Czytaj książkę: «Stan: Tackling My Demons»

Dedication

To Mum, quite simply the best,and to my babies Tom and Mia.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

ONE: In the Beginning: An Unwanted Legacy

TWO: Walsall: A Mixed Bag

THREE: Crystal Palace: The Issue of Race

FOUR: Southend and Forest: Opportunity Knocks

FIVE: Liverpool: Living the Dream

SIX: Villa: Going Nowhere

SEVEN: Paris 1998: The Ulrika Affair

EIGHT: Summer 1998: The Aftermath

NINE: Leicester: Second Chances

TEN: Real Oviedo: So This is the End

ELEVEN: 2004: Doggin’

TWELVE: Life Beyond Football

THIRTEEN: From Farmhands to Scumbags

Career Record

Index

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE
IN THE BEGINNING: AN UNWANTED LEGACY

I wish that my first memory was kicking my football for hours against the perfect wall of the swimming baths in Cannock, where my mum, Doreen, worked as a receptionist. I wish it was playing endless games of football on the patch of consecrated ground round the corner from our two-up, two-down. The cemetery’s claimed that grass now. There are gravestones where we used to play.

I wish it was going for a drive with my mum in her light blue Beetle, the car I made her keep for years and years, right up until I was playing for Liverpool, long after it ceased to be roadworthy. I made sure it was left parked on the drive of the house on the upmarket suburban estate where I lived when I hit the big time with Nottingham Forest and Liverpool. I used to entertain a steady stream of girls at that house when I was at the height of my philandering, four or five a day, every day, every week. The front room of that house saw some action. One girl would leave and a few minutes later another one would arrive. I operated them on a rota system. One time, I came home and the Beetle was gone. My mum had given it away.

You know what, I even wish my first memory was being made to ride my bike naked around the green off to the side of our little house by one of the local lads. I’d be five or six, I suppose. His dad was a miner at one of the local pits. They had come down from the northeast. I was the only black kid in Cannock and I used to get picked on. This boy liked to lock me in the coal-bunker at his house, too. He’d leave me there for hours while I shouted and begged and screamed.

Later, during the miners’ strike in the mid-1980s, he kept working. He was a scab. When all the pits in the South Staffordshire Coalfield closed and 30,000 jobs disappeared into the ground with them, most people in Cannock started up mini-cab companies. There were hundreds of taxis everywhere and no one to ride in them. The shops were all boarded up. The place was a ghost-town. He became a window-cleaner then. Once, he asked me to help him on his rounds. I did it for a few weeks.

But my first memory is of crying and pleading in our small red-brick house. It is of looking up and seeing my dad standing over my mum, gripping some sort of heavy brush in his hand and beating her with it. I remember trying to intervene, trying to stop him, and I remember being pushed away. I remember looking at her face and seeing blood and tears and I remember being very scared.

That was standard behaviour for my dad. He used to beat my mum up regularly. He would drag her up the stairs by her hair, into their bedroom, and subject her to prolonged attacks. Hours on end, sometimes. And my mum put up with it. She didn’t think she had any choice because she had left her first husband for him. She had made her bed, she said, and now she had to lie in it. But her life with him was one long torment.

Even though Cannock is close in geographical terms to multicultural areas like Wolverhampton and Birmingham, it was, and still is, very ethnically pure. Maybe because it was a mining town, I don’t know. Normally, the only black faces were the ones that were covered in coal dust. Ones like mine, mixed-race faces, weren’t tolerated very well. A neighbour of ours used to hang out of his upstairs window yelling ‘you little black bastard’ at me every time I went out. Back in the late Sixties, a white woman leaving her white husband and white kids for a younger black man was about as shocking as anything could possibly be in a conservative working class community. We used to get all sorts of racist abuse from the neighbours. They put signs in our garden, saying ‘Blackie Go Home’. My mum’s own brother refused to speak to her for 25 years after she hooked up with my dad. Uncle Don got in touch when I became a famous footballer. Funnily enough, he wanted to manage my financial affairs. I gave that the swerve. The separation between him and my mum was never mended. He died a few years ago. She didn’t go the funeral.

I think I blotted a lot of that out until recently, until I actually sat down with my mum and talked with her about it. She cried, and it made me feel angry all over again about the legacy of fears and insecurities my dad bequeathed me: the way I daren’t be alone; the way I have an almost psychopathic desire to be loved; the way I need constant reassurance from a string of women; the way I can’t make any relationship stick.

My dad was an incorrigible womaniser, just as I have been. When my mum went into labour with me on 22 January 1971, he was on the phone in a call box down the road, chatting up a girlfriend. Mum went up to Stone hospital by herself, and when he eventually showed up he was so abusive to the staff that they threw him out. He went off and registered my name anyway, without consulting my mum. He named me after him: Stanley Victor Collymore.

He was from Barbados originally, somewhere near St Andrews and Bathsheba, on the Atlantic side, an educated man who at one time had hoped to become the first black announcer on the island’s national radio station. He was in the RAF when he met my mum at a dance and charmed her off her feet. She left her first husband and three daughters and they flew to Barbados, but she missed the girls too much so they returned and made their lives in Cannock.

They were married in a church in Chadsmoor, on the outskirts of Cannock. Five people there, that’s all, on Christmas Eve 1969. No fuss. Just a short ceremony. Somewhere close by, there was a Methodist college where Arthur Wharton, the first black footballer to play professional football in England, studied when he first arrived from Ghana. I’ve tried to pin down where that Methodist college was several times, all without success.

I don’t remember much about my dad. We finally freed ourselves of him when I was four. I went for a few visits up to his house in Rugeley after that. His idea of light entertainment was playing me educational tapes about sugar cane cultivation in Barbados. We would lie on the carpet in the front room of his house, just listening to someone’s dull voice and watching the tape whirl round on its spool.

