Sober

by Tony Adams

  ‘Have a look at those,’ he said. ‘We’ve got plenty of players with problems.’

  I didn’t even need to look at them.

  ‘I could have told you that,’ I replied.

  The encounters with Gordon gave me new impetus. Now we had some finance beyond my dwindling fund. It was time to find ourselves a chief executive officer. I took Peter Kay out for lunch – although actually the Observer magazine was paying. They had asked me to do some reviews of restaurants run or owned by footballers, and I took Peter along as he knew all about food, having been a chef at the Savoy and won awards for his cooking.

  The idea was that I would interview the footballers – who were to include Gary Neville, who had bought an interest in an eaterie in Manchester, and my old mate Lee Dixon, who had a stake in the Riverside Brasserie at Bray – and Peter would brief me on the food. First stop on our itinerary was Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant at Claridge’s in Mayfair, Gordon having been a young player at Glasgow Rangers before becoming a chef.

  It seemed like a good chance to ask Peter if he was interested in becoming our CEO. He had some experience, having been involved with the Ark Foundation, a charity which helped people in the catering industry who had addictive illnesses. Actually, I didn’t really ask him. I just told him he had the job. I joked that I had asked two other people before him and they had turned me down so I was desperate.

  Peter was flattered and honoured but wondered at first if he would be able to do it. It was typical, and the response I got from James too. We addicts always have that initial reaction of not being good enough, of not feeling we will be able to do the job. I think they call it ‘impostor syndrome’, where people with low self-esteem believe that they are going to get found out.

  After thinking it over, though – and it didn’t take him too long – Peter agreed and I knew I had a good man who shared the ethics and ideals of the charity, who knew the illness of addiction inside out but was in recovery himself, and knew me and how I worked. I had the spine of my team in place: clinical director, a CEO and an administrative assistant.

  By now I had got to know Peter well and he had become a dear, close friend. A natty dresser with flamboyant blond hair, he had a real zest for life. We socialised together and any lingering thoughts I might have had that sobriety would be boring were dispelled around him. He showed me it could be fun as we had some laughs together, be it at jazz clubs in Dover Street or Chelsea coffee bars. He would also cook for me and arrange parties. He made me feel good about myself, telling me that I should be proud about what I was doing in establishing Sporting Chance.

  He had quite a sense of humour, too. As a gift for my birthday once, he gave me a photo frame with pictures in it of the people he reckoned at that time were most special in my life – Caprice and him. Now, as we set about building Sporting Chance, that line from ‘Moon River’ seemed appropriate – we were two drifters, off to see the world.

  Peter was especially good in the early years at forging a relationship with John Bramall, who would become Gordon’s deputy at the PFA with special responsibility for player welfare, though I have to say our treatment was a bit ad hoc for a while. We would take players in, usually individually, at a place near Hook in Hampshire. It was owned by that surgeon friend of mine, Mr Gilmore, who was also an Arsenal fan, and he allowed us to use a coaching house in the grounds and the swimming pool.

  We would bring in physios and fitness coaches to work with the players concerned and looked to help anyone who asked for it. It was mainly on a one-to-one basis and I would also go in and tell the guys my story and spend time with them.

  The location and the one-to-one element were not ideal, however, and we needed more space to get more players through. So we moved to Sopwell House, the hotel near St Albans where England and Arsenal used to stay. There, we could get three or four players at a time through our programme if we needed to, given the good facilities and the availability of hotel rooms. The clients could also use the pool and we could train them in the grounds. In the evenings, they would go to nearby AA meetings, or meetings of other fellowships such as Narcotics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous.

  It worked well enough for a couple of years but problems began to arise. The hotel was, of course, open to outsiders and we started to have concerns about our people being recognised and the press turning up. And though at times we would be getting small groups through, we were still mainly seeing clients singly. That was fine, as every person was valuable, but one of the essential elements of being in recovery is spending time with fellow recovering addicts. It is a disease of isolation and likes you on its own. You are more vulnerable alone, when you are left to your own thoughts and feelings. Easier prey. When people are in recovery together, they can talk things through and socialise as a group. With a common issue and bond, they are stronger.

  This was where Stephen Purdew, the owner of the Champneys group of health spas, came in. Stephen was a big Arsenal fan, and in fact would take Box No. 1 next to the Diamond Club when the Emirates Stadium was built. Under George Graham, we players used to go to Stephen’s Henlow Grange spa now and then ahead of big matches, such as cup semi-finals. After a conversation with him, he offered Sporting Chance a large, secluded house with the rooms we needed, in the grounds of his Forest Mere facility near Liphook in Hampshire. The clients could eat in the main building but had separate accommodation.

  This was in 2003 and now James, Peter and Mandy could be based there. In addition, we would soon recruit, on a freelance basis, people coming in for specialist sessions, be they therapeutic meetings with counsellors or physical workouts.

