Ferguson Alex - Managing my life : my autobiography

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ALEX
FERGUSON
with Hugh McIlvanney

CORONET BOOKS

Hodder and Stoughton
www.hodder.co.uk

Copyright 2000 Alex Ferguson

The right of Alex Ferguson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Hodder and Stoughton First published in paperback in 2000 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company

A Coronet Paperback

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Epub ISBN 9781444709100
ISBN 978-0-340-72856-7

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

Dedication

It is a simple fact that in every phase of your life there are constant reminders of those who have helped you, guided you, loved you. I can thank the Lord for such a happy childhood and can still feel the warmth of my mother and father and the surrounding support of both sides of the family. Basically you are what your parents are; experiences may help to shape personality but the essence of the person is determined by the make-up of the parents and that is very much the case with me.

My brother Martin has travelled the same road as me and, although different in nature, he is nonetheless a product of our parents. No one could have a better brother.

My wife Cathy is the mainstay of our family. It is she who has carried the main burden of bringing up our three sons, Mark, Jason and Darren. This is more than I could have asked for and they have turned out to be fantastic sons and fantastic people. We have all got to thank her for being such a great wife and mother. It has always been Cathys way to stay in the background, but now it is time for her to accept some limelight. I gratefully acknowledge her role in any success I have had. Without her down-to-earth attitude to life and her unstinting support none of it would have been possible.

1995 is a summer I cannot forget. Cathy and I decided to go to Canada to visit my dads sister Isobel and her husband Sonny because I had a feeling during a telephone conversation that my Uncle Sonny was failing. Martin and I owe a lot to Sonny; he was a teacher and in our school days he tutored us privately in his own time in the quest to improve us academically, so I could not ignore the opportunity to visit him. During our many conversations I mentioned the possibility of writing my autobiography at some point. I asked him if I could include one of his poems as a mark of respect and he immediately agreed. Sadly he died four months later. Here are three verses from the poem he sent me after my mother Liz died, which celebrate her happy and caring nature and are very special to me.

Growing up in the thirties was really quite bad When money was scarce and most people were sad. Yet during those dark days of despair Liz still found time to help and to care.

Count all your blessings, Liz used to say Add them all up at the end of the day. Never mind if you only have one or two Remember some people are worse off than you.

I can still see Liz clearly in my minds eye Because fond memories of her will never die. It is then I thank God for the things that be For having met and known such a person as she.

That same holiday brought the tragic death of our nephew, Stephen, at the early age of nineteen. Even, or perhaps particularly, whilst I am celebrating the successes of 1999, it is difficult not to think back to those earlier times.

Alex Ferguson

Acknowledgements

Once the decision to go ahead with this book was taken it was simply a matter of getting the best sports journalist of our time to write it step forward Mr McIlvanney. I asked my good friend Mike Dillon to sound out the great man because I knew how busy he was with The Sunday Times. Luckily the response was favourable. That was in January 1998 and over the next three months our trips to Glasgow together brought a flavour of the people who have played a part in my life. In the summer of 1998, Hugh and I continued to meet regularly whilst I started to write in longhand every fact I could remember of my life; this finally amounted to some two hundred and fifty thousand words quite a bit of work. Then it was Hughs turn to make some sense of it and, in his words, machine gun it. But, my goodness, he has done a fantastic job; only he has the style to transform all those meanderings and bring such definition and order to the story of my life. Well done, Hugh you are a genius. All those phone calls at ungodly hours Do you spell McLean with a small c and a capital L or is mac? It has been a pleasure to witness his professionalism.

Hughs niece Patricia Murphy also played a key role in the production of this book. Every time a wad of my handwritten accounts was ready, it was sent to Patricia to decipher, type out and send on to Hugh pronto. It is with great thanks that I acknowledge her work on behalf of both of us.

Similarly, I must thank my secretary Lyn, who made sure my handwritten script reached its destination safely, liaised constantly with the publishers and happily is always just a telephone call away.

I have been fortunate throughout my career at Aberdeen and Manchester United to have had wonderful people working for me players, office and ground staff. I wish to acknowledge my debt to them.

Others whom I would also like to thank include Roddy Bloomfield, my publisher, and his assistant Nicola Lintern. Roddy met me regularly at the Cliff to offer help and encouragement. He worked closely with Hugh and stage managed the team of specialists (all eleven of them!) who played a significant part in the production of the book. My old friend Glenn Gibbons checked the early Scottish section of the manuscript and my long-time friend and colleague David Meek did the same for the Manchester United section. Others in the team who deserve credit are Alastair Macdonald and Cliff Buder who compiled the statistics, picture researcher Gabrielle Allen, copy editor Marion Paull, map designer Rodney Paull, book designer Bob Vickers, indexer Jill Ford, Hodder and Stoughton production director Sandie Steward and the Independent football writer Phil Shaw who read everything through as a final check and raised some most important points.

INTRODUCTION

W HEN he signed a contract in 1998 to produce this book, Alex Ferguson already had a remarkable story to tell. What he had achieved in eight-and-a-half years with Aberdeen and eleven Manchester United had assured him of a place on any list of the most successful managers in the history of British football. Yet there was a danger that the story would lack a natural climax, that it would have to conclude with the ache of one great unfulfilled aspiration. So Ferguson, the hater of loose ends, put that right by leading United through a season of unprecedented triumph. The European Cup that they and he had coveted for so long was brought back to Old Trafford and the Premiership title and the FA Cup were added along the way to complete the kind of treble that would seem outrageous in a dream. It was a pretty fancy way of keeping his promise to do everything possible to ensure that his autobiography was worth publishing.