In March we were beaten by Boro in the sixth round of the FA Cup. None of us distinguished ourselves, including me. It turned out to be my last game for Everton. It was also that defeat that finished off Walter.
Walter had done his best for Everton, and I had done my best to help him. My injuries had buggered everything up, and then the drinking made it worse, so I was never able to contribute as much as I would have liked, or as much as I felt capable of.
David Moyes took over as manager, stepping up from First Division Preston North End. He was another Scotsman, and I’ve always got on well with them. However … he didn’t say he wanted me to leave, but I could see the writing on the wall. Besides, with Walter gone, I felt it was time to move on again.
“Good for Gazza, but not quite good enough. Paul Gascoigne, that immensely talented maverick, not only started the game but finished it in style, doing an abundance of skilled, original, intelligent things.”
Brian Glanville, on the Blackburn–Everton game, The Sunday Times, 23 September 2001
26
A LOST YEAR
After I left Everton, I got myself a new agent, Ian Elliott, and he fixed me up with Burnley.
It was a bit of a culture shock, joining a club struggling in a lower division. I had played in the First Division before, during that first season at Boro, till we got promoted, but Boro were really a Premiership club, in terms of wealth and facilities. Apart from that year, I had spent sixteen of my seventeen years as a professional, since making it into Newcastle’s first team in 1985, playing in the top league with a top club.
After my first proper training session, I saw that my dirty kit was still lying around in the dressing room. I asked this apprentice to take it away to wherever it got cleaned. In seventeen years, I had never thought twice about where it went. It had always been dealt with automatically.
‘It’ll cost you,’ he replied.
‘You what?’ I said.
It turned out you had to pay an apprentice to clean your stuff, or else do it yourself. The club didn’t do it for you. This lad charged me £5 a week to clean my boots and £20 a month for my kit.
One day I arrived for training and there was no kit laid out for me. I sat there for a while, waiting for my clean stuff, before I got hold of the lad. He said he was sorry, his washing machine at home had broken down. I had to borrow someone’s old kit to train in.
The deal with Stan Ternent, the manager, was that he would use me when necessary in vital games, bringing me on to change things if the team were getting nowhere. My basic wage was £5,000 a week, quite a drop from Everton’s £12,000, but I was also on £5,000 a game appearance money and a big bonus if Burnley reached the play-offs and got into the Premiership. I was also promised a share of the gate money, if it went up, and a percentage on the sale of all shirts with my name on them.
There was one week when I had just got over an injury and wanted to rest, so Stan said fine, go off and have a break, and I went off to Dubai for a few days. When I got back, Stan said there was no need to train, as I would be jet-lagged. Come Saturday, he didn’t pick me. ‘What’s the problem?’ I said. ‘I’m fit.’
‘Ah, but you haven’t trained.’
I stayed in a hotel during all my time at Burnley – I was only there about two months and made only six appearances. My last was as a sub, coming on for the final ten minutes against Coventry. We had to get at least as good a result as Norwich did to get in the play-offs as we went into the last game level on points and goal difference, though we’d scored more goals. We won 1–0 but just missed out on the final play-off spot as Norwich beat Stockport 2–0. I had two free kicks, which went near, but we didn’t make it, and that was it.
I didn’t really enjoy my football at Burnley. I found the First Division very tough. The lads were fine; it wasn’t them, it was me. Their sort of football wasn’t my style. It was all kick and rush. Perhaps I’d lost a bit of the necessary pace for it, but whatever the case, I wasn’t comfortable with it.
Gates had shot up by about 6,000 when I played, so my presence did give them a boost. And they sold hundreds of extra shirts. I remember standing in the chairman’s office and signing 150 of them. Yet later, when I got the figures, they said only seventy had been sold all season. Funny, that.
The rest of that year, 2002, is a bit of a blur, even though it wasn’t that long ago. I was depressed, as ever, about the usual things: about not playing football, about my stupid behaviour, about all my worries and obsessions, but also about not seeing Regan. I’d always put football and drinking before my family, which was wrong. By this time, Shel had washed her hands of me yet again. I was getting more and more blackouts with the drinking and desperate to find more ways to numb my misery. I experimented with a line of coke, just the once. It did give me a high, but afterwards I was left even more down.
I went back to the north-east, where I was living in hotels or rented flats, which didn’t help. I took more cocaine. So that made it twice I used it. Except the second time I took it for three weeks, solidly, every day. I didn’t pay for it. It was given to me by someone – not someone in the north-east.
Ian Elliott fixed me up with a trial in the USA with Washington DC. I knew it had been a bad move to take cocaine, and that it would show up in the blood tests, so I drank water for ten days to try to disguise it before going out to the US.
But all Washington DC offered me was $1,500 a week, which was a disgrace. I couldn’t afford to accept that, even if I’d wanted to. Not only would I have had to live in a hotel in Washington, but there was the small matter of the £10,000 a month I had to give Sheryl. I would have been paying out far more than I was earning, so it was impossible.
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 real
ised 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.
“Some people cry through pain but I don’t think that’s the case. I think Gascoigne was crying because he was in despair with himself. Many of his problems and his injuries have been self-induced.
Gascoigne has cried regularly for years. That tells you something: that nobody in football has done anything about it. I find that incredible. If a snooker player or a golfer cried during a game, I think people in that sport may realise there was a problem. Gascoigne could have been helped a long time ago.”
Dr Raj Persaud, psychiatrist, Daily Mail, 16 February 2000
27
CHINA AND BACK TO ARIZONA
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 her
e, 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.’
Gazza: My Story Page 24