Gazza: My Story (5 page)

As a teenager, as I said, I didn’t drink, not at all, and nor did I get involved in drugs. I might have done a bit of silly stealing, but that was it. I wasn’t really much interested in girls, either. I got on with them OK, though when I was younger I worried about my spots and whether girls would fancy me or not. Me mam bought us some of this special soap which you were supposed to rub on your spots, leave for two minutes, and then wash off. I thought I’d give it a really good go, so I put it on my face before I went to bed and slept with the
stuff on all night. When I woke up in the morning, I felt as if I’d got third-degree burns.

The spots went anyway, of their own accord, as I got older, but I still didn’t bother much about girls. I preferred being with the lads, having a laugh, to chasing lasses. In any case, the main thing in my life was football. There was something inside me that told me I had to put football first. I had to stay fit and healthy and, most of all, stay determined, otherwise I knew I would never succeed.

There was great excitement in August 1982 when Kevin Keegan signed to play for Newcastle. Arthur Cox had done so well to get him. We were still in the Second Division, but he was seen as the Messiah who would get us back in the First. Sure enough, he scored the only goal of the game in his debut against QPR.

Arthur had me doing little jobs for Kevin, such as cleaning his boots, perhaps to give me an example about how a real pro behaved. I even got to break in a new pair of boots for him, even though he took at least a size smaller than I did.

I took a pair of Keegan’s new boots home with me one day to show off to my mates at school. I let them
all look at them on the bus, and when I got off at school, I found I was one boot short. Someone had nicked the other one, or I had lost it. I cried all the way home and made my dad go with me to the bus depot, to see if anyone had handed in the missing boot. They didn’t really believe it when we said we were looking for one of Kevin Keegan’s boots. It never turned up and I was dreading having to confess what had happened. I had to come clean in the end. But Kevin was brilliant. He didn’t shout at me. When I told him the story he just laughed.

At school, when I was coming up for sixteen, we had to sit some CSE exams. I never paid much attention to lessons, but I don’t consider I was wild at school, just a bit lively and very noisy. The nearer it came to the end, the more often I’d get thrown out of lessons, so I’d go off and practise my ball skills in the playground. I’m sure they were glad to get rid of me.

I know I could have done better if I’d been been more interested. I was still quite good at maths and I liked English. They put me in for six CSEs and I passed two, English and Environmental Studies. I should have passed maths, but my desk broke in the exam. That’s my excuse, anyway. The screws were a bit loose and I
made them worse by fiddling with them; eventually, the desk fell to pieces and I spent the rest of the exam time trying to put it back together. That’s why I failed.

But I wasn’t bothered. On my sixteenth birthday, 27 May 1983, I signed as an apprentice for Newcastle United.

I wanted both my mam and my dad to be there when I signed the forms to become an apprentice – and both of them to sign the forms as well. But they weren’t speaking at the time. I think my dad might have been in one of his living-away-from-home phases. Anyway, they did at least both come, even if they sat there glaring at each other. I could see that Willie McFaul, Newcastle’s former goalie, who was then one of the coaches, was wondering what the fuck was going on, and I felt a bit embarrassed.

I was signed up for two years, on £25 a week. My mam was given another £30 a week to look after me, as I was living at home rather than in club digs.

Colin Suggett was the youth team coach, having finally retired from playing. He told me later that I gave him more aggravation and grief than any other player in his whole coaching life. He had me running lap after lap of the ground in training, trying to get my weight down. One very hot day, he coaxed me to do just one more lap. I was knackered already and said I couldn’t do any more. ‘Just one, son.’ I set off. I managed to stagger round somehow. I could see my mates in the youth team, leaning on the fence sucking ice lollies. They’d done their training to Colin’s satisfaction. When I completed my final lap, Colin said to me, ‘You lied. You could do another one. So I want you to go round one more time.’ I told him to fuck off, which of course I shouldn’t have done. I got punished for that.

It was Colin Suggett who first called me ‘Gazza’. My dad had been known as Gassa to his friends, and I’d sometimes been called that as well. But it was Colin who turned it into Gazza. I don’t think he did it deliberately – it was just his Sunderland accent, the way he pronounced it. And I became Gazza from then on.

I had all the ball skills, shooting and dribbling, but I have to admit I wasn’t very fast and I
was
a bit overweight. In the gym, we often did exercises with the
first-team players, such as Chris Waddle and Peter Beardsley. I learned a lot from them, and tried to copy what they did. The senior professionals had a session where you had to trap the ball with one touch and then shoot through different-shaped targets – a circle, a square, a triangle. You didn’t know which target to aim at till the coach shouted it out, so you had to be quick and accurate. I was usually the only apprentice who could do it. I always had confidence in my ability and succeeded in most of the ball exercises and tests, but things didn’t always go so smoothly off the pitch.

We apprentices had to be at the training ground by 9.15 every morning. I went there on the bus from Dunston and I was never late. I couldn’t wait to get there. As well as training, the apprentices had to do a lot of the shitty jobs: sweeping the dressing-room floors, cleaning the toilets and the showers, cleaning the boots for the first team. I did Wes Saunders’ boots for a while and then Chris Waddle’s. Chris had come to the club from non-league Tow Law. Arthur Cox had signed him for a set of second-hand floodlights, but he’d become one of the stars of the team.

Chris, so he says now, thought I was a joke, the smallest, podgiest player he’d seen in his life, but when he saw me with the ball, he realised I was in a different
class. Our relationship didn’t get off to a very good start, however. One day, when I gave him his boots, he said I hadn’t cleaned them well enough. ‘They are the tools of your trade and they have to be kept in top condition,’ so he lectured me. But I was only sixteen, and lippy, so I told him to fuck off and clean them himself.

