by Tony Adams
It was a tough call but, having got this far, I felt we just had to keep it going. What were sportspeople desperately in need of the sort of help I floundered about trying to find going to do if we no longer existed?
The decision was made to carry on, but we had to be more aggressive in securing funding. That would not be easy and there would be more transition periods before we got it right. Sporting Chance would come through and help get sportsmen – and women – sober, but there would be heartache and sadness along the way.
Indeed, what happened with the charity over the coming years would be mirrored in many ways by my own transition from player to ex-player to coach to manager. There would certainly be plenty of heartache and sadness, some of the latter very close to home.
6
Transition
Change will not come if we wait for some
other person or some other time.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
We are the change that we seek.
BARACK OBAMA
Yes, endings do mean a chance for new beginnings, but after the conclusion of my playing career, I wasn’t quite ready yet for a new start to the next phase of my footballing life – if indeed I was going to continue in football. I simply didn’t know then. I just needed a rest from all the intensity of playing the game for 15 years at the top level and to do some of the things that I had wanted to do for a long while.
For many players, the transition from player to ex-player is painful and a huge deal, which is why the PFA’s spending on education and welfare to prepare players for their retirement has increased so much. It is different for different people, but very often the retired player misses the dressing room and its camaraderie, which is why so many seek to stay in coaching, to be around training grounds and players and continue what can be a Peter Pan lifestyle.
That is not open to all, though, and those who don’t stay in the game more quickly feel like a has-been and a spare part, getting in the way of the family at home. Having no real sense of purpose can lead to some players, morose, depressed, yesterday’s heroes, seeking solace in drinking, drugging or gambling. There can be – have been – suicides among players with a void in their lives. Clarke Carlisle, who has endured depression and thankfully survived an attempt to take his own life, springs to mind.
I saw some statistics from XPRO, a charity for former players, from a few years ago which suggested that 40 per cent of players file for bankruptcy within five years of retirement. David James, the former England goalkeeper, is a well-known example. It surprised me the number was that high but they had the figures. In addition, they reckoned that four out of five ex-pros will develop some form of osteoarthritis. Worse, there were, they added in 2015, almost 150 former players in the prison system, many for drug-related offences, and 124 under the age of 25. I know this to be true. We’ve had some of them through Sporting Chance.
For the partner of the player, life can change dramatically too. At the top level, there is an undoubted glamour attached to being around a Premier League club and moving around the lounges at the stadiums, living in big houses with a network of friends at a club. Even lower down, players can be local heroes and their partners have some status.
Once all that goes, marriages and relationships can run into difficulties. Players and their partners are not used to being around each other for so much of the time all of a sudden and the dynamic between them changes. It is no wonder, according to XPRO again, that one in three players gets divorced within the first couple of years after retirement. That figure rises to 50 per cent after five years of not playing football for a living any more.
I felt very differently; I felt I was one of the lucky ones. I had had my rock bottom with alcohol back in 1996 and, ever since then, my life had improved. I had really appreciated the years I had left in the game and done my dream job, a privilege not granted to that many people in society. I did know that whatever I ended up doing next, I would not get the same sensation as playing, but I had learned that all things must pass.
It meant that I had pretty much prepared myself for retirement because I no longer defined myself solely as a professional footballer. I knew that if I did, it would leave a massive hole and I would find it hard to let go of the whole circus. Fortunately, I had a feeling of physical wellbeing and emotional euphoria due to my sobriety and I didn’t need to replace the adrenaline of a match day. At the time, I have to admit, I thought that transitions were for other people.
Mind you, I still experienced ‘football dreams’ after I retired, and indeed can still have them to this day. Alcoholics will tell you they experience ‘drinking dreams’ for years after stopping, in which they are having a pint or whatever, in a bar or on their own, and the dream feels so real that, when they wake up, there is a moment of fear and shame before they realise with relief they have not actually had a drink and blown their sobriety. Usually, the dreams occur as part of a grieving process for a lost way of life, and as a reminder not to get complacent about what alcohol can do if an alcoholic takes that first drink.
For me, the booze was big – huge, in fact – but football was even bigger. My dreams were more often about me running around a football pitch kicking, heading, ordering and organising. I guess it was about being in control, doing something I was good at and knew inside out, when so often real life is about not being in control and needing to accept that. After these dreams, I would wake up with relief and realise I didn’t have to go to training and punish my aching joints any more.
Physically, I needed to rest my body and certainly from that point of view I knew I had made the right decision. I watched the World Cup in Japan and South Korea on TV that summer of 2002 – applauded England reaching the quarter-finals even though I was never happy about Sven-Goran Eriksson, a Swede, being our manager – and saw Martin Keown on the bench. I knew that was not for me.
When pre-season came around in the July, it was actually a relief not to have to get up every day and have the stress of driving around the M25 into work. I guess I might have had some second thoughts if Arsène had let me just play games instead of having to do all the training – as Aston Villa did with Paul McGrath – but Arsène was not Martin O’Neill. Nor was he a Terry Venables, who gave me leeway when it came to training with England. Arsène was all about physiology. Arsène’s way was to have all the players in all the time.
