by Tony Adams
I moved home and was sober three weeks, going to meetings and working the AA programme, and then she told me she had met someone else. That went to my heart. At the time, I couldn’t play football and now I can’t get drunk either. Drink doesn’t work any more. I thought, ‘I’ve just got to deal with this,’ but it was dark, it was winter now. Sometimes I would be over the house we had lived in and see the curtain closing and thinking, ‘He’s up there with her.’
Listen, guys, I know I didn’t want her back but it killed me. The green-eyed monster of jealousy took me over. Along with the red mist. I wanted to go in and punch him. I drove over Putney Bridge and went to an AA meeting in Wimbledon where I shared it.
I was told to pray for them. What, pray for my wife who’s rejected me and the bloke who was sleeping with her? In a house that I was paying for? But I did and I got through that day without a drink. And I grew another day. Gradually the feelings passed.
That’s been my story. Any situation that’s arisen since, today I don’t have to drink. That’s fucking amazing. What happened in my life with alcohol makes me feel sad but also grateful that I found a way out of it. I have so many tools for coping today.
I’ve had both parents die since I’ve been in recovery and not had a drink. I’ve got married again. I’ve had three more children with a beautiful new wife and I can do a job now. I’ve had highs and lows in and out of football, given up playing and gone into coaching and management. Not had a drink through any of it. My self-esteem has come back and I am all right.
For years and years I used to think I was a piece of shit and not worthy of good things. Fear affirmed everything. Now I know that fear stands for ‘face everything and recover’, but not then. I thought I had AIDS. I thought I was going to die. I thought about suicide but I was too scared to kill myself. I was too afraid of dying. I was in that no-man’s land.
I still go to AA meetings and I am in therapy. The simple slogans still work for me: one day at a time, first things first, live and let live, keep it simple, easy does it. Having a good share-up like today with fellow addicts and alcoholics helps keep me sober. Hearing back about their stories and getting their wisdom and insight. There’s a saying: mad, sad or glad – share it.
I can forget as time goes on and think, ‘Was it really that bad?’ Yes, it was. ‘Did I really do that, piss myself, behave like that?’ Yes, I did. But there is a way out and you guys are in the right place. We can forge new lives. I have such a fantastic life today. Today is a wonderful day. Thank you for listening.’
2
A New Player
If we are painstaking about this phase of our
development, we will be amazed before we are
halfway through. We are going to know a new
freedom and a new happiness.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, here
Distance lends enchantment to the view, they say. As I look back now on my playing career, from the vantage point of 20 years of not having taken one drink of alcohol one day at a time over that period, it clearly falls into two categories for me: the drinking years and the sober years.
I will always be proud of what I and Arsenal – and to a sadly lesser extent England – achieved during the period from making my debut at Highbury less than a month after my 17th birthday in November 1983 through to my retirement in 2002. The bare statistics tell of leading the club to 10 trophies, 13 if the Community Shield is included, with four league titles across three decades, making 669 appearances and scoring 48 goals. On top came 66 international caps, with five goals.
I am less proud, however, of some of the scrapes I got into and the way I treated some people during that time, not least myself, when I look back. And I never want to forget them. Part of the reason I keep going to AA meetings these days is to remind myself of what it was like and so avoid complacency.
But if the past is a foreign country, as LP Hartley said, to me it now seems one on the other side of the world. Crashing my car and serving 58 days of a four-month sentence in Chelmsford Prison over Christmas and New Year 1990/91 for drink-driving, for example, now seems such a minute period of my life. I have long since dealt with all the pain and shame of the old days and ways, and no longer live like that. After my retirement came coaching and management at home and abroad, and I believe I am a very different being to the snarling defender of my early days, though retaining the drive and determination.
The times were as they were. Back in the 1980s, and even through the early years of the Premier League in the 1990s, drinking was part of the culture of the game. I drank and I played football. It may be hard to picture now, with the intensity of the modern game, but I was not alone and it made it easier to hide, and justify, my behaviour. Most players could stop, or it didn’t affect their lives. I crossed a line and couldn’t get back.
