No Nonsense Page 14
Apparently an arresting sight in a thong, and basted in suntan lotion, Sam was buried up to his neck in the sand as a forfeit while his team-mates played punk rock, which he hated, on the team’s oversized ghetto blaster. He became so hungry he ate 11 fried eggs in a single sitting when he was released.
Meanwhile, back in what passes as the real world, Willie McKay, who was acting as Newcastle’s agent, was conducting a surreal, day-long negotiating session. He was keen to get my agreement on a double-my-money £60,000-a-week deal, sweetened further by such bizarre add-ons as a £50,000-a-year offer to a mate of my choice, who would act as my driver. Unfortunately, I had given my word to another agent, Mel Stein, that I would talk to West Ham and their manager, Alan Curbishley. To say they were keen was an understatement.
Think of me as the owner of a house, where two potential buyers are in a race to exchange contracts. Each is happy to repeatedly gazump the other, and so the price relentlessly inflates. It is a strange, ludicrously privileged, position to be in. The figures quickly lose their relevance, because they are so contradictory to everyday experience.
Put yourself in my position. This is a chance to establish a lifetime’s financial security. It gives me what Mickey Duff, the late and legendary British boxing promoter, used to refer to as ‘fuck-you money’. You might prefer to couch that concept in rather more polite terms, but you can’t avoid its compelling logic.
The deal eventually hinged on a £350,000 loyalty payment, owed to me by City. Don’t worry, by the way. I can hear your muttering from here: loyalty? For doing a job, fulfilling a contract? At a time when you have been agitating for a new job? How can the bastardisation of such an admirable principle be justified?
City and Newcastle argued over it for several weeks, once I had come to the conclusion that Sam was in the process of building a top-four team and the Northeast was my preferred destination. I was on a stopover in Dubai, en route to a holiday in Mauritius with Georgia, when I got word from West Ham that Curbishley and Eggert Magnusson, the Icelandic biscuit baron who was to prove a calamitous owner, intended to fly out with a contract.
That was the tipping point for Newcastle. Like a good poker player, they knew when to hold, and when to fold. They agreed to pay me the £350,000, and pay City the £5.5m up front. I was in City’s debt because they had given me the chance to play professional football, but I hadn’t been a bad investment for them, since I cost nothing as an academy graduate. I could at last refocus my energies on football.
Or so I thought.
I was flying in pre-season training, and Sam sounded me out about becoming captain. He had partially funded the rebuild by selling Scott Parker and Kieron Dyer to West Ham for £13m. Mark Viduka arrived on a free, Alan Smith and Geremi offered new options in midfield and attack, and the defence was augmented by Jose Enrique, Habib Beye and Abdoulaye Faye.
I led the team in our second friendly, a 1-1 draw at Carlisle, until the 69th minute. Then, for no apparent reason, as I made a straightforward turn, it felt as if my right foot exploded. I’ve got a high pain threshold, and can usually run off a knock, but this was agony. A scan revealed I had partially fractured the fifth metatarsal, and that was me done for three months. Since the injury was sustained in relative isolation, I blamed everyone and everything.
It was only when I thought rationally that I identified the orthotic insert in my boot as the probable source of the problem. It was the result of a visit to a specialist in Stoke on the insistence of Mark Taylor, a long-term associate of Sam Allardyce. He is now Performance Director at Sunderland but was then operating as Newcastle’s Head of Sports Medicine and Science.
I was put through a series of tests on the treadmill when it was discovered that my left leg was slightly longer than my right. The aim was to make me more efficient, but I felt uncomfortable running with the insert in the boot, almost as if I was wearing high heels. I accepted advice to stick with it, but quickly resented the consequences of a decision taken by others.
Discomfort is more manageable than impotence. I could deal with the solitary grind of rehabilitation, and became as obsessive as any gym rat, but my sudden marginalisation stirred deep and dark emotions. I challenged the manager, and angrily asked whether I had effectively been a guinea pig for his belief in sports science.
