Raider: Not running but dancing

Our books editor Jon Gower explains how a Welsh rugby fan ended up writing a book about an American footballer.

I well remember the first time I met Raymond Chester. My wife Sarah and I were celebrating an upgrade on our room in a San Francisco hotel as it meant we had more room to hide chocolate eggs for our daughters to hunt down.

We’d promised them that the Easter Bunny wouldn’t forget about them just because they were 4,500 miles away from home in Cardiff.

Sarah comes from Oakland, California so every trip to the West Coast involved family visits. On this particular occasion we were going to be meeting one of her sisters, Martha along with her partner Raymond.

He, Raymond Chester turned out be an utterly charming man – open, engaging and a born storyteller, although I do also recall that shaking hands with him actually hurt.

It suggested he might sometimes forget the difference between a person’s grip and clamping down on a pair of dumbbells. Or at least that’s what it felt like.

Physical strength

Now in his seventies here was a man of great physical strength, and he still diligently worked out in the gym, cycled for fun over the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco, showed his physical mettle. Somewhere in the conversation he mentioned he’d been a footballer.

To me this meant what we call American football, which conjured up images of human wrecking balls smashing into each other at speed. It was hard to reconcile this with the gentle man in front of me, smiling broadly as he shared his stories.

I’ve always been fascinated by American culture, reading my way through the work of the literary heavyweights with great delight.

I have been lucky enough to interview some of them, luminaries such as Richard Ford and Gore Vidal, the latter teasingly suggested that he had family roots in Wales and that his first name was a corruption of my surname, Gower thus becoming Gore.

And then I had the great good fortune to spend a day with the one literary hero whose work I had read in its entirety, John Updike, who turned out to be what all such heroes should be, namely gracious to a fault.

And of course, there was the music, spanning from Springsteen to Kendrick Lamar not forgetting the perfect pop singles of Motown or one of my all-time favourites, The Doobie Brothers. So, despite growing up in Wales part of my head was always in the States, delighting in its diversity and its energy.

I then married a Californian and the connection duly deepened.

Convivially chatting with Raymond was initially a bit like the time I spent with Updike, even though what I knew about the NFL and what we call American football on our side of the pond could be written down on the back of a postage stamp.

A small postage stamp at that. One you’d look at under a microscope to make out the detail. I’m a rugby fan, one who reasonably expects to have a heart attack at the exact moment Wales scores a try against the old, old enemy England.

Enthralled 

But when Raymond started telling me about the length of his career, outlined his philosophy and started to recall certain key moments in both his playing and personal history this die-hard, life-long rugby fan found myself completely enthralled, just as I was in the company of the great John Updike.

Raymond had me transfixed as he told me about the 1968 game between Morgan State and Grambling, two black historical colleges who found themselves facing off at a time when America was convulsed after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

With riots on the streets and some cities literally in flames there were many who didn’t want the game to go ahead, citing the racial tension across the United States as reason enough to cancel.

Raymond recalled the importance of the match-up between Morgan State and Grambling, having no doubt whatsoever about what it represented. ‘It was probably the most significant game of my life, from a lot of standpoints.  If you set the scene for it, it was Martin Luther King, it was Bobby Kennedy, it was John Kennedy a few years before that.

The game was scheduled at Yankee Stadium and it was the first time in history that two Black Historical Colleges were going to play at that stadium, on that size stage.  And they were expecting 70,000 or 75,000 people in the stands. Then lo and behold Martin Luther King gets assassinated and then they were thinking about cancelling the game because the whole country was in chaos, just chaos.’

But the clash did go ahead and Raymond duly scored all the points as Morgan State came out the winners.

More importantly, it was a pivotal game because it led to the NFL paying more attention to Black players and started to recruit them. You could say the game helped change the colour of the game amid the convulsions of the civil rights’ movement: it was that important.

So I started to do some basic research about the game. Some very, very basic research to begin with. I bought American Football for Dummies and read it twice because I didn’t fully understand it the first time round.

But that said, and in my defence, rugby can be utterly perplexing for an NFL fan. I watched lots of footage of games, not least a sequence which showed Raymond shrugging off would-be tacklers as if they were wraiths. I thought this was an exquisite display of that self-same strength I felt that first time Raymond shook my hand but he suggested otherwise, that what was on display in that game was a fine sense of balance.

Looking at it again, and with that corrective, made me appreciate the skills on show even more. Not running but dancing. With that, I set to work.

Raider by Jon Gower is soon to be published by Calon  It is available from all good bookshops.