“I was trying to deal with it myself and that is not a good thing,” he said. He believes many of his struggles with addiction stem from his experiences at Chelsea. His award-winning memoir “Black And Blue” came out in 2008. He finally got clean, and was told he was cancer-free, in 2005. In and out of rehab, he also underwent chemotherapy for cancer. When his career was cut short by injury, Canoville fell into drug addiction and suffered mental health problems. “He said he could imagine what I was feeling in that moment, but these are the same ignorant fans that are paying your wages.” “The manager came to the side,” Canoville remembered. That’s deadly, man, to read that.”įor Canoville, even taking the field led to a feeling of dread because of the abuse and he spent nights agonizing about his game in a bid to win over his abusers. “I expected it right away,” he said, adding that Twitter and other social media platforms should have acted quickly to take it down. None of those attacks came as a surprise to Canoville, whose own abuse came before the internet and mobile phones. That’s something I teach to up-and-coming players now.” “I didn’t at that time and I’ve had to learn from that. They should say something right there and then.” “Players like myself, young Black players, shouldn’t be quiet.

“If you want to keep this game alive, you’ve got to deal with this,” Canoville said. Now 61, Canoville has become a reference point to a shameful period in Chelsea’s - and English soccer’s - past, and provides a constant reminder of the work the sport still needs to do to fight racism amid increasing examples of players being subjected to hatred worldwide. It was the majority of my own fans,” Canoville said. “It wasn’t the away fans that were racially abusing me. “What, I’m going to act like an ape?”Įven more astounding was the source of the vitriol. “Why do they always throw fruit like a banana?” the British-born Canoville said in an interview with The Associated Press. The Chelsea player was regularly called “the N-word,” often told to “go home” and had bananas thrown at him.

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