Gazza: My Story (35 page)

I might have got the order of events wrong here. Perhaps it was after the US trip that I spent those three weeks on cocaine. I was in such a state that I can’t remember all this clearly. My dad suspected I was taking the stuff. He asked Jimmy about it, and Jimmy confirmed his suspicions. My dad gave me a right bollocking. He said he couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.

It began to frighten me, and I became really paranoid. I had another head scan, in September, I think. I was down to eleven stone by then, the lightest I’d ever been as a grown-up. If I actually was a grown-up. You wouldn’t have said so if you had seen me fighting with my own brother. Both Carl and I were drunk, and had
some argument over our family. We both ended up having to go to hospital with cuts and bruises. We weren’t angry with each other for long: the next day, we were laughing about it.

During one of these hospital visits, the cocaine showed up in my bloodstream. I thought, fucking hell, this could ruin my football career for ever, if it gets out. So I stopped, just like that. Luckily, I hadn’t been using it for long, and I hadn’t got hooked. I don’t know why I tried it. I suppose because I’d tried almost everything else in life. I thought I’d see what it was like. Until then, I’d never seen anyone taking cocaine. I’d mixed with showbiz celebs, but they hadn’t been on it, as far as I knew. Nor had any players. There had been rumours about Paul Merson, about a couple of years previously, but I didn’t know if they were true or not. So you can’t say it was because of the circles I’d moved in. It wasn’t until this person came along and offered it to me.

For a while, I had fallen out of love with football. I couldn’t watch or go to a match – not that I’ve ever really been able to do that anyway, not when I wasn’t playing. It was thinking about Alan Shearer that brought me back to football; thinking of how he had organised his life. My dad gave me a kick up the backside, too.
‘Do fucking something!’ he shouted at me one day when I went to see him.

I felt I needed a helping hand from someone I knew well. So I parted company with my latest agent, Ian Elliott, and asked Dave McCreery if he’d work with me. I’d played with Dave at Newcastle, and he had always been a good friend to me, on and off the pitch.

I wanted to start training again. I thought, I’ll show them I’m not finished. At thirty-five, I realised I couldn’t give up football just like that. From the age of five, it had been all I had known, all I could do. What would I do with myself? Football had been my saviour, and without it, I’d probably just collapse, unless something else that challenged me in the same way came along, which looked unlikely. I was aware that I wasn’t the player I had once been, and wouldn’t be again, but I couldn’t suddenly turn it off, bring it to an end, while I still had plenty left to give.

I was living in a hotel near Morpeth, and Dave arranged for me to train up there under Steve Black, the fitness coach to the Newcastle Falcons Rugby Club. I was banging on the gym door at five in the morning, trying to get in and start my training and exercises. In six weeks, I got myself really fit, thanks to Blacky. Offers
began to come in from all sorts of places – the USA, Russia and Malta, as well as some English First Division clubs.

I was training like buggery. After the gym work, I’d do an eight-mile run and feel absolutely knackered. I trained so hard it was painful, made me ill. Stupid, I know. It led to the panic attacks starting again. But I have so much energy I sometimes imagine I’m going to burst. I have to let off steam somehow, otherwise I feel I will explode.

When the panic attacks returned, I began having a few drinks again, though nothing mad, and I did a few daft things, such as me arms. I now have these two tattoos. On my left arm is a panther and on the right one I’ve got ‘Gazza’ in a sort of Celtic script. I hope it’s not something that’s going to insult the Bhoys again. It’s all right, I’m only joking. I’ve learned my lesson. Last time I teased Celtic Football Club, I got a death threat.

As well as the panic, all my old obsessions came back again. My face started twitching down one side. It was in spasm all the time – I couldn’t control it. I kept asking myself why I was worrying when I had nothing to worry about. I was getting offers from various clubs, so I was confident that my career wasn’t quite over. Why
had I had those tattoos? Why did I do all these stupid things? Why did I train so hard and make myself ill when I was back to full fitness already? People were saying to me, ‘You look so well!’ because I was so thin, but I didn’t feel well. I felt terrible. I was sleeping no more than three hours a night and going for walks in the early hours, trying to shake off my anxieties.

Then one morning I woke up with my face in spasm and I could feel a tingle down my arm as well. I thought, fuck it, I’m having a seizure. My dad had been about the same age as I was now when he’d had that seizure and then his haemorrhage. I went to the Queen Elizabeth in Gateshead, my original home from home, where my endless run of operations had begun. At first it looked as if I might have had a stroke. My dad tried to reassure me, reminding me that when he’d had his blood clot he’d been given only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. ‘And now look at me.’

In the end, the doctors couldn’t find anything physically wrong with me. They didn’t seem to know what was causing the spasms. Probably, they said, I was suffering from stress as a result of doing too much training. When I came out I had a few drinks – and immediately my arm felt better.

Nevertheless, I knew I wasn’t right. Even at really brilliant times in my life, there have always been bad thoughts going round and round my head. I can’t escape them, so I start crying or screaming. I seem to be saddest when I’m happiest. I didn’t understand it. I went off and checked myself into the Priory. Not for alcohol problems this time, for head problems. I only stayed there a few days.

Therapists and counsellors and people like that are like anybody else. After all, you get good footballers and bad footballers, good bricklayers and bad bricklayers, good book writers and bad book writers. I’ve now met a lot of therapists in my life and some of them don’t seem to care. They just stare out of the window and say nothing, waiting for the next patient.

