Source: Telegraph
Tzofit Grant: 'Avram gets lonely so maybe he needs a massage'
The morning that Avram Grant's infidelity was exposed in the papers, his wife, Tzofit , was sitting in a restaurant outside her home town of Tel Aviv. The football manager had been photographed leaving a Thai massage parlour in Portsmouth known not so much for its backrubs as its 'happy endings'. He had rung at 6am to warn her of the coming storm. By 10am, Mrs Grant was besieged with enquiries, and issued similar statements to different papers, television and radio stations until midnight that night.[LNB]'What do I care?' she told them. 'It's his business. It's very stressful being a manager at a club like Portsmouth. He should have had two massages.'[LNB]Chelsea made major mistake sacking Avram GrantTony Adams sacking at Portsmouth proves Premier League chairmen still know nothingAlan Curbishley and Avram Grant emerge as Portsmouth front-runnersRenewing our vows led to two magical weeksIn the past few months, newspapers have reported an ever-growing list of sporting personalities caught scandalously offside: Tiger Woods and his rising scorecard of extramarital affairs; John Terry's double betrayal of his wife and his England team-mate; Chelsea's Ashley Cole who sex-texted his way out of marriage to the nation's darling, Cheryl.[LNB]But of all the reactions from girlfriends, lovers and wronged spouses, Mrs Grant's has been the most unusual. Faced with the prying and the press intrusion, the sniggering inquisition dressed up as sympathetic indignation, she has been defiant. She has, until now, brushed aside the press with that flip deflection. She has proudly defended her privacy, dismissed the prurience and stoically taken the postmodern Tammy Wynette position: she is standing by her manager.[LNB]She has refused to be the victim of the story, nor has she been a willing party to it. Instead, to spend a day with Tzofit Grant to hurtle from her sell-out play in Tel Aviv to her home in the suburbs with her teenage kids, to tea the next day with Rabbi Lau, the old chief rabbi of Israel, to a long, late dinner talking about her television shows in Israel, Avram's football matches in England and the pressures on their 17-year marriage is to see the complexities of real life too easily cast as a tawdry morality tale in the media.[LNB]But then, Mrs Grant is anything but the stereotypical footballer's wife. On television, she is notorious for her eccentric persona, her chutzpah and 'so sue me' attitude. But sitting in her stylish but informal home in Tel Aviv, she comes across as a mature, self-analytical woman: the thinking woman's WAG.[LNB]On the subject of tabloid intrusion, for example, she offers a harsh but compelling judgment: 'When you sit on your sofa, fat, lazy and stupid and eating crisps, then you hear about the fact that a beautiful woman, the wife of John Terry, has a husband that is [sleeping with] another woman, or you see what's happened with Avram Grant and his stupid wife who says he can have two massages, you say, 'Oh my God that's an amazing story, now I feel that I can continue to live, now I am not just a fat stupid cow on the sofa, because she is having a very bad time and my husband would never do that,' and you can say to yourself: 'Thank God I am me'.'[LNB]A strikingly attractive 45 year-old actress and the mother of two teenagers, Mrs Grant is a series of contradictions: she dyes her hair different colours but wears little make-up off camera, she has a healthy appetite but worries she is fat; works flat out on her career but is a devoted mother, can out-vulgar any lads' mag but was appointed president of a charity for the mentally ill in Israel after her brother was struck down with schizophrenia.[LNB]Nor is Mrs Grant's husband the most handsome man in the premiership: 'When I first met Avram, I thought he looked like a monkey.' Indeed, she acknowledges what most women do: '[Jose] Mourinho is sexy, I can't say that he isn't.' But Mr Mourinho, who was Mr Grant's immediate predecessor as manager of Chelsea FC, does not, she says, come close to Avram for charisma. And, as Mrs Grant puts it, when she goes to bed with a man, she is making love first and foremost to his brains.