Flying High, My Story Page 4

  In my final year at school, when I was hockey captain, I broke my leg. It was the first real physical setback I’d ever had. I’d scraped and bruised myself plenty of times in so many rugby and hockey matches but nothing this serious. And it happened during a practice game. I’d scored five goals. The goalkeeper was a huge guy and he got pissed off with me because I was having an absolute stormer. I got through one-on-one with him for another goal, but as I went to round him, he trapped my leg in his. Everyone heard the crack as my leg broke in twelve places. I went from this super-energetic sports dynamo to hobbling around on crutches. I was devastated. I could have diverted my frustrated energy into my studies – but I didn’t.

  I had made it into the sixth form only to study the hated sciences that my parents thought would lead me smoothly down the path of medicine. A path I had said time and time again that I wouldn’t follow. Outside the subjects I studied, sixth-form life was different to being in the lower years. We were nearly as old as some of the teachers and our relationship with most of the masters had shifted as we became more like their equals. We were given responsibilities and I was made house captain of Holman, missing out on head of school to Déj Mahoney. Being house captain brought a lot of work – I had to make sure all the younger boys were in bed and asleep and had to report to the house master every evening; house captains organized the house sports and debating teams, and recruited boys to play rugby, cricket and hockey. I think I adopted a different attitude compared to some of my contemporaries in that I tried to encourage and give younger boys confidence rather than adopt the more aggressive approach that some of the others took. The memory of what it was like to be new and nervous in that environment stuck with me and I wanted to help the younger boys rather than intimidate them.

  I managed to avoid the typical teenage vices. There was plenty of opportunity to head to the pub after lights out, and I did go at times, but I never drank in the way that some of the other students did. Some of the masters used to brew their own beer in their houses too (rules were a lot more relaxed then) and as Upper Sixth we’d have a few drinks with them. But I didn’t really get into drinking or partying until a few years later, once I had left school. I think this was for two reasons: first, I was such a clean-living sportsman that I didn’t want anything to affect my performances on the pitch; and second, I wanted to be house captain. If I had smoked, gone to the pub all the time or done drugs that might have jeopardized my chances. Basically I was a goody two-shoes even though I wasn’t exactly the model academic.

  I followed through on my promise to my parents and failed two out of my three A levels. In true teenage style, I had written my name at the top of the chemistry and physics exam papers and promptly fallen asleep in protest.

  The exam results came through when I was back in Malaysia and my dad was less than happy. Getting a D in biology, O in chemistry (my paper was graded as O-level standard) and F in physics was not what Dad had expected and I was sent back to Epsom to try again. I retook the final year where I could at least play hockey again and came out with slightly better grades (A in biology and Fs in chemistry and physics) – though still not good enough to justify the hefty school fees.

  Mum’s early death had had a profound effect on me and I was distraught we didn’t get to say a proper goodbye when I could tell her how much she had done for me and how much I loved her. Even so, I was determined not to become a doctor, and I didn’t try any harder to make my parents’ wish come true the second time round.

  So I ended school with one A level, many sporting triumphs, the accolade of house captain and an understanding of how to get the best out of people. I loved the camaraderie of boarding school and though some people might have a preconceived idea about what English public schools are like, Epsom wasn’t typical in that sense. It didn’t feel elitist and I wasn’t aware of any class barriers within the school. The staff and pupils were down-to-earth; you became like family and learned to get along with everybody.

  My academic record may not have been anything for my parents to brag about, but Epsom taught me a lot about belonging, friendship and teamwork, all of which I’ve tried to champion in my life in business.

  3. The Wilderness Years

  Soundtrack: ‘Edith and the Kingpin’ by Joni Mitchell

  When I left Epsom I was nineteen. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to be a doctor. It’s one thing knowing what you don’t want to do but it’s far tougher working out what it is that you actually do want to do. Not knowing much about my future plans, I did what a lot of teenagers do nowadays: I went travelling. I refer to this spell as the ‘Wilderness Years’ because although I learned a lot about myself and about life, I didn’t make any kind of progress in my career or impression on the world.

