International HERALD TRIBUNE
Global edition of the New York Times

Blackburn: A Team and Town Reborn

17th May 1995
by Rob Hughes

BLACKBURN, England: A man clad in a blue-and-white soccer shirt, wearing a yellow tin hat and carrying a white paintpot, clings like a limpet to a towering industrial chimney. John Warburton is intoxicated but not drunk.

A steeplejack by trade, a Blackburn Rovers fan by birth, he carefully paints a single word, CHAMPIONS, down the red brick chimney. High above the gray rooftops of this old cotton mill town, he leaves a mark of respect to Rovers, the team which, on Sunday, won England's league title for the first time in 81 years.

The chimney is slated for demolition. Like much of this northern town's disused industrial heritage, it will fall on hard times. But the Rovers club has bounced back. With the last kick of a 10-month season, Blackburn recaptured the glory last seen by grandfathers and great grandfathers.

The wealth of small towns like Blackburn dried up decades ago. Jobs declined, housing and institutions became relics of a bygone prosperity, and the team lost its importance as a founding member of the oldest soccer league in existence.

When history rolls, like the soccer ball, professional sport goes downhill with everything else. Except that, here, one man has reversed the momentum.

Jack Walker, who left school in Blackburn at 15 to work with his father and brother in a one-room scrap metal shop beneath a railway arch, sold his eventual steel empire in 1968 for £360 million.

He lives in tax exile in Jersey, where he launched, among other things, Jersey European Airways. A quiet man, not so much shy as disinclined toward flaunting wealth or modern hype, he at one time employed hundreds of Blackburn's manual workers at Walker Steel just a mile or two from Ewood. Jack and his brother beavered away, played a shrewd business hand, made a greater pile of money than any man in the town had ever imagined, then sold when the time was ripe.

But as the soccer club became desperate for the pennies of life, a former chairman remembered how much Saturday afternoons on the old concrete terraces of Ewood Park, the Rovers' stadium, had meant to the Walker brothers.

He contacted Jack, begged for a pound or two, and got more than he bargained for. Walker embraced the old flame. He threw millions - £55 million at the last estimate - into resurrecting the Blackburn Rovers. He lured Kenny Dalglish, who won five championships in Scotland as a Celtic player, and eight in England as a player, then manager of Liverpool, out of "retirement."

Dalglish, stressed by the tragedies of Heysel Stadium and Hillsborough that involved Liverpool fans, had walked away insisting he was ending "all active participation in football." But Jack Walker is a man of persistence. If soccer could reclaim his affections, then he could persuade Dalglish. He needed to, because players such as Gary Lineker had rejected inducements to move home and family to the half forgotten Lancashire town.

Could you blame them? Edwood Park was a decaying Victorian edifice, redolent of the red brick chimney era, a palace of sport in times when stadiums were built for thin folk to stand in. Nowadays, by government decree and by financial logic, they have to be stadiums to seat fat cats as well as folk whose traditional loyalty would take them into whatever shape or style the stadium had become, whatever the strain on their budget.

Blackburn before the Walker-Dalglish era had one foot in the third division, one heck of a job keeping the bank and the safety officers from closing it down, one reason to survive: Hope.

In October 1991, Dalglish accepted Walker's offer. By May 1995, the improbable dream was a fact. Blackburn, a town whose population combined with that of neighboring Darwen is 142,700, had taken the championship away from Manchester United, whose glamor is world renowned, whose paid-up official support group numbers 122,000 - and whose stock market valuation plummeted £10 on Monday.

Manchester United might get some of that fickle City money back if it wins the FA Cup final on Saturday. But the moral is clear: teams that occupy the high ground are as exposed as the steepljack up his chimney.

Down on the ground, with thousands of Blackburn folk marching across the steep hills to Ewood Park, Walker promises to spend "whatever it takes" to hold on to Dalglish and his coaching expert Ray Harford.

He vows to make Alan Shearer, the goalscorer whose dynamic leadership is much coveted by Italian teams, not just a millionaire in his time at Blackburn but a million pounds a season man. Shearer, he insists, is going nowhere; nor should he, considering how Blackburn kept faith and kept paying him while most of the previous season was lost through a knee injury.

In the company of Shearer, of players such as the national team goalie Tim Flowers and the Scottish defender Colin Hendry, Walker is in his element. They are the new players, the mercenaries, of Blackburn, but also men of substance.

Conversations over a pint of beer with the benefactor are down-to-earth, basic affairs. No hype, no promises outside the pay packet, no trappings of airs and graces of the rich man indulging his hirelings.

Around the dressing room, Walker, an old boy of 64, is treated as "one of them." Some part of him is back on the terracing where, as a lad, he loudly cheered on heroes in the blue and white halved colors.

Those heroes, the likes of Bryan Douglas, a conjurer who could dance with the ball, tended to be home-grown Blackburn lads. Since, the revolution had come and gone. Blackburn's commercial base had withered away. The parochial era of players augmenting soccer wages by working at market stalls on cobbled streets was past.

The team has regained its status, boasting the original motto, arte et labore. But if the method is pragmatic, the style more labor than art, for the moment the folks who come down from the hills care only that pre-eminence is restored. As is written on the tallest chimney: CHAMPIONS.

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Rob Hughes is on the staff of The Times.