In 1987, after winning my first trophy with Arsenal, the Littlewoods Cup, I went on a bender and lost my club jacket. In 1989, after winning the First Division with that amazing 2-0 victory over Liverpool at Anfield, I went on a bender and lost my dignity. That night, I stayed at my colleague Paul Merson’s house and wet the bed. It might have been acceptable if it was just the once, but it happened too often.
With England too. The death of Graham Taylor in January 2017 reminded me of the time in the early nineties when, as England manager, he urged me to sort myself out after I had knocked down a bedroom door in my drunken state, at the team hotel at Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire. I wasn’t ready for his advice at the time, though I would remember it.
Graham was a lovely, intelligent man, a gentleman, and he gave me a lot of confidence by saying that he was going to make me his number one choice as centre half after Euro 92, for which he had not picked me. We had something in common too: sections of the media branded me a donkey in my early playing career and some fans threw carrots at me during games. Graham was portrayed as a turnip in the Sun. Who would have thought that root vegetables could hurt so much?
To top all those episodes, my jail sentence came when Arsenal won the title again, in 1990/91, but could perhaps have gone unbeaten. We lost one match, however, at Chelsea, when I was inside and we ended up with David Hillier alongside Andy Linighan in defence. Who knows what might have been? What I do know is that when Arsenal’s team of 2003/04 did become the Invincibles, they had their captain Patrick Vieira with them all season.
The FA and League Cup double of 1992/93 was another cause for celebration, naturally, but while others went home to their families after any parties, mine would just go on. And on . . . I was drunk after winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup by beating Parma in Copenhagen in 1994, drunk after losing to Real Zaragoza in the final in Paris the following year. It was the drabness of life that followed the highs that got me. The booze calmed and changed me. It dulled any pain I was feeling in my private life, gave me respite. If I could have bottled that feeling, I would have been OK. But I couldn’t.
Some of the incidents off the field were frightening, looking back, like crashing the car into the front wall of a house in the Southend suburbs and going to jail, or falling down the concrete steps of a nightclub and needing 29 stitches in my brow. Some of them were funny, but only really because I survived them. A club tour to Hong Kong in 1995 embraced both the laughable and the dangerous.
One night, I was out with all the guys and, playing the big shot when I’d had a few, I went behind the bar and took over the DJ’s role for a while. Then, when I left, I jumped into a taxi – except there was already a young woman in there. It terrified the poor girl. After getting out, I somehow found my way back to the hotel – and it is amazing how drunks have a homing-pigeon instinct for returning to base – where I passed out in my room. In the morning, Ray Parlour knocked on my door. When he came in, he wondered if I’d felt hungry during the night, and I suddenly noticed a trolley-load of untouched sandwiches that I must have ordered in blackout.
Dear Ray. He has made a living out of telling drinking stories about
me and him, so I have little hesitation in telling one that has him at the centre. It’s not the one about us being drunk in a pizza restaurant – and our old manager George Graham disciplining him but not me as I was more of a first-team fixture at the time. Nor is it a tale about Ray writing off a car owned by the Arsenal scout Steve Rowley when he was just 16, that after having persuaded Steve to buy it off his brother, who was a car dealer. No, it comes from another night out on that same tour of Hong Kong.
As I left a bar in the notorious Wan Chai district with Ray, I noticed a row occurring on the other side of the street. I could see it involved our striker Chris Kiwomya. Chris had apparently got talking to a girl and it all kicked off, with her boyfriend taking offence. I went over to try to sort it out, as Ray walked on. As it calmed down, I turned to look back across the street where a local was coming at Ray and I could see the guy was carrying a machete. Undeterred, Ray decked the bloke, who was a taxi driver who had taken exception to Ray apparently lobbing prawn crackers into his cab. I dragged Ray away and we began to hurry off, only for the police to appear at the end of the road. I turned into a side street but Ray got picked up, as did Chris, who had begun fighting again with the girl’s boyfriend.
