Even now, when the facts are irrefutable, one of Bobby Moore’s closest friends disputes that the England captain suffered with testicular cancer at 23 because, well, Bobby would have told him something so vitally important. But Moore did not tell anybody. Had Tina Moore not told the story after her husband died, the secret of his illness would have gone with him to the grave. History would record that Moore suffered a passing groin problem in 1964–5 rather than the disease which was a harrowing ordeal.
There was no mention of this serious affliction in his authorised biography. In another version of his life story he talked, with ludicrous understatement, of “a minor groin operation”. He chose to brush over his illness as though it were a slight strain even though Tina remembers it as a tormenting experience that made Moore fear for much more than just his football career. “It was an awful thing and it had a terrible impact,” she says.
Here he was, invincible Bobby Moore; captain of club and country, the outstanding footballer in England, and, by late 1964, a first child on the way, too. His life seemed charmed. But then a lump appeared from nowhere. Moore could not bring himself to think the worst and so he ignored the problem. He would later confide in the doctors that he had borne the growth for a year. “It’s not like there were all those publicity campaigns you see now,” Tina says. “It’s not like you could look it up on the internet.”
By the autumn of 1964, he was feeling the odd twinge in training. When Moore ran, there would be a sharp tweak in his groin. Never one to complain, he got on with his job. Be a man, he told himself. As the pain grew worse, Moore carried on, chest out, trying to ignore his body’s warning lights and clanging alarms.
“Running it off” was the cure-all for footballers but this was one injury that would not go away. Team-mates started to notice the captain grimace. Then, in the dressing room, they saw a swelling. It would be seen in the showers, as he was getting changed. Moore’s fastidious habit of standing on a bench to prevent the bottom of his trousers scraping on the wet and muddy floor was not exactly designed for discretion.
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“F*** me, Mooro, that’s taken a few overs, hasn’t it,” Eddie Presland, the young full back, blurted out one day. Presland thought the growth was a cricket injury or, as Moore tried to convince himself, perhaps a kick in the groin during a match. Oncologists say that such visible swelling was probably a hydrocele, a collection of fluid in the scrotum secondary to the tumour; a condition much more likely in cases of delayed diagnosis. Still he ignored it — and, Presland’s remark aside, so did his team-mates. Moore’s delicate complaint, whatever it was, was no one else’s business. “We could see it,” Brian Dear says, “but Bobby wasn’t the type to make a fuss and he would never want a fuss making of him.”
Crossing fingers, hoping it would go away could only work for so long. The swelling was causing Moore severe daily pain. Eventually he went to see Bill Jenkins, the club physiotherapist. Rob Jenkins succeeded his father and still runs a practice opposite the stadium: “My dad looked at the swelling and told Bobby they had to get it seen to. It was my dad who got it taken care of.”
Tina’s recollection is a little different. She says that Moore and Bill Jenkins decided between them that he had been injured by a kick, and left it in the hope that it would disappear. It was only when she heard Bobby yelp in the night and found him doubled up in agony that she forced him to seek help. Six months pregnant, she had banged into him with her bump.
An appointment was made to see the GP and suddenly everything moved fast, terrifyingly so. Moore was immediately referred to a specialist who ruled him out of the Saturday game against Blackburn Rovers the following day, November 7, 1964. Moore would undergo surgery on Monday. The surgeon’s prompt insistence that he needed to conduct an exploratory operation induced panic.
“Bobby had to sign something saying that if they found what was wrong, they could remove whatever part was necessary,” Tina says. “He was terribly frightened but still clung to the hope that it was just a sports injury. Cancer was the last thing you thought about.”
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Moore was operated on at the London Hospital in Whitechapel by Gerald Tresidder, a consultant urologist. After surgery, he explained to a shell-shocked Moore that, yes, it was cancer. A tumour had been found. He had performed an orchidectomy, the removal of one of Moore’s testicles. “Bobby was worried out of his life,” Tina says. “In those days, cancer sounded like a death sentence.”
In fact, cure rates for testicular cancer were on the increase, climbing from 60 per cent in the Fifties to around 75 per cent thanks to more effective radiotherapy from cobalt machines (these days it stands at 99 per cent). But for all the reassurance from the doctors that the operation had been successful, Moore was beset with anxieties.
Even if he survived, would he be able to have more children? Would he be the same player? What if the cancer returned? And, typically, he dreaded what people might say if they discovered he had undergone such a delicate operation. Imagine if word got out not just among his friends but the fans.
Of course he did not show a flicker of these troubles to the outside world; not even to close friends or family. The patient spent just over a fortnight in hospital, a private room with a TV and a record player. There was a constant stream of visitors yet as they arrived, Moore told Tina: “Don’t tell anyone what I’m in here for.”
Heavily pregnant, she had her own anxieties. With Moore unwilling to discuss the specific illness even with his wife — he never once used the C-word throughout the crisis — she had to badger the doctors for information. She visited the local library to scour medical journals. This was not the blissful life she had imagined little more than two years into marriage.
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Was it not odd that they never discussed the illness together? She says that it was Bobby’s way, and this was an age long before celebrity confessionals and inspirational books. It was a private battle which, at his strict insistence, they would fight alone.
Eddie Bovington, Moore’s team-mate, says: “I don’t know why he had to keep it quiet, it don’t make sense to me. These days, you’d be on the television saying ‘get yourself screened’ and it would become a big issue about how you handle it. It was swept under the carpet, to be honest with you, and even now I can’t understand why.
“I never discussed it with him and I roomed with him for a long, long while, which now seems pretty stupid when you think about it. He couldn’t exactly hide it once he was back in the dressing room. But it was different times, you know, forty years ago. We are all feeling ourselves now to check if we’ve got it or not.
