by Tony Adams
CONTENTS
1 What we used to be like . . .
2 A New Player
3 Loss
4 Leadership – 1
5 A Sporting Chance
6 Transition
7 Under New Management
8 Going Dutch
9 Pompey Times
10 Premier Pressures
11 Loyalty
12 Every Cloud . . .
13 Why, why, why Gabala?
14 Farewell to Peter
15 Heart and Soul
16 Leadership – 2
17 Good Old Arsenal
18 Our England
19 China Crisis
20 What we are like now . . .
The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
1
What we used to be like . . .
We rise by lifting others.
ROBERT INGERSOLL,
American lawyer and politician
Part of the process for many alcoholics once they stop drinking and then get into recovery from the illness of addiction is to give their testimony to their fellows at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when they feel they are ready. It is what is called in AA ‘a chair’. The talk takes in their experience, strength and hope, telling of – as it says in the ‘Big Book’ of AA, the definitive guide for an alcoholic to getting and staying sober – ‘what we used to be like, what happened and what we are like now’.
The audience will comprise men and women of all age groups, backgrounds, colours and creeds, some of whom may only have just stopped drinking, up to those, like Tony Adams, with many years of sobriety. In Tony’s case, that is more than 20 years after his acknowledgement of his alcoholism in August 1996, following a seven-week drinking spree amid the disappointment of Euro 96 when the England team he had captained lost on penalties to Germany in the semi-finals.
Tony speaks regularly at local AA meetings, or indeed wherever in the world he is asked to speak, even in prisons. The following was delivered in March 2015 to four sportspeople newly arrived at the Sporting Chance treatment centre that Tony founded in 2000 . . .
‘Hi. My name is Tony and I am an alcoholic. It’s a privilege to be speaking to you. I am a grateful recovering alcoholic today but I have been in the same place you are right now – which is maybe full of shame about life with alcohol and fear of life without it. We all have our own experience and this is mine. The only thing I ask is that you listen for the similarities, not the differences. Sometimes I talk more about my recovery, sometimes about my drinking. I’ll talk about both, but you might want to hear what my drinking was like, as you’re new to this like I was once, so that you can get some identification.
My last drink was on the back of a four-day bender. It is very patchy and I had blackouts, so some of it I can’t remember. I do know I went out on a Tuesday but that is a blank. On the Wednesday, I went to a restaurant and nightclub in Chelsea called Barbarella’s and got smashed. I can’t remember where I stayed. I do remember pissing and shitting in my pants and peeling them off and going out again.
I remember bits about the Thursday. I went to a strip club off Piccadilly I used to go to. I would get girls there. You could take them off somewhere and pay them. I was drinking with twin girls. It sounds glamorous, all sex and drugs and rock and roll, but it wasn’t. It was all shit and passing out. I took one of the girls off to a hotel in Kensington.
I was off the planet. I passed out at two, three or four in the morning. I don’t know when. I woke up Friday morning seeing the minibar empty and bottles all over the room. I’d smashed it. I had sex with this girl and it was nothing and I think she could see the pain in my face. I was completely lost. The alcohol wasn’t working for me any more and nor was the sex. Nothing was. I was lost. It was four days of chaos and mayhem.
I got a cab back to a mate’s pub in the East End, then went on to my local in Essex for lunch. It wasn’t really lunch. I got smashed again. The more I was drinking, the less drunk I was getting.
At 5pm that Friday, I am sitting there with a pint of Guinness. I used to put brandy in it. I couldn’t drink spirits straight. Same as Scotch – I would spew it straight up. But the spirits worked quicker. Jack the barman came up to me and said: ‘You all right, Tone?’ I said: ‘No, I’m not, Jack,’ and started to cry.
It felt like my moment of clarity. Something inside me said, ‘You are fucked. You are beat.’ It was my moment of surrender. Big men don’t cry, do they? But I was in floods and floods of tears. Jack said: ‘Have another one, Tone.’ I said: ‘I can’t drink any more.’ Enough was enough.