Drunk again, but beginning to realise the seriousness of the situation after I got back to the hotel, I went and knocked on the Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood’s door. He stood there in his dressing gown and slippers. He was smoking a big cigar. I told him about the trouble and that Ray and Chris had been arrested.
‘Don’t worry, Tony,’ he said. ‘I know a good barrister out here. He’ll sort it out.’
And it was sorted out. Chris got off and although Ray was fined HK$4,000 (around £300 at the time), he was lucky to avoid a jail sentence, the barrister apologising to the people of Hong Kong on Ray’s behalf. Arsenal were not about to let Ray escape that easily, however, and he was presented with a bill for the lawyer, which came to £12,000. He was on £600 a week back then and it took him several seasons to pay it off. I remember that Stewart Houston was the caretaker manager at the time and it was probably one reason why he didn’t get the job full time.
That all happened the year before I got sober and the year before I returned to Hong Kong with England ahead of Euro 96. The memory played a big part in me shutting myself in my 15th-floor hotel room and declining the chance to take part in all that dentist’s chair stuff with Paul Gascoigne, Teddy Sheringham and the rest, as I knew if I did, I might well jeopardise being able to play in the tournament.
As it was, I gritted my teeth – white-knuckling it, they call it in AA – and stayed off the drink during that tournament, playing some of my best football, as Terry Venables’ captain. That came between more of the injuries I was sustaining, as we reached the semi-finals only to go out on penalties to Germany. Cue that seven-week bender. Guinness was always my favourite, about four pints an hour when in flow, but anything would do; lager, even the spirits I hated but which worked fast. I would pour them into the beer to dilute the taste.
When I did hit my rock bottom in my local in Essex that day in August 1996, it had all become too hard, overwhelming in fact, physically and emotionally. The more money I earned, the quicker my drinking and the illness of alcoholism had accelerated. And football had become irrelevant to me. For a man who loved the game, felt free on the pitch, that was desperately sad.
I guess for a footballer being destroyed by alcohol, I wasn’t that bad a player. I did have some talent and also a great squad around me. ‘Your mother and father made you a fighter,’ George Graham’s successor, Arsène Wenger – the two of them huge figures in my life and career – said to me early on, after he took over in October 1996.
It was true. I had some great assets that I could use in my recovery from my addiction. For a long time, I thought it was the booze that was making me durable, keeping me strong. But in the end it was tearing me apart. What I thought was my medicine became my poison.
I’ve heard it said that many creative people and celebrities believe that if they give up drink and drugs, or whatever their flavour of addiction or damaging behaviour, they will lose their mojo, what makes them what they are. In football, the example always cited was my dear old friend Gazza. Try to change Paul Gascoigne, the argument went, and he wouldn’t be the player he was. I’ve never subscribed to that line of thinking and my encounters with celebrated, creative people show that their work – not to mention their lives – gets better and takes on a new level of quality when they get sober.
I can only really speak for myself, though, and say that when I quit drinking, I became a better footballer for the six years of my career that it would prove I had left in me. I was calmer, smarter, and even more successful. I felt free, played free, as Arsenal’s captain and Arsène Wenger’s field marshal.
I never really worried about not being as good as before. I knew I had the ability, and I knew I had not done full justice to that ability previously. It had been exhausting trying to combine top-level football for club and country while an active alcoholic and keeping up a chaotic lifestyle.
It was Neil Ruddock, the Liverpool and England centre back, who has had his own struggles with drink, who said to me: ‘Tony, you were a good player when you were drinking. When you gave up, you were a great player.’
The comedian Jack Whitehall would also sum it up when I appeared years later with him on the Sky panel show, A League of Their Own: ‘You are,’ he said, ‘the donkey who became a champion racehorse.’ Not that I personally thought I was a donkey, of course.