Sometimes, when I was playing at my mum’s home – my home – in the side alley, I’d suddenly be aware of a presence and I’d look up and he’d be there, staring at me. He always seemed very sinister and cold to me on the rare occasions he took me back to his house for a visit. He scared me rigid, and with good reason. I don’t recall him laying a finger on me but my mum said he smacked me so hard when I was a six-week-old baby that she thought he had broken my hand. Mostly, though, all I remember is a cold, immaculately dressed man who brought terror into my life. It’s achingly predictable, but a few years ago he started writing letters to my mum, asking her whether I could give him £25,000 for a deposit on a new house. No answer required.

So much of my life since then has been affected by what he did to us and by the fact that there was just my mum to bring me up. It is much, much more than the mere fact of not having had a male influence to guide me. It is the deep, deep fear I have always had of being left alone; the compulsion I have to make sure there is no dead time in my life, that every minute is filled, with either women or with football.

I often think of myself sitting alone in that red-brick house at night, perched on a chair by the front window and staring out towards the main road. My mum worked all the hours God sent at the swimming baths to try to make ends meet. Most nights, after the short walk back home up the hill, she would get back about 10 p.m. If she was just a few minutes late I would start to panic, really lose it. I was petrified that one day she wouldn’t come back and I would have nobody.

My mum seemed old to me. She was 40 when she married my dad. He was 27. I thought she was so old she might pop her clogs any day. When we were going off to football matches, all the other kids had a father and a mother and they all seemed youthful compared to my single parent. However, she did more than her fair share of driving me about to places when I was a kid playing football in the local leagues, and she bought me everything I ever needed. She scrimped and saved and made sure I had the latest football boots and plenty of food on the table. My half-sisters said she spoiled me rotten. But sometimes, I would do something and she would say ‘you’re just like your dad’. It would send a chill through me, even though I knew that she often didn’t even mean it as a criticism, just a nod to genetics.

When I hit my girlfriend Ulrika Jonsson that night in the Auld Alliance pub in Paris during the 1998 World Cup, those words seared through my brain again. Just like your dad. Just like your dad. I knew my mum would be devastated. I knew I had let her down in the worst possible way. The thought of hurting her, as well as the guilt of what I had done in six seconds of madness to somebody I had fallen deeply in love with, was almost too much to bear.

That night in Paris was the start of the death of my football career. It destroyed me. After that night, everybody had an excuse to get rid of me when things got tough, and pretty much everybody did. Except Martin O’Neill. After that night, I knew for certain the pipe dream I’d harboured of being an upstanding, halo-ringed Alan Shearer or Michael Owen figure and to make my mum proud, would never be realised. I knew that the third England cap I had won in the 4–0 win against Moldova in September 1997 would be my last. Even that was only eight minutes at the end of the game as a substitute for Les Ferdinand. I had played two other games for my country, both friendlies against Brazil and Japan, but I had missed out on the festival of the 1996 European Championships in England even though I was playing the best football of my career. Terry Venables chose Alan Shearer, Teddy Sheringham, Robbie Fowler and Ferdinand as his four forwards for that tournament.

I missed out on the World Cup in 1998, too. That was why I was free to go on that tortured trip to France with Ulrika in the first place. I had been in Glenn Hoddle’s squad for the qualifying game against Italy the previous October but my form had collapsed by the following summer and I was injured anyway. Apart from that, Hoddle didn’t really fancy me, even though I had agreed to go and see Eileen Drewery, the healer he put so much faith in, with a few of the other lads.

In the autumn of 1997, before the qualifying tie in the Olympic Stadium in Rome, Hoddle had said he felt I would benefit from a trip to see Eileen. I went with Ian Wright and Paul Ince in Les Ferdinand’s Range Rover to her little bungalow somewhere near Reading. I was last in. Eileen laid me down on the bed and put her hands on my stomach and my head. ‘Do you drink a lot?’ she asked. I said I didn’t. ‘Do you smoke a lot?’ she asked. I said I didn’t. ‘Have you slept with a lot of women?’ she asked. I said: ‘Well, yeah, actually, I have.’ She nodded her head in a kind of knowing way. She seemed happy then.

I felt a bit worried about openly admitting such a thing, even though I had managed to keep my trap shut about the times I had sneaked out of the England team hotel at Burnham Beeches to go over to nearby Cookham Dean and shag Ulrika. I mentioned the questions Eileen had asked me to Les in the car on the way back. He just laughed. He said he’d given her the same answers.

Hoddle seemed pleased. In fact, he was more friendly to me than he ever was before or since on the day after I had been to see Eileen. ‘It’s much better having you around now,’ he said. ‘Eileen told me she’d cleansed your chakras. I can sense a more positive aura around you now.’ Bastard still never put me in the team against Italy. Or in any squad after that, for that matter. And I never got close again.

In another era, I would have won more caps. I scored 41 league goals in 65 games for Nottingham Forest and my only reward was a couple of appearances in the Umbro Cup in the summer of 1995. Think of how few goals Wayne Rooney has scored and how many caps he has got. Think about my pal Darius Vassell and his comparatively spartan returns for Villa and how many caps he has got. I’m not knocking Rooney or Darius. It’s just that England caps seem easier to come by these days. If my career had started three or four years ago, I would have had 40 England caps by now.

I had one glimpse of what might have been. In my debut, against Japan at Wembley, Shearer burst through in the first five minutes. There was a defender between him and the goalkeeper but I was free on his left. If he had squared it, I could have passed the ball into an open goal. What a start that would have been. Of course, the greedy bastard went for goal and missed by a mile. On such moments, international careers stand and fall, especially if you are pigeon-holed as a maverick, as I was.

I knew in my heart that my £7 million move to Aston Villa from Liverpool in the summer of 1997 had been a step down for me, and that my career was starting to slide. When I had joined Liverpool from Forest two years earlier, they had paid £8.5 million for me, a British transfer record at a time when the popularity of football was exploding in this country. Shearer usurped that, too, when Newcastle paid £15 million to take him from Blackburn to Newcastle, and in the years after the 1998 World Cup I started to live my life in football’s shadows.

