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The Sunday Times September 10, 2006
The Big Interview: Roy Aitken
The former Celtic captain is back in control and wants to return to the game after cancer and the sack. By Richard Wilson
It was Jane who kept pushing him to go for the medical. You’re at that age now, his wife kept saying, you should be getting regular check-ups. Kindly insistence has its own imperative and, eventually, he followed her advice. The season was over, their annual summer holiday in America was a couple of weeks away yet, so why not? He felt fine, he ran regularly and often joined in the five-a-sides at Villa’s Bodymoor Heath training ground when the numbers needed to be evened up. At 47, Roy Aitken still had that fearlessness, the recurring companionship of a sense of imperishability; he was once, after all, The Bear. What was to worry about? “You’re in great health,” the doctor told him as he began to reveal the results of his MRI scan. “I wish I had your report.” So he was still The Bear, the urgent figure the Celtic fans used to feed from the terraces with the bulky morsels of their roaring appreciation. There had never been anything to fret about. “But you’ve got a shadow on your colon.”
It was a week later when a colonoscopy confirmed that the tumour was malignant. We’ve caught it early, I’ve been lucky, Aitken repeated, over and over; always positive. I’m fortunate. I didn’t know it was there, but now I do. I’m in control.
“We’re going to take 12 inches of your colon away,” the surgeon told him jauntily. Okay, he said. “But you’ve got 29 feet of it, so don’t worry too much.” A laugh escapes inadvertently, like a blessed relief. Eleven days later — on June 5, a Monday — he was in London’s Cromwell Hospital having surgery. It was only when the morphine left his system, two days after the operation, that the pain started to claim its due.
The specialist had wanted to remove the tumour by keyhole surgery, but was unable to gain sufficient access. So instead he went in the long way, through major, invasive surgery, and so also discovered that Aitken’s appendix had shrunk to half the normal size and was covered in adhesions; as a player, he had, unknowingly, suffered appendicitis but carried on through the pain, thinking it was just indigestion. The operation left him with 20 stitches on his torso and some staples still inside to aid healing.
Isn’t it strange, the coincidences that litter life? Last year, his father-in-law, 80-year-old James Rourke, had part of his colon removed, in the same operation, because he, too, had bowel cancer. So James told him what to expect, what would happen and how it might turn out. And his former teammate, Tommy Burns, had undergone surgery in April to have two lumps removed from his leg after being diagnosed with malignant melanoma. When Burns was in hospital, they had swapped text messages; now, in hospital himself, they talked on the phone. Always positive, both of them, because that’s their nature and it’s also a form of control, of laying down some kind of jurisdiction of their own. Then Tommy was given the all clear.
Aitken had seen the effect that publicity had wrought on Burns and his family when news of his skin cancer became known, so he was glad that he had told only family and close friends; without the attention there was time and space in which to come to terms with it all. On the Friday, four days after the surgery, he was told the operation had been successful, that the cancer hadn’t spread. The all clear, his own exultation. Then a newspaper reporter turned up at the door of his son’s flat in London, and another at his father-in-law’s house in Scotland. Why? Because he has a past and a present that is relevant beyond his own life. He’s The Bear.
SITTING in the bar at The Belfry, a half-finished latte on the table in front of him, he has time on his hands. In neatly pressed slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, his brown shoes so earnestly polished that they glimmer as they reflect the light, he looks like a man nestling comfortably in the crook of middle-age. His hair has turned an almost purified white and there are creases on his broad, square face, but no air of frailty. “I was fortunate there,” he says, smiling disarmingly, as though referring to some triviality. When the specialist told Aitken that the cancer hadn’t spread, he began by saying, “we’ve just won the World Cup”, as if it was all something other than real. The extremes of the experience began to fade.
“I had a major scare, but I always try to keep on an even keel,” Aitken continues. “It’s not been a life-changing situation. In the week running up to the surgery I was a bit anxious, but I was always in control, because I’d caught it early, so that balanced out the shock. The good thing is that everything’s sorted. I was lucky. I just feel little twinges now, but I’m more or less fine.”
