Gary Bennett: ‘My arrival was a big shock for the city of Sunderland’

Whenever Gary Bennett glances in his rear-view mirror and spots a police car, he tenses. “I don’t get stopped nowadays,” says the former Sunderland captain. “But it’s still always on my mind that they’re going to pull me over.”

It is 40 years since Bennett became the second black player to pull on the famous red and white stripes yet the memories of his 11 seasons at the heart of the club’s defence remain vivid. Along the way he made more than 350 first-team appearances, establishing himself as a cult hero at Sunderland’s former Roker Park home.

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In many ways they were magical years for a very fine centre-half but Bennett also suffered appalling racist abuse. “My arrival was a big shock for the football club and for the city of Sunderland,” the 62-year-old says over coffee at a hotel near his home in Durham. “You could see people thinking: ‘What’s he doing up here?’”

Wearside’s demographic was then so overwhelmingly white that Sunderland’s manager at the time, Len Ashurst, had lengthy discussions with the board before Bennett, previously with Manchester City and Cardiff, signed in 1984. “Out at night in the car I was always being stopped,” he recalls. “At time it was very rare to see someone of colour in the north-east. I was always asked what I was doing in the north-east. The same happened when I tried to go into bars and nightclubs but the club was 100% behind me and they complained to the police.”

After being coached by the colourblind Malcolm Allison – “a man ahead of his time,” says Bennett – at Manchester City and making his professional breakthrough under the “wonderful” Ashurst in Cardiff, he was entering uncharted territory. “Len had a long conversation with Sunderland’s board about signing a black player,” he says. “I was something new for the supporters.”

As Sunderland’s club historian, Rob Mason, details in his excellent, recently published Sunderland AFC: The Definitive History, Roly Gregoire had struggled to cope with the demands of becoming the team’s first player of colour during the 1977-78 campaign. “Sadly,” writes Mason. “The amount of discrimination at that time meant that a black player would have had to be brilliant.”

If Bennett’s ability soon won over Sunderland fans, much remained imperfect. “There was a lot of ignorance from managers, coaches and other players,” he says. “But then, on television at the time you’d have Alf Garnett in Death us Do Part, the Black and White Minstrel Show and Love thy Neighbour. You just went along with it, you didn’t challenge it. You’d watch an England game on TV and hear the chants of ‘Ain’t no black in the Union Jack’ and think: ‘Oh.’ But we were all ignorant then, myself included.

“You just got on with things but you do still remember racist incidents, where it happened, who did it. It lives with you – it’s not a nice experience. You didn’t know how to handle it. I got really angry a couple of times. It’s only when you educate yourself a bit more that you learn how to deal with it.”

These days Bennett, awarded the MBE in 2022, is very much an educator. He combines his longstanding role as BBC Radio Newcastle’s Sunderland match co-commentator with anti-racism campaigning, most frequently for Show Racism the Red Card, the charity founded by Ged Grebby in the north-east in 1996 when Bennett, Newcastle’s Shaka Hislop and Middlesbrough’s Curtis Fleming became its three figureheads. Hislop was inspired to change the narrative after being told to “go back to your own country” and worse while filling up his car near St James’ Park only to turn round and face a set of abusers who, realising he was Newcastle’s goalkeeper, demanded his autograph.

If significant strides have been made, black managers remain rare. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” says Bennett, who had a brief stint in charge of Darlington. “But I remember going to a directors’ lounge after a match and the attendant trying to bar me. The look on his face when I told him I was the manager said everything. When the team was losing my skin colour put pressure on the chairman. Even now boardrooms are 99% white; people have no real understanding of discrimination if they haven’t experienced it.”

In his early broadcasting days Bennett was a rare black face in – still largely white and male – press boxes. “Often I was the only one going into a press room asked who I was representing,” he says. “And discrimination isn’t always verbal. It can be through body language. There’s a seat next to you no one wants to sit on. We’ve made progress but it’s still a daily battle.

“We’ve got to continue the fight. Managers sometimes still say: ‘Typical black kid, got a chip on the shoulder.’ There’s still areas of the north-east where young people are locked into very white communities. They’ll maybe never have been to Durham or Newcastle even. It’s very different to London, Birmingham or Manchester.”

Bennett, though, is anxious to stress that many outsiders’ views of the region are hopelessly outdated. “Sunderland’s a very different place from the 1980s,” he says. “It’s changed radically, it’s so much more diverse. People from outside the north-east often have a false picture of it. Then you realise they’ve never been. When they finally visit they say: ‘Oh, you’ve got a coastline. Oh, it’s beautiful here. Wow, Newcastle, what a city.’

“If you play for Sunderland or Newcastle, the north-east grows on you. It becomes ingrained in you. It’s unique. You fall in love with it.”

He is also rather smitten with Chris Rigg, Jobe Bellingham, Romaine Mundle and the rest of Régis Le Bris’s Championship topping young Sunderland side. “The team’s got great togetherness,” says Bennett. “And the manager’s getting the best out of them. Promotion would be fantastic. Sunderland need to be back in the Premier League.”

• Gary Bennett spoke during the EFL’s Together Against Racism campaign