or so games, and then in my final year I hit 92. The papers were full of it. I actually broke Ian’s record at a tournament in Jersey, and my dad and younger sister were there to witness the event. In an equivalent number of games I beat Rushie by two, but we played a lot more matches than he did in his record-setting year so I ended up pulling 20 clear.

I can still remember the decisive strike that day, though all my goals at that age were virtually identical: a ball over the top, followed by a sprint and a finish. I was quicker than everyone else at that time so it was always a one-on-one, with a finish to the side. You don’t get many crosses or diving headers in Under-11 football; you’re always running on to through-balls, with the full-backs mysteriously playing everyone on side. When I scored against Argentina at France 98, and in the 2001 FA Cup final against Arsenal, I can recall jogging to the touchline trying to assess the meaning of what I’d just done. The first time I went through that mental process, I suppose, was when I scored in Jersey to surpass Ian Rush in Deeside’s record books.

I hadn’t yet met Rushie when I improved on his earliest achievement in football, and I didn’t cross his path for a long time after I arrived at Liverpool. By then he had left Anfield, though I did see him occasionally in the players’ lounge, or doing a stint on local radio. I didn’t get to talk to him properly until January 2003, when he rejoined the club as the strikers’ coach. I’ve had a couple of rounds of golf with him since and he’s a mate now. When he was first unveiled as Liverpool’s striking coach we both did interviews about each other, and the Deeside scoring record was usually the first question to be asked.

There’s a funny story attached to my second proper association with a local club side. After Mold Alexander, I moved on to Hawarden Rangers and scored about 116 goals in 40 games in their colours. We won everything. When the club’s annual awards came round, I was desperate to be Player of the Year, as all young boys are. I just knew I was head and shoulders above the other lads in the team. But the winner was … our goalkeeper. We were winning 10–0 virtually every week, and our keeper, who was two years younger than everyone else, had barely made a save all season. It wouldn’t bother me now if someone got Player of the Year ahead of me, but when you’re 12 it really hurts. It’s life and death. You wait all week for Saturday to come.

Dad was livid. ‘You’re not playing for them again,’ he told me. The following season I was going to confine myself to the county team (though I was also by that time playing Liverpool youth games at the weekend). However, the manager of St David’s Park, another local side, was especially persistent and promised Dad that if I joined them I wouldn’t be asked to play too many times.

‘Just let him play in four or five,’ he pleaded.

‘Oh, go on, then,’ Dad replied.

St David’s were about to play Hawarden Rangers, and the manager came on to ask me to play against my old club – the one that had deprived me of the Player of the Year award. I wanted to spite them so much that I agreed to make myself available. We beat them 4–3 and I scored all four of our goals. There were rumours that the Hawarden manager was going to report the St David’s manager for tapping me up, though it never came to much. You can imagine the feeling of smugness as Dad and I walked back to the car.

When you’re the top man at football in primary school, you attract a certain amount of respect from your peers; once you get into secondary school, however, not everyone’s quite so fascinated. At Hawarden High, many of my contemporaries developed an interest in fighting and smoking, but I had to stay off that path. If you’re a prospect, it’s then that you have to retain your focus on the game. It was around that time that I started to become aware of jealousy in other children. I was well liked at school, but when it was announced that I was leaving to go to Lilleshall, in my third year at senior school, a couple of the tougher lads would occasionally snarl at me. I assumed it was envy because I was doing so well and moving on. It didn’t turn physical and I didn’t tell my parents, though my dad seemed to be aware that I had stirred up some animosity in one or two kids. Anyway, schools are full of cliques and hierarchies. I had my own. I certainly never went home crying, saying people were picking on me.

My best friend from my school days is Michael Jones, who I met at infant school. He lived about three miles away from us, so until I was allowed to ride off on my bike I had to rely on Mum to drive me to his house. Later we played golf every other day. Whenever I’m not working we go out for a meal with our partners, or he comes round to watch a match. We always look out for each other. Didi Hamann, at Liverpool, has become good friends with Mike, and he often joins us on the golf course. Mike turned pro in 2003 and has been to South Africa to play in the Sunshine Tour. His plan is to join the Pro Tour, which is two levels below the European Tour. He’s got a bit of climbing to do, but at least he has a sponsor to see him through his first year.

I didn’t really enjoy the academic side of school, though I quite enjoyed maths. I also liked geography. General knowledge interested me too. At home on winter nights Mum and Dad would set quizzes. It was the formal aspect of being taught through lessons that turned me off. In those environments I would find myself looking at my watch, gazing through the windows and waiting for PE – anything, really, except classroom teaching.

It was at the age of 10 that boxing was added to my list of sporting activities. A little known story about me is that I boxed in two proper club fights, one in front of the dickiebow brigade. It was Dad’s intention to make me stronger physically and toughen me up mentally, so he took me to the local boxing gym – the Deeside Boxing Club, above a pub in Shotton – where I watched a training session one afternoon and joined the following day. Organized fighting tends to be a fad for a lot of boys. They come in for a session or two and then disappear, often when the going gets really tough. But I stayed with it for three years because I enjoyed it so much.

The first of my serious bouts came after I’d played for Deeside Primary Schools that same day. The fight was in the evening, and I found myself opening a 10-fight bill in Anglesey in front of an audience wearing dinner jackets and bow ties. Never mind taking a penalty in the World Cup, nothing compares to being in a boxing match. My first opponent had already had a couple of fights, and I was much lighter than him, so I made sure I protected myself down below by inserting the proper guard. I wore all the body armour I could to make the weight. I just about managed to get close enough to him on the scales for the bout to go ahead, and the next thing I knew I was climbing through the ropes for the opening contest in the short but eventful boxing career of Michael Owen.