The episode had a fundamental impact on me, since it confirmed my determination to challenge authority and exacerbated the frustration which eventually led to prison. I was so desperate to restate my relevance as a footballer I falsely claimed I was ahead of schedule, and returned way too early. Even without the insert, I could barely run when I made my full Newcastle debut in a 3-1 home win over Tottenham.
I felt sluggish, unbalanced. The team stuttered, declined. I picked up an ankle injury and pointedly played it down. I branded Newcastle fans as ‘vicious’ for giving manager and players fearsome stick during a 3-0 home defeat by Liverpool. My diet consisted of regret and anti-inflammatory pills. I could no longer sustain the deception that I had dealt with my alcohol problem. I would go out with the express intention of getting drunk, and talk to myself in the mirror when I got home. I deluded myself that I had weaned myself off Peter Kay’s wisdom.
He saw it coming. He used a wonderful analogy with me, of the brain as a muscle, which needed to be worked on like any other. If you go to the gym, and do biceps curls or chest presses for months, your muscles will be strong. You will be lithe and lean. You’ll look and feel good. Stop going to the gym and you will gradually regress. You will slip back into old ways, and look shabby. You’ll turn in on yourself.
Basically, I had stopped going to the mind gym. My thoughts were cloudy, my actions undisciplined. All it needed was a trigger point, which happened to be Newcastle’s 1-0 defeat at Wigan on Boxing Day. I was left out after my substitution in the previous game, a 2-2 draw against Derby, was cheered. Michael Owen had been out of the team for six weeks. We worked up a persecution complex sitting in the stands, and I confronted Allardyce afterwards.
I told Owen I was going home to Liverpool to get slaughtered. I had lost self-esteem. I was trying to make sense of a world I felt was imploding. My body was starting to betray me. My mind was muddled. I had shut down to everyone but Pete, though I made it hard even for him to find the keys to my behaviour. I was slipping towards the edge of the abyss. I should have picked up the phone to him, but I was too proud to reach out for help.
The next thing I knew I was in the police cells, being shown CCTV footage of a thug throwing himself at someone with such vehemence and violence he could have killed him. It was me, captured at 5am in Liverpool city centre on 27 December. The court heard I had drunk 10 pints of lager, and another five bottles of beer, but that was an ill-educated guess. I really didn’t have a clue.
The Golden Arches beckoned, once the nightclub closed. I was with my brother Andrew, Nadine, my cousin, and a few of their friends. It was nearly five in the morning. Everyone was pissed and peckish. The McDonald’s queue was long and the behaviour was predictable. I was given immediate grief by a bunch of lads who decided, suddenly, that I should be playing for Everton.
I ignored them, endured the usual bollocks about being too big-time to respond. When Nadine told them to shut it, they flipped. She was called a footballer’s slag, an easy shag. Unforgiveable, unacceptable. When I told them never to speak to a woman in those terms in my presence, they bristled.
‘What the fuck are you going to do?’
Pete’s quiet voice in my head, desperately diluting the alcohol, told me to walk away, along Church Street, one of the main thoroughfares. Regrettably, the fuckwits decided to follow us, out of the restaurant. I tried to reconnect with reality by phoning Georgia, who was sensibly asleep and didn’t answer, but the mouthiest twat in the group decided he was a hero, and kicked Nadine. The die was cast.
Nadine’s attacker wasn’t particularly bright. A mate from the estate, who employed him on a local building site, told me later that he quickly realised h
e had made a big mistake. As he turned to face me, I hit him. I was off the scale. I threw a flurry of punches, connected with several, and was a YouTube favourite before the case reached court. How does that work, by the way?
Normal rules did not apply. His mates announced their intention to stab me. A bunch of schoolboy scallies, alerted by the commotion, recognised me and decided they were hard enough to intervene. Andrew tried to hold me back, but had no chance. I went for the gobbiest kid, punched him once and dropped him, chipping his tooth.
