BOOK REVIEW
Hooked: Addiction And The Long Road To Recovery by Paul Merson (Sportsbookofthemonth. com price: £14.67, saving £5.42 on rrp)
A decade ago, former Arsenal star turned TV pundit Paul Merson wrote How Not To Be A Professional Footballer, the book’s cover featuring his face adorning a beer can, a deliberate and carefullynurtured image of a likeable geezer who enjoyed a drink, a bet, a snort of coke and a laugh. Most people who reviewed the book were Gooners who wondered how ‘Merse’ had survived given the industrial quantities of alcohol and cocaine he had consumed.
A couple of weeks ago, Merson featured in a BBC documentary,
Football, Gambling And Me, which focused primarily on his longeststanding addiction – gambling. Considering his earlier biography, your reviewer suspected the film would portray Merson as a ‘victim’ – rich ex-footballer with a compulsive personality unable to impose discipline on his life.
Impressively, however, Merson sought no sympathy in what proved a poignant profile of a once brilliant footballer now in his mid-50s. A man who gambled away the deposit on a house which would have lifted his family out of the rented property they currently occupy.
Merson calculates he lost more than £7 million at the bookies. No wonder he looked lost. I suspect the film resulted in a huge increase in the sale of his latest book,
Hooked. I certainly hope so – and for the sake of his family that his long-suffering wife protects the proceeds.
It’s difficult for most people to understand the ravages of addiction and its horrible impact upon loved ones. Incredibly, Merson, this outwardly jovial, happy-go-lucky man, has battled addiction for more than 30 years. The fight continues, as Merson admits: “I’ve come to realise that I’m powerless over alcohol. My drinking and gambling have left a lot of wreckage.”
After three decades of often utter despair, it’s no surprise that
Merson considered suicide as the anguish brought on by drinking and gambling continued to rage.
Redemption, of a kind, arrived late one Sunday night as he walked home from the pub and ‘‘something clicked’’. Merson had had enough of “…feeling like this every day of my life. I rang up Alcoholics Anonymous the next day, and since then I haven’t had a drink”.
Merson no longer resembles the jovial fool of his first book, nor that of his laddish TV persona. Here is a guy in desperate need of help who pulls no punches in a searingly honest account of a life spent in hand-to-hand combat with addiction and its horrendous fallout.
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