  Going out into clubs to deliver educational seminars also became a growing part of what we did. I would tell of my experiences and my recovery and Peter would give a talk on the physical effects of alcohol or drugs, using a dummy to show the damaging effects on the muscles needed to play the game and how recovery times after games and injuries would be so much longer when alcohol was a factor.

  I particularly remember the seminar we held at Carrington, the Manchester United training ground. We must have looked quite a sight walking across the car park, Peter in his elegant tweed, waistcoated suit carrying the dummy, me towering over the pair of them. Often clubs would only let us talk to their academy players, but Sir Alex Ferguson made sure that all of the first-team squad attended – in fact, every player from the youth teams as well – and he himself was there overseeing it all. Of course he was.

  It was a bit odd. I had had drinking sessions with some of the United players now sitting in front of me, either with England or on foreign tours. And here I was, telling them what life was like after some years of being sober. The whole room was respectful, such was the control Sir Alex exerted over them. There was no nervous giggling or laughing, except at some of Peter’s gags. A few of them went, ‘Wow!’ Some would later come to see me and Peter privately.

  Afterwards, we had lunch with Sir Alex and he took a real shine to Peter. From that day on, we were always welcome at United. I know Sir Alex has talked about issues he had with the likes of Bryan Robson, Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath, and I knew that first-hand too, having had sessions with them around an Arsenal v Manchester United exhibition match in South Africa years previously. I recall Roy Keane having just joined the club and being out with us. In my state in those days, I kept calling him Kevin, after the old West Ham player Kevin Keen.

  Indeed, Sir Alex asked me if there was anything he could have done differently to handle some of the players who were drinkers at the club. It was clearly something that he had thought a great deal about.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘They were all going to go the inevitable way with alcohol without getting any help or treatment.’

  Sir Alex became something of a standard-bearer for us. His huge influence within the game with other clubs and managers after more than 15 years at United at that time meant that doors now opened to us elsewhere, word having got round that we had been into United
. We were very grateful to him.

  Still, we were not breaking even, and the treatment of each person going through the facility was costing £8,000. That was fine if they were footballers, with the PFA paying for them on top of the core funding they provided, but other sporting people were coming to us with no funding and we were not about to turn them away.

  We held fundraisers, one at the Guildhall in London, but didn’t want to pay event organisers as we were a charity. We just about broke even on the night. We couldn’t go on like this and I called a meeting of the staff and the trustees, the board who oversaw the running of the charity, down at Forest Mere.

  We brainstormed for two or three hours. Peter, the controller of the finances, was his charming self. He reckoned that we were close to breaking even and that we should keep going as we were helping people. We all agreed with him but the cash flow was now a concern. We had let Peter get on with it, so enthusiastic a champion of Sporting Chance was he, and we had never got the sense that it wasn’t working.

  But I didn’t think it should be such a struggle, and I didn’t want us to fundraise any more. It was a lot of effort for little return, and I was tired of running around and calling in favours from mates for auction items, like signed shirts and days out at spas, for the events. It seemed that we were just keeping the place going to pay the staff salaries, which was not the best reason. Besides, we weren’t really getting as many coming through and getting clean, sober and staying away from gambling at this stage of Sporting Chance’s development as I had hoped for. There were a few relapsing back into drink, drugs or betting once they left us.

  Overriding all my concerns about the effort going into the fundraising was my belief that sporting bodies should be financing all this. I had always felt it should be their responsibility. We would offer the facilities and the expertise, but they should be funding their athletes. That seemed to me like it should have been the deal. The PFA were great but their basic funding plus paying on top for individual treatments was still not enough to sustain us.

  We also had a bit of a problem, I think, with the way we were perceived. As part of the charity sector, we were competing for funds with a whole range of good causes, but I am not sure the public would have seen us as a worthy cause at this time.

  The illness of alcoholism and addiction was not really understood – many not even seeing it as an illness but instead merely a weakness. Nor was there an example of a high-profile footballer, or other sportsman or woman, who had been sober for some time and who could come out and say that they had been through treatment and that this programme of recovery based on the Twelve Steps of AA worked.

  Most people, having read all about his alcoholic drinking in the latter part of his playing career, knew that Jimmy Greaves, the great England striker of the 1960s, had gone years without a drink, but his was his own sobriety. As far as I knew, he didn’t go to AA and didn’t use the programme. To me, that was a bit of a shame as I am sure he would have had so much to pass on to people who had newly stopped drinking.

  And there were examples of people who just could not get the concept of the illness and the need to remain abstinent. Later, there would be Kenny Sansom, my old Arsenal teammate, and Paul Gascoigne, both of whom I and others tried to help on many occasions but who kept relapsing because they could not deal with all their issues and their feelings around them without a drink. Because they were alcoholics. Before them, there was George Best.

  I met George on several occasions, the first in a restaurant in Dover Street in the West End. He was wearing a leather jacket with the word LEGEND on it. I thought that was sad. He didn’t need to tell anybody that.