It was probably for the best. Some years later, when Zinedine Zidane retired, he came out with a memorable quote: ‘It is better to go one minute early than five minutes late.’ That sounds right to me.
In my last season, I did ask Arsène if I could train just on Thursdays and Fridays and do a bit of gym work on other days but he said no, he needed me out there on the training pitch the whole week. I did manage to persuade him a couple of times to give me time off, which meant I was able to play, rather than being injured due to over-training, but it made no sense to him really that I could do this. It was in conflict with all that he had learned and believed in. People prepared for matches by training with the team, not by resting.
It was the same for Lee Dixon, who also retired that season. One problem now was that, at the training ground at London Colney, the pitches were so firm. Arsenal liked a quick, hard surface so that the ball could be passed at pace. Lee and I would jog out on to the training pitch and be limping by the time we got there. Hard pitches seem to be the vogue nowadays because managers want firm, quick and slick surfaces to fizz the ball about on, but, because there is little give in them, I am convinced they contribute to injuries to players.
Indeed, Arsène would even come to accept some evidence of that and, more than 10 years later, Arsenal began to experiment at the training ground with a softer surface, with cork, sand and wool worked in below the turf to produce more give. It would still produce a quick surface but be kinder on the knee and ankle joints, and the aim was to install it at the Emirates if it proved effective at London Colney.
There were stories that
summer that I was going into management, and, according to my Wikipedia page, I applied for the vacant Brentford job – and was rejected. I didn’t, and so I wasn’t. I was not ready for coaching or management, not yet. Not by a long chalk. I just had too much else I wanted to do.
I was now Tony Adams the human being, not just Tony Adams the footballer. I had changed and gained new interests during my first six years of sobriety. I played the piano – not that well, but I had learned to play a bit – and I had friends, a social life and AA. I had become involved with the Royal Court Theatre, having met the artistic director, Ian Rickson, a Charlton Athletic fan, who asked me to sit on a panel to judge a young writers’ award. I was also recruited as a judge for a modern art competition backed by the Financial Times. I was now an avid theatre-goer and also enjoyed cinema and opera, going to Glyndebourne with friends. I even sponsored a new play at the Edinburgh Festival.
I was getting to meet some amazing people, too, including someone I really admired – Paul Weller, who was a fellow guest on that Ian Wright TV show where I first met Caprice. He had always been a big hero as I was a bit of a mod in my teenage years, with a parka and Hush Puppies and all. I was a massive Jam fan and later, for my 40th birthday, Stuart Peters, the agent who got me on to Ian’s show with Paul, gave me a signed copy of the Sound Affects LP. They say you should never meet your heroes, though, and they are probably right. Some of the mystique and magic went when I found out Paul was a Chelsea fan. I liked his band more. They were all Gunners.
It was all a result partly of experimenting and finding out what I liked and partly of reading the Susan Jeffers book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, which always stuck with me. Her theory was that your life should have nine pillars – among them children, family, profession, leisure – and if you were to take one away, your life would not crumble. For most of my life I had had just two pillars: football and booze. Maybe I took the title of the book too literally: I did a parachute jump, down in Wiltshire, just for the hell of it. It was hell, too. Never again.
Anyway, maybe someone got the story about me applying for the Brentford job because I’d been seen in the area some time before. I did go out with a girl who had a flat there. That, though, was long before I met Poppy in those few months before my retirement, which was just before another woman came into my life in an episode I was not very comfortable with. In fact, her behaviour was very strange, as you might expect of someone who I can only describe as a stalker.
I had met her on Putney Heath near my home while out walking my Dalmatian dog Harry in the spring months just before my career ended. She was about five years older than me. We got into conversation but I was only being civil; it was no more than that – for me at least. The next thing I knew, a dozen red roses had arrived for me at Highbury from her. I actually gave them to Poppy, who laughed about it and still reminds me of it to this day.
Not long after, I was walking Harry on Putney Heath and I ran into the woman again. This time, she had a Dalmatian. It was now getting a bit creepy and became more so when I decided to get another Dalmatian, which I named Sally – so I now had when Harry met Sally. She also got a second one.
One morning, I went to the door to pick up the post and there was a letter on the mat from her. She had read in the paper about a back injury I had, she wrote, and was recommending some homeopathic tablets. The next time I was on the heath with the dogs, there she was with a package of tablets for me. There would also be times when I would look out of my window and she would be driving down the street, slowing down in front of my house. A few minutes later she would be there again, driving around the block several times.
I suppose if it had been the other way around – a woman being stalked like this by a man – it would have been scary, but it never really frightened me, which was probably why I never did anything about it. I didn’t want to be unkind. In some ways, it was touching and I even felt a little flattered. At first.
Then an article about Poppy and me appeared in the newspapers and she backed off a bit. Poppy did tell me that the woman had come up to her when she was walking in the King’s Road one day and introduced herself as a good friend of mine, which unnerved Poppy a little. When I moved into Poppy’s flat just off Sloane Square and put the house in Putney up for sale, thankfully it all faded away, though only after almost a year of it.