And then my journey began.
How did I get to that place? It was the 16th of August, 1996. I was 29. I had plenty of issues that had made me pick up the drink and go to the pub in the first place. I had to go back and look at the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and go through a hell of a lot of therapy to find out what made me tick. And I have done.
I can place it back in my childhood. I was a shy, insecure little boy frightened of everything. Football was my first love, my first escape, my first addiction. That was the thing that I ran to if I had a problem.
I had the worst attendance at my school. I am not proud of that. I just couldn’t handle a classroom. There was too much fear. I used to get panic attacks. I remember once when the book was going round and you had to read. I was 13 or 14. I thought, ‘Oh fucking hell, it’s coming to me,’ and I am shitting myself. When I read it, because I was in such a state, I said ‘wheally’ instead of ‘really’. After that, I was known as ‘the wheally kid’ and everybody was taking the piss out of me in the playground.
I just put on a brave face and said, ‘I’ll go and play football.’ I was so self-conscious and sensitive to these comments. It went to the bone. It really did hurt. I put the mask on as Tony the footballer.
My old English teacher, Mr Beech, used to say: ‘Oh, Adams is here. It must be a football day.’ I would only go in when it was football. My parents were confused, and pulling their hair out, looking back, at this young man who just wanted to play football, making out he was ill some mornings, then getting up at 10 or 11 and going over the park.
This boy was very scared. I had to take my O levels and I had lived in fear through my teenage years of having to take these exams in my last year at school. It absolutely terrified me since the age of 11. I ran away. Luckily – or maybe it might not have been luckily if I had been able to face these things and grow, but I didn’t know anything about it at that age – I had been picked for England Under-16 and there was a tour to Hungary at the same time as the exams. There was no choice. I was gone.
Mr Dury, my headmaster, was a West Ham fan and he was pulling his hair out as well. He didn’t know what was going on. Funny, I met another old teacher of mine not long ago, Mr Allington, the head of year. We used to laugh about him being a West Ham fan and me signing for Arsenal.
One more illustration of how uncomfortable I was at that age – girls. I had this phantom girlfriend in my head. It was a lot safer. I didn’t have to talk to them. I called her Juicy Lucy. One day, I was trying to do a hundred headers in a row outside my house and two girls walked past. One of them said: ‘Katharine wants to go out with you.’
Oh shit. I put the ball down and I walked round the block with Katharine. She kissed me and then said she didn’t want to go out with me any more. Oh no, what have I done? Did I do something wrong? I got the ball, put it on my head and did the hundred and I escaped back into football. I didn’t have to face that any more.
That was the pattern throughout my life. I got lucky with football. I became successful and it was enough. I joined Arsenal at 16. I had my first experience
with alcohol at 17. I broke my fifth metatarsal and drank when I was out injured. It healed and I got playing again and, from then on, my football career and my alcohol career went hand in hand.
I was first getting smashed Saturdays after games, then Saturdays and Sunday lunchtimes. I would find little pubs and working men’s clubs that would open on Sunday afternoons. Then it became a nightclub in Islington on a Sunday night.
For six or seven years, I was really struggling to maintain midweek games. I could make it on Saturdays, but then to go again a few days later was becoming difficult. In all the summers when I didn’t have football, I was smashed. Ibiza one year, Majorca the next. Canary Islands, Torremolinos. I was off the planet. There were blackouts, fears, paranoia, things coming out of cupboards. A lot of pissing myself. Women. Sometimes I would gamble – horses, greyhounds, anything.
Gradually this illness was taking me over. And it is a progressive illness. It always gets worse, never better, if you continue to drink. It was taking my football career away. From 1994 and ’95 to reaching my rock bottom in ’96, it was becoming very difficult to play football to a high level. I had a certain amount of talent and I could disguise it and thought I was doing OK, but there were periods where I couldn’t control it, where I missed the timing. I remember three games I played pissed.
