Gazza: My Story (24 page)

She turned up on time and we went for a drink. Over the drink, I decided I didn’t fancy her after all. She was really boring and irritating, in fact. So, after an hour, I said, ‘Cheerio, pet, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a match tomorrow.’ And I went straight home and went to bed.

The next day, before our game, Terry Venables calls me aside and says, ‘Where did you go last night, Gazza?’

‘Nowhere, boss,’ I says. ‘I was just relaxing. I went nowhere, honestly.’

‘Then how come you were spotted with a girl in the doorway of Harrods?’

I couldn’t believe it. I was gearing myself up to lie my way out of it, because of course nothing had actually happened in the doorway, when he explained how he knew.

I hadn’t realised there was a security camera over the front door of Harrods. Somewhere, sitting in a little cubby hole, there’s this security guard, probably dozing off. Suddenly, he happens to glance at one of his monitors and sees me with a girl. He recognises me at once because, as luck would have it, he’s a Spurs fan. So he also knows we’ve got a game the next day. So what does he do, the bastard? He rings the club. Fortunately, Terry did believe me when I told him what happened.

Our baby was due in February 1996. Three days before the birth, Shel was at home in Hertfordshire and I was up in Scotland with Rangers. As we didn’t have a game, Walter decided to take us down to London for the
weekend, for rest and relaxation, which meant we had a very good night out on the Friday.

Over the years, I’ve actually not been a great womaniser, unlike some players I could name. I didn’t really have a regular girlfriend after Gail, until Shel came along. I suppose I wasn’t much bothered. So all those lurid tabloid stories about me give totally the wrong impression. I’ve always been more interested in being out for the night with Jimmy and the lads, with friends, or just staying at home on my own. I still am, really. Anyway, on this Saturday evening I went to Shel’s house. I’d been on the piss and was still a bit drunk and argumentative. Even at this late stage, I was still going on about why we shouldn’t be having a baby at all, and blaming her. We had a big row and she was soon in tears, and then I was in tears. I’d managed to upset us both. I thought, fuck it, I’m getting out of here.

I got in my car and started driving north, deciding I’d go home to Newcastle. Mel Stein rang me on my car phone. He said I should turn round and go back to be with Shel when she had the baby. I just told him to fuck off.

I drove to me dad’s and went out on the piss all night. Next day, I went out to the pub in the morning
to get drunk again, and it was there that I read in the paper I’d had a baby. That was how I learned about it, and found out the baby’s name and weight. Shel had tried to discuss names with me, but I’d refused to talk about it. I was blanking it out. I didn’t want to know or hear about a baby.

I didn’t do anything for about two weeks, made no contact, sent nothing. By this time, I felt very embarrassed and guilty about what I’d done, or not done, knowing I really should have been there. Finally, I went down south and I saw my son for the first time. Shel was brilliant. She let me have him on my own, so I could cuddle and kiss him.

I quite like the name Regan now. I think Shel got it from a waiter in some hotel or restaurant. He had served her, and his name was on the bill, and she liked it. She looked it up and discovered it meant ‘little king’. She thought that was a good omen.

Regan’s arrival brought us together again and Shel took the plunge and moved up, with all three children, to join me north of the border. I bought a large house in Renfrewshire, near Ally McCoist’s, which cost £510,000, a lot of money then in Scotland, or anywhere in Britain, come to that. It had six bedrooms, a swimming pool and
a tennis court. I loved it. Lovely house. And to start with, we were happy there.

I was playing well for Rangers, and for England, loving life in Glasgow and Scotland, winning trophies – and I was injury-free. That was about the most important thing of all in my life at the time. Any time, really. It’s when I get injuries that things become horrible. That I become horrible. But I had no twitches, I was sleeping OK, I had hardly any worries, hardly thought about death and other awful things.

My England career had been massively interrupted by all those injuries. Remember, I lost over a year waiting to move from Spurs to Lazio, and then another one at the end of my time in Italy. But England hadn’t done much to speak of during that time anyway, under Graham Taylor, notably missing out on the 1994 World Cup finals. And I hadn’t done much when I did appear.

So I’d been well pleased when Terry Venables took over the England job in 1994. I had loved him at Spurs. The minute we all heard the news, people like Paul Ince and Ian Wright, who hadn’t played for him before, were asking me, ‘What’s he like? What’s he like?’ I told them he was fucking marvellous.

I wasn’t fit for his early games, but he picked me for the Japan match at Wembley in June 1995, just before I signed for Rangers. It was the first time I’d pulled on an England shirt for fifteen months. I came on as a sub and we won 2–1.

After that I became a vital part of Terry’s Euro 96 preparation games. As the tournament was being held in England, we didn’t have to qualify. I was on great form at Rangers, and playing well for England, so much so that Terry took me aside one day and said he was thinking he might make me the England captain.

I didn’t think it was such a good idea. The press would be bound to dig out all the old cuttings about me drinking, the kiss-and-tell stories, the bust-ups with Shel, and would just hound me, looking for more dirt. Basically, they’d have a field day, which would be bad for me and my game and bad for England and for Terry. So I was quite pleased it didn’t happen. I would, of course, have been dead proud. But I was proud enough to be going into the Euro 96 finals to be held in our own country confident enough that I would be in the team.