Chris gave me a dead leg and in front of everyone. Somehow I managed not to cry, but after that I didn’t give him any more cheek.

Not long after I signed as an apprentice, the youth team was involved in a tournament up in Aberdeen. It was a big event, involving youth teams from Rangers and Bayern Munich, and it provided a brilliant break from normal training and cleaning people’s boots. It lasted quite a few days, and in the middle of it, over the weekend, we were allowed home.

That weekend I decided to have a go on an 80cc scrambler motorbike belonging to a friend. I didn’t have a licence, and couldn’t really ride it, but I’d been on a smaller bike before, so I thought I knew what to do. I got as far as the first bend, going too fast, and flew off. I ended up at my regular haunt, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, having loads of stitches in my knee. I think the doctor who put them in must have been an
apprentice himself, because he made a right mess of the job and my legs looked worse than they were. I went back to Aberdeen but I missed out on playing in the semi-final.

I didn’t tell the club what had really happened, but when I returned to training I still had these terrible marks on my legs. Long trousers or tracksuit bottoms would have hidden them, but of course you don’t wear them for training. I had the bad luck to meet Arthur Cox just as I arrived on my first day back. He immediately realised I had been in some sort of accident, so I had to tell him the truth.

‘Do you really want to be a professional footballer, Gascoigne?’

‘Yes, sir.’ I could feel myself starting to cry.

‘Then behave like one. One more stupid trick like this, and you’re out. Do you understand?’

We’d all been lectured on the usual things: keep off the booze, don’t smoke, don’t get mixed up with the wrong sort of women, don’t do anything risky which might lead to accidents. At least I didn’t drink or smoke. In fact I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as people smoking, perhaps because my mam and dad smoked so much. And I certainly didn’t get involved with the wrong sort of women. I started going out with my first proper girlfriend when I
was about sixteen. She was Gail Pringle, the daughter of Alfie Pringle, who coached Dunston Boys. I spent a lot of time at their house, and they were very good to me. I went out with Gail for about two years before we slept together, so I must have been eighteen by then. Yeah, it does seem a long time to wait, but I was too nervous at that age, and I think she was as well. When I finally took the plunge, it was a relief more than anything else.

When I was seventeen, I had to cope with another death in my life: that of Steven Wilson, who had been a friend for a long time. He’d become an apprentice at Middlesbrough at the same time as I signed forms with Newcastle. He didn’t really like it there and I thought I might be able to get him into our youth squad with me, so I encouraged him to chuck it in at Boro. While he waited for an opening at Newcastle, he went to work with his uncle in the building trade. It was at work that he became the victim of a fatal building-site accident. I cried for days. I blamed myself for his death because I’d been the one who encouraged him to leave Boro. If he’d stayed there, it wouldn’t have happened. I know it didn’t really make sense to blame myself, but I did, and I felt terrible.

The deaths of little Steven Spraggon and then Steven Wilson were not the only ones on my conscience over the
years. A long while later a cousin of mine who had bad asthma collapsed and died after suffering an asthma attack while playing football. Some doctors had said it was bad to play when you had asthma, but I told my cousin that was rubbish, it was OK to play, and he went ahead.

It seemed to me that, ever since Steven Spraggon had run into the road that day, I’d been surrounded by young people dying, and that I was partly to blame. Why had they died, and not me? Perhaps I would be next. I was cheeky and chubby and appeared happy-go-lucky to most people, but I was still plagued by those obsessions, little rituals I couldn’t shake off. I still had to lay out my clothes and kit in a certain way, and I didn’t sleep very well, either. Thinking about death could keep me awake all night.

I was also worried about my career. I was afraid that Newcastle would chuck me out because of my weight. Maybe they would release me at eighteen, once I’d completed my two-year apprenticeship, and I’d never become a professional. I still ate sweets all the time, and chips and hamburgers, and then I would secretly make myself sick to get rid of it all. I don’t know how I found out you could do that. Perhaps I saw someone on TV who was bulimic. Someone who stuck two fingers down their throat and brought all their food up. Funnily enough,
my sister Anna later got a role in a television series as a bulimic girl. Little did she realise that she needed to look no further than her own doorstep to research the part.

Anna didn’t train to become an actress till she was twenty, though she’d always wanted to be one. She did various office jobs, then she gave it all up to go and do a performing arts course at North Tyneside College. She got a part in a local film,
Sheila’s Stories
, and then became one of the original actresses in
Byker Grove
, the TV series set on Tyneside. She was also in a feature film called
Dream On
. Aye, she did well, when you think about it. Coming from the Gascoigne family. She later had a part in
Coronation Street
, too.

Apart from the bulimia, or attempted bulimia, the twitches got worse. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one I developed nine different nervous tics. I was still making those gulping noises, like the noises a pigeon makes. In the morning, I’d wake up and tell myself I wasn’t going to gulp any more; I’d do something else instead, like blinking all the time. Then that in turn became a habit I couldn’t stop. Or I’d keep opening my mouth, as wide as I could, or stretch my lips until they hurt. Another twitch was moving my right hip all the time, or my right shoulder, or my neck. Even when I
was playing, I’d find my neck twitching from side to side. Sometimes coaches would shout at me to stop it, so I’d try for a while, or start another twitch. I was too embarrassed to tell the doctor about all this.

One compulsion, which I still have to this day, was kicking my right toe on the ground when I was running. I developed that when I was an apprentice. I did it in training, or when playing, and it got so bad that my right toenail came off, I’d been banging it so often. All that blinking over and over again could be painful as well. I would end up with my eyes hurting like hell.