  My school friend Midge Finnigan and I settled on the US as our destination. In the 1980s it was a very exciting place, still seen as the land of opportunity where it was relatively easy to get work. I had enough money for the airfare but knew I would have to work while I was travelling around the States, seeing as much of the country as I could along the way. I must have decided at some point that I had been too well-behaved at school because I started to enjoy myself in ways my seventeen-year-old self would not have approved of.

  I bought my ticket to New York on TransAmerica Airlines only for them to go bankrupt just before we left. In the end, we flew with Delta and spent the whole flight chatting up the stewardesses and having the first of many parties. We must have made a good impression on the cabin crew because they invited us to a place called Peabody, just beyond Boston. We landed in New York, went to the Howard Johnson Hotel in Jamaica, Queens, unpacked our bags and went out looking for jobs. We worked in New York for about a month and then decided to go up to Boston.

  We looked at the map and assumed that Boston wasn’t that far, so we rented a ‘sub-compact’ car – which by UK standards was the size of a Bentley – and headed off. Eight hours later, we arrived. We continually underestimated the scale of everything in America.

  I had been working bar jobs in New York, anything I could lay my hands on for a few weeks that would pay the rent and allow me time to go out and experience the city. I loved it. The work situation got even better when we arrived in Boston – I somehow landed a job as the ‘third-relief organ player’ at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. And I did what all Americans do at baseball games: ate mountains of food and drank a lot of beer.

  There wasn’t a plan but I did have an uncle in Gastonia, North Carolina, so when the partying got a little boring in Boston we headed south on a Greyhound open bus ticket.

  North Carolina was where my real US education started, and I began to understand just how segregated the society was. Midge and I were walking around, asking about work, and some of the black people we met asked me, ‘Why are you travelling with this white guy?’

  And all the white people would ask Midge, ‘Why are you travelling with the Indian guy?’

  We went to see Marvin Gaye in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Midge was the only white person there. It opened my eyes to what real segregation looks like and made me realize how important it was to be as inclusive of all cultures, races and faiths as possible.

  After North Carolina, we worked our way down to Orlando, using the Greyhound pass. We only had a limited number of Greyhound trips and when it got to the last one, we decided we hadn’t been far enough west. We looked at the map and decided to head to San Francisco as again, to our naive eyes, it didn’t look too far. Three and a half days later we staggered off the coach into the warm Californian sunlight. We worked our way down from San Francisco to Los Angeles and then decided to go back to the UK via Las Vegas, which was the final eye-opener on an extremely revealing trip. I loved Vegas – everything was so cheap, bright, colourful and open. It felt so different to anything I’d seen before.

  Midge had decided to travel on to Australia while I went back to London. I left America with fond memories but the divisions
I’d experienced within society surprised and unsettled me. The Marvin Gaye concert was the moment that stuck with me for a long time and really shaped my thinking about how people should live and work together. Having witnessed division and people’s inward-facing lives in the US at that time, I came back to London with my eyes opened. The world seemed so much bigger than I had imagined and the UK felt so much smaller, and negative in its outlook. In the US, regardless of divisions, success was always celebrated: people flaunted it and were proud of their achievements. In the UK back then people seemed almost embarrassed by success and that confused me. I didn’t understand why people did themselves down. I’ve always been positive. I think you can make a success of just about anything if you have a positive outlook.

  I enjoyed being in London but it wasn’t long before Dad cut my partying short and summoned me back to Malaysia. I was booked on a plane home and sitting in Heathrow Terminal 3 waiting for my flight to be called when the dreaded ‘flight delayed’ announcement came over the tannoy. I walked over to the bar and out of the corner of my eye I saw a cricketer I recognized. It was Max Walker, the Australian bowler, with his signature moustache, sitting at the bar with a few empty glasses in front of him. Max was at the end of a great career for Australia. He had been back-up to the lethal Thomson and Lillee opening attack and had taken a lot of wickets. I was star-struck, but even so I went up and introduced myself. We had a drink, then another and another. I think he must have been telling me that going home wasn’t the best idea because the thought started to form in my mind that I should change my ticket to Sydney.

