Do You Know What?
Page 1
LIFE ACCORDING TO
FREDDIE FLINTOFF
LIFE ACCORDING TO
FREDDIE FLINTOFF
DO YOU KNOW WHAT?
Published by Blink Publishing
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Chelsea Harbour,
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Hardback – 978-1-788-700-46-7
Ebook – 978-1-788-700-45-0
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by seagulls.net
Copyright © Andrew Flintoff, 2018
Andrew Flintoff has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
Blink Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
CONTENTS
Prologue
1:In (Almost) Too Deep – Life beyond the comfort zone
2:At Least I’ve Got a Funny Story – A brief history of boxing
3:What’s the Worst That Can Happen? – Having a go
4:My Own Worst Critic – Not giving a shit
5:Floundering with Harrison Ford – The advantages of interloping
6:A Bit of Bumble – Notes on David Lloyd
7:Enjoying Getting Punched – Dealing with depression
8:Why Am I Here? – The mysteries of life
9:Not Curing Cancer – Just doing a job
10:Hard, Fast and Short of a Length – A fine romance
11:Number Two in a Bag – The daft things I’ve done
12:Haribo and Tantrums – Celebrity
13:Chips, Beans and Lamborghinis – The simple things
14:A Bee in Me Bonnet – Things that get my goat
15:What Have You Ever Done For Me? – Being let down
16:Bellends on Bikes – Health and fitness
17:The Game’s Gone – The way things used to be
18:Waterstones, Not Wetherspoons – Battling the booze
19:Goat Killer – The call of the wild
20:Striking a Balance – Family comes first
21:Parents – Doing things my way
22:Fun While It Lasted – Dealing with brickbats
23:Not by a Long Chalk – What happens next?
24:Who Decides What Matters? – Going back to basics
PROLOGUE
Earlier this year, I found myself treading the boards in musical theatre. Not for the first time in my life, I thought to myself, ‘How did I get here?’ But it was definitely me, singing on a stage. Not particularly well, but doing it anyway.
This is a book about the unpredictability of life, with all its glory and disappointments. It is a book about having a go, even when the odds are stacked against you. It is a book about not giving a shit what anybody else thinks. There are incredible things to experience beyond your comfort zone.
There is a bit of cricket, because it’s the game that made me and the game I still love. There are my thoughts on celebrity and what it means to be a working-class bloke from Preston with a stylist, a make-up man and a Lamborghini that never gets driven. There is romance and there are pranks and the mistakes of youth. There are things that get my goat and the strange things that amaze me. There is even a little bit of politics.
There are also some things that are particularly close to my heart, because life hasn’t always been easy. I drank too much and have struggled with eating disorders and mental illness. I hope that by sharing my experiences, I might be able to help people. And there is, of course, my wonderful family.
I would hesitate to call this a book of lessons, because I’m not the sort of bloke who shouts the odds through a megaphone. I’m not entirely sure men have been to the moon or whether the Earth is flat, and I sometimes wonder what does and doesn’t matter in life and whether any of this actually exists. But I hope we have a rapport, and that you see where I’m coming from. It’s not easy sometimes, because I struggle to make sense of where I’ve been, but I hope you enjoy the ride as much as me.
CHAPTER 1
IN (ALMOST) TOO DEEP
Life beyond the comfort zone
I’m standing in a wrestling ring in a warehouse in Florida, surrounded by dozens of cameras, filming me from every conceivable angle. What looks like the entire cast of Game of Thrones are ringside, all wearing fluorescent Lycra. And all I can think is: ‘I just want to get out of here.’
Before I know it, someone has shoved a microphone in my hand and shouted in my ear, ‘Right, now your turn.’ No going back now. Two minutes doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re so far out of your comfort zone you need satnav to find your way back, it feels like an eternity.
I launch into my routine, which I thought up during the walk to the ring: ‘I’m from Preston, England, and I’m gonna hammer all of you and shake things up!’
It still makes me cringe just thinking about it. But as I’m climbing out of the ring, I think to myself, ‘That was rubbish. I want another crack at it.’
I snatch the microphone back, climb back in and take in my surroundings for a few seconds. Everywhere I look there are weird and wonderful people, and I pick out a few obvious targets – a fella with a massive head, a fella with a big nose, a fella with a particularly bad haircut, a fella with a stupid voice – and let rip. The fella with a head like a melon gets it good and proper, big nose doesn’t know what’s hit him, the bloke with the man-bun looks like he might start crying. Two minutes go by and I can see the director trying to wind me up out of the corner of my eye, but I start shouting at him like a maniac, ‘Oh no, I have not finished yet, just you try and stop me…’ I’m like a man possessed. At this rate, wind-up man is going to have to wrench the microphone from my cold, dead hands.
My routine lasts ten minutes, and as I’m climbing out of the ring for the second time, all I can hear is absolute silence. Everyone else got a clap. I sit back down, feeling a bit self-conscious, and watch the room empty.
The acting coach comes over and says, ‘That was good, well done.’