The Ulrika thing. The thing in Paris. I can never quite bear to say ‘the night I hit Ulrika’. I think it’s a device I use to spare myself the full horror of the recollection. Whatever euphemism I use to refer to the moment when I hit her, it can’t disguise the fact that that moment and its repercussions nearly killed me. I know some people will say that’s my fault, that I am just reaping what I sowed, and I will never ever seek to suggest that I did not do a terrible thing that night. But it was six seconds of madness, something I have never done before and something I will never do again. And yet it has stayed with me. It has stuck to me more than anything I ever achieved for Forest or Liverpool or Villa. It has blighted my life from that moment to this.

When I was trying to build a new career in broadcasting, doing some summarising for Five Live and presenting a few shows of my own in the Midlands, it gave me intense satisfaction, a real buzz that was as good as the buzz I got from football. But, even before they dropped me like a hot potato when The Sun revealed I was involved in dogging activities, I still felt obstacles were put in my way because of that terrible night in Paris that had happened six years previously. The truth is, some people still remember it as if it was yesterday.

I’m not complaining about the criticism I got at the time. Even if it was all a bit bewildering, even if it felt as if I was about to be ripped to pieces by a lynch mob, I accept that what I did was an appallingly stupid, misguided and awful thing. I had built myself into a state about various things surrounding our relationship. I was jealous. I was deeply in love with her. But those are not excuses. They are just meant as statements of fact.

I realised how hard the struggle to rebuild my reputation was going to be one Saturday night before the 2002 World Cup when I was doing the 606 phone-in show with the radio commentator Alan Green on Five Live. We had got to the last few minutes of the programme when a punter rang in and said he thought I should be in Sven-Goran Eriksson’s World Cup squad. England were due to face Sweden, Argentina and Nigeria in the group phase but this was obviously a set-up because I had retired by then. Anyway, like an idiot I gave the guy his cue and asked him why he thought that. ‘Because you’re good at beating Swedes,’ he said. I was embarrassed. In fact, I was mortified. Greenie got rid of the guy straight away but it was awkward. Afterwards, the producers said not to worry about it and I did my best to put it out of my mind.

I was due to do a third consecutive 606 the following Saturday, too, but some time in the middle of the week, I got a call from Peter Salmon, the BBC’s Head of Sport. He said there had been a change of plan. They weren’t going to give me the show because there was no time delay and they didn’t want to risk any more dodgy calls.

I was desperately, desperately disappointed. And I was angry. I just felt so insulted. I was doing the job well, but because this thing reared its head they just caved in and took me off the air. I thought that was the end of it. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to broadcast. I thought if people were going to knock me at every opportunity, what was the point. I thought that if I wasn’t even going to be allowed to get past ‘Go’, what was I going to do?

For a while, I had tried to be whiter than white. When I was summarising for the BBC, I made sure I got to the game two hours early. I behaved like Mary Poppins, basically, which didn’t give me too much scope for having a bad day or coming down with the flu or something like that. I was professionalism personified, but even before the dogging scandal I was still blackballed by the BBC governors for a celebrity Come Dancing programme they were putting on. The programme-makers wanted me but the people higher up put a veto on me. They binned me and chose Martin Offiah, the former rugby-league player, in my place.

I know I did wrong that night in Paris, but sometimes the punishments that I am still suffering seem out of all proportion. Look at people like Johnny Vaughan and Leslie Grantham who have been rehabilitated after crimes they committed many, many years ago. My crime was to hit a woman, a woman who happens to be a very popular and attractive television personality. It was wrong and I will regret it bitterly until the day I die. But I didn’t put anyone in hospital. I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t run somebody over when I was drunk behind the wheel. And yet, sometimes it feels that some people treat me as if I had.

The fresh bout of depression the 606 incident plunged me into led me to the brink of suicide. I had lost the joy I used to get from football long before that, and from the time I joined Liverpool right through to when I went into the Priory and beyond, it felt like I was having to endure on a weekly basis the kind of crises most people only have to deal with once or twice in their lives.

Perhaps that sounds self-pitying. Maybe it is. But it felt like I was having to put up with a lot. The media impinging on my private life. All the shit that went with that. And I knew I was barely dealing with it. I knew I was barely keeping a lid on everything. I had to do something about it or I knew I wouldn’t see 40. Ending it all was starting to seem increasingly tempting. But I also thought about all the things that would be a waste if I ended up topping myself.

I thought about my son, Tom, my child from a relationship with a Cannock girl called Michelle Green. Tom was born in 1996 while I was away with England at Burnham Beeches. You want to know how I met Michelle? I saw her washing her car in the driveway of her parents’ home. I was driving past but I stopped my car, wound down the window and asked her out. We only had a brief relationship, but she got pregnant and we had Tom.

The relationship with Michelle hasn’t exactly been plain sailing either. I suppose with my attitude towards fidelity, plain sailing is never really going to be too high on the agenda. I had a blazing row with her about access to Tom just before Christmas in 1997. It ended with me storming out of the house I had bought for her and slamming the door hard on my way out. I drove my car round the corner to talk it all through with my mates Paul and Caroline at their house and parked outside.

Half an hour later, the police arrived and arrested me on suspicion of assault. Michelle had called them and claimed I had knocked her out cold and kicked the door off its hinges to get to her. I was released and then re-arrested on Christmas Eve. The second time, you could have been forgiven for thinking they’d just found Osama Bin Laden. I walked out of the door and there was one black maria parked on the pavement to my right and another to the left. Both full of coppers. The only thing missing was a sniper on the roof and a helicopter circling overhead.

I pleaded not guilty and the case went to Crown Court and a two-day trial. We both gave evidence and the jury found me innocent. There was no evidence against me because I had not done any of the things she said. There was no damage to the door and there was certainly no damage to Michelle. The judge said there was no stain on my character and I could go. However, when Paris happened people remembered the false charges Michelle had made and wondered whether there had been some substance to them after all.

