This football autobiography deserves its status as a Sunday Times bestseller

A refreshingly honest confession from Big Dunc

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

A footballer is interviewed on the side line.

Ferguson at Everton.

Pete from Liverpool, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Duncan Ferguson was sent off as a Premier League player for Everton eight times. On his own admission he drank too much alcohol, misspent his earnings to the extent that he had to declare himself bankrupt, and deeply regretted holding a grudge against the Scottish Football Association that meant he only played seven times for Scotland. By following his father’s advice to “throw the first punch” he ended up in Barlinnie prison.

Confessing those mistakes in his new autobiography, Big Dunc, makes for a compelling read. It’s not surprising that the book has topped the Sunday Times best seller list for weeks and sits front and centre at Waterstones in Liverpool. Ferguson – who played for Dundee United, Glasgow Rangers, Everton, Newcastle and Scotland - is brave with his admissions. Not many autobiographies would be so honest. And confession has been good for sales.

But then, honest confession has always made a good story. A glance through the Gospels and Paul’s letters shows the apostles Peter and Paul being very willing to confess their faults. Peter is told “Get behind me, Satan” by Jesus. He impulsively cuts off a servant’s ear. He denies knowing Jesus to an inquiring bystander. Immature, daft, and actions he later regrets, yes. The apostle Paul calls himself the “chief of sinners.” He confesses to persecuting zealously the Church before his conversion. Autobiographies that confess to mistakes, weaknesses and shortcomings are far more helpful – and relatable - than those that seek to airbrush any such blunders out of the picture. It helps, of course, if you also scored 106 goals in 360 appearances.

Just as appealing is the fact that the book is also about change and reconciliation. These days, Ferguson is off the alcohol. “I wanted to be a better person, a better father,” he writes. He has coached young players back at Everton and seeks to help them avoid the mistakes he made. His father’s advice to be loyal was good advice that he followed. He has taken on two very difficult manager’s jobs. He has apologised to people he had fallen out with; relationships have been healed and a fresh start offered.

Big Dunc is also a love story - in fact two love stories. The first is with Everton and the Everton supporters. Even in his wildest, most regretted moments, Ferguson connected with his fans. When he was in Barlinnie prison for 44 days he received around 10,000 letters from Evertonians and he tried to reply to them all. If he was ever in a Liverpool pub or club he would enjoy the company of fans. Whether he was visiting Alder Hey Children’s hospital, a youth club, or a supporter he’d heard was in need, he was always up for a photo or an autograph. His treatment by the authorities, whether the law in sending him to prison, or the Scottish FA in banning him for more matches, struck a chord with Evertonians who also knew about injustices in life. And he was a centre forward, a number 9, and supporters love a centre forward who leads the line, scores goals and wears his heart on his sleeve, even if he does maddeningly get sent off and too often carried an injury not always unrelated to lifestyle.

The second love story is between Ferguson and his wife Janine and their three children. “They saved me”, he writes. The book ends with “Take care, God bless, Dunk” and then this acknowledgement: “Thank you to my wife, kids and family for putting up with me and for supporting me through the good times and the bad times. I love you all.”

So there is a positive ending. Honest confession, change, reconciliation, love and a good ending. It deserves to be a bestseller.

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Column

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Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”