The surgeon said it would take three months to fully recover, yet within six weeks he was back at work as Aston Villa’s assistant manager, after David O’Leary had left the club. “Is this the right thing to do,” Jane kept saying worriedly, trying again to exert some influence. So, too, did his surgeon, and even the club doctor, who warned him flatly, “you’d better be careful”. He wore a truss round his midriff, but still every shout prompted a shooting pain. “Your insides are healing, so using any of the abdominal muscles is a strain,” Aitken recalls with a grimace. “And being on my feet all day wasn’t ideal.”
So why go back? Why risk your health like that? “I felt I had to be seen to be doing the right thing,” he replies. “It was professional, to make sure things were ticking over. The boys responded well, which was important for me. We won all our (friendly) games. If the job was going to be available, I was as equipped as anyone to do it and I was going to make sure I proved that. But I knew deep down there was going to be a change of management.
So when it came to the crunch, just prior to the team going on a pre-season trip to Holland, I took a step back. Then Martin (O’Neill) came in within a couple of days.”
By returning to the club, he was trying to take control of another situation, but one that he knew more intimately, and understood more clearly. Two weeks after O’Neill’s appointment, and the subsequent arrival of his own management team in John Robertson and Steve Walford, Aitken had agreed a compensation package. “There’s no problem with that,” he stresses. “I’d still like to think I did the right things up to the end and I didn’t lose my job because I wasn’t doing it properly. When a manager moves on, his team moves on with him, I understand that.”
He has started to ease back into jogging and he and Jane plan to go on the holiday to America they had been forced to cancel. He has a house to sell and a new existence to shape. In the space of four months, he was diagnosed with cancer, underwent major surgery and lost his job; everything he relied upon was stripped away, yet he when he looks back it is with an impassive eye.
“The job? In football, are you ever in control?” he says. “It’s such a fickle trade and I’ve been in the game since I was 16. The surgery puts it into perspective. Some people say, ‘oh you’re better not knowing’, but you are. If this had got any worse, I’d have been in big trouble. It’s a case of deal with it and move on. I’ve got children and I need to make sure they keep on top of it. It can be hereditary. My daughter, Ashley, is 25 and I asked her to go for the colonoscopy. She’s clear. My son’s only 21 and he’ll do it in the next five or six years.”
JOHN AITKEN graduated from London’s Arts Education School with an acting degree in the summer and subsequently signed up with 41Management, an Edinburgh agency. During the Festival Fringe, he appeared in the play The Libertine and in December he will return to the city to take on the role of Prince Charming in Cinderella at the Kings Theatre. Aitken’s face softens with pride when he talks of his children: Ashley, long qualified as a nurse, and now John taking the next steps on his path.
“On the one hand, acting couldn’t be further removed from football, but it’s similar in the sense that he’s got to go for trials,” Aitken points out. “As a footballer, you’ve got to be picked, do your bit when you play and hope that you do enough to get another job on the back of it. The contracts tend to be shorter in acting. It’s a stop-start job. What is it they call it? Resting. We’d be out of a job, but actors are ‘resting’.”
His reputation as a player was one of gruff intensity, a kind of grim brutality, yet for a time he sought refuge from the image of The Bear and all it entailed: the idea of conflict, of a lack of control. He has always considered himself more than the perception of rampaging, crudely momentous Celtic and Scotland captain. “I was sent off about half-a-dozen times in my career, but it was never for lifting my hands or anything like that,” he stresses.
“I got pigeon-holed because there was an aggressive side to my game. But I also felt I had a lot to offer from a football point of view. I wouldn’t have played all the games I did, won all the trophies, 57 caps and played in two World Cups, if I didn’t.”
His son shares traits that will inform his approach to his own career, but it is the contrast that will often be stressed: The Bear/The Actor. “I don’t know how that will work for him,” Aitken reflects. “From a young age, he wanted to act and I never pushed him any way. Both John and Ashley did whatever they wanted to do. John went to London when he was 16. I’m going to enjoy seeing how he is and trying to help him in his career, although it’s down to him. There will be parallels I’m sure, there already have been, where I could help him.”