Michelle and I don’t talk about any of that now. We treat it as if it never happened. We have a good relationship. I pay her Child Support and I see Tom, who is eight now, whenever I want. Tom was one of the reasons I decided to quit playing football and move back to Cannock in 2001. I wanted to see more of him. I resent the years I missed when he was growing up. I had him a lot when he was a baby, but then, as what was left of the relationship between Michelle and me degenerated into wrangles about pay-offs and maintenance, I hardly saw him again until he was five.

More than that, I resent the years my mum missed because she was caught up in the bitterness between us. Michelle used to say my mum could see Tom as long as she didn’t take him anywhere near my house. So she used to push him around Cannock in his pram in the pouring rain just to snatch a few precious hours with him.

Tom’s growing up fast now and I love him to bits. He plays for one of the kids teams at Cannock. I think he might have the talent to make it as a professional if things go his way. When I was thinking about suicide, I didn’t want to leave him. I thought about Tom, and about my mum who had suffered so much and sacrificed so much. I thought about my wife, Estelle. For some of the time when I first began what has become a recurring flirtation with suicide, she was pregnant with our daughter, Mia. Estelle had stood by me for so long and weathered so many storms and tolerated so many indiscretions.

From the time I went into the Priory in January 1999 until the beginning of 2003, I was so low generally that thinking about suicide actually gave me a lift. It was a way out that was a clean no-brainer. I think that’s why a lot of people do it. Part of me wanted it because I knew that if I did it I wouldn’t have to think about the things that were torturing me any more.

I was a total mess back then. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t structure my day properly. I’d be sitting in bed in the morning watching Trisha and all these people with their problems. I couldn’t face having a shower or getting dressed. Those all seemed like major events I didn’t want to confront. And, of course, Estelle was growing increasingly exasperated with me because I was sitting around the house like a zombie.

I came close to doing myself in a few times in that period. Estelle found me sitting in my flat in Birmingham with a belt round my neck. I was just sitting there like a fucking dick, my hands tightening this belt, the telly flickering in the corner. On another occasion we had a row about something, she walked out and I slit my wrists. I didn’t do it big. I didn’t want to go the full way. I just wanted to give myself the option to do it. It wasn’t even really a cry for help because I didn’t tell anybody about it, but it bled badly enough for me to have to bandage myself up.

Mostly, I used to think about hanging myself. I thought that would be the best way. In fact, I was reading a lot of stuff about quick ways to die at that time. It was all the stuff about making sure the length of rope was right for your weight.

But when it came to it, I didn’t have the bottle for that either. Not then, anyway. Now it’s not bottle that’s stopping me. I’m not sure what stops me now. Sometimes, especially since the dogging was exposed and I was ridiculed again and my relationship with Estelle finally crumbled, I still think suicide is just around the corner. But back then I used to sit there thinking about what would happen if I was on a fucking tree branch 30 feet up and I’m just stuck there dangling and I can’t breathe but I don’t die. If it had been a case of just doing it so it would all be over and done with, then great. But it never happened because I think more than anything the mere thought of suicide was just this release valve. Rather than staring into space thinking about ways of dragging myself out of this depression, rather than taking tough decisions, I could just go out into the garden or into the woods and it would all be over. How I got through that time, I don’t know. I just kept telling myself to grind on through it. But there were plenty of days when I thought the only way out was to pull the chain on it.

Perhaps I didn’t do it because my mum never pulled the chain on me. Perhaps it was because when I thought about what she had been through, it seemed somewhere in the back of my mind like cowardice to take an easy way out. Perhaps it was because when I asked her about what her life with me and my dad was like, the realisation of how strong she had had to be gave me some strength, too.

It wasn’t easy for her talking about it. When other families go through their photo albums, they see happy, smiling faces staring back out of them. But one of the pictures we remember best is one of my birthday parties. She’s there with a birthday cake, gazing into the camera with a black eye that my dad had given her. She wept when she talked about those days in my early childhood:

I made a dreadful mistake when I left my first husband. He was a really nice fella. He was a director of a small firm in Cannock and he worked hard. When he worked in Wolverhampton, he would cycle all the way there and all the way back. But we married when I was 19. We had three kids. I suppose there wasn’t much glamour in my life.

Stan’s dad was a charmer. He was a good-looking fella, tall and handsome. Everyone liked him. Particularly women. I had a blonde beehive hairdo back then and I caught his eye. When I left my first husband, we went to Barbados for a few weeks and stayed in a kind of shack amid the sugar cane where he had been brought up. I started to realise I’d made a terrible mistake when I saw him smash that shack up in a fit of anger.

I tried to leave Barbados without him but he followed me back to England. By then, my first husband had found somebody else so Stan’s dad and I moved back into the council house I had been living in before. He was 13 years younger than me. He went to work in the tax office in Cannock and pretty soon Stan was born. But everything had already gone terribly wrong by then.

When I was seven months pregnant with Stan, we had an argument about something and he put a telephone cord around my neck and tried to strangle me. I called the police, obviously, but in those days they were far more blasé about domestic violence. They just said, ‘Have a cup of tea and talk it over and everything will be all right after a good night’s sleep.’

When Stan was a few months old, his dad began to teach at a college in Birmingham. I was called in one day to be told that one of his students had had a nervous breakdown because she had got entangled in a love affair with him. She was just the first. Soon after that, I got a phone call from a woman who said she and my husband were getting married and who then asked when I was moving out of the house.

One of his girlfriends was the daughter of the manager of the Co-op in Cannock, and that poor girl even bought a wedding dress. She was so convinced that she was his sweetheart. I don’t know if it was because he was frustrated at not being able to be with these women more, but he began to hit me regularly then and things got worse and worse.

During the four years we were married, I had to go to the hospital several times. He broke my jaw with a punch once. On another occasion he cut me over the eye when he clouted me with a heavy brush. That was the time Stan tried to intervene; that is Stan’s first memory. I went up to the hospital to have it stitched because the cut was bleeding dreadfully and they found the bruises on my arms and stomach. I told them I had fallen off a ladder.

