SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THESE . . .

A fifteen-year-old Craig Johnston was cleaning out the sauna of Middlesborough Football Club. Jack Charlton came into the bath and started talking to another member of staff. “The Roo’s no good,” Charlton said. “Get him on the next plane home.”

Craig “Roo” Johnston grew up on the northern shores of New South Wales, Australia. “It was founded by the people from the North East of England,” he states. “And they say they brought two things with them: coal mining and football. So, whereas the rest of the state was very rugby league and cricket oriented, the thing in the North East was football, and that’s why Dad grew up playing soccer, and idolised the heroes of England, and when he was old enough came to Scotland and played for Dundee United in the reserve team. And he always vowed that one day I’d be a soccer player.”

Driven on by his father, the young boy had a dream. He trained, played, got a kick on the leg, and ended up in hospital. The kick hadn’t been much. It was what it unmasked – osteomyelitis, a form of polio which attacks the bone marrow. Twice the doctors would be on the verge of amputating his left leg. Twice he would be told that he would never be able to play soccer again. But the boy was stubborn.

“They would be having me in for more tests and more bad news,” he now recounts, “and I’m saying, yeah, but I’ll play soccer in England one day.” Doctor’s orders were that he never play again competitively, so he began to train and train. “I went in for athletics, cricket, surfing, golf – all the things where you don’t have bodily contact,” he says. “Slowly I got better at all of them. I just had to have as much sport as possible, morning to dusk, nothing but sport, nothing but sport. And I was good at everything but sort of master at none.”

One day, when he was about twelve, he took the two-and-a-half hour train journey to Sydney with a friend, so that they could skateboard the Sydney hills. They had other things on their minds too. “There was all these posters up in Kings Cross for sex movies,” he recounts, “so we wanted to find out what this sex business was all about. So, we went looking for the sex movies. We ended up in this dodgy cinema where there was this film on called The Giants of Brazil. And it was about Pele, Tostao, Rivelino, Gerson, Garrincha, all the greats of the great Brazilian teams.

“I was transfixed,” he recalls. “I couldn’t believe that people could play a game like this. And that one vision of Pele when he scored and he jumped up and he punched the air. And it freeze-framed on that. And I knew from that moment that that was what I wanted to be. That gave me a dream; something to focus on.

“I watched it four or five times on the loop, so much that I missed the train home. So, when I got home the day after, I never got a bigger hiding in all my life.” But it didn’t matter, the dream had a focus. (Twenty years later, he would tell this story when helping launch Pele’s autobiography in Australia. Pele, who was in the audience, would come up to him after and ask: “By the way, did you ever get to see that sex movie?”)

Middlesborough had just toured Australia and the fourteen-year-old New South Wales boy wrote to them asking them for an apprenticeship. “They said that I could come across if I paid my own fare,” he states. “So, Mum and Dad sold their house and moved to a smaller place to finance me coming across.”

It was far from easy. At first he was lonely, homesick – and a terrible player by English standards. So when Jack Charlton said he had to go, you could hardly blame him. After he'd heard the sentence, the fifteen-year-old boy remained standing in the sauna, long after everyone had left.

“And what do you do when you’re a fifteen-year-old kid? You start crying and stuff like that. But then there was the determination to prove them wrong. Because, again, I’d had this lonely existence before, with only the ball as company, which in a way was very comforting. So, I went back to the brick wall philosophy. And it was an isolation that was rewarding. Because, believe me, it’s like doing anything, the more you play with this wonderfully perfect object, the ball, the more you understand its mysteries and subtleties and skills. So, in a way what Jack Charlton said was the best thing that ever happened to me.

“Because after that initial sort of shock, you’re staring at the world. And you’re either going to put your tail between your legs and pack it in, and go home as a cry baby and a failure. Back to your parents and the people who were expecting good things off you. Or you say: I’m going to do this. Against all the odds, I’m going to do it. So, you set your alarm and get down there two hours before everyone else, and leave two hours after everyone is gone.

“It’s hard. I found that the easiest thing to do was to say silly things like: I’m going to be a better player tonight than I was this morning. To put a cross on the wall and say: Hey, I’m not going home until I hit that cross ten times from twenty yards. There were times when I packed it in early, only training two hours instead of four or five. I would sit in front of the television, thinking: What a wimp for not doing it! But the times I did push through that pain barrier and the time barrier… Everyone else is sitting watching television, sipping tea, in a warm environment in front of the fire, and you’d be there with the rain pouring down. You’d scream and shout at yourself but your mind was focused.

