Whatever Happened to Billy Parks

Sir Alf picked three strikers: Channon, Chivers and Clarke. They would score, because the Polish goalie was a clown.

And Billy Parks was on the bench.

Billy Parks: the best of all of them; the most natural, the most beautiful, the most easily distracted, as he carried the immense weight of his talent on his slender shoulders.

The Polish Clown saved from Chivers.

The Polish Clown saved from Currie.

The Polish Clown saved from Clarke, then Channon, then Channon again.

Then. Then. Then. Norman Hunter didn’t tackle Lato, the Polish midfielder. Norman Hunter, who normally took bites out of human legs, who never let anyone past him, missed the tackle and Lato played it through to Domarski who sent it tamely past Shilton. They weren’t winning. They were losing.

Attack.

The Polish Clown saved from Chivers and Channon and Clarke and Hunter and Bell.

Then Clarke scored a penalty. But that wouldn’t be enough. They had to win.

And Billy Parks sat on the bench. In between Kevin Keegan and Bobby Moore. His knees drawn into him against the cold, his mind wandering to the two hundred and fifty quid he’d bet on an England win.

A win that would make everything alright. A win would bring colour to the grey beige of the seventies. A win would change everything.

But the Clown saved every shot that came his way.

So Sir Alf looked to his bench. Destiny called for someone. Sir Alf looked at his bench and thought about which valiant hero would bring forth triumph. Who would forge their name in the fires of destiny. Score a bloody goal.

Billy Parks sat, cold. He avoided Sir Alf’s gaze, his mind on the barmaid from the Golden Swan whom he would pick up later in his inferno-red TR6.

Eventually, because he knew he had to, he looked up. Five minutes to go. He looked towards Sir Alf and Sir Alf looked away from him and called upon Kevin Hector. Kevin Hector would deliver the goal. Kevin Hector would make everything alright. He had scored over 100 goals for Derby County. He was reliable. We would be alright – wouldn’t we?

England got a corner. Tony Currie swung it in. For once, the Clown was nowhere, he was beaten by the flight of the ball. The ball fell on to the head of Kevin Hector. This was his chance. This was his chance. This was his destiny. He headed it towards the goal. The Clown was beaten.

Kevin Keegan and Bobby Moore rose up from the bench. Billy Parks didn’t move.

The ball went towards the goal. Just a ball heading through time and space. It means nothing. It means absolutely everything. All England has to do is win. One goal would do it.

The ball left Kevin Hector’s head and went towards the goal-line. Everyone stood up, everyone waited for the goal, everyone waited for the triumph, for the tension to be broken, for everything to be alright. But it wasn’t a goal. The net didn’t bulge. A Polish defender kicked it off the line.

Keegan and Moore sat down again. Sir Alf sat down again. Parksy looked towards the crowd. The mass of grey faces. Kevin Hector’s destiny was fulfilled. The man who missed the chance.

If only things had been different.

Perhaps they could have been.

Perhaps they could be.

(Taken, in part, from the little known, but highly acclaimed, 1977 biography of Billy Parks, Parksy: The Lost Genius of Upton Park, by veteran Sunday Times football journalist, Philip Clarence.)

1 (#udf1a4d3f-a94d-5ad4-bdfe-1a7d25e3c762)

There are two bar stools on the small makeshift stage.

One for me, and one for my whisky tumbler. The crowd like that. A little visual joke, just to break the ice, just to make them relaxed. I’ve been doing that for years.

I’m sixty-odd now. I still tell people I’m fifty-eight, but with the bloody internet and Wiki-whatsit, every bastard knows that I was born in 1948, which makes me, well, sixty-odd.

