Melee in The Hammers Pub

It would be rather foolhardy for me to draw on the same breath of ‘sports air’ as Joseph Kabuleta and Aldrine Nsubuga, who hone their fine sports knowledge in the back pages of Sunday Vision, and who know a great deal more about football than I. Give me a red card for it, but rules are meant to be broken – not so?

I do like my football though I am not as diehard about it as I was in the 80s. In terms of English football, then, there was no Premier League. Rather, the elite teams like Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool were in Division I, and the divisions ran down to Division IV and into the GM Vauxhall League.

The first match went to watch was between Bradford City and Sunderland FC. I only went to the game not, because I was a Bradford City or Sunderland supporter (though am sure a certain Sira Kiwana did support Sunderland because he is the only Ugandan on record, known to have lived in that drab town), but because Gary and Keith who were close friends came from Sunderland and were hard fans.

I have to point out to Kabuleta and Nsubuga that English football in the 80s was a far cry from what it is today as regards the fans. As a fan you had to be careful. Milwall FC had one of the most notorious fan clubs as did Chelsea, Spurs, Arsenal and West Ham for example. Pitch invasions by fans during or at the end of a match were a common Saturday occurrence as were stabbings, beatings and other acts of violence. When it came to stabbings, if you weren’t stabbed, then you would get neatly sliced with a carpenters Stanley knife or a razor blade and into the wound, a business that read: “You have been visited by The Milwall Supporters Club” would be inserted.

Getting back, I never knew what to expect about going to a game until we got to Bradford. A phalanx of police on horseback and in full riot gear met us at the train station and like the Nazi’s did when the hapless Jews were led into the Auschwitz gas chambers, we were literally frogmarched to the stadium.

Inside the stadium, it was not a place for the fainthearted, nuns, prima donna babes, homosexuals, lesbians, Jews, Pakistani’s, the disabled, women with big boobs, blacks, Chinese... for a good number of fans were fiery skinheads, anarchists, neo-Nazi’s, anti-establishment and racist who could scare the pants off battled hardened bush war veterans like David Tinyefunza, Salim Saleh and Pecos Kutesa.

When they spoke, every other word was the most vile swear word. They would pee into beer cans and hurl them at rival supporters. They would grab at the girls boobs and knock over the people in wheelchairs while asking if the Nazi’s had botched the experiment on them hence they were wheelchair confined.

A few years later I was in London in an Arsenal jacket complete with the sponsor’s logo – JVC, going across the back. I was off to West Ham to meet a friend – not to go for a football match, rather to hang out at his new flat. I’d never been to West Ham so of course I got lost. And since it was the era before cell phones, the norm then, was to find the nearest landmark like a pub, make a call from there and have a pint while you wait to be picked up.

I did just that except I hadn’t bothered to look up at the sign of the pub before I walked in. It was, The Hammer’s – the official West Ham supporters’ pub. Like a lamb to the slaughter, I stood there nodding as the barman asked me if I was sure I was in the right pub. Looking round, there was nothing alarming about them. Ok a couple of skinheads, some builder looking chaps, and men with scarred faces and black eyes.

As the pint went down, I looked up at the framed pictures on the wall and the more I looked at them, the more I began to realise that they had a theme – football and West Ham FC. And I am standing in their pub wearing an Arsenal jacket? Duh!

By the time the first beer glass and barstool torpedoed across the bar, it was too late to do anything. The melee by the door was on and while I thought they were all fighting to get a piece of my sorry black self, they were not. Three diehards from Milwall across the Thames, had raided the pub which was a worse sin than I, walking in with Arsenal colours.

As the police sirens wailed out of the distance, everyone scattered as did I. Weeks later I heard talk of an Arsenal fan who had walked into The Hammers, and had the nerve to walk around the pub with a pint in hand while looking at the framed pictures and that a massive fight had then broken out. Everybody wanted to know who the brave fan was. I too wanted to know.

As time went on and the more I heard the story, the more I felt I belonged to it – like I had written the script. It was me! I was the brave Arsenal fan, that one night in the pub, I came clean and confessed to which, you could almost hear a pin drop as people looked at me like I had lost the plot.

Worse, my stunt was claimed by a Rasta who, for the next few months didn’t have to buy himself a drink in the pub, and who sat there fondling and smooching the fine babes that I was supposed to have been fondling and smooching, drinking the beers that people were supposed to be buying for me and telling the story I was supposed to have been telling. I wonder if I can still sue him or has the statute of limitations expired? – Rita? (she’s the Vision’s legal brain).