by Tony Adams
Anyway, that day on the beach Poppy’s mobile rang and it was a friend of hers by the name of Paul Goldstein, who at that time had his own skiwear brand before selling it to Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct. Paul knew we were in the south of France, but where exactly were we now? He was on a yacht in the bay, he said. Why didn’t he come ashore and meet up with us? Poppy asked in reply. Oh, and he had a friend with him. By the name of Caprice. To wind us up, he said he might bring her along.
In the event, he came ashore but Caprice didn’t, perhaps because they had been on the beach earlier for a while and she didn’t want to make the trip again, but maybe also because she thought it would have been a bit awkward. It probably would have been, though Poppy was a bit disappointed. She was intrigued and wanted to meet Cap. She always kept saying that I should give her a call.
The holiday was a lovely time of eating well and Pops and I getting to know each other, but Dad was not a well man and was in decline. He died, in fact, not long after we got home, on 30 June, in St Francis Hospice, at Stapleford Abbotts, Essex. He was just 66, though given what he had been through earlier in his life, we had thought he might go before he did. He had had a heart attack in 1977 and would later lose a kidney and suffer a thrombosis.
It was almost as if he felt it was his time to go, now my career was over, and with my mum, his wife, having gone just over a year previously. He had taken the keenest of interest in my career, watching pretty much every game either live or on TV, and I had so much to be grateful to him for.
He, like Mum, was a good person. They had their problems and issues, stuff that happened to them as kids which they did not have the good fortune to be able to address as I was able to in recovery and through therapy, and which you hope your kids will not have to deal with as well. But you can also get too analytical. They played their hand the best way they knew how, for themselves and their family, given the cards that life had dealt them.
It was a well-attended funeral, with many figures from the world of football whom Dad had got to know there to pay their respects. Also there were people from his own playing days and from the Essex FA. Lee Dixon and other Arsenal players came too.
Afterwards, I received a letter of condolence from David Beckham and I was very touched by it. David had got to know Dad when he and his parents, Ted and Sandra, were invited into our hospitality box at Arsenal, and David wrote about what a good man he was.
It was a sad time but one that I felt I could deal with. I now understood more about the rhythm of our experiences, the ups and downs that were graphically revealed to me that summer. If you look at a cardiograph, the rising and falling movement shows you are still alive. If you are flatlining, you are dead. The trick for a recovering alcoholic is to find enough balance in your life so that you can go through both joy and pain without the need for a drink either to celebrate your mood or lift your spirits.
Now I was a parentless adult – the word orphan sounds strange at the age of 35 – and it was time to stand alone. At that time, the loss of my father probably didn’t really hit me as deeply as it might have done, perhaps because I had prepared myself for it and was convinced I was emotionally well. But, sure enough, it would hit me.
I had had a few months off now and, while I had enjoyed it, I began to turn my mind to what I might do next with my life. Being a driven and goal-orientated person, I guess it wasn’t going to take long. On top of that, some of my old impatience came back. I didn’t want to go into management straight away, but I did think I should find out if coaching might be for me, to discover what I liked and what I might be good at.
I paid for myself to go on a course at Warwick University to do my UEFA B Licence, which is the stage that ex-professionals are allowed to come in at, being exempt from the various coaching levels beneath that.
There were quite a few notable ex-players on the course, which was led by John McDermott, head of player development at Tottenham, assisted by Paul Bracewell, the former Everton midfield player. Also there was my old Arsenal team-mate Paul Davis, the man who had written me a very thoughtful letter all those years ago when I was in prison about his hopes that I would learn from the experience. It went over my head at the time, though I would come to recognise its wisdom years later.
In the other group from me was Paul Gascoigne, who was his usual manic and funny self. I could see that he was great with the young players he was working with. People held his hand through the course and if only he could have stuck at it when he left Warwick, things could have been different, but of course he didn’t. His alcoholism was still active.
My most vivid memory of the course is of Roy Keane being there and John McDermott having to intervene in a dispute between Roy and a student who, Roy claimed, had annoyed him by not listening to instructions during his coaching session. I warmed to Roy, though not because of that, I should add. He was an honest guy with interesting views. We played together on the same six-a-side team, so our goalkeeper was well protected. I would have liked to have played some club football with Roy.
I enjoyed the week, found it fun, in fact. It wasn’t like playing but it was close to it, and people, both among the coaches and the players brought in as guinea pigs, were receptive to my ideas. I definitely came away thinking I had something to pass on and possessed the skills to do so.
My old need to find something I was good at and to be acknowledged for it was still there, even if I did try to deny it sometimes. If I played backgammon, I had to win. If I played the piano, I had to do it well. Actually, that was part of my recovery – accepting that I didn’t have to be the best at everything I took on. I soon discovered with the piano, for example, that I wasn’t going to be a virtuoso like Evgeny Kissin, and that was OK.
