Soccer Star Promotes Breastfeeding (football=soccer)

Theo Walcott's in a league of his own

Young Arsenal star Theo Walcott is back after a long injury. He talks to Simon Crompton about fitness, family and fame – and why tackling a breast-feeding campaign is his new game plan

Theo Walcott has a few points to prove. Back this season from a long-term shoulder injury, the wonderkid who was hailed the future of English football has had more than his fair share of frustration since last year’s record-breaking move to Arsenal and selection for the England World Cup squad at the tender age of 17. But events, like Theo, are moving at speed, and the “Theo to the rescue” headlines last weekend show that Walcott is well and truly back in the thick of British football.

Walcott transformed a shaky performance by Arsenal when he came on as a substitute against Sunderland last Sunday and once again showed that Wayne Rooney has a rival for the title of most exciting English footballing youngster. But there’s more to him than body swerve and pace. Today he’s telling me about the benefits of breastfeeding. Understandably, he’s not totally at ease, and his mother is at his elbow to fill him in on the bits that he forgets.

“I was breastfed, all my family were breastfed, and little Aurora here,” he says, dandling his one-year-old niece on his knee. “I see her being fed by my sister all the time. I just think it should be second nature to people.”

A footballer who thinks outside the box

Walcott has decided to lend his name to a new campaign encouraging more enlightened attitudes to breastfeeding (see panel). The fact that one so young, and earning a living in such an aggressively male world, should take a public stand on something perceived to be female territory is little short of remarkable.

But Walcott, who made a headline-grabbing £12 million move from Southampton to Arsenal last January, isn’t exactly a normal footballer. There’s a Jag in the drive of his five-bed Hertfordshire home, but it’s his father’s. His is the VW Golf, hidden behind. And he shares the house, which he bought after the World Cup, with his parents, two dogs and, at some points during the week his brother and sister, brother-in-law, nephew, niece, and girlfriend Melanie.

The siblings, partners and children are arriving as I turn up, and it’s genial chaos. “It’s always like this,” says Lynn, Walcott’s mother, with quiet resignation. Her son has had only three hours’ sleep, having returned at 5am after an European Champions League away game, but he’s making tea for everyone. “Hope it’s OK,” he says, offering me a cup. “Everyone always says my tea is rubbish.”

Not exactly Footballers’ Wives. Walcott admits that his family is hugely influential, and it was his mother, an independent midwife and former breastfeeding teacher, who suggested that he lend his name to the new campaign. Being embedded in kith and kin also seems to have given him the inner steel to be his own man. Which is impressive when you think that the public has always seen Walcott as the baby of the footballing world.

He admits to having been a bit in awe of the rest of the squad during the unsuccessful (and for Walcott, unused) World Cup jaunt (he has not been selected for the main team since, though he has been impressive for England Under21s and Steve McClaren, the England manager, has told him he has not been forgotten).

He seems unconcerned (or perhaps unaware) about the potentially lethal dressing-room combination of being baby-faced and advocating mother’s milk. “I know I’ll get the mickey taken out of me, but that’s always happening anyway. What can I say? It’s the right thing to do. It’s about healthy eating, getting healthy bones, right from the start of life, and men need to support their wives in that. That’s what I’ll be doing with my kids.” He adds hurriedly: “I’m not saying I’ll have them now!” He and Mel, 18, a mayor’s daughter from Southampton, who is about to train as a physiotherapist, have been an item for two years.

The breastfeeding manifesto that Walcott is promoting has been produced by a coalition of 39 organisations, including the Royal Society of Paediatrics and Child Health and the Royal College of Midwives. It not only calls for health-care professionals to be fully trained to support mothers with breastfeeding but also for government support for breastfeeding in public. Walcott says he’s amazed when people give dirty looks to his sister when she’s breastfeeding in restaurants.