“It’s like a Rocky movie. But the Rocky inspirational bit lasts as long as the ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ soundtrack. So, after that two-and-a-half minutes, you’re still left there in the cold. It’s easy to be spurred on for two-and-a-half minutes, but you’ve got to maintain that intense committment over two-and-a-half years. And that was the reality of what I was doing. I would get up, thinking it’s a Rocky movie. Then after ten minutes you’d be bloody bored. But you have to see past the boredom and go through the mental anguish. You have to trick yourself mentally and physically. And then do it again and again. Every day.”

The payoff came when the seventeen-year-old Craig Johnston becoming the youngest player ever to play for Middlesborough in the F.A. Cup. Things were really looking up. Then down again.

“In a way, the change was too dramatic,” he states, “because I had done irreparable damage to my cartilages in my knee and in my pelvis. Because I was actually training on a cement carpark floor. So, between seventeen and nineteen I was basically out with an injury that could have wrecked my whole career. Because the pelvis had eroded away. So perhaps it was too dramatic, the rise.”

Lots of therapy and strong belief saw him through. He was back, playing well, and in 1980 Liverpool came calling. “For a week I was the most expensive player in British football,” he remembers, laughing. However, he was small fry in a Liverpool team that would become legendary. With them he would win five League Championship medals, one European Cup Winners medal, three League Cup winners medals and one F.A. Cup Winners medal.

However, it was not the medals which were the high points of his seven years there. “The high points,” he remembers, “are still the moments of camaraderie, team spirit and mateship that only a bunch of focused athletes can have. When the pressure is that intense that you burst into laughter almost. Or someone takes the piss and the whole lot comes tumbling down in terms of tension.

“It’s not an individual glory. You don’t hang onto: Hey, I won an F.A. Cup Winners medal, or the Double. The Double was an important thing but it wasn’t the actual medals but something ridiculous like, ah, we had to win twenty three odd unbeaten games and we did to win the Double. And it was done with mates that you really liked. It was really the collective effort, rather than an individual thing which made that era so special for me.”

Piss-taking is a good cure for expanding egos, and it was needed in abundance in a Liverpool dressing room packed with tremendous talent. “Souness was an important part of that as a player,” he states. “I’m not sure that that transposed as a manager – I’m not in a position to say. But he was an important part of all of that. Bringing everybody, including himself, back down to earth. And Terry McDermott, Dalglish, Hansen. When you rattle the names off it’s fucking mind-blowing. Rush, Lawrenson . . .”

Who was the fairest of them all? “In terms of the most gifted,” he states, “and I know I get a lot of strange looks when I say it, but I honestly believe that the most gifted player I saw, day-in day-out, was John Barnes. He still is. Even more than Kenny, Souness and Rush. In terms of relationship with the ball, doing things that are quite unnatural, Barnsie was it. One thing that’s always perplexed me about football is why John Barnes is not showing what he’s capable of. I still hope to see it, especially for England.

“But in terms of attitude,” he goes on, “I think that Dalglish is the best professional I’ve ever seen or had anything to do with, in every way. Commitment, mind-set, passion, ah, everything. Dalglish is the man. And that’s why everybody talks about him with such reverence.”

The dream could come so far. “There’s a thing called football intelligence,” he says candidly, “and I lacked it. You’ve either got football intelligence or you haven’t. People like Hoddle and Rush, they have this brain on the field. You know, I was nick-named the ‘headless chicken’, because I would run round like a headless chicken. But I understood that my game was about energy and enthusiasm, and about going and getting the ball and giving it to the players who could play. Making a big run to create space so that they could have another option. I was a grafter and provider.”

Was the dream fading? “No,” he states, “I think that the day I first played First Division football, the dream was realised. And I think scoring a goal in the F.A. Cup Final against Everton was the second part of the dream. But no, the dream was to be as good as Pele, so I fell well short of that. So, I didn’t achieve the dream. But at least I can walk away from it content that I tried my best. That it wasn’t through lack of trying that I didn’t make it. And that’s why it was easy to quit.”

The decision to quit soccer at the peak of his career was also a result of a serious accident which happened to his sister, Fay. While on holiday she had fallen into a coma as a result of a gas leak in her apartment. “The accident to Fay made me wake up,” he remembers. “There are times where you have get a grip and see what’s happening. Fay was very much like me. She was full of energy and enthusiasm, and to see her lying in a hospital, basically incoherent, was awful. Makes you wake up. And I did. “I woke up and said: Why am I doing this? Up and down the motorway. Why am I in England? Why am I playing soccer? Did I love it? And I said: Well, I don’t love it absolutely anymore, like I used to. And it was just the realisation that life was too short. The thing is I didn’t leave Liverpool, I’ve had a lot of people say, you left Liverpool but I left football. I went back to my family. I didn’t have a job in mind. I was qualified at nothing. I left school at fourteen. I had nothing planned, nothing at all.

