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“Every professional footballer,” he told me, “should hold their head in shame.”īy now, the facts of Fashanu’s early life are fairly well known, at least in outline. When I spoke with Ambrose Mendy, the sports agent who represented the ill-fated footballer for several years, he was unequivocal on this matter. Too little thought is given to the choices that individuals made, or did not make, to help Fashanu when he needed them most. When a life implodes, as Fashanu’s did, too little thought is given to the astonishing invisible pressures that are constantly exerted upon it. It is grim to think that the name of the first Black footballer to command a transfer fee of £1 million, a sum paid in 1981 by Nottingham Forest to take him from Norwich City, is mostly remembered as a cautionary tale – a warning that sport is no place for gay male players. Instead of accelerating into the distance, untouched and undefeated, he found himself torn to the ground by overwhelming forces. Yet Fashanu was painfully and utterly subject to the laws of footballing gravity. Like ‘Oumuamua, he bewitched every expert who observed him, soaring into the uppermost reaches of the English game with a spectacular strike against one of the finest teams in Europe. Like ‘Oumuamua, Fashanu was gone from each new place just as quickly as he had arrived there: in his nineteen years as a footballer, he played for twenty-two clubs, an existence not so much nomadic as frantic.
For, just like that ageless voyager, Fashanu was elusive, fast-moving and ultimately unknowable.
Sometimes, when I think of Justin Fashanu – the first openly gay footballer to play in the men’s professional game, and still the only Black one – I think of ‘Oumuamua. Never before had an inter-stellar visitor passed through our region of space, and so, when astronomers came to name this mysterious immigrant, they called it ‘Oumuamua, which roughly translates from Hawaiian as “a messenger from afar arriving first”. The object, travelling too fast to be trapped by the gravitational pull of any star system, tore through our Solar System and then surged back out into the open ocean of the universe. In 2017, much to the excitement of scientists, an unknown object emerged from the depths of the cosmos and cut a majestic arc across the night sky.