Mostly, he would drag me up to our bedroom by the hair and beat me there. I think his logic was that the bed sagged when he was hitting me so the punches wouldn’t bruise me as badly and it wouldn’t be so obvious what he was doing. The lady that lived next door to us always knew when there was a problem, because when I knew I was going to get a beating I would beg Stan’s dad to let me close all the windows first so the neighbours wouldn’t hear. I’d plead with him not to shout, so the neighbours wouldn’t know I was being beaten up.

He was such a strange mix, Stan’s dad, very formal and always immaculately dressed to the point where he might change his shirt two or three times a day. He would ring me from work and tell me when I could go shopping but that I mustn’t be away more than an hour. And I would have to be back, because if he rang and I wasn’t there he would come and look for me and I would get knocked about again at home.

And then, of course, there was the abuse we used to get as a family, the racial abuse that almost hurt more than my husband’s punches. Jeff’s mum was one of the worst. It was always stuff about how I should move away because I had married a black man. The things she said to me were so dreadful that once, when she had said something particularly cruel to Stan, I went round and asked her to come out into the garden so I could give her what she deserved. I’m ashamed of that now. I wonder if she’s ashamed. She wouldn’t come out into the garden anyway.

Stan won’t talk about it much but they used to do terrible things to him, too. One day, I was walking over to the garages at the other end of our circle of houses and I saw a group of boys coming across the field, making another boy crawl through the grass on his hands and knees. The boy on his hands and knees was Stan and they were weeing on him, actually weeing on him, as he crawled.

Stan used to get it from his dad, too. Not physical abuse, but he would do really strange things. He bought Stan a toy cat once and then one day when he came round he took the cat upstairs with him and disappeared for ages. When he had gone, I went to look for it and he had cut it up into tiny pieces and left it scattered across the bed.

People always wonder why I didn’t leave him earlier but where was I going to go? My mother lived with us and by that time she had Alzheimer’s disease. There was nowhere to go. They didn’t have refuges for battered wives then. And I felt I had made my choice and I had to live with it. I’d lost a lot of my friends, too, because they were too ashamed to come round and see me any more. I found out afterwards he had been visiting a few of them and they … well, they liked him.

Eventually, though, I just couldn’t put up with it any longer. He started hitting one of my daughters, too, so I got a divorce and got him kicked out. Even after that he would prowl around on the land at the back of the house. He rang me and threatened to cut my throat, and I had to make Stan a ward of court to keep him away. Sometimes, I could just sense his presence outside. I just knew he had come to watch us. They stopped him coming into Cannock but he never disappeared. He kept writing to me, kept saying he knew that I had never married again because I still loved him.

Stan isn’t like him. Just because he has been a womaniser doesn’t mean he is like him. Stan has got friends. Stan tries to do his best for others. I was ashamed of him when he hit Ulrika but that’s the only time I have been ashamed of him. I had always pleaded with him, ‘be kind to ladies’. But that one incident doesn’t make him like his dad. Not by a million miles.

I know wives who have been victims of violent husbands sometimes say this, but in many ways I blame myself. You see, I never loved Stan’s dad. Even my first husband, I never missed him after I left him. I think that’s just my way. Perhaps it’s just that I never met the right fella, but I don’t think I’m capable of loving anybody apart from my kids.

I’ve never tried to find my dad. But just after Christmas last year, he found me. He sent me an e-mail after I’d written a piece in the Daily Mirror touching on some of the abuse he had handed out to my mum. He said that he considered I was lost to the black side of my family and that I had been corrupted by white ways of thinking. He said that if I ever criticised the black race as a whole, I had better keep looking over my shoulder because he would be coming for me.

It made me laugh really. Partly because he hadn’t wasted any time trying to renew my acquaintance ten years or so ago when he suddenly realised I might be earning a decent wedge at Nottingham Forest. Funny that, isn’t it? Him and my Uncle Don, who’d combined to make life so difficult for my mother, united by a love of money that conquered all their hostility towards my mother in a trice. What a pair of sad bastards. Pathetic specimens of humanity.

I laughed, too, because my dad’s threats made me think of the time when I was at Forest and I had my hair dyed blonde. I looked like a right twat, to be honest with you. Frank Clark, the Forest manager, said I should spend more time on the training pitch and less at the hair salon and I might improve myself as a player. Point taken.

A couple of days later, I opened a newspaper to see a picture of my dad staring out at me as large as life. I hadn’t seen him, even a picture of him, for more than 10 years. He had a handsome face and he was wearing smart, elegant, Seventies-style clothes. He wasn’t being very complimentary about me, though. It was the same sort of stuff. How I was trying to turn myself into a white boy. How he had always wanted me to play cricket for the West Indies, not be a common footballer. What struck me most was that I did not feel a thing. No hurt. No hatred. No despair. Why should I after what he had done to us? Why should I after the legacy he had bequeathed to me? If he had a soul left, my dad had just sold it. And I didn’t feel a thing.

CHAPTER TWO
WALSALL: A MIXED BAG

Everybody thinks I underachieved as a footballer. Everybody always says I could have done so much more. I could have been one of the greats. I could have had 80 caps for England instead of three. I could have been a stalwart of the national side. I could have won a hatful of medals and the admiration of my peers. They say it’s such a shame it turned out the way it did and that I walked away from football when I was 30, when I should have been in my prime, not burned out, my mind frazzled.

Well, I want to nail all that. I didn’t underachieve. I overachieved. I had a great career. I played for Aston Villa, the club I had always wanted to play for. I played for Liverpool, one of the most famous names in world football. And I played for my country. I scored the winning goal in the best match of the 1990s, Liverpool’s 4–3 win over Newcastle at Anfield in 1996. I scored goals that got people up off their seats. I was an entertainer. The fans of the clubs I played for loved me. That will always mean more to me than any one of the medals that public opinion has deemed the arbiter of success in a footballer’s career.