“When you’re a kid,” he expands, “this game is a real game. It’s more unconditional. You play it unconditionally. But ten years later, having played every day almost, it’s not such a wondrous pleasure all the time. And there’s pressures imposed on you as a professional, especially playing for Liverpool. Especially a professional who is a grafter. I think playing soccer if you’re John Barnes or Kenny Dalglish is a far more enjoyable experience than playing soccer if you’re Craig Johnston. For me, it was very hard work. I’d love to have been one of those players that strolled about the pitch — don’t have to run — they let their feet do the talking. But I used to come off after every game feeling totally wrecked. And if somone said, ‘Hey, was that fun?’ I'd have to say, ‘Let me get my breath back and I’ll tell you’. But people will see this and say that it’s still better than working for a living. But I had the option and I said: Okay, I’ll go and work for a living. I’m not putting down being a footballer, but just to this individual, it just wasn’t this barrel of laughs that everybody thinks it is. So I walked away.”

Today, he feels that soccer has lost a lot of its charm. “I think soccer can be very boring,” he states. The World Cup in Italy in 1990 was a good example. And I think that a lot of soccer is quite boring. Because I think that people have got faster and fitter, and defensive tactics have come more into play. And I think that gifted players can be marked out of the game by workhorses and defensive players. And football is in the entertainment business.

“If I’m a modern consumer, there’s any number of entertainment avenues — TV, film, rock concerts — that I’d go and watch first, before I’d watch football. Saying that, I think Sky have realised that. I think what Sky have done for football is brought it back into the entertainment arena and it’s much more enjoyable and watchable for that. And I think that FIFA has changed some of the rules for the better on the side of skilful players, and less time wasting, and less of the bollocks and the crap that goes on.”

Having quit soccer he was jobless. So, he thought about trying out his hand as a rapper. After all, while at Liverpool, he had been involved in a number of charting football rap tracks. (He wrote the ‘Anfield Rap’, which was No. 3 in the charts, and the rap section for New Order’s No. 1, ‘World In Motion’, England’s 1990 World Cup song.)

“Growing up,” he says, “apart from the water, the things were music and sport. Music was my release. When MTV came to Europe I was one of the first ones to get a dish. It cost a stupid amount of money back then. It was as big as the side of the house this satellite dish. And then when the rap thing came along, I just thought that this is the best music I’d ever heard, having sat through all that synthesiser fucking pop stuff that dominated so much of the British charts. I’m a rock ‘n’ roller from way back in terms of my musical tastes. And when I heard rap and this big heavy thump, I thought, this is it. So, football songs are awful and I did an even more awful one called the ‘Anfield Rap’. But at least it was an attempt at rap.

“So, when I packed in, I had to have a source of income. So I went to New York to Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s and Run DMC’s producer, Herbie Lovebug. I had a few ideas, and basically got the Hollywood shuffle, you know, just got the real run-around for two or three months. But I just sort of chilled out in New York, man, drinking beers and saying: Hey! I’m free! I don’t have to train. I’m not answerable to any coaches telling me what I can do/can’t do. The feeling of freedom was immense.”

“About a month or six weeks after I’d retired,” he recalls, “I was in Central Park, watching a fella play Neil Young songs. And it was a really sunny day, and I sat on a big crate of beer, joking and laughing with a couple of musician friends. Two Irish guys walked past. And one of the guys said to his mate: ‘That’s Craig Johnston.’ The other guy said: ‘Don’t be stupid, he’s playing in the Charity Shield today against Everton’.

“And the first bloke said: ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right. But Jesus it sure looks like him’.”

It was quite a change alright, to be hanging loose in Central Park. However, a new dream was needed, and if not a dream, something to focus on – and more pointedly, something to make a few quid out of. He got a job compering and producing a weekly segment for Australian television’s Wide World of Sport. He did it his way.

“I had so much enthusiasm,” he states, “and nothing was too hard to do. You know, if I wanted a helicopter shot, I would sort of bribe a helicopter pilot. If I wanted a two-camera shot, I would go to a sports company and say: Well, if I put a Reebok t-shirt on this famous sporting person, will you pay for an extra camera? I couldn’t half-do things. Like every weekly set was like a major Hollywood production to me because I wanted it to be so good. And I think it annoyed so many people at the station who had a formula for what a sports story should be. And after a year, basically this guy came and said: ‘Look, you’re fired’. And I said: ‘Tell me why?’ And he said: ‘I don’t think you’ve got any feel for the television industry.’

