The footballer setting record straight after 46 years

The footballer setting record straight after 46 years ByJeff BrownWarning: This article contains details of racially offensive language and behaviour "I waited 46 years to break my silence, because I didn't think anyone would listen. I thought I'd take these stories to my maker." Rumour had it Roly Gregoire had become a bus driver, a milkman or even a DJ. But what really happened to Sunderland's first black player was too painful for him to talk about until now. His first-team debut for the club on 2 January 1978 should have been the proudest day of his life, but hours after the 19-year-old's assist in a 2-0 win over Hull City, the racist abuse started. By the time injury cut short his career two years later, he had faced so much racism that he could not bear to watch football for many years. He moved away, changed his name and until now has not felt able to share his story. "Sometimes I wish I'd never played football, to tell you the truth, because some of the pain, I can still feel it," Gregoire, now 67, tells BBC Look North in an emotional interview. "Talking to you, I can feel myself welling up at times but I'm trying to contain myself because I want to get this across so the supporters can understand where I'm coming from." Image source, Sunderland Echo/Sunderland Antiquarian SocietyImage caption, Roly Gregoire (holding pen) signed for Sunderland on 5 November 1977 Signed from Fourth Division Halifax Town on Bonfire Night 1977, for a fee of £5,000, Roland Gregoire – a quick, direct and confident striker known to everyone as Roly - had caught the eye with a hat-trick against the Wearsiders' reserves, earlier that season. Gregoire settled into digs on the sea front in Seaburn, delighted and surprised that it was the very Sunderland suburb much loved by him and his family because of their annual Sunday School outings there from Bradford. Sunderland manager Jimmy Adamson opened the new year by handing him the number seven shirt for the Second Division game against Hull City at Roker Park, and the teenager responded by setting up a goal for club legend Gary Rowell in a 2-0 win. It was a landmark moment for Gregoire which was ruined, forever, by what happened next. He remembers: "After the game I was having a drink with some supporters, and one of them asked: 'Were your brothers at the game today?' I said: 'Yes, five of them.' And he said: 'They're fast!' But someone interrupted, and I didn't get the chance to ask what he meant. "Later, I rang one of my brothers to make sure they'd got home OK. He said they'd been coming to find me at the club hostel where I was staying, but on the way someone threw half a brick at them and shouted … they used the N-word, I'll put it like that. "It was a group of men - a lynch mob - who chased them through the park near the ground. "They were just teenagers. They were so scared – but somehow they managed to escape. It was despicable. Seaburn had meant so much to us, but from that day on my mother, 'til the day she died, never, ever spoke of Sunderland again." Image source, Halifax Town FCImage caption, Roly Gregoire (bottom row, second from right) started his career at Halifax Town, making five appearances for the then fourth-tier side before his move to second-tier Sunderland Still a town at the time - it wasn't granted city status until 1992 - Sunderland was a different world to the one in which Gregoire had grown up. Born in 1958 in the Toxteth area of Liverpool to Windrush Generation parents from the Caribbean island of Dominica, he was raised in Bradford, another multi-cultural city. By contrast, according to the Census figures, barely 1% of a Sunderland population approaching 300,000 in 1981 was of African-Caribbean origin. A fifth of the League's 92 clubs had yet to sign a black player by 1978, the year Nottingham Forest's Viv Anderson became the first to claim a senior England cap. "I knew only one other black fellow in Sunderland, he was at the polytechnic," remembers Gregoire. "Wayne Entwistle [a white striker, who signed the same day in a £30,000 deal from Bury] shared digs with me for a while and was a good guy, but it was quite a lonely time." Gregoire cites the club's 1973 FA Cup-winning captain Bobby Kerr and experienced midfielder Mick Docherty as two colleagues who made him feel welcome, in a debut season where he made eight first-team appearances. But he felt the dressing room attitude towards him change in the summer of 1978, with a couple of notable incidents on a pre-season tour of Kenya. "After one game, all these children ran on to the pitch and went up to one of our players and gathered round him," he says. "But when they'd gone he came to me and wiped his hands on my shirt. I thought that was disgusting. "It was like he thought those children had disease, and wanted to wipe it on me! Why me? Because I'm black, is that why?" Later, at a post-match reception at the home of a wealthy local white family, the team lined up to mee

The footballer setting record straight after 46 years

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