  Then things got even more surreal when Billy Joel sat down with us. We stayed in the bar for hours, and at the end of our little party I changed my ticket. Instead of going home I flew to Sydney with Max Walker and went off to meet Midge when I landed. My dad wasn’t best pleased, to say the least.

  Again, travel opened my eyes. I’d always thought of Australians as being open-minded and positive but I was shocked by most people’s unpleasant attitude to the Aboriginals at that time. I heard people in Queensland say that they should be shot. The segregation, the ‘them v us’ attitude, stuck with me and reinforced the impression I’d got in the US. I worked on a farm for a few months before I realized that it was time to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

  I was twenty when I came back to London. The year out had taught me a lot, but I hadn’t really achieved anything apart from a new-found ability to party hard. That thought was starting to bug me. I found myself a job as a waiter in the Cavendish Hotel in Mayfair which had just recently become famous thanks to a television series, The Duchess of Duke Street, that was based on the life of the founder of the hotel, Rosa Lewis. I found the work tough – up at 5.00 a.m., preparing the restaurant, serving the food, dealing with demanding customers, working through until 10.00 p.m. under the critical eye of the maître d’.

  The service industry is brutal – people don’t realize how long the hours are or how tough the physical demands. I quickly grew to respect and admire the kitchen staff, the porters and my fellow waiters who came from all over the world and worked so hard for little reward. The contrast with my experiences of segregated communities in the US and Australia could not have been stronger. Here, everyone, regardless of race or colour, pulled together and it was humbling to see how people still had each other’s backs in such gruelling conditions.

  I’m not the world’s smartest dresser. If I can get away with a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, that’ll do me. At the Cavendish we had to wear black trousers, a white shirt and a tie. Not really bothering about my appearance, I set the tone early on in my career there by arriving one morning with blood on my collar because I’d cut myself shaving. A fellow waiter stopped me appearing in front of the maître d’ in time and gave me a fresh shirt. The next day I was more careful with my shaving but my shirt was still creased from the previous day’s work and I was sent home to iron it. My fellow waiters looked out for me but I think I tried their patience a lot. Life in the Cavendish was hard for everyone – the hours were back-breakingly long, the pay horrendous and the working conditions brutal. But I’ll never forget the camaraderie.

  I realized how much better it is to embrace everyone regardless of how rich or poor they are, what colour skin they have, what religion they follow. I’ll happily talk to anyone and treat them equally – I think it is my one real strength.

  As well as learning about fairness, the Cavendish also showed me what the future looked like without a proper education. And that was grim. So I decided to retake my A levels, choosing subjects that I actually wanted to study this time: history and economics. My aunt lived in Birmingham and I arranged to go and stay with her while I went to a cheap crammer school in the city. She was initially happy to see me but I still liked to party, so she threw me out after a couple of months because I was a distraction to her own teenage kids. Forever the disruptor!

  This was when I really started to understand what life was about. I got a bedsit in School Road, Moseley, and for the first time I was alone and had to look after myself. It was a revelation. It didn’t stop me partying but it did make me appreciate how much it takes to hold everything together: feeding yourself, keeping everything clean, making money last and all the countless other things you only learn when you have to fend for yourself. I started to have more of an understanding of my dad’s frugal approach to life.

  This time I achieved grades that were good enough to get me a place studying accountancy at university in London. My dad was proud that I’d finally achieved something academically – it wasn’t much but it was a step in the right direction. However, things didn’t go quite the way my dad thought they would. There’s a pub on the corner of Warrington Crescent and Randolph Avenue in Maida Vale and in front of it is a turfed-over roundabout which sits like a green island in the middle of a tarmac sea. The first thing that comes to mind when I think about university is that roundabout. We seemed to spend a lot of time in that pub and that’s probably the reason why my memory of that time is so blurry. I don’t think the university saw much of me until I took my finals.

