Page 73 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

perhaps ought to have learned more about the grapes. That was the essence of it all. But soon I was
developing a working knowledge.
In the autumn of 2010 I was asked about retirement, and found myself saying, instinctively:
‘Retirement’s for young people, because they have other things they can do.’ At 70 years of age, with

idleness, the system breaks down quickly. You have to have something in place when you retire. Right
away, the next day, not after a three-month holiday.
When you’re young, the 14-hour days are necessary, because you have to establish yourself, and the
only way to do that is by working your balls off. By those means, you establish a work ethic for
yourself. If you have family, it’s passed on to them. My mother and father conveyed the fruits of their
labour to me and I have done so with my own children and beyond. With youth you have the capacity
to establish all the stability of later life. With age you have to manage your energy. Keep fit. People

should keep fit. Eat the right foods. I was never a great sleeper, but I could get my five to six hours,
which was adequate for me. Some people wake up and lie in bed. I could never do that. I wake and
jump up. I’m ready to go somewhere. I don’t lie there whiling my time away.
You’ve had your sleep – that’s why you woke up. I would be up at six, maybe quarter past six, and
be in the training ground for seven. I was only a quarter of an hour away. That was my habit. The
routine never changed.

I came out of a wartime generation that said: you’re born, that’s you. You were safe. You had the
library and the swimming baths and football. Your parents worked all the time, so either your granny
looked in to make sure you were all right, or you reached an age where you looked after yourself.
Your basic pattern was laid down that way. My mother used to say, ‘That’s the mince, that’s the
tatties, all you need to do is put it on at half past four.’ It would all be ready to cook. You would light
the fire for them coming in from work. My dad would get in about quarter to six with the table all set
– that was your duty – and you would take the ashes down to the midden. Those were the chores when

you came in from school, and we did our homework later, my brother and I, at seven o’clock at night.
It was a simple regime, born of a lack of modern amenities.
Now we have more fragile human beings. They’ve never been in the shipyards, never been in a pit;
few have seen manual labour. We have a generation of fathers, my own sons included, who do better
for their children than I did for them.
They attend more family events than I did. Picnics, with the kids. I never organised a picnic in my

life. I would say, ‘Go and play, boys.’ There was a school ground beside our house in Aberdeen and
the lads would be out there with their pals every day. We didn’t have a video recorder until 1980. It
was grainy, terrible. Progress brings CDs and DVDs and grandsons who can pull up their fantasy
football team on your home computer.
I didn’t do enough with my boys. Cathy did it, my wife did it, because she was a great mother. She
would say, ‘When they get to sixteen, they’ll be daddy’s boys,’ which was true. As they grew older
they were very close, and the three brothers were very close, which pleased me greatly, and Cathy

would say: ‘I told you.’
‘But you produced them,’ I would tell her. ‘If I ever said a bad word about you to those three boys,
they would kill me. You’re still the boss.’
There’s no secret to success in this world. The key is graft. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers:
The Story of Success, could just have been called Graft. Hard Graft. The examples there run all the
way back to Carnegie and Rockefeller. There is a story about Rockefeller I love. The family were big

churchgoers. One day his son said to him, as the contributions tray was coming round, and each
worshipper was donating a dollar: ‘Dad, wouldn’t it be better if we gave them fifty dollars for the