Steve Bull has had it all in football, and remains a hero to thousands in the Black Country. But he has been forced to cope with a personal heartbreak. Today, in the first of three exclusive interviews, Bully who is 40 tells MARTIN SWAIN about the battle to see the children he adores.
It takes a lot to bring Steve Bull even close to tears but a simple text message did the trick at the weekend. It was from his youngest son, thanking Dad for organising a signed souvenir book from one of his favourite stars, Jordan. Well, it helps when one of your dad’s mates is Gazza, who happened to be a guest at the celebrity model’s wedding.
But Bull has paid a heavy price for what he calls his “lucky” career and none more so than the loss of contact with his two sons in the wake of the break-up of his second marriage.
A text message, a phonecall at Christmas . . . these are the limits of Bull’s contact with his beloved boys, now aged eight and 13, and has been for four heart-breaking years. It is all he can expect for the forseeable future, too, now that the legendary goalscorer of Wolves and England fame has abandoned legal proceedings to try to regain access.
It was, he says, a heartbreaking decision to make. But frustrated and infuriated by the courtroom wrangles and legal red tape, Bull let his heart be his guide.
“It killed me to walk away from them and say: ‘That’s it, no more,’”
said Bull. “But it was doing more harm than good to them. And I know this. The kids will always be there and they will find me.
“They are my blood, they are my life. I may have been guilty of being immature. But I am not a bad man, I am not a bad dad and I love them with everything I have got in me.”
This is Bull speaking as never before about the private torment behind a career which was arguably the Black Country’s most spectacularly successful rags to riches sports story of the last century. We are sitting in the living room of his spacious converted barn in deepest Shropshire, secluded and private, a sanctuary from being Steve Bull, Wolves and England legend, whenever he steps into the Black Country.
He is, as we know, a fighter. At 17, he was told to forget about professional football because a dodgy right knee wouldn’t take it. At 21, Albion fatefully told him ‘thanks but no thanks’ and moved him on to a desperate, crumbling Wolves.
Four years later, Bull was with England at the World Cup and by the time he had finished lashing more than 300 goals past goalkeepers up and down the country, he was decorated with an MBE and the title of the region’s most prolific scorer.
All of it came at a cost however. A bitter, public bust-up with his parents is thankfully healed and repaired. But now this - a father desperate to see his kids again.
How it reached this point is difficult for Bull to explain even as he now reflects on his life as a mature 40-year-old. Time has brought out the best in him, too. Wolves’ favourite son of the modern era is fit and well and now devoid of that awkward shyness which overwhelmed him whenever he left his place of business - the football pitch.
Bully would always keep his head down hoping to avoid eye contact in the hope of dodging the interviews he hated giving. Not now. These days, there is a confident and relaxed Bull staring back at me and able to talk candidly and impressively about his loves, his life . . . and the one remaining heartache he needs to resolve to find contentment.
His dispute with his second wife, Julie, is at the core of the gap he waits patiently to fill in his life. His first wife, Sarah, has all but been airbrushed from the Bull story.
They parted just as the young striker’s career was exploding into life without recrimination or bitterness. “We were just two young kids doing something stupid,” he recalls. “We all do stupid things when we’re young. We met at Wednesbury swimming baths, started going out together and got to know each other.
“You always think ‘this is the one’ at that age, don’t you? It lasted about seven months but it felt like Sarah tried to change me from what I was to what she wanted me to be. “That’s when the disagreements started ; We had an amicable settlement and that was it.”
Bull’s first love, however, had been Julie and when they rekindled their courtship, it was against a backdrop of a meteoric success for the hungry young forward. By the time they married, in summer of 1991, he had played for his country and was one of the most famous faces in the game - but the first signs of discord and upset in his private life were clearly on view.
Bull’s parents were not invited, the legacy of a dispute with their new daughter-in-law.
“It was a good marriage to start with and although we have obviously had our differences I would never criticise Julie,” says Bull.
“The problems that came along were just what happens. I blame myself for a lot because I wasn’t strong enough to deal with it.
“At first everything was alright between my mum and dad and Julie but I remember she came back from visiting them one day and complained they had hardly spoken to her.
“I felt that couldn’t be right but more and more Julie began distancing herself from my folks. The atmosphere got worse and worse as we saw less and less of each other. It’s difficult to explain now but at the time, it’s just what happened.
“Looking back, I know I wasn’t strong enough. They were my mum and dad after all. But I just wanted to keep the peace instead of standing up for what I felt was the right thing to do.
“If only you’d known then what you know now, eh? If Kirsty tries to get me to do something which I don’t think is right these days, she’s got no chance.