  Alongside my pub activities, I looked to educate myself further in the ways of the world through the various university societies rather than dwell on the intricacies of double-entry bookkeeping. During Freshers’ Week I toured the groups and societies in the main hall and ended up in front of the Malaysia–Singapore Society table.

  A guy looked up.

  ‘Hi. Are you Malaysian? You should join us. We do loads of events that put us in touch with home.’

  I looked at him with a slightly confused expression and said, ‘Why would I want to do that? I know all about Malaysia and Singapore, I’m interested in the rest of the world …’ and wandered off. I think they were a bit pissed off but to me it made absolutely no sense to join a group of people from the same country. Instead I joined the Brazilian Society and had a better time discovering things about a part of the world I hadn’t visited, where football was a religion.

  I was living in Maida Vale, hanging out with a big group of friends – some from Epsom and others I’d met in London or who were friends of friends – and the university didn’t seem that bothered about whether I went to lectures or not. Party time. I’d head off to Calais for the day to buy wine and beer for parties or go to Paris to see bands. I remember seeing the Police at an open-air concert where the French crowd pelted the support band, A Flock of Seagulls, with mud. I thought the band were pretty good – it was just the French being impatient.

  Sometimes I’d spend the day at Lord’s, the home of cricket, not only to watch the match but also because the bar was open all day.

  Another close school friend, Mick McBryde, was renting his brother’s flat in Ladbroke Gardens, Notting Hill, and I seemed to spend a huge amount of time there in 1984–5. Mick still has the Visitors’ Book and there are many pages with my name scrawled on; I must have virtually lived there. Mick and I would go to local parties or
just hang out playing Monopoly. I was always the racing car, of course, and once I beat him twice in an hour. As we sat there late into the night, we’d talk about all the business ideas we had and we’d listen to music – Joni Mitchell’s album The Hissing of Summer Lawns was our favourite, and one track, ‘Edith and the Kingpin’, must have worn out, we played it so much. (Almost twenty years later, Joni Mitchell came out to Malaysia and I mentioned that Mick and I used to listen to that song constantly. She was kind enough to sign a copy of her new CD for Mick, saying she hoped it brought back happy memories.)

  At the time Mick and I were hanging out in Ladbroke Gardens, I had moved to the Uxbridge Road, within a stone’s throw of Loftus Road, QPR’s ground. Mick got a temp job pulling pints at the Loftus Road bar and was serving the night I went to see Barry McGuigan take on the legendary Eusebio Pedroza in June 1985. It was an epic fight. McGuigan got a points decision after fifteen rounds and it was to be the best night of his fighting career. It was also my introduction to what would become my sporting home in London thirty years later.

  The great thing about London is that it offered a party every night if you wanted to go out and I usually did. We’d often end up in the basement of a Russian restaurant called Borshtch ’n’ Tears in Knightsbridge, drinking until the early hours with whoever had made it that far into the night.

  As you can guess, the academic aspect of university still didn’t interest me at all, but business did. Like every other student, I was paying rent and thought it was a rip-off, but unlike most students I decided to do something about it. The challenge I set myself was to buy a house. I had no salary so getting a mortgage looked impossible. Nevertheless, I wrote to and called hundreds of financial advisors – and I mean hundreds – but they all either laughed at me or flat-out refused. I kept going, working my way through the telephone directory, following up on leads from friends or hitting the streets and going into offices on spec. Time and again advisors told me it was impossible and I should give up but I wouldn’t do it. Having said that, even I was starting to doubt if I could pull it off when I found my luck in an Irish Life broker on Streatham High Road. If you’ve never been to Streatham – and particularly if you never saw it in the eighties – you’ll have trouble understanding just how unlikely it was that I’d have a chance of a deal there. But I did. I hit it off with the broker straight away – perhaps he liked the glint in my eye and the off-the-wall request – and he offered me a deal. I had explained that I was being financed by my dad and that I wanted to use that as my proof of income. Somehow he managed to swing it. I got a £26,000 mortgage and bought a house in Colney Hatch Lane, Muswell Hill. I consider that my first proper business deal.