Christ, sixty-odd? How did that happen? How did the years crumble away so bloody quickly? Sixty-odd, but still in good nick I reckon; like a well-preserved Dodo, rendered ageless in a glass cage by the blurred images of my youth that I know the crowd prefer to keep in their memories: Sunday afternoons with Brian Moore; Saturday nights with Jimmy Hill after Parkinson with a cup of tea; Peter Jones’s dulcet Welsh tones; Harold Wilson: Ford Capris; the Yorkshire bloody Ripper. It’s all up there in flock wallpaper purple with me somewhere in the midst of it making my way down the wing at Upton Park or the Lane.

Sixty-odd now. Still got all my hair though – well most of it – even if the happy blond is rudely interrupted by the odd bit of dirty grey. I’ll admit that, but, hey, I am sixty-odd.

I smile at the crowd. There are about twelve of them here. A few more are by the bar getting a round in before I start. I don’t blame them. This is a drinking afternoon. Drink’s part of it, of course it is.

They look at me and I know that they don’t care about the deep black ridges under my eyes, or this suspicious purple brown spot that has recently appeared on my cheek. I smile again, with my eyes twinkling just as they remember and my teeth glistening like a Hollywood starlet (courtesy of a bit of work I had done a couple of years ago using the last of my testimonial money). I am still capable of lighting up a room, still capable of sending a full-back the wrong way.

I am Billy Parks.

I lift the cheap whisky tumbler, neat, of course, and drink it. That’s for them. They expect it. It’s part of the legend.

The last of the drinkers take their seats and I notice the poster on the wall above the bar, handwritten in black marker pen proclaiming:

SPORTSMAN’S LUNCH AT THE ANCHOR,

This Tuesday, 14th March, 1pm

Former West Ham, Spurs and England Legend, BILLY ‘PARKSY’ PARKS.

Ticket £5 (includes free pint of Foster’s)

(Samantha and her Boa will be back next week)

Bless ’em.

They had cheered when I came on to the stage, ‘Parksy, Parksy, Parksy,’ they had chanted. Drink helps all of us.

I wave in a quiet understated way and they smile and sit back in expectation of an hour’s drinking and a good laugh. I wonder how many of them have actually seen me play? But that doesn’t matter; they all know the stories, and that is what they’re here for – the stories and the brief journey into a world they all feel they know and belong to.

I like to think that I don’t disappoint; hell, I’ve been telling the same stories for twenty-odd years.

‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Good to see that so many of you have used your day release from Parkhurst to be with me today.’

They laugh. I knew they would.

I go into my spiel and ignore the two fat City-boy types who are standing at the bar, talking loudly, probably about money; I even ignore the bloody fruit machine by the exit that, for some reason known only to the evil misguided bleeder who designed it, lights up like tracer fire every ten minutes and plays the opening bars from Coronation Street at top volume. I’ve told Alan, I don’t know how many times, to turn the bloody thing off when I’m on stage.

I tell them football stories, because that is what they’ve come to hear. I tell them about the characters of my era – proper characters, true lions of another better time, long passed over into the realm of myths and legends with the telling and retelling of tales. I tell them of their drunken exploits, their sexual exploits, the fights, the put-downs, the fast cars, the funny stories that made them godlike and mortal at the same time. I tell them of the managers who were hard bastards, and lunatic chairmen. I tell them about magical footballers, old friends, whose very names conjure up colours and tastes and sounds and sensations and people long gone: Georgie Best, Rodney Marsh, Chopper Harris, Norman Hunter, Alan Hudson, Charlie George, Frankie Worthington – legends each and every one of them.

I tell them about a tot of rum before kick off and a sneaky fag at half-time, fish and chips on the bus on the way back from Newcastle and the time Terry Neill got so angry at Loftus Road that he put his foot through the changing room door and missed the second half as a couple of stewards and our kit man tried to pull his leg out. I tell them that they were good honest pros, though. Good. Honest. Pros. And the crowd fills itself with lager and scampi and smiles and feels, for a few minutes, closer to that time, closer to the legends, and that feeling that if there had been any justice it would have been them. I know that they all think that. I’ve always known it. It’s the way they look at you. You were one of the lucky ones, Parksy. Luck: it’s got nothing to do with luck, son.