Around that time, I was contacted by an academic by the name of Gary Armstrong, who had heard me talking about retirement and my feelings about it on a radio programme. He wanted, he said, to interview me for a project he was working on. Gary was a Sheffield United fan, author of books on the sociology of football and a lecturer at Brunel University in west London, where they had a School of Sport and Education. We got on well and he suggested I could do a course at the uni and get a degree in sports science. It appealed to me on several levels.
First, I could do my coaching badges alongside the course, having learned that I had enough drive and determination to want to do it, as well as look more deeply into football and its culture, in conjunction with studying biomechanics, physiology and suchlike.
Second, and practically, I had more or less moved in with Poppy, into her flat off Sloane Square, and I was selling my Putney house so that we could buy a place together in the countryside. We had identified a house we liked in Gloucestershire, near Cirencester. I could organise and help with the move and divide my time between the two places.
(When it came to the house we found, it would prove to be an example of what a small world it is. Joe Strummer of the Clash had once written a song called ‘Tony Adams’ for his other band, the Mescaleros, which had the lines: Who is that screaming in Lunar Park?/ If they make Tony Adams captain,/ We could all go screaming in Lunar Park. It turned out Joe’s parents would be neighbours.)
Third, I could prove to myself that I wasn’t the ignoramus I had thought I was as a result of my experiences at school. There had been a bit of promise there, after all . . .
In my first year at senior school, the English teacher Mrs Roberts asked us to write a story about ourselves. I basically wrote about how brilliant I was at football. She gave me a mark of 95 per cent and a star and said I was the best student in the class. I suppose I was good at talking about myself even then. Unfortunately, it was all downhill after that. She put me in for English O level when I was 14, and I got an ‘Unclassified’. I never did take it again the following year. It was the year I went to Hungary for that England Under-16 tour.
It was interesting first walking into a classroom at Brunel full of 19-, 20- and 21-year-olds. I was not really nervous but I d
id feel about 102 years old. On induction day, we broke into groups to get to know each other, and I went with a few to a coffee bar in nearby Uxbridge. They were great kids but busy in their own worlds. I must have seemed 102 to them as well.
I think that whole experience of going back to school might test anyone’s ego, let alone an ex-footballer who had had the sort of career I had and a recovering alcoholic a lot older than them. It made me feel humble, and I was proud of myself for being able to show that humility and a willingness to try something different. I remembered that being the former Arsenal and England captain did not make me better; not having a host of academic qualifications did not make me worse. The AA programme is about ego deflation and this was part of my recovery.
I had also learned by now to have some balance in my life, by seeking to ensure that I didn’t get emotionally too high or too low. Or too intense about work. Yes, I had to acknowledge the part of me that had drive and determination, but you can’t take that into your home life. It will drive you into an early grave. Footballers are competitive people but you don’t have to be the best driver, the best husband. Nor do you have to expect the same high standards from others too. When I was tempted to question myself, worried about perfectionism and any need to be the best, I tried to ask myself: ‘Who are you comparing yourself to?’
It did me good to sit still in a classroom and listen to different subjects and points of view to discover what I was interested in and what made me tick. I hadn’t forgotten that, in terms of learning, I was years behind the likes of Arsène and Jose Mourinho because I had had a long football career to occupy my time and attention and they hadn’t. I may have known football in practical terms but I didn’t know much about all the theory I was hearing. I was realistic enough to know that I couldn’t just walk into a big coaching or managerial job without a proper grounding. Too many players think they can because of their name, reputation and contacts.
Gary Armstrong was good in helping me through, and he was an excellent football academic with specialist interest in anthropology, the history of sport, sociology and social sciences.
I quickly found out that biomechanics – the study of how the body works and moves – was not especially my thing and that physiology was a difficult subject. Psychology was too much Freud, too much theory. I preferred the natural psychology employed by Sir Alex Ferguson, the art of man management, which accorded with my own beliefs about how you got to know your players, how you treated them as individuals and got the best from them. Anthropology and sociology interested me, though, the more so when I realised I could write about my own experiences.
I also read a lot, books like Harry Pearson’s The Far Corner, about North-east football, and a biography of Joan – formerly Hans – Gamper, the Swiss who founded FC Barcelona. I wrote essays on subjects as diverse as whether chess was a real sport and whether sport was play or business. I didn’t, I have to admit, watch much live football. I wanted to get away from it for a while.
I did do a case study of West Bromwich Albion, getting hold of the club accounts to analyse in detail how you could take a club up to the Premier League and stabilise it financially. Later, I would use it as part of my coursework for my diploma in management that the League Managers Association set up at Warwick University under Dr Sue Bridgewater. It was a good course, preparing you for all the off-the-field stuff – interviews for jobs, being interviewed by television and press, and talking with owners.
Sam Allardyce was a speaker on the course and he described his own experiences in football. He was full of anecdotes that reflected his longevity in the game and his battling nature. He came across as a survivor which is ironic, looking back, given that some years later he would lose so quickly the England job he had wanted for so long.