[LNB]Her frequently foul-mouthed and strident opinions belie a keen mind, generous personality and uncompromising values. Ironically, for a woman whose husband has been caught paying a woman for sexual favours, she says: 'Almost every woman has a price. It starts from a very early age when our parents want us to marry a man who has money … It's most women, maybe 80 per cent in the rich, Western world. Especially the upper class, it's very easy to buy an upper-class woman in exchange for a comfortable life.' From her first encounters with Mr Grant, she railed against the transaction that she believes is at the heart of courtship, where a man tries to buy a woman, and a woman allows herself to be bought. 'On our first date, I opened the glove compartment and found some perfume, and the smell was amazing. And Avram told me, 'You can take it', and I was so tough with him, I said, 'Yes thank you very much — and then when you want to sleep with me I need to say yes?''[LNB]Three weeks later he proposed, in a football stadium, at midnight. Less than three months after that they were married.[LNB]Football has been part of their marriage ever since. When Roman Abramovich hired Mr Grant as director of football for Chelsea in 2007, Mrs Grant came to live in St John's Wood. In the evenings she found herself going to parties on Mr Grant's arm as the 'plus one' she had worked so hard not to be.[LNB]'I was so lonely. I used to wake up every morning and cry for hours. Because in one moment I understood what it was like to become a nobody, a zero. I lost everything, my work, my personality, my spirit.'[LNB]It was also a testing time for Mr Grant, who was made manager after Mr Mourinho's departure. He consistently led the team to victory until the fateful day that John Terry slipped and missed the penalty in the Champion's League final against Manchester United in Moscow.[LNB]'I couldn't look,' says Mrs Grant in a stage whisper. 'My daughter, she screamed, and my son shut down completely. Until now, as a family we can't talk about it. I remember after the match I walked out into Moscow and it was raining. I didn't cry as I was just trying to support my children. I said to them, 'It's just football, it's just a game.' But I knew I was talking bull.'[LNB]And her husband?[LNB]'I think he died a little in that moment,' says Mrs Grant. 'And he is still underground. Something changed in him. But I don't think he believed that Roman would tell him to go. That was what really broke his heart.[LNB]'Avram and Roman do not like each other, they love each other. And we are all very thankful to Roman for giving Avram such a big opportunity … But I never understood why Roman dropped him. I think maybe he was nervous of the press … And maybe it was also because Avram didn't have such status then as a football manager. The Russians care a lot about status.'[LNB]Mrs Grant is now living apart from her husband, since he has taken on the job as manager of Portsmouth. She says that her husband received offers from all around the world to be manager.[LNB]So why did he return to England, to a team that is at the bottom of the Premier League and in serious financial trouble?[LNB]Mrs Grant shrugs. 'Because it is the best football league in the world. And because being a manager in England is unfinished business for Avram. And because it is a great opportunity for him. He is taking no salary now, it is not a normal club to be working at … But Avram is an amazing coach, a first-class coach … He has the capability of managing the English team. And also Argentina and Brazil.'[LNB]And does she think that because her husband is a football manager in England and she is an actress in Israel, that the normal rules do not apply? Have they chosen some sort of 'open' relationship?[LNB]'My relationship with Avram is not open. If he had a relationship with a woman in London, I think we would get divorced.'[LNB]So is she disappointed with him?[LNB]'About the massage? Of course not, never … Sometimes I think, what is a massage? What is the difference between rubbing your leg and other parts of your body? … If it's in your private life, you can do want you want to, as long as you are not a publicly elected figure. If you want to have a massage, have a massage. And if something happens in that room, it's between you and your wife, that's all.'[LNB]Mrs Grant does this a lot. She talks as if she will tell you anything, while all the time keeping a veil over the very private details. This, she believes, is the way to manage being in a celebrity marriage.[LNB]'With Cheryl Cole, I don't know anything about her story except I think she missed the opportunity to be very dignified and high class. If she wants to dump Ashley Cole by text, and take him to court, and take all his money, or tell him he is a -------, that is absolutely fine. But they fight each other in the tabloids — that's what I don't appreciate.'