Rio Ferdinand--Five Star--The Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

while,’ Leon added. ‘He was so proud of her because she was so beautiful.’
    Rio dated Latifah for almost two years and he has since admitted that she broke his heart. Leon explained: ‘Rio was real serious about Latifah. Rio loves women and Latifah was a goddess, man, if you know what I mean.Latifah was the one …’ Rio’s friends say he tried to keep the romance as low-key as possible because he knew his mother would not appreciate the diversion from his school work and football ambitions.
    Sport was particularly important to Janice because she believed it would help keep her son off the streets. And Rio knew all about the temptations that lay ahead. ‘This is a tough place and, like a lot of areas, there are kids going off the rails and others trying to stick to their guns and do well for themselves, academically or playing sports. Fortunately, the majority of my friends were sports-orientated. There were others, though, who did a bit of sport but got involved in negative things as well … smoking, stealing, dabbling in drugs. But that wasn’t the way I wanted to be.
    â€˜I guess I was lucky I had strong friends around me, many of whom were older. They knew the road I wanted to go down. They knew I was serious about football and they wouldn’t smoke stuff in front of me. And if they ever saw me doing anything like that – not that I would – they would have stopped me. They didn’t want to push me into that.’
    One of Rio’s most daring late-night pastimes was to visit a friend in a nearby flat who had cable TV. Rio would stay up late to watch foreign league matches. ‘We’d watch anything we could. A lot of European football especially. We were also bunging football videos on all the time. The player I really wanted to be like was Dutchman Frank Rijkaard. Not when he played at the back. He was a midfielder then.’ One of Rio’s favourite soccer videos was about the genius of George Best. He would make notes while watching it and then try to repeat some of Best’s trickery out on the playground the following day.
    Watching all that TV football simply reinforced Rio’sdetermination to make it as a professional player. ‘I wanted to play football, and fortunately I had the talent as well as the determination.’ But there were other kids on the estate who wanted to earn big money and didn’t care if that sucked them into a life of drugs and vice. ‘I had a couple of friends in prison. It’s unfortunate but it’s part and parcel of life for some people brought up in certain environments.’
    Rio’s closes friend from his childhood, Gavin Rose, said: ‘There was a close-knit group of about seven of us and we realised Rio’s potential. We always said one of us had to make it as a footballer and it became obvious that he was going to be the one, so he was specially looked after by the rest of us.’
    But ultimately it was Janice who deserved the most special praise. ‘My mum was really strong,’ says Rio. ‘She never let me off the estate unless she knew where I was. I had to tell her the time I would be back. We lived on the fourth floor of the flats and because the lift was always broken I always had to run up the stairs to tell her where I was off to.’
    Often, by the time Rio got back down, his mates were halfway along the road. ‘But I knew that if I went off the estate without telling my mum I’d get a good seeing-to when I got back. It got on my nerves at the time, but I’m grateful now for the way she treated me.’
    As Kate Goodwin, wife of local league organiser and coach Dave Goodwin, pointed out: ‘There are a lot of dangers living on a city estate and Rio would be the first one to admit that he could easily have gone the wrong way.’
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    At Bluecoat, still greatly influenced by his father, Rio continued his interest in drama as well as football.