Tommy Martin: To Alex Ferguson memories aren't nostalgic, they're foundation of an extraordinary life
Alex Ferguson
As befits someone who famously loves to read books about great historical figures, no one has attempted to take the measure of Alex Ferguson’s life as often as the man himself.
Never Give In, the new documentary directed by Ferguson’s son Jason, is the latest autobiographical effort to understand what drove him to become the dominant figure in British football, coming after two previous books on his life. It hinges on the brain haemorrhage suffered by Ferguson in 2018, a near-death experience that left him terrified of losing his memory. Recovering in hospital, Ferguson scrawled the word ‘Remember’ repeatedly on the pages of a puzzle book.
For Ferguson, memories are not merely a nostalgic retreat, but rather the very foundation of his extraordinary life, the wellspring for the values on which he built his teams. For a man obsessed with control, to lose them would have been unthinkable.
As such, Never Give In dwells on his proletarian Glaswegian upbringing and formative football experiences; almost half the film has elapsed before he takes up the Manchester United job. The narrative sweeps to a climax with the 1999 Champions League final and the successes that followed are given only a brief postscript.
The film’s title, taken from Ferguson’s post-match interview on that famous night in Barcelona, is seen as the defining quality of his teams, a relentlessness borne of the manager’s life experiences. He tells of seeing the Govan shipyards from his mother’s pram and of his father’s 40 years working on the Clyde and how “that history, it gets ingrained into you.”
“I used to ask [the players], what did your grandfather do, what did your father do? I’d have to get the feeling inside them that what their grandfathers worked for, and their grandmothers, is part of them and they have to display that meaning…It’s a fact of life that where we come from is important. You come out with an identity. I’m from Govan. I’m a Govan boy.”
Ferguson is well-versed in how the lives of great figures are accounted for. His personal library is stuffed with books on prime ministers, presidents, and diplomats.
“Then I have my despots section,” he informed us in his 2013 autobiography, one of the most unintentionally funny lines in the history of English literature.
So he knows how the lens of the present colours our view of the past. In Managing My Life, published in the afterglow of the 1999 treble season, Ferguson pinpointed the working class loyalty of his upbringing as the key quality in his success. His later book, coming after the ruthless dispatch of players like Roy Keane, David Beckham, and Jaap Stam, hinted at the darker shelves of his library, dwelling on the need for absolute control.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that this account chooses to focus on his indefatigability; he is speaking, after all, after being given only a 20% chance of survival from the brain haemorrhage.
However, there is no attempt to show an unseen, cuddly side to the man. Instead there is the constant swirl of dark passions.
Indeed, the only acknowledgement of Ferguson as a father figure is in the tough love he showed to the brilliant generation of young players at Manchester United in the 1990s.
There is plenty of guilt at how his own family suffered for his obsession. He speaks of the sacrifices made by his sons and his wife, Cathy. He reads from a note written to her from his hospital bed, less a love letter than a rueful apologia for the things he missed while he was “busy working”.
That guilt may explain why the film hangs so much of its narrative on Ferguson’s departure from Rangers as a player. Scapegoated for their 4-0 defeat to Celtic in the 1969 Scottish Cup final, he never played for the club again. Ferguson believes that his departure had more to do with the fact that Cathy was a practising Catholic.
He tells of how a Rangers director asked him if had gotten married in a chapel or a registry office. “I should have told him to fuck off,” he says. “I let myself down there. I let my wife down, which was the most important thing.”
The film suggests a desire for vengeance against Rangers inspired his belligerence as Aberdeen manager. This was memory as fuel. Gordon Strachan refers to the intensity of his invective, the depth of it, how it would touch on the players’ character and intentions in life.
“When I looked at that,” Strachan says, “I thought, there’s something up here, there’s something inside this fella that’s making him angry and driving him. Looking back now, it looks like I bumped into a wounded animal.”
At moments like these we are reminded of just how intimidating a presence Ferguson was as a younger man and how that presence shaped the football world around it. As the film goes through his early struggles at Manchester United, it was possible to speculate that the club didn’t sack him simply because they were afraid to.
It is compelling to think of Ferguson’s persona as the product of working class values dipped in vengeful spite, but as with his previous attempts at self-analysis, it falls short. Ferguson has long overemphasised the importance of his upbringing in his success. He even anointed David Moyes as his successor at United simply because he was Scottish and didn’t smile a lot.
Long before he was wronged by Rangers, Ferguson had spent two years not speaking to his father after a row over the direction of his football career. Before that he was a shop steward for shipyard apprentices and is pictured in the film leading his charges out on strike.
Before that again, as a child, he beat up a school bully in defence of his younger brother Martin. “Alec always wanted to be the leader,” Martin says. “Always wanted to be the guy in front. Alec was always first to be in.”
Maybe it is comforting to blame nurture for the way he was, rather than nature. The film concludes with Ferguson’s emotional reception at Old Trafford on his recovery, and there is an acknowledgment that even he cannot hold on forever. “You worry that you’ll lose all this history, all these memories,” he says, “but they’ll live on, they’ll never be forgotten.”
At the same time, the viewer feels the unspoken present, with the protests against the Glazers, whose ownership Ferguson supported, and the sense of a legacy being frittered away since his departure. United fans fear that like Ozymandias, king of kings, Ferguson’s club will be blown away into dust.
Memories have never been so important.
