The story of Justin Fashanu – the world’s first £1m black footballer and Britain’s first openly gay footballer, who killed himself aged 37 in 1998 – makes a moving, challenging, troubling biopic.
Authentic Adam Lind Womens Jersey Forbidden Games tells how Justin and his brother John, aged four and three, were removed from their mother and three siblings, to be fostered by Barnardo’s. The more sensitive Justin could never reconcile what he perceived to be an abandonment, but John saw things differently. “No mother wants to give away her own children,” he says, “and it propelled us to become major celebrities all over the world. We made ourselves millionaires, so it couldn’t have been all that bad, could it?”
John’s resulting insecurity manifested itself in shyness and a speech impediment. He clung to Justin, “the only person who could hear what I was talking about … that was part of the bonding of us at a young age”.
Eventually, the brothers were fostered by a white couple in Shropham, Norfolk, where their real mother would visit once a month. They were excited by the opportunity to be part of a family,
http://www.officialnationalstore.com/Adam_Eaton_Jersey but the passage was not seamless – John struggled to sleep, so a doctor told his foster mother to hug him tight. “She used to grab me and give me a great big cuddle every morning, every evening, and that gave me a lot of security,” he recalls. “It was a lovely feeling, your whole face disappearing into Mummy’s breasts.”
The boys’ colour made them outsiders in Norfolk. “If you saw a black person,” says John, “that was Michael Jackson’s picture somewhere, and maybe, maybe, if you were lucky, Muhammad Ali … they were the only black people I saw in my life till I got to 18, 19.”
Accordingly, they grew up knowing “nothing about race”; had the 16-year-old John been asked about colour, “I’d have told you I was white because the environment was white.” But his world changed when,
Alex Galchenyuk Womens Jersey at the age of 18 and without Justin, he visited Nigeria – his father’s homeland, and now his home. “The plane landed, and for the first time the doors opened and I just saw black people everywhere,” he says. “I was shocked! I thought: ‘Wow, wonderful!’ My own people! My God! Hallelujah! People who look like me! I can walk around the whole of Nigeria free as a black man! That was the beginning of my life as far as I was concerned.”
Meanwhile Justin, though proud, was ambivalent regarding race; principally,
http://www.officialcanadiensauthentic.com/Alexander_Radulov_Jersey he wanted to be left alone. Scarred by the childhood trauma from which he had protected John – he endured violent nightmares into adulthood – he was simultaneously vulnerable and charismatic, desperate for acceptance and searching for identity.
Growing up where and when he did, this was not easy. “It was a racist society,” John recalls. “Times have, thank goodness, changed, but they’ve changed on our backs.”