“I knew that he was wrong because I knew that people in Australia were seeing my pieces and they liked them. I was heartbroken. But my attitude was that I knew better than this guy, who was basically a bureaucrat and I’ve always hated bureaucrats. People that have no talent but are great at licking up to other more powerful people. I’ve always hated that, and I thought: I do know what people want to see. So, I went off and created The Main Event.”

The Main Event was a family game show which won prime time billing on Australian, British and French television. It made Craig Johnston a lot of money, money he would use to develop his next dream: The Predator football boot.

“During that time the only real involvement I had with football was coaching kids,” he remembers. “I actually loved it because I tapped back into that enthusiasm I had for the game as a kid. Quite often I’d be driving along, and I’d stop to watch kids play. I’d start thinking back about how good it was. And have to pinch myself and say: I’m outta that now. And whenever I watched English football on television, I used to get a bit of a cold shiver, because that used to be me.

“So, I used to tour around Australia coaching kids, and wanting to do the ultimate coaching video, which I never really got to. But I will; I’m working on it right now. But the kids were saying all these things to me, about problems with controlling the ball and hitting it properly. Basically, because I always had problems addressing a ball, and sending it from A-to-B correctly, I have a better understanding of telling kids how to do that, than would a naturally gifted player. Because they would say: You just do it. But I mechanically could break down the elements of getting a ball from A-to-B.

“So, three or four things tweaked the idea into place. I never set out really to make the perfect soccer boot. It just sort of happened as a natural consequence, along the way.”

The journey to make the ‘perfect’ boot would take several years, much travel and incredible effort and belief. “Definitely there were times when it seemed like it wasn’t going to work, definitely,” he says. “But then, so did the television career, so did the football career. They all seemed like lost causes more often than not. It’s true. But if there’s a kernel of truth and realism there, you keep going back to that. And you go to it, and you say: Is it real? Is it real? Yeah, it’s fucking real. Then it’s worth hanging onto. Whereas if you say: It’s not real, it’s just a figment, then you leave it alone. ‘Cause there’s too much else to do.

“I knew the steps to doing it because the steps are like: How do you become a better soccer player? It’s a feeling thing, but there’s basic laws to doing something. And again I knew that I had to have a patent for Adidas and a working prototype. I knew for The Main Event I had to have a pilot that was filmed, that was published. So, people can’t steal your ideas. So, there are basic laws to making anything. Maybe it’s a natural instinct for me. It’s a transition from an idea or a thought or a dream into reality. And it’s that in-between thing that’s the interesting thing. And to me the logical thing; the hardest work and the logical thing. And as the book says, the journeying is often far more interesting than the arriving.”

The Adidas Predator was launched this year, selling out on its first production run. It is a radical departure in boot design, incorporating at its front a ridged-like rubber structure which gives better control of the ball, while increasing the power and the swerve the ball can be given when kicked.

Another Johnston innovation is a computer-controlled minibar for hotel rooms. Rather than having to run daily checks, this new system — called The Butler — will mean that when you take out a can of Bud from the minibar, it'll be automatically billed to your account.

Then there’s the soccer coaching video, which may also become a film and a cartoon. And there’s Hard Drive, a show which combines sport, music and technology for a MTV-type audience. It’s all go . . .

Craig Johnston is driven, incredibly driven. What drives him? Is it the fuel of the outsider? “I think I’ll always be an outsider,” he says, “even at home in Australia, because of the experience I’ve got abroad, I find it difficult at times to fit in. But the water is home. When I see waves and surf and the ocean in Australia, that’s home.”

He’s met Jack Charlton on many occasions, and they’ve shared a laugh about the “sauna” story. “When I actually played in the first team at Middlesborough,” he states, “the headline was: ‘Crippled Aussie Kid Makes It.’ It was not: ‘Talented Australian Boy Finally Comes Good’. The tough part was then. I didn’t go and buy a gun and shoot Jack’s head off, you know (laughs). Because that’s not the way I grew up. I grew up thinking that anything’s possible if you work hard enough at it. And even if you don’t get there, at least you can be happy with yourself.”

What would he like to be remembered for? “As someone who tried. I mean, if someone remembers that golden period with Liverpool, and he remembers apart from the Rushs and the Souness’ and the Dalglishs, if he remembers this guy who tried his bollocks off to help these guys further this great institution, that makes me happy. Just a working class guy that paid his money on the Kop.”

And someone who dreams? He nods. “I had a big meeting the other day with a multinational company. And apparently when I went out of the room, the boss said: ‘Ah, this guy’s just a dreamer’. And I knew he was thinking that about me. I dream.”

He dreams. Then he goes and makes reality.