What I did lose was that need in me to laugh and joke and entertain everybody. In the old days, I had been the social secretary, the old leader of the Tuesday Club for the drinkers in the team, but I no longer felt I had to be that person who needed people to like him all the time. We all want to be liked but now I felt more that I preferred to be respected.
I guess the Tuesday Club disbanded with the arrival of Arsène. If it did continue, I certainly wasn’t invited and wouldn’t have wanted to be. Over the coming years, although I would always feel close to them on the pitch, I would slip away from many of my colleagues who still liked a drink – and that was fine; they lived their lives whichever way they chose. I think some of the guys were probably relieved that the Tuesday Club did end, actually. I dragged Ray Parlour round all sorts of drinking places and it probably contributed to his expensive divorce.
My team-mates were always respectful towards me and never took the mickey out of me or, to my knowledge, told jokes about me. I appreciated that. My closer friendship with Lee Dixon in my last years was evidence that you see people in different lights and are drawn to different people when you get sober. Lee is a thoughtful man with an open mind, interested in people and behaviours – interested in life.
Others? I travelled to the odd away game with Dennis Bergkamp on the train because we shared a fear of flying but never really got close to him. Towards the end of my time, the game would change – as I did – with more and more overseas players coming into the Arsenal squad, and they tended to stick together by nationality: Dennis and Marc Overmars, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry. It was understandable. I guess it’s the same with Brits abroad.
There was also the age thing, with the younger ones obviously not sharing the same conversation topics and interests as a back four who were well into their thirties. Plus the language barrier. The Brazilian Edu was a good player and a lovely guy, but his English wasn’t great and my Portuguese non-existent. It is true that you don’t have to be close to your team-mates as long as you respect them and appreciate them on the pitch.
Acceptance of a changing dynamic within the group, both on their part and mine, probably stemmed from the day when I sat them down in the dressing room after training soon after quitting drinking and acknowledged my alcoholism to them. They all heard me out in silence, broken at the end by Ian Wright apparently saying: ‘You’ve got some bottle, Tone.’ I say apparently because it was reported and I can’t sa
y I remember it, so bound up in my own zone was I at that moment. Ian would later say that the group was grateful to have back the captain they had been lacking for a while, and I too would soon feel like I was back.
This respect and new way of life was open to Gazza too, another alcoholic who had this desire to please people, and to his own detriment. I may have been a defender and him a more creative player, but it still boiled down to realising potential and making the best of your God-given talent. I look back and remain convinced that Gazza would have gone on to even greater things, made better decisions in his life and career, if only he could have stayed stopped after one of those many times when he quit drinking for a while. But it was not to be. His path was not my path.
I did have ups and downs as I learned to deal with my emotions – getting sent off twice, at Derby and Newcastle – and I was still finding my way off the field as I learned to settle down in my new life. I had found out that life is unmanageable with drink. Now I was discovering that, without it, it can take a while still for it to be manageable.
Less than a year after getting sober, for example, I decided to take the kids to St Lucia on holiday. I probably felt guilty at having not been a proper dad during the last days of my drinking and thought I should take them on a grand, expensive trip. Due to an electrical storm, the plane was diverted to Antigua, however, and we had to wait in the airport there for seven hours. I was not a great flyer and my anxiety levels rose.
Even with a nanny along to help me – by now I was separated from my then wife, Jane, who had decided she didn’t want to be with me any more and was then in her own early recovery from cocaine addiction – I was going spare looking after my three children, Clare, Oliver and Amber, who were then 12, five and two. They were active kids and other passengers were getting annoyed. I glugged Coca-Cola from a machine. The only place open was a bar – and so I went over there and bought a packet of cigarettes. I had never smoked before, nor would I after, but I had that addict’s desire to change the way I felt when anxious that seems so intense in early recovery, although I was desperate too not to give up my hard-won sobriety by drinking alcohol.