On World Parkinson’s Day, Joe Gregory, 65, a retired social worker with Parkinson’s, will be living his dream of playing football for England in Bilbao, Spain. He will be playing for the national walking football Parkinson’s squad in a tournament against the Basque Parkinson’s walking football team, and the Basque over-65s walking football team.
World Parkinson’s Day holds particular significance for Joe as it was on that day five years ago that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. In another uncanny turn of events, it was his lifelong passion for football that led him to find out that he had the condition in the first place.
“I hadn’t played football for about 20 years, and I wanted to play again,” says Joe, whose father and brother John were professional footballers, with John playing for England in the 1980s. But when Joe decided to work on his fitness so that he would be able to play to a good standard, he noticed something odd.
“When I was out running, I noticed that my leg strangely just wasn’t working – it was dragging to some extent – and I noticed that my left arm didn’t feel right.”
After being referred to a neurologist by his GP, he was told on 11 April 2019: “Are you ready to hear this? You’ve got Parkinson’s.”
“I was almost very relieved right from the start because at least I knew what was the matter with me, and I could potentially do something about it,” says Joe, who lives in Reading. “My biggest thought was ‘I shall never now play football.’ That was one of my biggest fears, and I probably play more football now than the rest of my life put together.”
Since joining the England Parkinson’s Walking Football team when it began in July 2022, Joe has played for England all over the world, from Singapore to Guernsey – and now Spain.
In the UK, he plays several times a week, belonging to three clubs as well as the England squad. He joined Watford-based Parkinson’s football club, Fighting Fit Football, six months after his diagnosis in 2019, moving on to walking football for Parkinson’s when the club was the first in the UK to take it up in 2021. He also plays for Berks and Bucks Neuro walking football group, and he proudly coaches the women’s nationwide walking football team, Parkinson’s Pioneers.
Joe says that Parkinson’s has made him grab life with both hands. “I was always a person that used to put things off – partly through fearing I was not going to be good enough. Once I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I just thought ‘I will now return to football. What does it matter if I’m no good? At least I’m playing football.’ That’s been my philosophy since diagnosis. As well as the football, I’ve cycled, I’ve swam, I’ve done [mud run and obstacle course] Tough Mudder; I’ve done all sorts of things that I would have put off beforehand. Since having Parkinson’s, it was like, what more can happen that’s bad anyway, why not just enjoy what you can do?”
Joe loves the camaraderie and friendship that walking football has brought him. “In all honesty, my Parkinson’s football teammates and I, we feel quite guilty about it, but in some ways, we have a happier life, a more fulfilling life, than before. I’ve got more friends now than I had probably in the rest of my adulthood put together.”
Over the past five years, Joe has raised money for Parkinson’s charities by – you’ve guessed it – using his football skills.
During the Covid lockdown, Joe would kick the football about in his garden and do keepy-uppies – where you use your feet to juggle a football and keep it off the ground. “I found I could do a few hundred to start with, then it was a few thousand, then in April 2020, during the Covid lockdown, I decided to try and do 10,000 keepy-uppies without dropping the ball during Parkinson’s Awareness Week to raise money for Parkinson’s UK and Cure Parkinson’s. In two-and-a-quarter hours, I managed to do 13,500 keepy-uppies before I voluntarily dropped the ball.”
Setting himself new challenges is part of Joe’s new philosophy on life: “As well as thinking to myself, ‘I’m not going to not do things anymore,’ I want to do things that are not generally humanly possible perhaps. I want to do things that even people without Parkinson’s potentially couldn’t do either. I wouldn’t have attempted the keepy-uppies if I didn’t have Parkinson’s because there wouldn’t have been so much motivation to do it.”
In 2021, he did a sponsored walk doing keepy-uppies all the way from his current home in Reading to the house where James Parkinson – the first to describe “the shaking palsy” in 1817 – was born, lived and practised in Hoxton Square, London. (In another coincidence, Hoxton is where Joe’s family comes from.) It took Joe four days, and he raised money for Parkinson’s UK and Cure Parkinson’s, as well as for some local community groups in Hoxton.
In September 2022, he did the London marathon, again juggling a football, and ended up being the fourth last person to finish, at half past ten in the evening.
And Joe is not stopping there – his next dream is to walk to Africa in order to raise funds to improve care for people with Parkinson’s who live there. Watch this space!