As part of our final warm-up for Euro 96, we went to play a couple of matches in Hong Kong and China. On the plane out, I tried to attract the attention of a
steward standing in the aisle, just after we had taken off, to ask him to get me a drink. All I did was poke him gently in the back. But then things got out of hand and there was a bit of a scuffle. The pilot intervened, giving out a message that if there was any more trouble, he would stop the plane in Russia, drop me off and leave me there. An official complaint was later made to the FA about my behaviour. Luckily, none of that ever made the papers.

In Hong Kong, after we’d played both our matches, Terry said we could have a night out, so we all went to this club. I got drinking with Robbie Fowler at the bar and he saw this girl and said to her, ‘Hi, what’s your name?’ I said, ‘What a fucking awful line. You must be able to do better – that’s really corny.’ So of course we started pushing and shoving each other. We were just messing around, really, nothing serious, but it led to me picking up a pint and pouring it over Robbie’s head. Then Teddy Sheringham arrived. I poured a pint over his head as well. Steve McManaman came over and he, too, ended up wearing a pint. At the same time, I somehow managed to rip his T-shirt. The evening’s game then became that everyone had to have a pint poured over them and their shirt ripped. Just a simple little intellectual game.

Bryan Robson was now on the England coaching
staff, no longer a player or one of us, so he was standing around, staying cool. The lads said, ‘Go on, Gazza, rip his shirt and pour a pint over him. You said that was this evening’s game.’ I was a bit worried about involving him, as he was looking cool in his best clothes, whereas the rest of us were in T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms. I was afraid he might thump me. I decided I would rip his shirt, but only a little bit. But when I did it, for some reason the whole of his shirt came away, leaving him with only his collar on. It was very weird. And very funny. He took it in good humour.

I went and hid in a little telephone booth, and when I came out, Dennis Wise and Teddy Sheringham had taken down some boxing gloves that were hanging in the bar and were pretending to have a boxing match. As I stepped out of the booth, Dennis hit me with a real upper-cut.

Then someone said, ‘How about the dentist’s chair?’ I thought, that’s handy, I could do with some fillings. I didn’t know what it was at first. It was explained to me that what you had to do was sit back on this big chair and the barmen would pour different spirits down your throat from the bottles. I think there was tequila and Drambuie. Obviously, most of it got spilt, as you were lying back, with your mouth open, just like at the dentist’s
– hence the name. It was all a laugh, no more than us letting our hair down before the Euro finals. Nothing bad happened. Nobody got attacked, no girls were assaulted, the place didn’t get wrecked. I went home quite early, in fact, sharing a taxi with Bryan Robson in his shirt collar, thinking it had been OK – a quiet night, really, nothing wild. Till we all saw the next day’s papers.

I should think about eight of the England team had stepped into that dentist’s chair, but most of the photographs that were published afterwards were of me. They had been taken by some punter who just happened to be in the bar and decided to make himself a few bob. But really, it wasn’t all that bad. It just looked bad when the reporters put their own interpretation on it in the papers.

A couple of days later it was my birthday. I got some flowers from Regan, which was very touching. So I had to celebrate that, even if we were supposed to stay indoors and be sensible after all the bad publicity. I went out on my own for a quiet drink. Yes, I was wearing my England tracksuit and a big pair of Doc Martens, so I suppose you could say I was drawing attention to myself, but I didn’t think of it that way. I just wanted to go out and have a bit of fun – I wasn’t thinking about my clothes.

I found a little hotel and went to the bar, where
there was a load of locals, all smoking big cigars. I joined in, and some of them gave me a few cigars. I went back to the England hotel smoking a big cigar, strode into the dining room, where the FA officials were all eating, and ordered champagne all round. That was one occasion when Terry did tell me to calm down.

On the plane home, we were all knackered. I had a few drinks and soon fell into a very deep sleep – until some bastard gave me a hard slap on the face. I woke up with a start, really furious. I went round trying to make somebody tell me who had slapped me, but nobody would. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Welcome to hell. Unless yous tell me who did it, no one is going to sleep on this plane.’

I went up and down the aisles, kicking all the seats, throwing cushions around. We were on the top deck of a Cathay Pacific plane, in the first-class cabin, which had been reserved for the England squad. Dennis Wise climbed into one of the overhead lockers to try to get some sleep and escape my attentions. Jamie Redknapp got down under two of the seats. I suspected it was Steve McManaman who had slapped me, so I gave his seat and his TV screen a good punch. His screen did go a bit blurry, but it seemed to still be working, after a fashion. Then I did the same to Les Ferdinand’s.

While I was going around shouting at everyone, an FA official came up the stairs from their seats on the lower deck, and told me to stop all the noise, sit down and go to sleep. I told him to fuck off. ‘Don’t you dare tell any England player what to do,’ I shouted at him. ‘We do the playing, you do fuck all.’ It was a bit out of order, I admit, but then, I was a bit tipsy.

During the ten days or so we had been away, I had only actually been drunk on two nights. I didn’t think that was so bad. Plus, of course, the plane home. So I suppose that makes three times. Still, it wasn’t a lot in a ten-day period.