[LNB]But neither does she believe, self-evidently, in holding your tongue: 'I think when you meet someone and you fall in love, don't leave your personality behind you.'[LNB]After the first years of her marriage, in which she tried to be 'mainly Avram's wife I was stupid, he didn't even appreciate it', Mrs Grant returned to her career with a vengeance, making ever more provocative television shows. This culminated on her show Milkshake, where she drank a glass of her own urine on television: 'What's the big deal, it tastes like the Dead Sea,' she said to camera.[LNB]'I was interviewing someone who treats problems by drinking urine, and I like to follow a concept, right to the extreme,' she shrugs when I ask her to explain.[LNB]She claims the same impulse drove her much criticised decision to film her mother just after she had arrived in hospital in an ambulance, during her reality television show The Real Hours. 'I was in the hospital that specialised in heart surgery, talking to the doctors in an operating theatre … I got a message from my brother that Mummy was on the way to the hospital. So I told my director, 'Come on, let's go come with me',' she explains.[LNB]'And he said, 'Are you crazy?' And I said, 'What am I doing? I'm doing The Real Hours. This is my show'.'[LNB]Mrs Grant has a compelling way of telling stories. She puts on other voices as well as physically inhabiting the person who is talking: during her account of her first dates with Mr Grant she hunches her shoulders and adopts a simian expression; talking about society parties in London, her lips become pinched, her voice haughty.[LNB]She will be serious about the most unlikely issues: 'The problem with footballers is that they don't have nice feet. They have so many blisters and a bad shape.'[LNB]But she will then be tongue in cheek about matters of state, such as the recent assassination in Dubai of a leading Hamas figure. 'It's so sexy to be Mossad, isn't it?' she says, with a giggle. 'I'm so proud of them. I feel more safe now I know they can kill bad people. But why should the Australians criticise?' she asks, referring to their aggressive reaction to the use of fraudulent Australian passports. 'They sit on a beach, taking drugs, living like hippies, doing nothing … they don't have any problems, except for with kangaroos.'[LNB]For a moment she stares at me indignantly through her square, Clark Kent glasses, before bursting into infectious laughter.[LNB]It's hard not to spend a day with Mrs Grant without feeling she is always dramatically, but authentically, herself.[LNB]And yet, these days, only herself. She and Avram have been living in different countries for four months. Although they speak several times a day, and laugh a lot on the phone, Mrs Grant says she has taken a decision not to miss her husband:[LNB]'All my life I have missed people. I missed my mother, I missed my father. And now I miss Avram. I don't want to miss anyone anymore.'[LNB]Indeed, Mrs Grant's life has been full of abandonment. Her parents divorced when she was five, and her mother, deep in debt, forced her grandmother to take care of her.[LNB]At the age of 10, she was sexually abused by a neighbour.[LNB]Did she understand at the time that it was wrong? 'No. I was just grateful that someone loved me.'[LNB]At 14, the young Tzofit was expelled from a boarding school she hated, and it was not until she joined the Army that she started to flourish. She started drama school at 22, having been abused in various ways by other men along the way.[LNB]Small wonder then, that Mrs Grant has 'decided' not to miss her husband. 'If you try to catch hold of someone you can never fly yourself,' she says succinctly. 'I need my spirit and I need my freedom and I need my space.'[LNB]But for now, depending on the future of Portsmouth, her marriage is at an impasse. Mrs Grant has no plans to leave Tel Aviv, where she thrives, along with her children Daniel and Romi and their dog, Joy. Although she likes Portsmouth 'especially the fans' she does not intend to live there. Mr Grant remains in St John's Wood, from where he commutes to Portsmouth.[LNB]That must be quite a journey every day? 'One and a half hours,' says Mrs Grant. I express my sympathy. 'Yeah, poor guy. And lonely too.' She laughs drily, then flashes me a mischievous glance. 'So he needs a massage, or he doesn't need a massage?'[LNB]
