Mark Walters cannot help smiling about the time Mo Johnston, his then teammate, received a bullet in the post. “I said: ‘Mo, you’ve taken the pressure right off me!” he recalls of the death threat sent to Johnston after the striker, a Catholic and former Celtic hero, joined Rangers in 1989. “We had a good laugh about it,” says Walters. “I had all sorts thrown at me – bananas, darts, a pig’s leg – and I had letters from the Ku Klux Klan telling me where I should go and what I should be doing with myself. But I never got a bullet! Unless you’ve been in a professionals’ dressing room, it’s hard to explain the humour.”
Laughing off or blocking out hatred had been Walters’ modus operandi since long before he joined Rangers in 1987, when he became the only black player in the Scottish Premier League. He encountered abuse that may seem almost unbelievable today but says it was, in one respect only, easy to ignore because racism is boring and paying attention to it would not have helped him to fulfil his ambition of becoming a successful footballer. He achieved that, playing for his hometown club Aston Villa before winning three Scottish titles with Rangers, a cap for England and the FA Cup with Liverpool.
Walters has rarely spoken publicly about much of this since retiring in 2002 but now, aged 54, he has released an autobiography, Wingin’ It, because he felt it was time to take stock. “It’s been cathartic,” he says of a book in which he addresses issues he had previously preferred not to discuss: racism, his frustration at the paucity of coaching opportunities for black former players and family matters including the lack of a relationship with his father, Lawrence Wabara, who played for Nigeria in the 1950s (“I only found out about that in my teens when I saw some pictures,” he says. “It did disappoint me, the fact he had been such a good footballer but never really did anything to help me”).
As a child, reared by his Jamaican mother, Ivy Walters, the future winger used to sneak into Villa Park. He ended up making his Villa debut aged 17 a month before the club beat Bayern Munich in the 1982 European Cup final. He was not in the squad for that match but later established himself as a key first-team player and one of the most exciting wingers in the country. Everton, then English champions, tried to buy him in 1987 but Walters chose Scotland.
“People said Rangers must have blown them out of the water financially but there was very little difference in the money,” he says. “The main reason was that English clubs were still banned from European competition, whereas Rangers had the Champions League. Lots of good English players had already gone there, like Ray Wilkins and Terry Butcher, and I had already become a bit of a fan of the club after watching them play in Europe on TV and loving the atmosphere at Ibrox.”
The atmosphere on big European nights turned out to be everything he had hoped for, but to enjoy the good times he first had to overcome an altogether more violent reception. “[Graeme] Souness [Rangers manager] did tell me I might get some stick but I had no idea there were no other black players in the Scottish league and would have been shocked if told I was going to be a pioneer, but that certainly wouldn’t have put me off,” he says. In his first appearance, away to Celtic, a large number of the 50,000 crowd made monkey noises when he touched the ball and the match had to be stopped so bananas could be cleared off the pitch.
The abuse was even worse from Hearts supporters two weeks later. This time Walters knew what to expect, partly because on the way to the game a teammate showed him a newspaper interview with a man displaying a huge batch of fruit he had bought to hurl at Walters. “The guy was standing there with his stall, very proud … so I was aware I had to be on my toes but I was shocked when the match started and I saw it wasn’t just fruit but people were also throwing darts and even a pig’s leg. That made me chuckle, but only when I got off the pitch at the end and knew I was safe.” Had he considered leaving the pitch before the end to avoid being hit? “My mentality was to play better and I can thank my mother for that,” he says. “My upbringing was to work twice as hard to achieve something if you have to. Stick it out.”
The treatment he endured provoked widespread condemnation across Scotland. After that racist abuse grew rarer. Walters even got a letter from a Hearts fan apologising for his behaviour and announcing he had imposed a lifetime stadium ban on himself. “I never had one problem in Scotland outside a stadium so I like to think [the abuse] was just an attempt to put me off my game rather than a sign that people were genuinely racist,” he says. “And that letter was good, if he really learned from it. Because education is always the answer.”
Walters provided footballing education after retiring but not as much as he would have liked. He earned all of his coaching qualifications and began what he hoped would be a long second career by taking charge of an under-nines team for Villa. “I was prepared to start at the bottom and work my way up because I had never coached before,” he says. But the highest he climbed was to be head of Villa’s Under-14s, apart from a brief stint coaching the first team at the invitation of manager David O’Leary before the Irishman was sacked in 2006. Walters spent five years coaching in schools on behalf of the Football Association. “But I never really got a chance to manage young professionals, players at the level or near the level I had played who could really benefit from my advice,” he says. “In my opinion unless you’re a manager’s son or have been playing golf with the head of academies or something, you’ll never get a job. Jobs were going to guys who had never even played professionally.
“I had all the badges and every award going – in fact, I was overqualified for every job I had. I applied for lots of others but most didn’t even bother replying. I realised it was about who you knew.
His son and daughter are now 23 and 25 respectively and he says his opportunity to coach at the highest level may have passed. But he believes measures must be introduced to ensure other black coaches can rise as high as their ability deserves: “The ratio of black coaches to black ex-players is ridiculously low and that can’t continue.”
The Guardian Sport
