Gazza: My Story (31 page)

One day after training at Boro, I noticed that the team coach was standing there empty, with the doors open and the key in the ignition. I thought, I’d like to drive that. I know, I’ll drive it into town, take some of the lads to the bookie’s so they can put a few bets on. I jumped in and started it up. It all seemed easy enough at first, till I came to this narrow gate on the perimeter of the training ground. I didn’t see the big breeze block. And it slipped my mind that I was driving a huge coach, not a car. As a result, I took the bloody thing with me. I heard this horrible scraping noise and realised I must have done a bit of damage. Then I reversed, which made things even worse.

There was a security man on the gate, and I threw him the keys of the coach and said, ‘Quick, you take it.’ My team-mate Phil Stamp was driving up in his car and stopped, seeing what the coach had done, but not who had been driving it. I jumped into his car and said, ‘Hurry up, get the fuck out of here.’

Bryan Robson rang me in town. ‘I know you are mad, but this is fucking too much.’ The team coach was so bashed up it couldn’t be used for the next away game and the club had to borrow another one. And I had to stump up £14,000 for the damage I’d caused.

I thought Bryan Robson was an excellent manager. I had no problems with him, though he might have had a few problems with me. It was good having club football to look forward to again after the humiliation of La Manga, and great to be in the Premiership. During the close season, I had worked really hard on my fitness and agility, which is how I came to play the drums so well at David Seaman’s wedding in July 1998. And I tested my reflexes by setting fire to Jimmy’s nose. I then bet him £500 he couldn’t hold a red-hot lighter to his nose for more than three seconds. He did it twice, so I had to pay him £1,000. But it left him with a scorched conk for weeks, and he claims you can still see the burn marks.

So I was, honestly, fit and slim by the beginning of the new season, and Bryan Robson was really pleased with me. But just before the first game, at the end of August, I had a lot on my mind. As well as the divorce from Shel, Glenn Hoddle’s book was being serialised in one newspaper and picked over by all the rest, so the press were after me all the time, on both topics. In the middle of all this came a sudden blow which knocked me for six.

I was over in Gateshead, staying in a hotel with Jimmy and some friends, including David Cheek, who was Jimmy’s uncle. I’d known him for many years, and he was a good lad. I sometimes took him training with me. He always called me The Boss.

We began the evening drinking cocktails, then went for an Italian meal, came back to the hotel, had some more drinks and crashed into bed. I woke at four in the morning and, as I usually do when I wake up early, wanted someone to play with. I rang Jimmy, who was of course still asleep, and he told me groggily to fuck off. I rang the others, but they all either hung up on me or didn’t answer.

Not long afterwards, there was a call from Jimmy. I thought, good, he’s getting up now so we can go and
do something, but all he said was, ‘Davey’s dead.’ He’d died in the night, just like that. I rushed out of my room and down the stairs to see his body being taken away in an ambulance.

Davey was only thirty-eight and had four bairns. I was shattered. He had been a heavy drinker for many years, but I’d never expected this to happen. He went so suddenly. Once again, I felt it was my fault, for taking him out drinking. All I could do now was act as pall-bearer at his funeral. I wondered if the same thing would happen to me, whether I’d go out like that, out of the blue.

After Davey died, I started having blackouts. I took tablets for depression and heaps of other pills, anything to numb my mind. Or I just got drunk.

I didn’t feel much like playing after the funeral. Bryan Robson said I didn’t have to, but I wanted to turn out for Boro’s first game back in the Premiership. It was against Leeds at home. It ended in a goalless draw, but I lasted the full ninety minutes and most reports said I was Boro’s best player on the day. I managed to get the better of Lee Bowyer, who was snapping at my heels, and gave Paul Merson a forty-yard pass which he nearly converted, but he got bundled over.

I was substituted in our next match, when we were
beaten 3–1 by Villa, but I played the whole of the home game against Derby, which we drew 1–1. I was getting fitter with every match. We beat Leicester away, 1–0, our first win back in the Premiership, and I scored our goal. Paul Merson had left for Villa by then, complaining that there was a drinking culture at the club. I don’t know who he was referring to. Did he mean me?

Actually, Merson was teetotal when I knew him at Boro, so we all tried to help. I remember him coming to my house once and hiding two bottles of wine in the kitchen so he couldn’t see them and wouldn’t be tempted. I deny that I was part of any drinking culture among the players at Boro. Since my Spurs days, and that was just odd nights out when I was young, I hardly ever went out drinking with team-mates. In fact, on the whole I’ve not socialised with other players after a game or after training. I’ve kept myself to myself. Having seen them all day in training, at work so to speak, I preferred to be with other people in the evening, such as Jimmy and my other old friends. That’s always been my style.

In the middle of September, we were due to meet Spurs at White Hart Lane, so I was looking forward to that. It would be my first league game there since 1991. David Pleat was now caretaker manager at Tottenham, in
the wake of the departure of Christian Gross. I was given a good ovation by the Spurs crowd. Glenn Hoddle was in the stands, still England manager, but I don’t think he’d come to see me. Probably he was checking out Sol Campbell, who didn’t have a very good game and didn’t look fit. We stuffed them 3–0. I was brought off four minutes before the end, as I was knackered, but I got probably the biggest cheer of the afternoon from the Tottenham supporters.

In the next game, against Wycombe Wanderers in the Worthington Cup, Bryan made me captain as Andy Townsend, our normal skipper, was injured. We won that one 2–0. At that stage, we were sixth in the league.

In October the Premiership clubs had a week off because of England’s vital Euro 2000 qualifier against Bulgaria. Needless to say, Hoddle had not picked me for that. So instead of a visit to Wembley, it was a four-day break in Dublin for me with Middlesbrough.