I didn’t realise at the time that he was only 15. I was more concerned with my brother, who threw himself at another lairy bystander. I’m sorry, but if you are off your head at that time of morning, challenging allcomers, you deserve everything that’s coming to you, even if you are not old enough to have taken your GCSEs. Abuse people and shit happens.
Obviously, I’ve replayed the incident continually, in my mind. Could I have avoided it? Would I do the same, if it was repeated tomorrow? If I’d been sober, would I have been able to de-escalate the situation? The reality is, it doesn’t really matter. I’m pissed out of my head in the city centre at 5am. I’ve let my family down. I’ve let my manager down. I’ve let myself down.
The police had a real-time view, on CCTV, and arrested me within minutes. I awoke in a holding cell, on a bench with a thin plastic mattress. I was covered by a grey horsehair blanket, and wanted to throw up when they served me tea, a sandwich and a packet of crisps. I was isolated, instantly sober. I stared at the walls and wondered, ‘What the fuck have I done?’
Absurdly, I was initially preoccupied with letting Michael Owen down. Equally absurdly, we had agreed to share a helicopter into training that day. I knew I had been involved in a fight, because my hands were scuffed and sore. The bizzies told me I was in for the duration, because the court wouldn’t sit on 27 December, or the 28th. I contacted Sam Allardyce, who promised help, but I knew I was going to jail, because I had already been bailed in the Dabo case.
The consequences began to overwhelm me. I could forget about a six-month loan move to Juventus in January, which had been mooted by Claudio Ranieri, who wanted me to add dynamism to the team he was re-establishing in Serie A and the Champions League.
I was asked to give a witness statement. I refused to comment, but the CCTV footage I was shown shook me to the core. Was that really me? How had it come to this? When the courts opened for business, in the brief festive break, I was consumed by a dismal sense of dread. Forget my football profile. I was just another St John’s failure to be processed and punished.
Newcastle had wooed me with the promise of a driver, and a suitably flash car. I ended up sharing a meat wagon, with men dismissed as the dregs of society. I was no longer a name, but a number. My designer gear, which mocked my pretensions, was replaced by harsh prison-issue clothing, boil-washed to within an inch of its working life.
Voices, from blank faces I did not want to recognise, spoke of due process and deliberation. I was led along a landing at Walton jail, which would later be condemned in an inspectors’ report as ‘dirty, overcrowded, chaotic and unsafe’. A grey cell door slammed. I was scared, lonely, but not alone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
INSIDE OUT
Des O’Connor and Carol Vorderman inadvertently helped me through the inevitable existential crisis. I was watching them co-host Countdown, the TV game show, after a fitful first night and an endless first morning in Walton jail, when my cellmate returned from his duties and switched channels without a word.
The challenge was primal, as far from mental gymnastics with numbers, vowels and consonants as it gets. In such a harsh, enclosed environment you are quickly categorised as victim, survivor or enforcer. Aware I could not be seen to be intimidated, I got up from my bed and, equally silently, switched it back. I felt my fist tense, imperceptibly, and turned to face my foe.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ he said.
His eyes locked on to mine, as he mentally examined his options. It was like watching a cat calculate the odds on winning a fight for territory. Eventually, after several seconds that passed as slowly as centuries, he dropped his gaze, shrugged, and mumbled a frustrated obscenity. He was gone the next day, and replaced by a terrified kid on a drink-driving charge.
New Year’s Eve, listening to the dull thud of distant fireworks and the din of inmates who had obviously succeeded in distilling illicit hooch from fruit and potato peel, was bizarre. People are still plugged into the outside world, and actions inside can have external consequences, so I remained wary and introspective. My powerlessness put the fear of God into me.
I was released on bail after six days because Peter Kay convinced the judge I needed intensive counselling. The conditions were onerous, a benign form of house arrest. I had to agree to live with Pete and his wife, which he admitted put a strain on their relationship. He was assigned as my perpetual chaperone, and I was allowed out only between the hours of 7am and 7pm. I was banned from drinking alcohol, and from entering licensed premises.
