Everton fan Speedo Mick raises both funds and eyebrows with his charity workEverton fan Michael Cullen, also known as Speedo Mick, collects donations outside the stadium before a Premier League match against Watford.The first sign things may have not been entirely right with Michael Cullen came the evening he turned to his wife and said, “I’m going to have a go at swimming the channel.”
That would be the English Channel, the chilly, shark-infested body of water separating England from France. Cullen had about as much chance making it across as he did of walking to the moon because he was 48, had never had a swimming lesson and probably shouldn’t have stepped into a bath tub without a lifeguard present.
But pointing out the absurdities of her husband’s ideas only made him more determined to see them through. So Rachel Cullen answered the only way she could.
“OK,” she said with a well-practiced sigh “I’ll put the kettle on.”
In hindsight, though, maybe that was the first sign that Michael Cullen was more right than the rest of us. Because he wasn’t planning to swim the English Channel for personal fame or fortune, he was doing it to raise much-needed money for a hospice center in Liverpool that was in danger of closing.
And in the last three years the ideas that sprang to life over that kettle have helped Cullen raise nearly $125,000 for charity, won him a role in a London play and made him a finalist for the prestigious Pride of Britain Awards, in which ordinary people are recognized for doing extraordinary things.
It also sped Cullen’s transition from mild-mannered — and anonymous — London lighting engineer to Speedo Mick, a fundraising superhero who has visited all 20 Premier League soccer stadiums and twice hiked across England, in the dead of winter, clad in nothing but a tiny, form-fitting nylon bathing suit and the scarf of his beloved Everton soccer club.
“Mick’s become a character,” says Everton executive Mo Maghazachi, “that goes beyond the game.”
The channel swim wasn’t Cullen’s first attempt at fundraising. But it may have been the closest he’s come to death.
“People were looking at me sideways thinking, ‘He’s got no chance,’” Cullen said. A third of the way into the nearly 16-hour swim, he was ready to agree. He was so tired he thought he was swimming backward, so Rachel, in the nearby support boat, tried to keep his spirits up by playing his favorite songs over the sound system — occasionally mixing in the theme from “Jaws” just to see if he was paying attention.
He finished the swim in quiet, inky darkness, paddling with one arm after injuring a shoulder, before stumbling ashore in France exhausted and marked by 11 jellyfish stings.
Cullen had actually worked up to the channel swim, running marathons to support charities for the homeless in London, a community of which he had once been a part. Then after a knee injury made running difficult, he began showing up at landmarks such as Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street, where he would strip down to his bathing suit in defiance of the winter chill.
“My job is taking my clothes off,” says the impish Cullen who, at 5 feet 5 and 159 pounds, is dwarfed by his plus-size spirit and enthusiasm.
“I’m not really self-obsessed, obviously.”
In exchange for his sense of humor, Cullen found people would hand him money — whether as a reward for braving the elements or as a plea to put his clothes back on he was never certain. But in either case, as with the channel swim — which fell $1,250 short of Cullen’s fundraising goal — the money he raised was never enough.
So Cullen, who grew up in the Blue Mile — the area surrounding Everton’s home stadium of Goodison Park, where 85% of the residents are Everton fans — decided to take his campaign to the people he knew best: the loyal and long-suffering supporters of his hometown soccer team.
At his first game, in 2014, he bought a ticket, entered the stadium fully clothed, then began undressing at the opening whistle. It was an audacious striptease, considering winter temperatures in Liverpool frequently dip to near-freezing.
Yet while the neighborhood is one of the poorest in England, the fans responded generously.
“I went to Everton and everyone was just cheering,” he remembers of his Premier League debut. “The security was like, ‘You can’t do that. You have to go.’ I’d just take my clothes off [and] everyone was donating.
“So I went back the next day and Everton was generous enough to let me stay. The rest is history. I’ve been going to every single game.”
