Who Are You Beyond Your Name?

A phone rang inside a locker, and I laughed to myself.

Four lockers away, in my gym changing room, there was a guy getting ready for work. Nothing that made me look twice. Then he pulled on a black top with CHELSEA written across the back.

I’ve been a Chelsea fan man and boy, so I said, “I like your top. Is that from the latest Chelsea range?”

“Yes,” he said. “You can get it in the Chelsea shop.”

Then I noticed everything else matched. Chelsea kit, tracksuit and rucksack. I assumed he worked in the shop.

“Do you work for Chelsea?”

“Yes. I’m one of the coaches.”

Now my ears pricked up. He explained he’d only been there just over a year and that things had become rather crazy. He was 38, and after the manager was sacked, he’d found himself leading Chelsea out at Wembley as interim manager for the FA Cup final.

Think about that for a moment.

He’d lived the dream of countless footballers and managers: leading a team out at Wembley for the final of the FA Cup, the oldest national football competition in the world.

My jaw dropped.

Calum McFarlane. I knew exactly who he was. I just hadn’t recognised him.

F••K me. The guy who’d walked out at Wembley in charge of London’s serial cup winners was standing four lockers away from me, and I’d thought he worked in the club shop.

We carried on talking, and then I did something that anybody who knows me knew I would do. I asked for his number.

I told him I’d like to write about his experience as interim manager. He said yes, so I handed him my phone.

“Dial your number.”

He did. A moment later, I heard his phone ringing inside his locker.

I smiled to myself. My son, brother and Chelsea pals would all be saying, “No way did that happen.” Well, there it was. I had the proof.

Two strangers, four lockers apart, in a gym changing room, confirming a phone number the old-fashioned way.

None of it would have happened if I’d simply got dressed and gone home.

I was 14 when I first became fascinated by Malcolm X.

I couldn’t have explained what drew me to him. There were the words, the intelligence, the defiance, the refusal to bend himself to make other people comfortable. But there was something else, something I could feel even through grainy footage recorded years before.

Presence.

Over the years, I began to recognise it in others. Not charisma exactly, because charisma can be performed. This was more visceral. It existed before the person spoke.

I met three men who possessed it in extraordinary amounts: Ken Bates, Richard Williams and Don King.

Bates once told a room of journalists, “I’m off to my lovely country home now while you go back to your hovels.” He said it with a smile, and he meant it. Williams sat in the stands at Wimbledon watching his daughters play each other in a Grand Slam final and refused to celebrate either way, because he couldn’t bear to see one of his children lose. King walked into a diner, ordered grits, eggs and bacon, pulled out his own no-salt pepper sauce, and by the time breakfast arrived he’d sold you on three ideas you hadn’t even known you wanted.

On paper they could hardly have been more different. One transformed Chelsea. One fathered and coached two of the greatest tennis players who ever lived. One became the most recognisable boxing promoter on earth.

But standing near each, I felt the same thing. Energy. Something you could feel before a word was spoken, before any assessment of the man had time to form. They occupied more space than their bodies did.

And I was in awe. I don’t want to rewrite that into something more convenient. I was absolutely in awe, and I knew I was standing in the presence of extraordinary men.

But I didn’t yield. I never have. I could feel their force without surrendering my own. I could recognise something extraordinary in another human being without making myself smaller in his presence.

For years I never thought deeply about any of this. I simply knew certain people had it.

Then last Friday, something different happened.

There was no force field, no famous face I recognised, no reason to think the bloke four lockers away had recently occupied one of the most intimidating positions in English football.

So I spoke to him.

One question became another. A conversation became an introduction. An introduction became an opportunity. And eventually, my phone made his phone ring inside a locker.

None of it required permission or an invitation. Just the balls to act rather than waiting for life to announce that something important was about to happen.

Because the interesting people don’t always arrive surrounded by an invisible force field.

Sometimes they’re simply four lockers away.

I’ve spent decades thinking about the energy certain people carry into a room. Increasingly, I’m just as interested in the energy we carry into our own lives: the willingness to remain curious, to approach, to ask another question, to be in awe without yielding, to recognise another person’s significance without diminishing our own.

Perhaps that’s why that 14-year-old boy was so mesmerised by Malcolm X. I thought I was watching a man with extraordinary presence.

Maybe, without knowing it, I was also learning something about how I wanted to show up in my own life.

More than fifty years later, I’m still showing up.

So I’ll ask you what the changing room asked me.

Who are you beyond your name?

I’m still finding out.