Former Norwich defender lived for years in an LA motel, cut ties with his family for more than three decades and is now the subject of a documentary<\/p>\n
\u201cI hated it,\u201d Tony Powell says on a spring afternoon in Los Angeles\u00a0of his past as a secretly gay professional footballer for Bournemouth and Norwich in the 1970s. Powell is 78 and now lives in a very different world compared with when he was a husband, the father of two young daughters and Norwich\u2019s player of the season in 1979.<\/p>\n
Powell is not a demonstrative man and, having been forced to bury his true self for decades, does not make a fuss about the pain he endured. But there is an ache in his English accent, which remains intact after 45 years in America. \u201cI\u00a0just wanted to be who I am, but\u00a0at\u00a0that time it was not a good idea to come out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Former Norwich defender lived for years in an LA motel, cut ties with his family for more than three decades and is now the subject of a documentary \u201cI hated it,\u201d Tony Powell says on a spring afternoon in Los Angeles\u00a0of his past as a secretly gay professional footballer for Bournemouth and Norwich in the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}