Before The Bear, there was Shirley, Aitken’s nickname when he first joined Celtic because of his long, curly hair. When he was a schoolboy, he reached grade eight on the piano and received a diploma from the Royal Academy of Music; later in his career, he was persuaded to dress up as Liberace and sit at a piano for a newspaper photograph. The recollection makes his eyes shine. The person beyond the footballer is always there somewhere, and there is much to recognise in John.
“I see in him that he’s focused,” Aitken says. “He’s had to be, because at drama school if they turn up one minute late for class, they get sent home. It’s tough. What I’ve seen of him, he’s professional and proactive.”
HE SPOKE to Dave on the phone the other day. Dave’s just back from America, where he watched the US Open tennis, and they talked about football in general, the start of the Premiership season, who’s hot, who’s not; everything and nothing. Apart from the 11 months that O’Leary was out of the game following his departure from Leeds, he and Aitken have worked together for the past seven years. “I’ve got to decide what route I go down, but I’d love to work with Dave again,” Aitken says warmly. “We’ve a good relationship and I’m sure he would take me.”
The end at Aston Villa was abrupt, an unedifying conclusion. Relations, from the players, to the manager, to the board, had gone awry. Aitken was recovering from his surgery as O’Leary’s time came to its close, but he has no wish to extract himself from the reality. You face up to what you know. “Listen,” he says, with only a hint of exasperation. “In the first season, we finished sixth and overachieved, the season after we finished 10th and that’s where the club was, and still is, mid-table. Last year, we underachieved, finishing 16th. The amazing thing is, Birmingham and West Brom were both relegated and their managers get pats on the back and told ‘unlucky’; Dave was lambasted locally for being the only team that survived in the Premiership.”
So what now? Jane often says, where is home? The answer is nowhere and everywhere; there is the flat in London that John uses, their old home in Harrogate, near Leeds, which they have rented out. But there is also the west coast of Scotland, where Aitken grew up and lived when he played for Celtic. Or Aberdeen, where the family stayed for five years while he went from player/assistant manager to manager to rejection at Pittodrie, but that was the football; their life in the city was more stable. “We had such a lovely time in Aberdeen,” he says. “So we’d probably go there (if they returned to Scotland). I’d never rule out coming back, but I still see my future, short-term, in England, where there are more opportunities.”
He won’t rule out management, but then coaching has dominated his career and that’s what he takes the most enjoyment from. His time in charge of Aberdeen was surreal: he saved them from relegation after taking temporary charge when Willie Miller was sacked, and was then given the job permanently, going on to win the League Cup and finish third in the league. The following season it was sixth and the November after that, with the team struggling and Aitken becoming either insular or provocative — The Bear losing control — he was sacked. Yet distance, as it always does, brings a gentler perspective.
“It went well,” he says. “The club … how can I say it? They made a big mistake in sacking Willie. I mean, if they can sack their greatest ever player … they were making changes at board level that I thought were totally wrong. They should have stuck with it a little longer, because I’d proved my worth. I was annoyed. What has the club achieved since then? It could have set my career back, but I wasn’t prepared to let that happen.”
He is the last manager to have won a trophy at Aberdeen, but that was a different time. If he were to go into management again, he would delegate more, in the way that Dave did with him. “But I’ve still got my own thoughts,” he adds. “That hasn’t changed.”
HE CANNOT stand still and dwell on what has been and what might be. There is no Roy Aitken shrine in the house, he says mockingly, Jane puts all the fragments of his career in the loft. And there are no assumptions about the future. “I’ve got to assess what I’m going to do,” Aitken remarks. He is more experienced now, better equipped to see the management process as a whole, its limits and its worth. He was coaching at Leeds when the team played in the Champions League semi-final and he has become a familiar face in the Premiership.
“From the management point of view, I’d maybe need to step down,” he adds. “I wouldn’t be against that, but I don’t know what will come around: coaching or management. My thoughts are open to both.”
The Bear, Roy Aitken, however you see him, he has some priorities that remain the same and others that have evolved. Every year, he will undergo a colonoscopy to make sure that the cancer hasn’t returned. “These polyps that develop (on the surface of the colon), they take five or 10 years to turn cancerous,” he says. “But if you get them early enough, you can just snip them out.”
It is as simple as that. He has regained control, and he is not about to relinquish it again.
Times Newspapers Ltd.