One was against Swindon Town and the manager pulled me off and we made out I was ill. One at Everton I hadn’t timed it right. I thought, ‘Let’s have another drink’ and I had one the day of the game but I came off knowing I hadn’t done well. I wasn’t well. The other one at Sheffield United was hard work physically. It really was.
Still, at that time I could justify it as we were still winning, and comfortably against Swindon. Against Sheffield United, I was man of the match and got awarded some cutlery. That was confusing to me.
These were tough days. The game that I loved and which gave me everything was no longer my first thought. I was spending a lot of time in pubs and clubs, so what did I do? I married a barmaid.
I met her during a blackout and was told I went back the week after and saw her again. I couldn’t remember the previous week. I had sex with her the week after. I brought two children into the world with her. Her drug of choice was coke, but I didn’t know that at the time. Using addicts attract other addicts. I was too busy getting smashed anyway to worry too much about her problem at the start.
The arrangement worked for both of us. It propped me up. Then when I did come to realise her addiction, I could say, ‘You’re the druggie. I’ll never be a druggie like you. At least I’m not a cokehead.’ It justified my drinking behaviour. She went on from coke to crack so I sent her to a treatment centre because she needed help. I drove her down one Saturday morning to Clouds in Wiltshire and basically threw her in there.
Two counsellors then sat down with me, not with her there, and said, ‘How are you, Mr Adams?’ They asked me about my behaviour in the relationship. I went, ‘Hold on. I don’t get this.’ One part of me was scared and wanting to cry and the ego side of me was, ‘Hang on. I am Arsenal and England captain. Why are you fucking questioning me?’ I really wanted to say, ‘Help . . .’
I got back in the car and ran for home. That was January ’96 and it coincided with my cartilage coming out. I couldn’t get my football and I couldn’t blame my wife any more. My life circumstances changed and, for the first time in 11 and a half years of drinking and using it to suppress my feelings, I didn’t want to drink and I was still getting pissed. It frightened the life out of me.
I didn’t want to do this but I had no tools to do anything different. I was sitting in the hospital after a knee operation and my situation and my fears hit me hard. So I had a drink. It was a private hospital and I ordered two bottles of Chablis. I’d also had a pethidine shot up my arse and I was on the roof.
But everything that goes up has to come down.
My wife was away in treatment and I thought, ‘I can’t do this any more.’ I passed out one day at home, with the kids there. I had a stepdaughter aged 11, a son aged four and a little girl aged 18 months. The stepdaughter had the presence of mind to phone my mother-in-law and she came round. She called me a drunken bastard. She took the kids and part of me said, ‘Hallelujah. Party time.’ Another part said, ‘Shit. What’s happened?’
I had pissed on my sofas, my beds. The house was a complete khazi. I didn’t want to drink but I was still getting drunk. I managed to stop for a few days here and there in the February and March. Four days, five days. I got to three weeks on will-power. Then I got pissed again. I thought I was Superman but I couldn’t beat this. I had no mental defence against a drink. That progression of the illness again.
April came and my knee was OK. I had used football to suppress feelings and deal with things and so I threw myself into it. England had a big tournament, Euro 96, and I concentrated on getting fit.
Before the tournament, we went to Hong Kong and we were in a hotel. The lads went on the piss to a bar and there was that incident with the dentist’s chair. The pictures went round the world. I knew if I went with them I would be on the piss and gone. The tournament would be gone for me.
That night, I locked myself in my room and couldn’t wait for training the next day. I was shaking with the fear of whether I would take a drink. It was a massive hotel. I was there on tour with Arsenal the previous year, and I went out to bars with a couple of the lads and got involved in an incident that involved the police, some of the locals and all sorts of shit.
Some of the boys were wondering, ‘Where’s Tony? He’s the lad . . .’ I said to two guys, Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman, ‘When we win the tournament, I’ll go out and get pissed again, I’ll be the first to the bar, but I am going to focus in for now.’ It was my excuse to get them out of the way. I wanted to play the games.