These days Cullen, now 52, shows up as much as 90 minutes before kickoff and stands outside Goodison Park dressed in a royal blue swimming cap and goggles, a matching blue speedo and his Everton scarf. On a recent winter night, Cullen, wearing little more than his barely mentionables and a smile, braved a stinging chill as he made his way down the narrow streets of terraced houses to a parking lot on the far side of the aging stadium.
“I still get cold,” he says through teeth that were soon chattering. “People think I don’t feel it. I feel it.”
The worst conditions he has endured, he says, came last season at Stoke City, where frigid 16-mph gusts dropped the wind chill into the low 30s.
“I love the challenge to go to a game when it’s freezing cold. You get more respect and you get more donations,” says Cullen, who tackles his stunts with humble earnestness. “In the summer it’s just like going out sunbathing. You’re not really doing anything. You’re just standing there in your trunks.”
Michael Cullen watches his favorite team, Everton, play Norwich City at Carrow Road Stadium.
And the fans respond, greeting Cullen with warm handshakes and requests for selfies. Others simply stuff cash into the blue bucket he carries. Most walk away smiling.
“It’s Everton that gave me the leeway to raise the money I’ve raised,” Cullen says in a Scouse accent that gives away his working-class Liverpool roots. “I mean, I’m a man going around in me speedos, me goggles and me hat. They’ve been really lenient with me to allow me to raise all this money.”
Lately Cullen has taken his show on the road, making attendance at a soccer match a clothing-optional event all across England.
Last spring, dressed in his Speedo, hiking boots and trademark scarf, he walked 200 miles from Liverpool to London for Everton’s FA Cup semifinal against Manchester United. Last month, dressed the same way, he went in the other direction, raising $12,500 for a children’s charity by walking from Buckingham Palace to northwest England ahead of Everton’s Merseyside Derby game with neighborhood rival Liverpool.
Once there he stood bare-chested among the Liverpool faithful, who applauded Cullen as he bravely held his blue Everton scarf above his head in a sea of Liverpool red.
Yet despite his close affiliation to Everton — the team gave him a season ticket as its fan of the year — Cullen says none of the money he raises goes to club charities. And that’s fine with the team, which benefits from the relationship in other ways.
“Some things go beyond the game,” says Maghazachi, the public relations manager for Everton, which has a long and well-earned reputation for outstanding charity work. “He’s raising money for good causes.
“When he came into the ground, people knew what he was trying to do. And it actually provided a bit of light relief during the game.”
Fifteen years ago Cullen learned the value of charitable giving from the other side, when he was homeless and thinking more about drowning himself in the English Channel than swimming it.
“I had nothing to live for,” Cullen recalls. “I had lost all hope and couldn’t see how things were ever going to change until I was given a hand by total strangers, people who believed in me when I had no belief in myself.
“Now I do the same, hopefully, and that is to spread love instead of hate and negativity. I’ve got a roof over my head and never-ending gratitude to be lucky enough to give back. You can only keep what you have by giving it away.”
Cullen has given away more in the last three years than most people will in a lifetime. And when he can’t give money, he gives of himself, visiting hospitals in his swimsuit and goggles.
He has even managed to lift the fortunes of the soccer club he has worshipped since birth. After Saturday’s draw with West Ham, sixth-place Everton is on pace to match its second-best Premier League finish in eight seasons and is just two points shy of qualifying for a European tournament for only the second time in seven years.
That success has convinced Cullen skimpy swimsuits have secret powers — ones that might even steady the nuclear standoff behind President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“Put them both in Speedos and I swear their lives will change — along with their priorities,” he says. “Within a fortnight they will both disarm all of their nuclear weapons.
“Plus we would have had a good laugh.”
Cullen chuckles at his own joke. Despite his affinity for swimwear, he hasn’t gone near water since his channel swim. And as for his long-suffering wife Rachel, whom Cullen refers to as “my favorite face,” she keeps the kettle close by, awaiting the night her husband decides to plan a fundraising climb up Mt. Everest in his bathing suit.
“She’s a little bit sick of it at the moment, to be honest,” Cullen says with a wink. “But she’s still very supportive.”
By Kevin Baxter / latimes.com
