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Stuart Pearce: I won Celebrity Mastermind because there were three people even thicker than me
“If you want to win it, it’s easy,” he said. “Just make sure you go on the show with three people who are even thicker than you.”
It was a line that went down a storm with the 450 people gathered on Friday night in a marquee outside Mansfield Town’s Field Mill stadium to enjoy An Evening With Stuart Pearce. Many of those present (including Telegraph Sport) had paid £60 for a ticket which included the chance to have a photograph taken with the man himself. When it was my turn, I congratulated him on his quizzing success. “I’ll tell you what,” he replied. “No one was more surprised than me.”
“I remember thinking I couldn’t shirk it, or let someone else take responsibility, I had to do it,” he said of his decision to step forward. “So in the break after full time I went straight up to Tel [Terry Venables, the then England manager] and I said: ‘I’ll take the third penalty.’ And he looked at me astonished and said: ‘are you sure?’ And I said: ‘well I was until you said that’.”
That, it turned out, was a typical Pearce memory. For a man who accumulated 78 England caps and played 401 times for Nottingham Forest, a player renowned for his ferocity and application, he is remarkably self-effacing.
And, to the delight of the overwhelmingly Forest-supporting crowd gathered in Mansfield, what he reckons was his luckiest turn came in 1985 when he was signed by Brian Clough to play for the club. His Clough stories were many and varied. Most of them, tellingly, seemed to have the speaker as the butt of the joke. Like the occasion he had just arrived at the City Ground and Clough, recalling that his new full-back had until recently made his living as an electrician, asked him if he might take a look at his wife’s iron, which wasn’t working.
“I took it home, took it apart and realised that the element had gone,” Pearce explained. “Really, there wasn’t any point repairing it, so I told the boss it would be cheaper and easier if he simply bought her a new one. When I told him, he just took the iron off me and didn’t say anything. Anyway, I then walked into the dressing room for the first time, sat down next to John Robertson, looked round at all these amazing players who had won the European Cup, thinking ‘blimey I don’t belong here’.
“And the boss comes in. He’s holding the iron. And he announces to the assembled team: ‘We’ve just signed a new full-back who reckons he is a skilled electrician. But when I asked him to repair my Barbara’s iron, he couldn’t. Gentlemen, I regret to tell you we have signed a fraud’. That was my introduction to the Forest dressing room.”
“It was a short conversation,” Pearce suggested. “He called me into his office and said: ‘I see you’re in the England squad, do you think you’re good enough?’ So I said: ‘I’m not sure boss’. And he replied: ‘Well I am. You’re not. Now ---- off’.”
In a sense it was no wonder Pearce was so clearly enjoying this visit to his past. Because recent times have been far from kind to him. In March last year he was taken off an international flight unconscious after suffering heart arrhythmia. Then in October his son Harley, an agricultural entrepreneur, was killed when the tractor he was driving crashed in a country lane in Gloucestershire. It is impossible to imagine Pearce’s devastation.
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“If you want to win it, it’s easy,” he said. “Just make sure you go on the show with three people who are even thicker than you.”
It was a line that went down a storm with the 450 people gathered on Friday night in a marquee outside Mansfield Town’s Field Mill stadium to enjoy An Evening With Stuart Pearce. Many of those present (including Telegraph Sport) had paid £60 for a ticket which included the chance to have a photograph taken with the man himself. When it was my turn, I congratulated him on his quizzing success. “I’ll tell you what,” he replied. “No one was more surprised than me.”
“I remember thinking I couldn’t shirk it, or let someone else take responsibility, I had to do it,” he said of his decision to step forward. “So in the break after full time I went straight up to Tel [Terry Venables, the then England manager] and I said: ‘I’ll take the third penalty.’ And he looked at me astonished and said: ‘are you sure?’ And I said: ‘well I was until you said that’.”
That, it turned out, was a typical Pearce memory. For a man who accumulated 78 England caps and played 401 times for Nottingham Forest, a player renowned for his ferocity and application, he is remarkably self-effacing.
And, to the delight of the overwhelmingly Forest-supporting crowd gathered in Mansfield, what he reckons was his luckiest turn came in 1985 when he was signed by Brian Clough to play for the club. His Clough stories were many and varied. Most of them, tellingly, seemed to have the speaker as the butt of the joke. Like the occasion he had just arrived at the City Ground and Clough, recalling that his new full-back had until recently made his living as an electrician, asked him if he might take a look at his wife’s iron, which wasn’t working.
“I took it home, took it apart and realised that the element had gone,” Pearce explained. “Really, there wasn’t any point repairing it, so I told the boss it would be cheaper and easier if he simply bought her a new one. When I told him, he just took the iron off me and didn’t say anything. Anyway, I then walked into the dressing room for the first time, sat down next to John Robertson, looked round at all these amazing players who had won the European Cup, thinking ‘blimey I don’t belong here’.
“And the boss comes in. He’s holding the iron. And he announces to the assembled team: ‘We’ve just signed a new full-back who reckons he is a skilled electrician. But when I asked him to repair my Barbara’s iron, he couldn’t. Gentlemen, I regret to tell you we have signed a fraud’. That was my introduction to the Forest dressing room.”
“It was a short conversation,” Pearce suggested. “He called me into his office and said: ‘I see you’re in the England squad, do you think you’re good enough?’ So I said: ‘I’m not sure boss’. And he replied: ‘Well I am. You’re not. Now ---- off’.”
In a sense it was no wonder Pearce was so clearly enjoying this visit to his past. Because recent times have been far from kind to him. In March last year he was taken off an international flight unconscious after suffering heart arrhythmia. Then in October his son Harley, an agricultural entrepreneur, was killed when the tractor he was driving crashed in a country lane in Gloucestershire. It is impossible to imagine Pearce’s devastation.
#sport
source
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