  I was also scheduled to make a personal appearance with him once, along with Gordon Banks, but George turned up drunk an hour and a half late. Because of his lack of professionalism and no longer wanting to be around active drunks, I told the organisers not to book me with him again. People told me to loosen up but I was annoyed with them. They were all over George and that was the problem. Too many just condoned his behaviour and thus enabled him to keep drinking.

  The final time I met him he was sober, down at Champneys at Forest Mere, next to the Sporting Chance premises in the grounds, with Stephen Purdew offering the facilities for George to dry out. George was charming, intelligent and articulate over lunch. That was his natural being when not drinking but alcohol robbed him of it. Too many people would tell him he was not an alcoholic and that’s what he wanted to believe.

  When I talked to him about AA, he said that he had been to meetings and was asked for his autograph, or to coach people’s kids’ teams. I’m not sure if that was the case. That never happened to me or to famous people I know who go to AA. But that was the ego and the denial of the active alcoholic who will find any excuse to keep drinking if they can. And it can drive them to their grave.

  For me, it was vital to keep going to AA and to see people getting stronger in their sobriety, people from all walks of life. All people are different and have their own way of dealing with things, but this worked for me. I was grateful that there were people around willing to pass on their knowledge and experience to me, and I was now in a position where I could do that too.

  It also helped me to see other people in the public eye – musicians and actors who performed in front of crowds for a living – managing to handle not drinking one day at a time despite all the scrutiny they faced. That is the great thing about AA – there is always somebody there you can relate to. Not only do you stick with the winners, as the saying goes, you win with the stickers.

  I recall Paul Merson asking me around that time whether I felt any pressure to stay sober, knowing that if I relapsed, it would be all over the papers and Sporting Chance would be blown as a credible treatment centre. But I never did. I was on my path and comfortable with myself. I was getting a lot of love from AA and other sources and I felt I had ‘got’ recovery – that I had found a power greater than myself who was walking with me and looking after me.

  Not that I ever could or would crow about that. You never know what life has to throw at you and you can’t predict the future. And my upbringing was that you didn’t show off. I just had a sense that I could stay sober, one day at a time. It was a balance between being confident enough to spread the message publicly and not getting ahead of myself.

  The Adrian Mutu case back in 2004 probably didn’t do much for our image at Sporting Chance, either. The Romanian striker, who was then at loggerheads with the new Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho, tested positive for cocaine and the PFA asked us to take him under our wing and see if we could help him. It became a cause célèbre and attracted plenty of publicity that we did not seek and did our best to deal with.

  Peter Kay worked very hard at doing that, and he also became something of a mentor to Adrian and indeed to other players who would come through Sporting Chance. He was very good at dealing with Chelsea and the FA, who would ban Mutu for seven months and fine him £20,000. Peter needed to be a diplomat as well as a good public relations man. In fact, he became the face of the charity for a time and while we were still in our early days, this was fine by me. His closeness with certain players also helped them, I’m sure, knowing that they had someone they could trust and turn to.

  The problem in essence was that Adrian Mutu had very little interest in getting into any sort of proper recovery. This was mainly because I don’t think he believed he had a drugs problem and it seemed clear to me that, when he came into Sporting Chance, he was doing what he was told to do without much personal willingness, as it would help him escape worse punishment by the game’s authorities. We didn’t really want to deal with anyone who didn’t want treatment and recovery, but we were by now in a difficult position, as the PFA’s go-to people when it came to drugs.

  Indeed, they even wanted us at one point to become an arm of their work, to come under their umbrella. We were fierce about our independence, though. That’s how treatment worked. Players needed to be anonymo
us at our facility, able to trust people who had nothing to do with their union or their clubs, so that they could talk freely about their issues. They didn’t want to be going back to their clubs with even the possibility of private matters becoming public.

  Thus – with the Mutu case an example of footballers’ excess – a perception grew up around us that we were somehow simply a kind of safety net for people caught taking drugs, rich boys who had got into trouble of their own making. And, as rich boys, they should be able to pay for their own treatment. Why should it need subsidising?

  Spoilt young men, who had everything done for them by their clubs these days, who went down the pub or betting shop and pissed or gambled it all away, just did not evoke much sympathy in certain quarters.

  Those who advanced those arguments did not know two things, however:

  First, anything about the illness of addiction. It is no respecter of status, wealth or power. It strikes at all sections of society, high and low.

  Second, people like Adrian Mutu coming to us were few and far between. We weren’t, at this point, getting the high-profile high earners who could comfortably afford the treatment themselves. We were getting lower division and non-league footballers with their arses hanging out of their trousers.

  Here we were, five years into Sporting Chance, having just moved into new premises, and I, we, were contemplating closing it down. Charities can be like that, I was told. Many do have a lifespan that comes to an end.

  I hated the thought of shutting the doors, however, and I considered instead creating a foundation that would send players through treatment programmes at other centres, even if they didn’t have the fitness and conditioning element that we had and which made us unique. Maybe, some people told me, it was time to let it go.