Just in case I was under the illusion there was widespread faith in my ability to stay on the straight and narrow, we had to fight through a scrum of photographers at the prison gates. Since we had been ordered to be at Pete’s place in Southampton within six hours, I had time only for a five-minute reunion with Dad, and a sweep through my bedroom for kit and clothing.
The car journey south was solemn. It offered time and space for honesty, humility, long-overdue gratitude. I apologised for my degeneration, and told Pete, without shame or exaggeration, that I owed him my life. That set the tone of our conversations for the following five months, which were profound and punctuated by gradual legal concessions on how I could live that life.
Georgia would have been within her rights never to have spoken to me again, yet she visited me in Southampton. Our relationship deepened, when it could so easily have been destroyed. Her understanding was another source of salvation, a contrast to the enduring suspicion of the police, who would turn up, unannounced, at the Sporting Chance clinic to check my progress.
It took another fortnight for the judge to be convinced that I needed the physical and psychological release of returning to football. Newcastle owner Mike Ashley offered me his helicopter, since my curfew ensured Pete and I needed to fly to and from training. It seemed a generous gesture until I received an eye-boggling invoice which confirmed it was business as usual.
Ashley had overseen the sacking of Sam Allardyce soon after my release on bail. His choice of successor, Kevin Keegan, was ominous, given the complexity of our relationship at Manchester City. He was the Messiah. I was a very naughty boy. He quickly pulled me to one side and promised a clean slate, provided I had given up drinking.
I was determined to be clean, one day at a time.
The next allowance permitted me to stay in Newcastle. Pete’s responsibility eased, to one day with me each week, provided I remained in the company of a club-appointed security guard. I nicknamed Big Dave, my new companion, Baloo after the bear in The Jungle Book. He had a quick wit, and stood for no nonsense, but I still couldn’t visit football grounds because of the ban on licensed properties.
Freedom in the form I most cherished, being able to play, followed soon after. Keegan was as good as his word, and he put me on the bench for a visit to Arsenal on a Tuesday night, 29 January. I had to sit on the coach while the team meeting took place in the hotel, which was off limits because it had a bar. I was only allowed to go in the dressing room, or on the pitch.
We were well beaten, 3-0, but Keegan lanced the boil by putting me on for David Rozehnal in the 57th minute. I got what I expected, and probably deserved – a thunderclap of booing and abuse. Anyone who expected me to walk on eggshells didn’t know me that well; a trademark tackle prompted Samir Nasri’s off-the-ball retaliation, which merited a red card according to Kevin’s combative post-match interview.
Even my harshest critic had to concede my mental strength. I pl
ayed well in the remaining 12 games after that, despite being in limbo, awaiting trial. The boys were planning holidays in Cancun and California, the Maldives and Marbella. My tour operator would be Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons. My next match would be playing for the drugs-free wing, on the artificial pitch at Walton prison.
Since my solicitor warned me to prepare for a 12-month stretch, I was relieved when sentenced to six months, after accepting the charge of affray and assault. The judge, Henry Globe QC, condemned a ‘violent and cowardly act’ but took into account two character references. Peter Kay stressed my acceptance of the need for ‘total abstinence’ and Kevin Keegan assured the court he had seen a ‘massive change’ in me.
I would be out in three months with good behaviour, but the sense of permanence was striking once I returned to Walton. The four-hour processing procedure was infinitely more rigorous. I was given a small plastic bag of toiletries and dressed in convict chic – shapeless grey trousers, a thin blue tee-shirt and a dark sweater.
I was hyper-alert once again, sniffing the air like a rabbit deciding whether to make a run to the safety of the burrow. A prison officer, acting on behalf of the governor, offered me the chance of a place on a secure wing. He admitted they had a vested interest in minimising the possibility of unfavourable publicity, in the event of me being attacked, seriously hurt, or worse.
The governor shuddered at the thought of a potential compensation case involving the football club, but I resisted his initial solution, calculating that association with paedophiles and perverts, clustered for their own protection, was potentially calamitous. I accepted the alternative of a place on the drugs-free wing, because it offered better access to the gym in return for submission to regular drug testing.