Later, Poppy would say that she too had stalked me, being an Arsenal fan. I don’t doubt she had called me a few names from up in the stands despite that. Her favourite player was Nigel Winterburn. A left back may seem like an odd choice, but he had a rapport with the fans on the touchline and, having come from Wimbledon, he had some character about him. Poppy also liked his windmill goal celebration. She had a long wait between those moments, mind you.
That summer after I retired was a magical time in many ways as I embarked on my new life and the relationship with Poppy. I recognised very quickly in her a woman who was good for me. It helped, for starters, that she was an independent woman with means of her own and comfortable in her own skin and with her own status. She was not after money or celebrity. I had moved on in my life to the point now where I was attracted to an intelligent woman who was emotionally well. Being an Oxford graduate, Poppy was also very educated. I soon saw that she was an exceptional woman.
Not only did she look stunning in the purple Pringle jumper she was wearing when I first met her, but she also had a beautiful smile. I thought she was a good-looking woman with a great figure. Spirituality works, but I’m human too. As my therapist James says, agreeing with one psychologist who expounded the theory, there’s an inner chimp in all of us, which is the part of the brain that controls our impulses. It’s just a question of owning up to and taming it.
With all this pleasure also came pain, however. The summer also marked the death of the man who had been the biggest single influence on my life and career, my father Alexander – also my middle name – Adams.
In the June after my retirement, we went down to the villa I had bought at Mougins in the south of France, taking Dad with us. By now he was very ill with emphysema, and we travelled down on the train as he needed an oxygen tank always by his side to provide an airway and help him with his breathing. It was a special time with Dad. We were now closer than ever. The previous year he’d come down to Mougins a lot to help me buy the place, accompanying me to meetings with estate agents and architects.
Dad was the one who’d coached me in my early years and done most to develop my football career. He was the man who’d told me back in the mid-nineties that everyone around Romford, where I was doing a lot of my drinking with his clients and mates from his roofing business, was calling me a drunk and that I needed to do something about it. He had shown me love and tough love.
It was strange, though. He and Mum were always uncomfortable with me calling myself an alcoholic in recovery. A couple of years after stopping drinking, I took them out for dinner to a restaurant by Putney Bridge. I wanted to make my amends to them, as suggested by the AA programme in Steps Eight and Nine, where it talks about drawing up a list of people we’ve harmed and then making direct amends to them – apologising, in effect – except where to do so would injure them or others.
When Dad first confronted me about my drinking, rather than accept it was my own fault and responsibility he and Mum blamed my first wife Jane and her drug-taking for me going off the rails. Mum’s little boy could do no wrong in their eyes. It wasn’t the reality but they loved me and that was how they saw it.
I told them then about how sorry I was for causing them so much pain and anxiety through my drinking. I was especially sorry that going to prison for drink-driving had brought so much shame on them. My dad cut me off, not wanting to hear it.
‘Look, Son,’ he said. ‘There’s no way you were an alcoholic. Not in a million years.’
To them, I had had a temporary drink problem and all this recovery stuff was a bit over the top, even if they were pleased I was living differently to
how I used to. I had to accept their reaction rather than try to force across my point of view. For a long time I had not understood the illness of addiction, so they could hardly be expected to. I left it at that. I had said my piece and made my peace. Cleaned up my side of the street, as we say in AA.
Dear old Mum wanted to talk about my house in Putney, about how nice it was and that I deserved it for all my hard work. That touched me. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said simply and smiled.
One day at the villa, with Dad settled and comfortable, Poppy and I decided to have a day on the beach at the famous old Le Club 55 in St Tropez, which had become well known in the 1960s when stars like Dean Martin and Sophia Loren used to be seen there. Once we arrived, I could sense that there were paparazzi lurking and, as Poppy peeled off her top to sunbathe topless, I told her about my suspicions. She was surprised and asked me how I knew. ‘You just get to know,’ I said. She didn’t believe me but when I looked around more closely, I could see a long lens about 50 yards away. I had got used to checking out my environment.
I was right. A few days later, an article appeared in the News of the World with the heading above the pictures of ‘Four Four Phew’. Quite clever, I have to admit, but not very nice, especially as by now the internet was in full swing and she would be all over that. Years later, I would privately win a case against the paper for hacking my phone, when they found out via my voicemail that Poppy was pregnant. As part of the settlement, I managed to get the topless pictures of Poppy removed.
A spate of articles about me and Poppy soon followed. One was headed, above a picture of the two of us, ‘Whisky and Sober’. That was OK, I guess, and was quite funny. Another amused both of us when it claimed we had split up (I think it actually said I had kicked her into touch – geddit?) because of the differences between us. She was a King’s Road, jolly-hockey-sticks socialite and me an Essex boy with his football mates, and I apparently thought we were incompatible. She got some stick off her Oxford buddies for that. Mostly, Poppy took it all with a pinch of salt and laughed it off, as did I, though she would get upset with anything in the press that she felt was unfair about me.