I was sleeping very badly, far worse than normal, thinking about Davey and death and that his was my fault and that I would be next. I’d started taking sleeping pills at the end of my time at Rangers, in the hope that they would make me sleep and blank everything out. But all they did was make me feel really terrible when I woke up and go on feeling like shit all day. So I’d just
dive into the booze to cheer myself up, stop myself thinking about death and dying.

Those four days in Dublin turned into a four-day drinking session. Jimmy and my friend Hazy had come over to join us, as my guests in our hotel, with Bryan Robson’s permission.

When the time came to catch the plane back to England, I got myself into a state about flying and started drinking before we even boarded. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, because I was due to go direct from Newcastle Airport to Hertfordshire, ready to pick up my son Regan the next morning and spend a day with him as part of the access arrangements in the divorce agreement.

To get myself fit to fly, I drank sixteen hot toddies. That’s about thirty-two whiskies (they were very strong hot toddies). I reeled off the plane at Newcastle and somehow got myself to the railway station and on to the train to Stevenage. I have no memory of getting off the plane or of catching the train. All I can remember is standing on the platform at Stevenage, crying my eyes out. I felt so miserable and depressed, and being drunk just magnified those feelings. I’d made such a mess of things, wrecking my marriage, ruining Shel’s life and the children’s. That row with Hoddle, then David Cheek
dying. Everything seemed so bleak, and most of it was my own fault. It seemed to me that Shel and Regan would cope much better if I wasn’t around.

So I decided, in this emotional state, to throw myself in front of the next train. I waited and waited, but no train came. A railwayman saw me staggering around and came over. I asked where the fuck the train was and he said there wasn’t another one. The last train had gone. That’s when I really started crying. Even when I was trying to kill myself I couldn’t get it right.

I somehow managed to ring Shel, sobbing down the line, saying, ‘Please help. Please come and get me.’ She’d heard this sort of talk from me before, and she’d been taken in by it enough times already, she said. She refused to let me come and stay at her place, not in the state I was in. It would just upset the children. However, she agreed to come and pick me up from Stevenage Station and take me to Hanbury Manor. The hotel where we’d had our famous wedding.

About one in the morning, the phone rang in my hotel room. It was Reception. They said a Mr Robson was there to see me. I said fuck off, and hung up. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and there stood Bryan. He really was there.

Unbeknown to me, Shel had rung him and told him about the state I was in and where I was. Bryan had immediately jumped in his car and driven all the way from Middlesbrough to Hertfordshire to rescue me. I’m so grateful to him for doing that. And grateful to Shel for making that call.

Not that I knew much about what was happening at the time. I didn’t really take in what Bryan was saying to me, or what he was explaining about what he was going to do. I wasn’t aware of anything, really. I was out of it. He dragged me into his car and we drove off. The next thing I remember was arriving at a big white building. It was the Priory, in south-west London – one of the country’s leading private psychiatric hospitals, famous for treating celebrities for eating disorders, alcoholism and drug abuse, among other things – though I didn’t know that till several days later.

They knocked me out for about four days, gave me tablets, tried to detox me. When I returned to some level of consciousness, they put me on a twenty-four-hour watch, fearing I might still be suicidal, that I might jump out of the window. I still didn’t know what was going on, or quite where I was, or why. When I eventually sobered up, I asked what was happening. It was then that I was told I
was in the Priory, suffering from alcoholism and depression, and that they were going to make me better.

Shel came to visit me. Of course, as I always did when I was at a low point, I asked if there was a chance she’d have me back, if I could come and live with her. She said no. She said I was an alcoholic, and I had to be cured before we could even discuss it.

I shouted at her, ‘I’m not a fucking alcoholic!’ I refused to admit it to myself or to anyone else. For the next few days, I just stayed in my room.

One day there was a loud knock on my door, and someone was shouting that I had a visitor. I called out, ‘Fuck off. I don’t want to see anybody. Go away.’ But the hammering and banging went on and eventually I opened the door. The visitor was none other than the rock legend Eric Clapton. A real fucking legend. Not like me. And he’d come to see me? He said he’d heard I was here and that he’d been through a similar thing himself. I was so touched that he’d bothered to come and talk to me, and it helped a lot, just listening to his own experiences.

While I was in the Priory, one of the things they did was get me to answer about fifty questions about my life and habits. I thought I’d just lie, make it all up, that they wouldn’t catch me out. I reckoned I knew what
they were trying to do. If you answered half the questions in a certain way, it would prove something or other. I responded to about thirty-five of the questions, making things up or hiding the truth, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. They still said the answers proved I was an alcoholic.

I continued to deny it. I felt I could control my drinking. I only did it when I got depressed, to give myself a nice buzz, to blot out all the bad things in my head. I didn’t call that being an alcoholic. I didn’t even like alcohol much.

As I began to feel a bit better, I took part in various activities. I organised five-a-side football games and quite enjoyed myself. I felt safe in the Priory. But at the same time, I still did not believe I was an alcoholic, so I did not accept what they said about me or the ways they were trying to help me.

I should have stayed there longer. Everyone told me that, Bryan as well as all the experts, but I was fed up with it. I didn’t think it was doing much for me. They didn’t seem to really understand my problems. Or perhaps I wasn’t giving them a proper chance.

It costs a fortune to stay in the Priory, about £20,000 a month, but that wasn’t the reason I wanted out quickly.
You’re supposed to stay in for twenty-eight days, and Robbo had said I had to finish the whole course, that was the point of it. But after three weeks I was begging to be let out, and I left before I had had the full benefit of the course. I was determined to show that I was not an alcoholic, that I could stay off the booze if I really wanted to. I could do it all by myself.