As the story of Paul Gascoigne‘s detainment under the Mental Health Act continues to grow, it got me thinking about the players that pour their hearts and souls into the game and suddenly find out their not good enough anymore, their not needed or injury and health have finally caught up to them.
The first time I’d met Gazza was back in 1997 at Ibrox. Ubusuku Abukusumo and myself were lucky enough to head over to Glasgow Rangers to train for 3 1/2 months as part of the Project 40 program (which sent young players overseas to not only train with big clubs, but to get great life experience) and the Richard Gough/MLS deal. After getting off our flight and checking into The Swallow Hotel down the street, Buka and I made our way over to Ibrox to meet with Archie Knox (2nd in command under Walter Smith) to find out our schedules and meet some of the guys.
We had been told to bring our gear as we’d be training with the Reserves (getting the crap out of our legs after the long flight) and as we were walking to the gear room to grab our issued kit (by the way, they never, ever gave us anything more than a long sleeve t-shirts, shorts and socks… no sweatshirts or gloves or beanies.. and if they caught you with your hands inside your long sleeve shirt, it was 50 press-up.. needless to say Buka and I were pretty yoked after that trip), Gazza yelled out to us in the middle of an interview, “yea dread and Cali, welcome mahn!” Buka and I just looked at eachother in amazement that 1. he acknowledged us at all and 2. that he seemed to know who we were (which we’d later find out was because of Goughy who ALWAYS looked after us including having the cooks prepare a special Thanksgiving meal after training the day of because we were away from home and Scotland doesn’t have a Thanksgiving, which we’d forgotten about).
Getting back into the changing room to strip and get ready for training, we’d already talked about watching eachother’s back obviously because we knew we’d be a target for changing room pranks (some of which I fell for and still use to this day, ask Jamie Watson). I’m about half way changed when I look up and see Barry Ferguson walking in (who was just breaking into the Senior team at the time), stop dead in his tracks and say, “What the f*ck are you doing here?” Buka just looked at me and said, “How does this always happen when I’m with you?”
See, Barry and I go a bit further back. When the United States U-20 team played in a tournament in France called the Toulon Tournament (France won by the way with guys like Thierry Henry and Mikael Silvestre), we played Scotland in the group stage and Barry and I had a run in. He had absolutely crushed one of our players in the midfield (standard tough tackling for him) and got up screaming something none of us could understand because it was Glaswegian. I started laughing at him and needless to say, he didn’t take too kindly to it. The best part was that all four teams in the group stage were staying on this little island that was so isolated that you had to take a boat to and from shore and Barry and I somehow ran into each other everyday afterwards. (We did become friends and all three of us hit the town a few nights during our stay which were fan-f-ing-tastic I might add.)
You’ve never experienced soccer/football until you’ve seen home AND away Old Firm matches, had people buy you dinner because you were the “Yanks” training with Rangers, been denied at restaurants because you were the “Yanks” training at Rangers, seen Ian Durrant throw haymakers during a training field bust up, get to train with Rino Gattuso before his AC Milan transfer, watch Ally McCoist karaoke with Gazza singing “Ebony and Ivory” or watch Gazza piss on a teammates hand while the guys doing a calf stretch and the whole squad fall over laughing in fits a day after he’d been detained the night before for spousal abuse.
The biggest obstacle professional players face is not the physical demands that the coaches, teammates or the game asks of you each and everyday, it’s what happens when Father Time’s run out and your career has ended.
It’s hard for people to understand from the outside because when looking at it from a fans perspective, the player/person is expected to ride of into the sunset with the boatloads of cash and fame that he’s acquired. BUT what people fail to acknowledge most of the time is that for much of the players entire life, all he’s done is kill himself daily to become that one thing, a Professional (think Doctor or Lawyer, but for a very short time span). When that’s taken away, it leaves a giant hole (no more trainings, lockerooms, games, travel, etc) in the players life and very, very rarely does it end on their terms (I can attest to this first hand).
Throughout my own experiences from 1997-2006, I saw players come and go without too many feelings because as a player, you can’t really allow yourself to get attached. Yeah, you want to be friends with your teammates and their families, but the first time you see a guy let go through no fault of his own and just on circumstance alone (trades, team salary cap, horrible coaching decisions), you have to separate feelings because you never want to imagine it could happen to you. But eventually it does and there’s not a day in any ex-players life where, just for a split second that you had the ability to go back and experience it all over and you’d give anything for it.
One of the great things about the Professional Footballers Association is the pension. When guys like Gazza were in their career, they were giving a portion of their salaries to the PFA and once they retired, they are given monthly checks to ease their way off into the sunset. But what about guys like Gazza who were crazy even at the height of their careers and now don’t have that same celebrity/lifestyle they once had which afforded them more protection from getting in trouble (you know in his playing days when he hit a fire alarm or grabbed a bellboy by his throat like he did two days ago, it would have just been attributed to the “Gazza”, not Paul Gascoigne). Is there something more the PFA can do like Ex-Manchester United midfielder and Sunderland Manager Roy Keane is suggesting?
Will anything ever fill the void of laying it on the line every weekend for your club and fans? Or is it up to the strength of the individual to find what their next path in life leads to?
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