I don’t agree with that criteria. Alan Shearer has never won a winner’s medal in all his time at Newcastle, and yet the enjoyment and the satisfaction he has provided for Geordie supporters who worship him is worth a million medals. You don’t have to have little bits of silver hidden away in a bank vault somewhere to convince you that you were a success. All you need are memories that make your chest puff out and your eyes glisten when you think of them. That’s why I count helping to keep Southend United in the First Division in my season there as one of my finest achievements. That’s success to me.

But that’s not the main reason why I look back at my playing years with pride, and not with regret. If you want to understand me, if you want to put what I did in its proper context, you need to know what I was up against. You need to know what was going on inside my mind. You need to know about my thought processes and how they tortured me. You need to know about the mental illness I suffer from and how I have struggled to overcome that all my life. You need to know how I’m fighting Borderline Personality Disorder. And how, essentially, that often feels like a losing battle.

When people talk about me and how I wasted my talent, there are usually two favourite themes they trot out. Firstly, they talk about how, wherever I went, I never got on with my team-mates. They talk about me being a loner. They recall apocryphal stories about team-mates not celebrating goals with me. They repeat rumours about players not talking to me in the dressing room at Nottingham Forest. They say I was arrogant and aloof and that I was bad news for team spirit wherever I went.

The other strand is my attitude to training. The common perception is that I damned myself by being an incorrigibly lazy twat. The stories go that I left behind a trail of infuriated managers who had grown increasingly exasperated by my reluctance to fall into line on the training pitch. It’s almost like football was the fucking army and I was guilty of serial insubordination. Failing to obey some fuckwit officer who never had a tenth of my talent as a player and who catered his sessions to the lowest common denominator. Well, I’m not a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ person. I don’t respect automatons and drones.

If clubs failed to get the best out of me, that is their failure. Not mine. If they paid millions of pounds for me and then tossed me into the general pile of players, if they treated every personality alike rather than catering for individual needs, then why should they be surprised if someone like me doesn’t react well? Man-management isn’t rocket science, but because I was fragile mentally I needed loyalty and care. When I got that, at Southend, Nottingham Forest and Leicester, I flourished and the team prospered. When I didn’t get it, I withered.

Training and I have always been strange bedfellows. Part of that stems from the fact that my first experience of a professional club was mutilated by a horror of a human being called Ray Train, who was the youth-team coach at Walsall when I joined as an apprentice on £29 a week at the age of 17. Being an apprentice under Ray Train was like a baby coming out of the womb and the first thing it sees is people firing guns or battering the fuck out of each other. This was my first taste of professional football and training at a league club.

The man terrified me. It’s a strong word but I use it intentionally. He inspired terror in me. My first day under his tutelage set out the pattern for the rest of my career as far as a distaste for training goes. It was a template for cynicism about training. I still associate training with him. Even when I’m sitting in my car today outside the health club I use in Great Barr, I start to sweat and get the shakes before I go for a work-out because I associate working out with him.

That first day at Walsall was a beautiful, sunny day in June and I had caught two buses from our house in Cannock to get there early, one from Cannock to Walsall Bus Station, the other from there to Fellows Park, the predecessor to the Bescot Stadium. I got to the ground, washed the kit and swept up. Then we went over to the training ground and the first thing we did was a long cross-country run. And I struggled.

More than that, I struggled badly. I hadn’t done four to six weeks’ preparation. Nobody had told me I had to. I was lagging behind. I was so far behind everyone else you wouldn’t believe it, and from thereon in, Ray decided he was going to have me for his bunny. At the end of every session he would allow us all to walk back towards the dressing rooms and then, just when I thought I was free, he would shout: ‘Not you, Stan.’

Ray was the ultimate grafter. Even at 40, he still trained like a fucking demon. The only other person who got near him for intensity, in my experience, was Archie Gemmill at Nottingham Forest. Ray couldn’t let go. He had to prove he was still a player. Had to prove he was still as fit as all of us. So for him to see a lazy, black, eminently talented player come on and score a couple of goals for the youth team as a late substitute used to infuriate him.

The bloke was five foot nothing. He had played for Carlisle for five years between 1971 and 1976, a defensive midfielder who was the cornerstone of the success they enjoyed in that period, which even took them into the top flight. He was popular with the fans because of the effort he put in, but people told me the senior pros used to laugh at him because he was this little fucking sergeant major type figure. He was never racist. He didn’t even shout, really. That was what made him so sinister. He would sidle up to me and whisper what he wanted me to do in my ear. I hated him, but most of all he terrified me. He made my life a misery. He always made a point of leaving that little gap between letting me walk away at the end of a session and then calling me back for more. It was psychological torture. And it was only me. It was public humiliation in front of the rest of the lads. I have tried to take my rawness into account, but that little man went out of his way, time and time again, to fuck with my mind.

He would get me to come in an hour before the rest of the lads. He seemed to like the ones who were grafters, particularly a group of three or four who had been released by Celtic. They were all hard-working midfielders. But to me, whether you are the laziest fucker on earth or whether you are a grafter, a coach should do all he can to get the best out of you. That was not quite how Ray saw it. He tormented me but he didn’t get me any fitter.

His favourite mode of torture was to get me to mop the changing rooms at Fellows Park. He developed this fiendish system where he would hide penny-pieces in obscure places like on the outside of the U-bend behind the toilet or on top of the cistern. If you missed one of these penny-pieces he took it as a sign you hadn’t done the job properly and you had to start again. It was pathetic. It was medieval shit. I still feel sad I had to go through it all. I still feel sad that it left its mark on me.

He still haunts me. I think about him and what he did to me most days. I’m still terrified of him. I met him once in New York when I was there with Ulrika. We were in Bloomingdales in the Ralph Lauren section and I caught sight of this little fucking dickhead stretching up, trying to reach some of the T-shirts on the top shelf. It was Ray. He had knitted hair that sprawled over his head like a cardigan. Somehow, he sensed somebody looking at him and turned round. ‘All right, big man,’ he said. I had to get out of there. I was shaking with anger and fear. There I was, a grown man, still brought low by this guy. Ulrika wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

I never complained about him or objected to any of this treatment to his face. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. One day, I thought God had smiled on me because Ray keeled over and had a heart attack on the training pitch. Right there in front of me. It felt like divine retribution. The ambulance came for him and carted him off to hospital, us all standing there in our dirty kits watching. I had never been so happy in my entire fucking life. There was the possibility that he might die, but at the very least we would be rid of him for a few months.