But that, of course, is negative thinking, and I’ve been told often enough that all of life is good and bad, and I must stop dwelling on the negative things in my mind and wanting to smash up the place and instead concentrate on the positive, good things. It’s easier said than done.

I think the year 2002 must have been one of the worst of my life. It’s a period I don’t really like looking back on now.

I came back from the Priory and returned to my training schedule, fixated on getting as fit as possible, doing twice as much as I needed, all day, round the clock. I was determined to have at least one more year playing for some club, somewhere.

I felt I would prefer to go abroad, make a fresh start. After all, there was nothing much to keep me in England. There seemed no future in my relationship with Shel. I also thought that, by going abroad, anywhere, I could remove myself from the spotlight a bit. I wouldn’t be quite as famous – or notorious. I could make mistakes, or learn new things, without my every move being followed.

I signed up with another new agent, a professional one, Wes Saunders, who was working with a well-known national football agency. He was based in Sunderland, his home town, which was handy. I had played with Wes at Newcastle when I was young and he had always been helpful to me. In fact, I used to clean his boots at one time.

So Wes got working on a deal to take me abroad, away from everything. What he came up with turned out to be a lot further abroad, and further away from everything, than I had expected.

At the end of 2002, I flew out to China. It wasn’t my first visit. I had been there, you’ll remember, before Euro 96 with England, when we had a warm-up game in Beijing. I scored in that game and was Man of the Match. ‘He comes, he sees, he conquers’ was one of the headlines. All bollocks, of course.

This time I was to have a two-week trial with a First Division club – the name escapes me now – to see if I liked them and they liked me. Wes came with me. I hated it at first, especially the food. We had duck’s head, duck’s eyes, chicken feet, and a lot of bat. I didn’t realise it was bat to begin with. It was not bad, as it happens.

When I turned up for training on the first day I was greeted by a lot of reporters and photographers, Chinese and British. I’d been filmed stepping off the plane and appeared on the main Chinese news. People were following me in the streets. The press all said that Gazza looked unfit, Gazza was knackered, which was true enough. I’d been travelling for about three days without sleep.

I was soon feeling bored and restless. When I wasn’t training, there was nothing to do except hang around all day. I couldn’t speak the language and none of the hotel staff could speak English. When I wanted more water, I had to point at the fridge and try to indicate it was water I was after, but couldn’t make myself understood. It was like being locked in a cave. China is eight hours ahead of England, so whenever I rang home I always seemed to wake up my friends and they’d say ‘Piss off, why are you waking me up?’

Out walking, I came across this video shop run by a woman who spoke brilliant English, really good. She said yes, they had a James Bond film, so I bought it, took it back to my room and put it on. Fucking hell, it was in Chinese. James Bond speaking Chinese.

From what I saw of it, China was very beautiful,
very colourful. It wasn’t like I imagined it would be, what you’d expect of a grey, boring, dull communist place. That was the image I’d had from what I’d seen on the telly. But there were so many poor people, kids running around in bare feet. I looked at them all and wondered why I was worrying about my trivial problems. I could be living here, like them. And then I thought, yeah, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. If I could earn myself £5 a week here, I would manage.

I trained hard, because I was on trial, proving my fitness. It was 86 degrees and I was doing laps for an hour with Wes timing me. Every time I went past him I asked ‘How long?’ and he’d say ‘Fifty-seven minutes to go.’

‘Fucking hell, stop messing around.’

At team meetings, they had to translate everything for me. So the manager would start talking, then stop and turn to me, while someone repeated what he’d said in English. Then he’d be off again, in Chinese, while the bloke was still translating. I sat there thinking, what am I missing? What’s he on about now?

I was reaching the stage where I was getting really wound up, wanting nothing more than just to go home. Then we had a proper practice match and, suddenly,
everything seemed to click into place. I felt really good, scored three goals and made some others. My fitness was OK.

I knuckled down to the training, but I was still lonely when I went back to the hotel. At a loose end one day, I noticed a pool at the front of the hotel, an ornamental thing with koi carp in it. I said to Wes, ‘Let’s go fishing.’

‘Don’t be daft. You’ve no rod, no tackle.’

‘Just you watch.’

I went to my hotel room and fetched that little packet of needles and thread that hotels provide for you and you never ever use. Not me, anyway. Why would I want to be doing any sewing?

I then got Wes to go outside and find a bamboo cane while I went off to a shop and bought a Jammy Dodger. Obviously, it wasn’t an actual Jammy Dodger, but the nearest biscuit-type thing to a Jammy Dodger the Chinese have. I tied the thread to the bamboo cane, bent a needle at the end to make a hook, put a lump of Chinese Jammy Dodger at the end, and I was off to the pool to do some fishing. ‘We’ll be stopped,’ said Wes. ‘They’ll send security.’

‘Never you mind. Just look at this.’

I started fishing, and I caught one, I really did. I blew a kiss to the heavens and fell to me knees. It made my day. After that, China began to grow on me. It always takes me time to acclimatise. When I moved to Italy, I spent the first week crying in my hotel room. Then I loved it.

After the two weeks were up, the club said they were still not sure about me and asked me to stay on for another week. I said, ‘Piss off. It’s yes or no now, or yous can forget it.’

There happened to be another club, in the B League, the Chinese second division, who were also after me. They had been monitoring my progress at the First Division club, showing real interest. They were offering me the same money, but what really appealed to me was that they wanted to give me the chance to do some coaching.