The Brunel course also gave me time to go skiing for the first time. In fact, I went twice that winter with Poppy, who was a big fan of the activity, to Val d’Isere, where her family had a chalet. As a player, you can’t go skiing for fear of getting injured, but it was wonderful to get the bug, a fabulous cleansing experience. You eat well, sleep well and feel free, relaxed and healthy. I was taught to ski by a great guy called James Dealtry. Again, it was nice not having to feel I had to be the best skier around the place, though I was determined to get off the nursery slopes after a couple of days. This holiday was more about being on the piste than something that sounds similar . . .
With the university terms being short, at 10 weeks each, there was plenty of time for other things in my life, including holidays. In late June/early July, we went to the Amalfi coast for a romantic break, staying on the island of Capri, then up to Portofino near Genoa. There I was, in wonderful hotels with the woman of my dreams, soaking up the sun, eating beautiful Italian food, playing tennis every day. How could life have been better?
It was then that it hit me.
It was around the first anniversary of my father’s death and I was conscious of the date. Suddenly, out of the blue, I felt very alone. On top of losing my mum, this was the double whammy. I had no parents to turn to any more. The twin links to my past, the two pillars of it, were gone and it had well and truly dawned on me. A year earlier, I had been bound up in my own stuff – my retirement and my new relationship – but now the realisation of that moved from my head to penetrating my heart, and my veneer of having it all together just crumbled. The tears came flooding out of me. It was uncontrollable for three or four days. I just cried and cried.
Poppy couldn’t work it out. I hadn’t cried at my dad’s funeral and she wondered why I couldn’t be like everyone else – grieve at the time rather than a year later. I do tend to hold things in for some time before they hit home and I then release them. Again, I had no booze to suppress things any more. I just had to let the process take its course.
In fact, Poppy did get angry with me one day on Capri when we ran into a group of people she knew, a whole host of around 25 very lively people from the Sanchez Junco family who own the Spanish magazine ¡Hola! She wanted us to go out for an evening with them but I just couldn’t face it. To her annoyance, I took myself off to bed.
The memories of my dad came flooding back, of how he used to get me out of trouble. I recalled a time when I was about 15 and Dad was refereeing a game at Hainault and I got roped in to run the line. There was this mouthy central defender, a real bully, and he kept shouting at me to put my flag up – as I would come to do in my career with linesmen, at least in the George Graham days. Perhaps that was where it came from, long before George instilled it in us. The defender was calling me every name under the sun. He was killing me. At one point, I have to admit, I did put my flag up when I knew the opposition forward wasn’t offside.
Enough was enough and, after one particularly bad volley of abuse, I just put the flag down on the ground and ran away. I turned back to see Dad walking over to the bloke and giving him a shove. I immediately felt guilty that my father was fighting my battles for me, but I was also grateful to him for sticking up for me.
I guess I would want to do the same for my own children, but I know these days how important it is to let kids make their own decisions. What I really wanted to do in that episode was turn round and tell the bloke to fuck off rather than have my dad sort it out for me. At that time, in that moment, and in the world we moved in then, my dad was doing the best he knew for his son, as he and Mum did when they chose my first house for me rather than let me do it myself. God bless him. Bless them.
I had become a man when I got sober and grown enormously. Now I had to become a man who stood on his own two feet. It needed three or four days of having an emotional breakdown for me to get back in touch with the reality of my life and where I went from there.
Eventually, I left the hotel room and I did what the treatment at Sporting Chance suggested to people like me, addicts who were sportspeople too. I worked my programme, praying to my Higher Power, and I got active as well. At Sporting Chance, we keep players occupied and fit through physi
cal activities. I played tennis with Poppy and hit my way out of my trough.
The realisation also hit me on that holiday that Brunel was fascinating me but it was not fulfilling me. The feeling was confirmed when a new term and year started and I began to contemplate working on my master’s degree – ‘The Development and Production of Top International Footballers’. I had become friendly with Robin van Persie at Arsenal and he was to become one of my case studies, looking at his characteristics and the environment in which he grew up and was hothoused at Feyenoord of Rotterdam.
Having completed my UEFA B Licence, my master’s was to run alongside my A Licence. The issue with that was I needed a group of players to coach on a regular basis – and it is naturally so much easier to have access to them if you are part of a football club. My old team-mate Martin Keown was coaching the Oxford University side in order to gain access to do his.
I was also getting twitchy about not being involved in football. Now, pre-season is an ordeal for most players, particularly the first week when you return. I had not missed the first year of preseason at all. But something about the familiarity of its rhythms and routines gets under your skin. The second summer without pre-season provoked a strange, masochistic nostalgia in me.
Late October arrived and a job in football that interested me came up. The club was also showing interest in me. I went to Gary Armstrong and told him I was thinking of getting back into the game. He told me to keep writing, get to 30,000 words if I could, and they would look at giving me a master’s. Get it up to 100,000 and I might get a PhD. It was definitely something I could come back to, we both agreed, and indeed in the coming years I would go on to collect more research and data for it.