He didn’t die. Little fuckers like him never do. But I thought there was still hope. When he came back, Tommy Coakley, the first-team manager, got the sack and Ray was promoted to caretaker boss. I wished fervently he would be given the post permanently or that the new guy would keep him on as his assistant, but, of course, no one could be that stupid. John Barnwell got the job and booted him back down to the youth team and the torment began all over again.

It was a systematic attempt to break me, and it worked. Instead of leaving me to do the extra work he gave me by myself, he made the other lads stay, too, to watch me. One day, the first team were travelling to an away match and most of the reserve side had gone with them, so the youth team played in the reserve match that night. Except me. I was the only one left out. I had to stay behind and sweep the stands at Fellows Park. By myself.

I wasn’t getting much of a run in the team. I was always on the bench. If I got on, I usually scored. But I was getting more and more unhappy. I dreaded waking up in the morning because I was so scared of what the day was going to hold. Often, I wished I would die in the night just so I could avoid Ray the next day. Sometimes, even if I made it to Fellows Park in the morning I’d head for the phone box outside the ground and call my mum in tears.

In the end, I just called it a day. Ray getting the youth-team job back finished me. I went in to see John Barnwell, said it wasn’t working out and asked him if I could be released from my contract. He was very good about it. I thought I was free of Ray then, but Ray never left me really. I went on to Wolves as an apprentice and I scored 18 goals in 20 games for the reserves. I was devastated when they let me go after less than a season there, but when Graham Turner (who was the manager then) released me, one of the reasons he gave was my inconsistent appearance record at training.

And it was true. Sometimes I just didn’t go in. It wasn’t as if I was skiving off so I could do something else. I didn’t go out on the piss or smoke fags or go in to Birmingham. I just stayed indoors. I’d developed some mental block at Walsall. Ray had infected me. It was the same at Forest. There were four or five occasions when I didn’t go in. Liverpool was exactly the same. It was very unprofessional but I had my reasons.

In training, I loved five-a-sides and I liked to do practical, functional stuff that was relevant to my game. I wanted people putting crosses in for me. I wanted to try to hone my finishing. I wanted to be put in situations where I could take people on. I wasn’t like most of the players because most players are low maintenance when it comes to training. They do what they are told. If they are told to lick their own arsehole, they’ll lick it. No questions asked. But if I was told to do something mundane like sidefoot volley a ball back to someone who kept on throwing it to you time after time from a few yards away, I lost interest. I could do that standing on my head. The Gareth Southgates of this world did it because it could genuinely enhance their game. But for me, that kind of exercise was like white noise. It was minutiae. Doing stuff like running across the width of the pitch doing sidefoot volleys was a piece of piss so I’d just switch off.

Perhaps I was a victim of the increasing premium on supreme physical fitness. I have never been the fittest. Somebody like Robbie Savage could go six months without training, then go on a long run tomorrow and dash through it like a whippet. But if I do long fitness stuff, I just get bored. And if I was either uninspired or if something had happened in my personal life, sometimes I would decide to skip training.

If you get an intelligent coach like Arsene Wenger, he knows how to manage his players. I look at someone like Thierry Henry and think he must have his days sometimes when he can be temperamental. But some of the sessions at Arsenal only last 45 minutes. When I was at Palace, most of them went on for three hours. If you knew that was coming, the temptation was to sit at home and think ‘fuck that’.

My curse is that I’ve always been blessed with a great touch. I don’t need to practise my ball skills. I was born with them. I’m never going to lose them. If someone injected me with a fitness drug and I walked out in the Arsenal team or the Liverpool team tomorrow, no one would ever know that I had not played football for three years. I can guarantee that. But if you took an average player who had been out for the same length of time, you could forget about giving them a ball. You might as well give them a bag of cement to kick around.

The fittest I have ever been was at Nottingham Forest. We had a coach there called Pete Edwards. We used to take the piss out of him because he was a muscle man, but he was superb. He organised very high intensity, short-burst sessions with balls in match environments. Our warm-ups were the equivalent of full sessions for other clubs, but when we finished our matches there was not one Forest player who looked as though he had just played 90 minutes.

It makes me smile now to think of how fit I was then. In my current state, energy is about as hard to find as rocking-horse shit, but back then I had too much of it. The night before a game against Sunderland, I even felt I had to go to the gym to do an hour on the treadmill just to get rid of some of the excess energy that was coursing through me. I went out the next day against Sunderland and I was still flying around. After Forest, I went to Liverpool, where the regime was not as intense. It was like pulling a thread on my fitness. It all started to unravel.

Maybe I just don’t look like I’m trying. Sometimes, it clearly appears as if I don’t care. Glenn Hoddle criticised me once in training before England’s World Cup qualifying tie in Rome in 1997. The forwards were queueing up for finishing practice and Ian Wright had just lunged for a cross and prodded it in. When it was my turn, the cross came in and it just evaded me. I didn’t lunge for it because I wouldn’t have got it anyway. ‘You see,’ Hoddle shouted. ‘You see, that’s the difference between you and Wrighty. Wrighty lunged for it even in training. You didn’t lunge for it.’ What a ridiculous thing to say. The problem with Hoddle was that he would get exasperated by people who couldn’t do what he had once been able to do. He would still run around the training pitch, tapping the ground as he ran with the point of his boot like a fucking dick. That just lost him the respect of the players.