“I just work hard and train hard”

You have to keep reminding yourself that Walcott is still a teenager. After that manic year in 2006, he has definitely grown up – wide shoulders, bucket hands and a fetching experimentation with facial hair. He also has a surprising streak of arrogance that appears in glimpses (“It shows how big I am that I can ignore the jokes”), and which you realise is essential to survive in football. Just how tough that world still is becomes apparent when he recalls the battle with injury and the long periods on the bench over the past 12 months. His shoulder first dislocated in a game against Portsmouth in December 2005. He has inherited a congenital fault, in which the shoulder ligaments are too slack, from his father, Don, who now manages his company. Until now, he hadn’t revealed how long-standing the injury had been.

“It started to pop out quite frequently in the second half of last season and soon it became an absolute nightmare. We had to keep it quiet because if the opposition heard about it, the first thing that happens is that someone will shoulder-charge you.”

Then he fell heavily in a game against Everton the day after his 18th birthday in March this year and there was no hiding the seriousness of the incident. “Everyone could see the pain I was in. Even just drying myself with a towel, or rolling over in bed, popped it out.”

Surgery to repair and tighten the ligaments became urgent and waking up afterwards was one of the worst nights of Walcott’s life. “When I woke up, I was absolutely in bits. My arm was completely dead and floppy after the anaesthetic. It’s all over now, though. They say I won’t be able to get full extension, but it’s 95 per cent.”

The injury kept him out of the game until August, so this season Walcott is raring to go. He has had six club first-team appearances, two as a substitute. “I just work and train hard, that’s all you can do really. And a smile on your face helps, too.”

“He never went through a sullen phase as a teenager,” his mother chips in, supportively.

Walcott’s just beginning to get used to the idea that he’s a role model. He’s aware that the young kids who support him from the stands want to support him off the field, too. Just how he has felt about his own footballing idols: Michael Owen and Thierry Henri. “You never see them in the newspapers doing dodgy stuff, which shows what professionals they are.”

All good wholesome stuff then. A manager’s dream, as well as a mother’s. Walcott has never been to a nightclub in his life, and Mel doesn’t like partying either. She confides that she didn’t always find it easy fitting in with the other England WAGs (wives and girlfriends) during the World Cup. Mel will be going back home this evening, leaving Walcott for a boys’ night in with his mates. No footballers mind, just old schoolfriends from his home village of Compton, near Newbury. They’ll be playing pool and computer games.

Does he ever feel an outsider? He shrugs. “We’re all different in football,” he says. But I’m wondering whether, at 18, he’s strong enough to be so different, to pull off the feat of demonstrating to young boys that you can be sensible, sensitive and talk about women’s issues, and be more the man for it.

And then, as our photographer says for the umpteenth time “just one more picture”, Walcott says: “No. You said that was the last, and that was the last” and walks off. It’s three o’clock, he hasn’t had any lunch, and he wants it over. That glimpse of steel again. “You’ve got to draw a line,” his father says to me good-humouredly. “I’m glad he did that.” And I am, too.

Breast is best

The Breastfeeding Manifesto, launched by Best Beginnings and supported by Unicef, Save the Children, the Royal College of Midwives, and the British Dietetic Association, calls for:

Better training for health professionals, so that they can better help mothers to start and continue breastfeeding.

Statutory breastfeeding breaks at work.

Governments to encourage greater social acceptance of breastfeeding in public.

Children to be educated at school about the importance of breastfeeding.

Controls on the marketing of formula milk.

For more information about the campaign, or buy a T-shirt in support, visit www.breastfeedingmanifesto.org.uk

Breastfeeding facts:

The World Health Organisation recommends that babies are exclusively breastfed for the first six months.

In the UK, nine women out of ten stop breastfeeding before the baby is six weeks old.

If all babies were breastfed for at least three months, the reduction in gastroenteritis alone would save the NHS £35 million.

I find this article so impressive because not only is he young, popular and famous, and taking a stance that I admire, but he is representing a minority group, which I feel is a focus missing SO much when it comes to promoting breastfeeding. Studies have shown that the majority of breastfeeders are white, university educated, middle class women. We are missing the mark promoting outside this box. So when I saw this, I was incredibly excited.

My fondest wish is that Mr K grows up this enlightened and supportive of his future wife. Not that she will be good enough for him, of course. ;)