Soon as that last game against Germany was over, I had no mental defence against a drink again. Nothing to keep me sober. After Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss, I went down the tunnel and had a drink in the dressing room. It felt fantastic, I have to admit. In the next seven weeks, I did everything – pissed myself, shit myself, hallucinating, things coming out of the cupboards. I was up and down and sideways.
All the 12 years of drinking came out in those seven weeks. I slept with people I didn’t want to sleep with. It was just shit. During those 12 years, I had gone to prison for drink-driving, had 29 stitches in my head after falling down steps drunk, been in intensive care. That’s where alcohol took me.
That Friday in August in my local in Essex at 5pm was my rock bottom. That’s when it all started. I threw in the towel. I was beaten. I gave in and asked for help. I got some fish and chips, ate them in bed and stayed there over that weekend, detoxing. It wasn’t really a safe one. I was shaking badly. I got up on the Monday and got a cab into work at the Arsenal training ground at London Colney.
I went in to see if I still had a job. Paul Merson was there and I had ignored him before. He was clean and sober for 18 months and wasn’t part of the groovy gang. Now he’s well and it was weird. He looked at me and I looked at him with like, ‘Help’, in my eyes. He said some funny things about getting sober then said there was an AA meeting in St Albans the next week.
I went to one before that, at Dawes Road in Fulham. We had a guy in the club who was in Gamblers Anonymous and was helping Paul. He told me about this meeting in Dawes Road. I was sitting outside in my car and shitting myself, wondering whether to go in or not. I was frozen. I wanted something and didn’t know how to stay sober.
I went through the door and it was a meeting about Step Nine of the AA programme, about making amends to people. I heard stuff that made sense to me. I heard me. I heard somebody share about football, about the old phrase ‘win or lose, on the booze’. Still, I wasn’t sure if this whole thing was for me or not and I needed more meetings to find out.
But I felt all right that night and I didn’t have an alternative. I didn’t know where else to go. The next week,
I went to a lunchtime meeting in St Albans with Paul after training and loved it. I opened my mouth and just said my first name and a few sentences about my drinking and why I was there. I had made a start. Then I got to another meeting soon after and loved it and just got on with it.
Therapy was also important to me and I had been going to see a man called James West on a recommendation. I thought at first I was going to see him about my wife’s problems, not about me. To understand her. It was those one-to-one sessions that took me into the AA rooms. And those one-to-one sessions are still a part of my life today. At first, I went to see James on a Monday and was pissed by the weekend. I said maybe I needed to see him on the Thursday as well. James said: ‘I think I’d better move in with you.’
I’ll never forget what I told him, and he reminds me of it to this day: ‘I know how to get drunk and how to play football but I don’t know who I am.’
I kept going to AA meetings and kept going. They suggest 90 in 90 days when you start out and I probably went to more. My knee had suffered during the European Championships and needed a clear-out and I had another op, so I had time off work to throw myself into AA and into therapy. Into changing. Because I knew that if I didn’t get some tools, something was going to take Tony down the pub again. I needed something to deal with all this stuff.
The AA rooms and the therapy and the books about recovery and the friends I made gave me the tools I needed to stay off drink. That and all the things I heard, like ‘stick with the winners’, those people who had proved how to stay sober. I jumped in and changed. I dropped pals that I had only drink in common with.
My wife had gone by now. She came out of treatment earlier in the year when I was still drinking and said, ‘I don’t want to be with you any more. You are a drunk. Get out.’ The rejection fuelled my drinking at the time. I can see now why she didn’t want me but, at the time, my pride ate at me. How dare she?
Self-loathing was getting to me: ‘You don’t deserve this woman,’ it told me. But there was also my ego – she’s mine. My life was built then on competition. Win, lose. So I tried to win her back. I wrote letters but it never felt good.