‘Thanks, mate, but I don’t think the others liked it much.’
‘Don’t worry about them. You can teach anyone to wrestle, but you’ve got to be able to get a reaction from the audience, whether good or bad. Wrestling fans hate vanilla. And one thing you weren’t was vanilla.’
How did I end up in a wrestling ring in Tampa? It’s a fair question – wrestling isn’t a typical career progression for a former England cricketer. The simple answer is, I needed a job. I was living in Dubai at the time, drinking too much, eating anything I wanted, cruising through life. My day consisted of taking the kids to school at 7:30 – I’m not an early riser, so that was a nightmare, especially after a heavy night – before heading to the gym at the Burj Al Arab. The Burj is a six-star hotel, and ridiculous for it, because you don’t have to do anything. You park your car and someone appears out of nowhere to take your keys. Someone carries your bag to the gym. You meet your bag at the gym and as you’re getting undressed, a man is picking your clothes up to wash them. You get in the gym and as you’re trying to put weights on the bar, someone steps in to do it for you. I’m su
rprised they don’t offer to run for you as well.
After the gym, I’d sit on the beach for two or three hours. Every day I’d eat a fruit platter, because it was the cheapest thing on the menu, but it still cost about 30 quid. Then I’d go out and drink aimlessly in the evenings, and if I’d carried on like that I would have been skint. As it was, I was in a restaurant one night and both of my credit cards bounced. I looked around in a panic and saw the football manager Steve Bruce on another table. We had a mutual friend, so I went over and said, ‘All right, Steve, nice to meet you. I’m a big fan, so and so says hello.’ Then, after a while, I said, ‘Look, Steve, bit of a problem, I can’t pay my bill. Can you lend us a few quid?’ That was my life in Dubai, but it wasn’t really living.
In television, everyone is looking for a hook. So you’ve got to put yourself out there and throw ideas at people, and if it all starts sounding like that scene from Alan Partridge, when he’s desperately pitching programme ideas to Tony Hayers, the fictional BBC commissioning editor – ‘Arm-wrestling with Chas and Dave? Inner-city Sumo? Monkey tennis?’ – that’s all right, because someone will bite eventually if they think your idea has legs.
While I was sat on the beach, contemplating the fact that the grape I was eating probably cost £5 on its own, I thought about all the things that interested me, and settled on wrestling. When I was a kid, I’d watch WWE – WrestleMania, Royal Rumble – and even Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks of a Saturday afternoon on ITV. So I thought, ‘Why not have a go?’
My original idea was to get trained up and fight The Undertaker at the Manchester Arena. I pitched my idea to my then management team, they thought it might work, we wrote up a treatment, presented it to Sky, and they loved it. Sky put me in touch with Vince McMahon, the boss of WWE, he gave it the thumbs-up and invited me over to train at the WWE’s performance centre in Tampa, where American wrestling wannabes try out for a place in the big time. All of a sudden it was no longer a daydream: this mad idea I came up with on a beach in Dubai was actually going to happen.
To say I was a bit out of shape is an understatement. If I’m being completely honest, I’d completely let myself go. So I flew a trainer over to Dubai for six weeks (not a sentence I ever thought I’d write when I was a kid growing up on a council estate in Preston), got myself fit and bulked myself up, so that I thought I was massive. But no sooner had me and the missus arrived in Tampa, I thought that maybe this wasn’t the place for us. We were sat there waiting for our bags to come off, next to this big American fella, and he let out this almighty fart. I said to the missus, ‘Did you hear that?’
She replied, ‘Yes, I did.’
He did it again, so I said to him, ‘Mate, are you all right there?’ and he looked at me like I was daft, as if lifting your leg and letting rip in the middle of an airport was the most natural thing in the world. Not for the first time on that trip, I thought to myself, ‘These might not be my kind of people…’
The next morning, a car picks me up to take me to the wrestling school, and the missus decides she wants to come with me. We arrive at this unit, open the car door and this fella walks past who looks like he’s come straight from the cantina in Star Wars. He’s about six foot eight inches and 300 pounds of pure muscle, with a head on him the size of a basketball. This isn’t a case of wondering if he’s my kind of person, this is a case of wondering if he’s a person at all.
My missus says to me, ‘Are you sure you’re all right with this?’
I reply, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’
I’m not fine at all, I am absolutely shitting myself.
I walk in the gym and there are all these gigantic blokes staring at me, at which point I say to the missus, ‘Go back to the hotel, I’ve got this.’ Which is code for, ‘I haven’t got this at all, but you really don’t need to see what’s about to happen.’ So off she goes, leaving me with about 60 of the biggest, frostiest men in the world, all of them thinking, ‘Who does this lad think he is? This is my dream, and this lad thinks he can just pop in and steal it from me…’
We start off with a warm-up, and the only person speaking to me is this massive lad from Wales, who knows me from the cricket, and is probably thinking, ‘Where did it all go wrong?’, but is too polite to say anything. Once we’ve warmed up, everyone stands around the ring to watch people chuck each other about, and after about five minutes they put me in there.