“It was a strange time. I was going out for a pint with my old man at a time when we were not speaking to each other! It was an immature time for me; I know that now. Strange as well . . . you’ve think you’ve got it all sussed . . . ”
But what followed was even more heart-breaking. “Julie and I started falling out but I was immature and thinking it didn’t bother me, not realising how painful this can all be I suppose,”
Bull continues. “I started to have a break from home, stayed in a hotel in Hednesford, but still fulfilling my parental role. I would pick the kids up from school and be there for them as much as I could. But eventually, I told Julie I was going. “‘You’re leaving me, you’re leaving the kids’ she told me which, to my mind, wasn’t true at all. I tried to tell the boys that too. This was between me and their mum and would not change the way I felt about them.
“But after nine years our relationship had changed. This was February 2000 when I left the family home. “I went for access and was granted visits on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and every other Sunday. But soon the problems started. “I wasn’t allowed to take them out of the house. I would go there on Sundays and nobody would be in. I would turn up to see them only to find out they had gone on holiday somewhere or other. It got worse and worse.
“My confrontations with Julie were unpleasant for both of us. She told me I had hurt them for life and they would be better off without me.
“It is the sort of thing which all separating parents probably accuse each other of. It got worse when I started seeing Kirsty. That’s when I started to see less and less of the kids and when I ended up turning to the courts for access.
“At one stage, Julie became quite ill and my oldest, being eight or nine at the time, was really protective of his mum. I know that he is still very angry with me. “I know he has said that I was a bad dad who shouted as his mum and that he didn’t want to see me.
“That’s why I eventually called off all the legal action. The advice from the experts in these cases is not to force it; time will heal. I hope so, I hope so. “I’ve been in the courts for three and a half years and I feel drained with it. It may sound straightforward having been granted access in the first place but you have to experience the system to understand just how you can end up banging your head against a brick wall.
“You get bounced from one hearing to the next, with different judges who have different views about whose right and whose wrong. It goes on and on and at the height of it, I felt like joining the Dads for Justice campaign. I would have been happy to dress up as Batman and climb Buckingham Palace myself if it could have changed anything!
That’s how it gets you.”
But Bull has always been a patient man. In tomorrow’s reflections of his career, you will hear how he calmly and coldly waited to take his revenge on the Albion defender who taunted him in a famous Black Country derby. And that ability to see beyond today and tomorrow, and into the years ahead, serves him well now.
He knows that it is his oldest son who feels the pain of his parents’
separation more than anyone. But he has total faith in their one day being reunited. “I’m missing a lot of years with them and a big part of their lives,”
he says. “They are years I will never get back and it is hard to bear at times.
“I mean, I know my oldest boy is playing football for a local team but I’m not sure which one. But you can imagine how I am desperate to be on the line to watch him.
“I mean, how’s this for being daft – I bought a motor bike and got my licence a while back not because I wanted to ride one particularly. But I thought with all the leather gear and helmet, no-one could possibly recognise me and I could drive round to where they lived and just watch them, just to be near them.
“But that was a stupid idea because the neighbours would soon start reporting some creep hanging about on a motorbike !
“I write to them. I text them. I think my youngest is a bit more open to me because he will call me if anyone does. “He sounds a right one. I heard this story about him going to his pal’s house to see if he could come out to play. The dad answered the door and said the last was out with his mum. So he said: ‘Well, do you fancy coming out to play instead then?’ Cheeky little beggar! “But he rang me last Christmas to thank me for their presents and it was a really emotional moment.
I hate Father’s Days though. I am not good company when they come around.
“But I know they will find me. They are being well looked after because Julie is a wonderful mum. I have no complaints about how she is bringing up the boys. She is doing her motherly duties but every kid needs his dad as well.
“Am I happy? Well, nearly there. It’s like 99 per cent. I’ve a beautiful wife and strong family and friends. And there’s my two boys.
“They are my life. Every morning I look at their pictures on the dressing table and. But this is life, isn’t it? Would it have been any different without my football career? If I had been just plain Steve Bull, factory worker? I’ve thought about that often but we will never know the answer.
“I am one of those people who can bury things away. That’s how I deal with painful stuff. I can’t force them to see me and I don’t want to.
But there will be a day when there is a knock at my door or the phone rings and I hear ‘Dad, can I come and see you?’
Steve Bull has had it all in football, and remains a hero to thousands in the Black Country. But he has been forced to cope with a personal heartbreak. Today, in the first of three exclusive interviews, Bully who is 40 tells MARTIN SWAIN about the battle to see the children he adores.
