Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman are a pair of documentary filmmakers who used to pass by the shuttered, run-down Holloway Motel in Los Angeles almost every day. Like most residents of West Hollywood, they noticed an old man always sitting on one of the balconies sipping from a glass, sometimes pottering about on his laptop, often cradling a dog. Thinking there might be a story in how this mysterious character remained living in a place no longer taking bookings and slated for demolition, they decided he might be worth investigating.
Turns out Tony Powell was “The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel”, the title Petros and Freeman gave the extraordinary film they subsequently made about his life. Thinking he might be some septuagenarian eccentric worthy of a short, the project evolved into a full-length feature when they heard his full story.
An Englishman exiled in America for more than 40 years, a former professional footballer who played nearly 300 games for Norwich City in the old First Division, and a gay man who had deserted his wife and kids, cutting off all contact with family so he could live his truth thousands of kilometres from home.
There have never been more sports documentaries available to watch. There have never been fewer that are worth your while. Too many are produced by players and their agents, put together to enhance public image, rehabilitate reputations and improve commercial viability. Clubs are at that kind of crack too. The production values are usually high, the editorial values invariably low.
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The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel is not slick and, at times, it would have benefited from the producers knowing more about English football. But it is incredibly poignant, powerful, moving and raw.
It doesn’t matter that you may not remember Powell. A teak-tough defender straight from 1970s central casting with wavy hair, a neat line in industrial-strength tackling and a willingness to get his head on the end of anything coming towards his own goal. It was the era of cut-up, muddy pitches and Admiral kits. The box-office stars of that Norwich side were Justin Fashanu, particularly for that Goal of the Season on Match of the Day versus Liverpool, Kevin Reeves and even John Bond, the charismatic manager always appearing oversized in a flared suit in the tiny dugout, as per the fashion diktat of the time.
“Powell is one of those footballers who does not get the headlines,” wrote Bond, in his weekly column for the Norwich Evening Post. “Yet to me he is a dream player. He gives his all in every match and is the sort that every manager wants in his side. There must be only a handful of players in the country who would have gone out against Ipswich on Tuesday night with a broken nose and had the courage to head balls as Tony Powell did. In fact, he got three knocks on his head in the game but it did not matter to him at all.”
A promising amateur boxer in his native West Country, Powell turned pro late, joining Bournemouth from non-league Bath City at age 20. After more than 200 appearances, he moved to Norwich, just as the club was on an upward trajectory towards the top flight.
There’s quaint footage of him giddily picking up a sponsored car – a prize for being voted player of the year at Carrow Road in 1979. It’s a reminder that footballers in those days scarcely earned above the industrial wage. A free set of wheels was a major boon. The game was so much smaller then, the media coverage not nearly as magnified.
The latter point explains why he was able to fade into obscurity in the early 1980s following a move to play alongside George Best for the San Jose Earthquakes of the North American Soccer League. Years after his tragic former teammate Fashanu became the first footballer to come out, Norwich couldn’t locate Powell to invite him to their centenary celebrations in 2002.
He was long since domiciled in West Hollywood, the epicentre of gay life in Los Angeles where he had nursed his long-term boyfriend David Castro through a fatal battle with AIDS, and ended up managing the no-tell motel he eventually made his home.
At one point in this excellent documentary, the director asks Powell the names of his estranged daughters back in England. He blanks on the answer. A troubling cameo that suggests he’s erased them from his memory. Or perhaps he’s suffering the deleterious impact of a previous life spent heading all those sodden balls in aerial battles. He hailed from an age when a burly, 6ft 2in centre-half needed to be better with his noggin than his feet. How much fans appreciated that style is evident in their reaction when he finally goes back to Carrow Road to be introduced to the crowd.
His return to England also involves a more protracted, painful family reunion full of touching and achingly beautiful human moments. Through it all, Powell’s desertion of his children and ignoring of his siblings’ attempts to contact him through the decades is never glossed over. The director repeatedly challenges his subject’s false narratives. No attempt is made to ennoble him in this compelling portrait of a complicated man facing up to the consequences of painful decisions he once made in order to be his most authentic self.