The press called Hoddle’s assistant, John Gorman, ‘Coneman’. There’s always a fucking Coneman but Gorman acted like a pre-pubescent teenager, just excited to be there. He always called me ‘big man’, too, and tried to give the impression he knew what was going on. But if I’d asked him anything important, he would have shit himself and hedged around it. He knew halves of bits of stuff that were discussed in the bar late at night. But, really, that amounted to nothing. His role meant not asking Glenn any awkward questions. He was a yes man.

And football’s full of them. Full of people scared to be different. Full of people only too happy to let you down and turn you into a fall guy. Something as simple and as harmless as heading home to Cannock after training was enough to put me out there in freak-show territory at a string of clubs. Football doesn’t deal very well with anybody who strays from the norm. It’s suspicious of anyone who doesn’t aspire to the norm. Think of what happened to Graeme Le Saux just because he read the Guardian and said he liked going to see art-house movies now and again. Football gave its snap judgement: the guy must be a faggot.

Football’s full of contradictions and hypocrisies like that. The players moan about the media, and the tabloids in particular, but they all read The Sun and the Mirror. If they hate the tabloids so much, why don’t they read the Guardian or The Times? They’re too scared to be different. Worried they might get the piss ripped out of them for being a lah-di-dah smart-arse gay boy. Much easier to fit in and toe the party line and do what the others do. Much easier to conform.

It wasn’t that I had a problem with authority. I just had a problem with bad management. I couldn’t understand why a football club would spend millions and millions of pounds on a new asset and then not try to get the best out of them. Clubs knew what they were getting when they bought me, so why didn’t they make plans for me? Why do you break the British transfer record for a player and then try and force him into a style of football that is foreign to him?

From Ray Train at the start to Raddy Antic at the close of my career with Real Oviedo, I feel I have been ill-served by the men who have been in a position of power over me. I know there’s a danger of that sounding self-righteous and self-pitying but it was also business suicide on the part of the clubs. There have been honourable exceptions like Colin Murphy and Barry Fry, my two managers at Southend, and Martin O’Neill at Leicester, but for the most part these men who had often paid lavish amounts of money to bring me to their club gave every impression of being disappointed they had signed an individual and not an automaton.

That was one of the things that shortened my life as a footballer. In the end, I’d just had enough of betrayal and bullshit and double-speak and the empty friendships that flourish in football dressing-rooms and die the moment you move on to another club. That kind of friendship is no friendship at all, and by the time I had reached my late twenties I had grown weary of it. By the end, I’d had enough of being treated like a circus curiosity, the sensitive, difficult footballer no one could manage.

Football’s full of people who are scared to challenge you. By that, I don’t mean it’s full of people scared to bollock you. There are plenty of men who think that’s enough to establish their authority. But to gain authority over me, you have to interest me, and football’s full of people taking the safe option, full of coaches putting on piss-poor training sessions for men who are supposed to be trained athletes every week of the year. There’s too much uniformity. Not enough variety. Too many players with ability are allowed to stagnate. As a player, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle seeking worthwhile stimulation from training.

But maybe the clubs were fighting a losing battle with me, too. I know now that I have been suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder since I was young. It’s called Borderline because it was first used to describe people who lived on that edge between psychosis and neurosis. That’s where I live. Right on that line. I sit astride it. I exhibit all the symptoms. I’m a textbook study in this particular offshoot of being fucked up.

You’ll recognise me, and the way my career has fallen away at times when it should have kicked on, from some of the Borderline sufferer’s traits. The chronic disturbance with self, others and society. The ambivalence towards all directions, aims and goals. I didn’t have the hunger other players have. Just didn’t have it. Not always, but sometimes. Not because I was lazy but because it just didn’t feel right to me to behave in certain ways at certain times.

One of the most common characteristics of someone with BPD is the subconscious search for different states of chaos. In my personal life and in my football career, I have gravitated towards situations that are bound to end in schism and conflict. Other people try and avoid discord. My illness propels me towards it. One way or another, we always seem to find each other. We like hanging out together.

People look at me and scoff at this idea that I’ve got any sort of mental problem, partly because I’ve got a lot of money, which most people associate with happiness, and partly because they can’t see me doing anything extreme like playing paintball in my front room or throwing cats into trees. I wish that made me normal. I really do.

Let me try and give you an idea of how my mind can torture me just as surely as if I was strapped to the rack in one of the seven circles of Hell. Maybe you’ll start to see why the longest time I ever spent at one club was two full seasons. Maybe you’ll start to see why it often ended in tears. Maybe you’ll start to understand why I can’t hold down a steady relationship with a woman, why I flit from one to another like a honeybee.

I feel I must be loved by all the important people in my life at all times or else I am worthless. I must be completely competent in all ways if I am to consider myself to be a worthwhile person.

I feel nobody cares about me as much as I care about them, so I always lose everyone I care about, despite the desperate things I do to try to stop them from leaving me.

I have difficulty controlling anger. I have chronic feelings of emptiness and worthlessness. I exhibit recurrent suicidal behaviour. I’m reckless sexually.

When I am alone, I become nobody and nothing. When I am alone, when I have no work to structure my day, I take to my bed. Since I stopped playing football, apart from my work for Five Live, I have slept for three years.

I will only be happy when I find an all-giving, perfect person to love me and take care of me no matter what. But if someone like that loves me, then something must be wrong with them.

My life, like that of most sufferers from Borderline Personality Disorder, has been defined by a pervasive pattern of unstable relationships and a tendency to act on impulse. Since I used to wait by the window at night for my mother to come home from the swimming baths, I have always made frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, another BPD classic trait.

One passage from a book by a guy called Jerry Kreisman, called I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me, seemed unusually relevant to my behaviour and my failure to make anything, from a relationship to a spell at a football club, more than ephemeral. ‘The world of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, Dr Kreisman writes, ‘is split into heroes and villains. A child emotionally, the BP cannot tolerate human inconsistencies and ambiguities. He cannot reconcile good and bad qualities with a constant coherent understanding of another person. At any particular moment, a friend is either good or evil. There is no in-between. No grey area. People are idolised one day, totally devalued and dismissed the next.