I’m standing there in my shorts in the middle of the ring, this other fella gets in with me, and I have to ‘run the ropes’, which is when you leg it across the ring, bounce off the ropes, barge into your opponent, and he picks you up and throws you on the canvas. After being thrown a few times, I think I’m going to swap with someone else. But it turns out I don’t swap, the person who’s throwing me does. For two hours, I’m bouncing off the ropes and getting thrown on the canvas. I did a bit of gymnastics as a kid, so could do a few flips, but nobody has taught me how to do this, so it’s a case of suck it and see.
After a ten-minute break and a drink of water, I’m back in the ring, only this time I’ve got these monsters running at me, and I’m throwing them on the canvas. But every time I throw one of them, they front up to me, as if they want to do me in, because I’m not supposed to be picking them up and ramming them into the floor, I’m supposed to be lowering them down, almost as if we’re dancing. Nobody has bothered telling me this either, so everybody hates me even more than when I first walked in.
After lunch, people are leapfrogging over me, and I’m leapfrogging over them, and I get so tired that when this one fella jumps over me, I can’t get back up, and I stagger across the ring like I’m pissed and fall straight through the ropes. As I’m falling, I hook my leg on the top rope, face-plant the apron and bust my nose, so there’s blood everywhere. Meanwhile, the missus is sat by the pool drinking her fourth piña colada of the day.
That evening, I get out of the shower and the missus looks at my body in complete shock. I’m bruised all over and can barely put my clothes on. We go and have some dinner and a few drinks to loosen up a bit, and then it all starts again the next morning. By lunchtime, it’s starting to wear a bit thin, and when this fella starts taking the piss out of me, doing these stupid impressions, I’m thinking, ‘I’m gonna have to put a stop to this, otherwise the next two weeks are going to be hell on earth.’
So I jump in the ring and say to him, ‘Mate, I’d stop that right now.’
‘Or what?’
‘You’re going to have to put all those muscles of yours on your chin, because that’s where I’m going to belt you.’
As soon as I say it I think, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? If he goes off, I’ve got nothing. I’ve brought a butter knife to a gun fight…’ Luckily, he backs down, and I get accepted a little bit more by the rest of them.
That afternoon, I start getting a really bad pain in my side, to the point where I can’t go any further. I say, ‘Look, I think I’m having a back spasm’, and the whole room goes up laughing – ‘Hey, look at this goddamn Limey!’ Oh, great. I take myself off to the physio room and as the bloke is manipulating my back, I can feel my ribs separating and I’m in agony.
I say, ‘Mate, I think I’ve broken my ribs.’
‘You’ve not broken your ribs, you’d be in too much pain.’
‘Mate, I want to cry.’
He’s still laughing when he sends me off for an X-ray, telling everyone within earshot, ‘This guy thinks he’s got broken ribs! What an idiot!’
In the specialist’s room, there are pictures everywhere of all the famous wrestlers – The Undertaker, Hulk Hogan, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, even Kendo Nagasaki is probably up on his wall somewhere. There are also capes, masks, Lycra outfits, so that it’s more like a wrestling museum than a surgery. He gets this X-ray out, sticks it on that machine they stick X-rays on, points to these two broken ribs and says, ‘You’ve got two broken ribs.’
I say, ‘I know.’
He asks me what I do and I tell
him I’m a wrestler. He asks me how long I’ve been doing it and I tell him a day and a half. He says, ‘Do you think it’s for you?’
I reply, ‘I don’t think it is, to be honest with you…’
When I return to the gym, I’m waving my X-rays around like Neville Chamberlain just back from his meeting with Hitler – ‘Peace in our time!’ Soon word gets around that I’ve been wrestling with two broken ribs and suddenly people think I’m an all right bloke. The problem being, I’ve still got ten days to go.
Next day, I turn up at the gym knowing I can’t do anything physical, but when I look around the gym, everyone is practising these pieces to camera, literally roaring about an inch away from the lens, covering it in phlegm. About 20 minutes later, I’m up in the ring with a microphone in my hand, shouting at the fella with a head like a melon, big nose and man-bun, telling them I’m going to take them all to the cleaners. Sometimes, when you think you’re in too deep and might be drowning, you’ve just got to shut your eyes and swing. More of that in a bit.
Because I can’t do any of the physical stuff, I say to the missus, ‘We’re here now, why don’t we just go to Miami?’ So the missus finds a place and we head down there.
We walk into this lovely art deco hotel called the Delano and the fella says, ‘This is reception, but in the evening it turns into a nightclub. And I’ve got to warn you, it’s the sort of place where men will try to hit on your woman.’
‘If that happens, that’s not gonna end well.’
‘Well, if your woman doesn’t show any interest, they might try and hit on you.’
I’m standing there thinking, ‘This is gonna end very badly.’
‘Do you want me to show you to your room?’
‘No, I’ve got this, I’ve stayed in hotels before, just show me where the lift is and I’ll find it myself.’
‘Let me show you up anyway, so I can explain the room to you…’