“Years ago you didn’t touch it because you were frightened you might have it. You didn’t have a clue what it meant. You’ve got to be a hard man. You can’t have cancer, can you?”
“That’s how Bobby got the OBE,” Brian Dear says with a rueful smile. “One Boiled Egg.” But it wasn’t a joke he ever shared with his pal.
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The fans had to be told something. Moore would be missing for three months in the middle of the season. A routine groin operation was the story. The press were happy to go along with the ruse. Word crept out to a well-connected few that Bobby had a more significant problem “down there” probably caused by a kick, but they stuck, to a man, to the little white lie.
Moore’s need for secrecy presented ongoing challenges because he required abdominal radiotherapy as an outpatient. Two blue crosses had to be drawn on Moore’s back to mark the para-aortic lymph nodes to guide the radiographers. The crosses were applied with indelible ink so, even though his treatment was limited to three weeks, the marks lasted for months.
Moore was paranoid about those blue marks being seen in the dressing room, which meant all sorts of difficult manoeuvres in the showers. He would wait until the rest of the players had departed, or sidle in with his back to the wall.
Whether Moore’s first illness was related to the later, fatal bowel cancer which killed him is entirely speculative. Both consultants who dealt with Moore for the latter illness, Peter Hawley and Professor John Smyth, are doubtful. But Tim Oliver, consultant oncologist and Professor Emeritus of Medical Oncology, St Bartholomew’s and The Royal London Hospital School, has conducted extensive research after becoming suspicious about a higher prevalence of cancers in those who had undergone previous radiotherapy treatment.
He explains that the cobalt machine used to treat Moore was far less precise than modern methods. With Moore’s radiotherapy targeted around the abdomen in an inverted T-shape, the bowel would have been within that field. There is the possibility that the radiotherapy could have left lasting cell damage which resurfaced as bowel cancer more than twenty years later.
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“You could never say definitively that one individual would not have got cancer in any case,” Professor Oliver says. “But I found that cancer frequency increased among those who had radiation because of the damage done to tissue. The probability has increased by between two times and two and a half times by having the radiotherapy.”
It is impossible to be certain but, in at least one significant sense, we do know that Moore never fully recovered from his testicular cancer. The tumour was removed but the lasting legacy was, according to Tina, the insomnia that stayed with Moore through his adult life. “It affected him very deeply psychologically,” she says.
Moore never discussed how the sleeplessness came on — well, he wouldn’t — and in the eyes of most of his friends it was part of his nocturnal lifestyle. It made sense that Mooro liked to stay up: more time to drink. He was increasingly enjoying the social life, sinking halves of lager.
But Tina was convinced that his insomnia was brought on by the stress. Over the three long months of inactivity, he had fretted whether he would be the same player. One of his visitors in hospital was Ron Greenwood who, with good intentions but lack of managerial tact, told his stricken captain: “You’re not to worry, Bobby. The team is doing just fine without you.”
From his bed, Moore grimaced at the idea that West Ham were sailing happily on without their captain.
To lose a testicle through cancer was a challenge not just to his health and career, but to his manhood and his self-esteem. Though Roberta was born in January 1965, Moore inevitably worried if he could have another child. He was even paranoid that he might look different in shorts.
“He needed to prove he was still a man,” Tina says. “It was very important. Although the doctors had told him there would be no problems, he needed to prove that to himself.” She quickly became pregnant again after Roberta’s birth but miscarried. Dean, their son, was born three years later. Tina believes that his sleeplessness was one reason he became so attached to Roberta, in particular.
“He’d get up and take her for a ride in the car at all sorts of strange times,” she says. “He never slept well from then on. He internalised it all.” She would frequently wake up alone in bed and find her husband downstairs or taking his baby daughter out for a walk at odd hours.
As the insomnia became a regular, aggravating part of Moore’s life, at West Ham they quickly became used to the late-night habits of their captain. Rob Jenkins, was a frequent companion sought out by Moore to help him through his long nights. On the evening before a game, the captain would wander down the corridor in the team hotel seeking the physio’s company and a nightcap. They would sit up, sipping a lager or two. Then Jenkins would give Moore a sleeping pill, washed down with a swig of beer, and the captain would wander off back to his bed.
“I used to get him one every Friday night before a game. Mandrax or Mogadon, a strong one, but they are not available now, just so he could get a good night’s sleep,” Jenkins says. “It would be that and a couple of lagers. We’d just have a drink and a chat and then he’d turn in sometime around midnight if it was the night before a match.”
After failing twice in management in the lower leagues, Moore became exiled from the game, to the dismay of his friends
The FA was an obvious employer, if only to use Moore as an ambassador and glad-hander. Jimmy Tarbuck tells of pulling aside Peter Swales, chairman of the FA’s international committee, when the two men bumped into each other in the directors’ box at Manchester City. Tarbuck demanded to know why the FA did not get the unemployed Moore on board. He seethes as he tells of a brief exchange.
‘I went “Peter, can I have a word? Why don’t you take Bobby Moore on one of these England trips with you, an ambassador for football?”. I said “Pelé’s done it, Beckenbauer’s done it. Bobby would be perfect”.
‘Do you know what he said? He said “are you serious? They’d all want to meet him”. Honestly, those were his words. I said “well of course they would. Who would want to meet all you boring bastards?” ’
Terry Venables says that he took up the same argument with Graham Kelly, the FA chief executive, asking why Moore was in the press box at Wembley when he should have been in the Royal Box among the VIPs. According to Venables, Kelly replied that it would be setting ‘a difficult precedent’ if he started inviting former England internationals into the inner sanctum. Venables fumed: ‘I said “where is the precedent? I don’t remember too many people captaining England to the World Cup”.’