Fruit loose & fancy free
The pineapple on his head has gone but Jason Lee's drive to succeed is still strong, says Stewart Fisher
Sunday Herald Sun 10-Aug-2003
A couple of footballers are taking it in turns to suspend a standard household brush so that its head hovers inches above their own scalps.
As the unkempt bristles jut out awkwardly towards the hazy summer sky, the point of the pair's bizarre behaviour gradually dawns upon their bemused colleagues.
Inside Falkirk's Grangemouth training ground, Jason Lee, the object of their amusement hears the laugh as he showers after only his fourth training session at the club. Oh well, he must be tempted to think, at least no-one left a pineapple lying around.
For the uninitiated, it is worth backtracking seven years to an episode of the BBC's Fantasy Football League, and the merciless, relentless comparison of Lee's tied-back dreadlocks to said tropical fruit by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner.
At the time, Lee was an eye-catching centre forward leading the line for Frank Clark's high-flying Nottingham Forest side, who finished third in the Premiership table.
To be lampooned in such terms once would have been bad enough for most of us. But their ridiculing of the player's hairstyle co-incided with a loss of goalscoring form that allowed them to edit the caricature into a weekly item.
A more media savvy figure may have ventured into the limelight at this point, in an attempt to nip the furore in the bud. But Lee didn't play it by those rules. Instead, he refused to respond openly to press questioning, and declined to accept an invitation to appear on the show to laugh it off.
The rest of the media merely presumed he had taken a huff, and deduced he blamed Baddiel and Skinner for the slump. The tabloids looked on gleefully as his career trundled through Grimsby, Watford, Chesterfield and Peter-borough.
That, certainly, is the conventional wisdom. But then Lee has never been a conventional footballer. He has spent most of his top-flight career determined to prove people wrong.
And for all that some have cast aspersions in his direction, the 32-year-old has also had enough of a career in the game to not just have played in every division of the English domestic game but to have been promoted from every one of them as well. Now, having arrived at Falkirk with a two-year-deal to his name and his hair shaved bald, his new paymasters would be delighted if he could extend that record to Scotland.
In a career spanning 16 years, he brings with him the experience of more than 400 senior appearances. Although he has never been seriously prolific, at 6ft 3in most First Division defenders are unlikely to find facing him too much of a laughing matter.
Especially as he still resents the implication that some kind of deficiency in the strength of his character was responsible for his fall from the limelight. ''It didn't knock me honestly, it really didn't knock me,'' Lee said, with the tone of a man who has been defending the same accusation for the best part of 10 years.
''I was a high-profile player and I was enjoying my football. I just think everyone else jumped on the bandwagon and made it worse than it was. I think it was blown way out of all context and proportion. I had a sense of humour. I used to watch the show. I found it funny.
''With regards to the hair itself, I was never going to have the hairstyle forever,'' he added. ''I had it for about six years and I always fancied a change and to be honest I was just being stubborn about it all along anyway. I was getting stick about it long before Frank Skinner came along.''
Not that the player doesn't cringe inside at some of the mistakes he made during the episode. ''I never really saw the reason to speak to Frank Skinner and David Baddiel about it,'' he recalls.
''They wanted to have a laugh at my expense and that was fine, but I didn't want to get involved in all that. Maybe I didn't handle it the best way at the time, because I decided to keep silent about it, and hope it would just blow over. But people then obviously tried to make their own mind up on the situation.''
If the brush incident sums up what he can expect from his new team-mates, Lee is also bracing himself for some hairdressing-related banter from opposing fans in the First Division.
''If I don't get stick for that, then it will be 'you big . . .' or you big something else,'' Lee said. ''Or I will be this or I will be that. I have always been a target. But I am sure our fans will get behind me, because every club I have been at I have got on well with the supporters as I work my socks off. I am an in-your-face sort of player and I'm a handful.''
Any suggestion that Lee will not be mentally tough enough for the Scottish game should be dispelled by the fact that this is a man who was keen to swap three years sharing a dressing room with Barry Fry at Peterborough for another two under the tutelage of John ''Yogi'' Hughes. It may well be the footballing equivalent of swapping the frying pan for the fire.
''I would say John Hughes and Barry Fry are not too far apart in terms of enthusiasm and craziness,'' Lee said. ''All the other managers I have played for, the discipline has been very serious. But seriously you don't get very many characters like that and it is great to play with those people. Barry Fry is a one-off and I am sure Yogi is too. I respond to those type of people. They enjoy their football.''
Indeed, it was a combin-ation of such forthrightness, anticipation of the challenge ahead, and the shock of being available on a free transfer for the first time in his career, that made Lee keen to experiment in Scottish football.
Like so many players, Lee - who was born in the Forest Green area of London - was discovered in Sunday league football, before going on to appear as a schoolboy for both Millwall and Charlton. He made his full debut at the Valley in England's top division aged just 17. And after spells at Lincoln and Southend, it was only when a certain Pierre van Hooijdonk arrived at the club that he knew his time at Nottingham Forest was up. A Second Division title win with Watford under Graham Taylor served to ease the frustration.
And now Falkirk. Last week, as he made his debut in the Bell's Challenge Cup defeat to Brechin, there was a timely reminder that after a decent first-half performance, work still needs to be done. ''I need to settle down and have some good training sessions, and build my fitness up,'' he said, although he did not do too badly yesterday, scoring the late winner, a superb volley, against Inverness Caley Thistle.
This season, of course, he comes into a Falkirk side - alongside the likes of Russell Latapy - still in mourning after being prevented access to the SPL, and then stripped of so many of their best players. As an outsider, Lee is unsure how the others will react to finding themselves instead playing at Ochilview - all security certificates permitting, of course.
''I can't imagine how disappointed everybody at Falkirk must be about that,'' he said. ''If you have worked hard to get promotion, you win the league and you've done everything you can as a player and then politics being what they are they decide that you are not going to play in the top league, it really must be a wrench.''
All that remains is to confront him about his team-mates' sarcastic tribute. ''It was very, very funny,'' Lee deadpans. ''But I've seen some hairstyles here which I'm not so sure about anyway.''
He is perhaps the perfect signing to remind Falkirk that feeling sorry for yourself is not an option this season.
― Jason Lee's mum, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 12:56 (twenty-two years ago)
twenty-one years pass...