PAUL STEWART Fun and fear with my mate Gazza
PAUL GASCOIGNE stayed with me throughout his time at Spurs – and caused havoc with his antics on and off the pitch.
I was Spurs’ record signing in the summer of 1988 when I joined for £1.9million from Manchester City.
I met Tottenham boss Terry Venables just days before I married my wife, Bev, in Blackpool and told him to keep the move secret so it did not take away from her big day.
Less than 24 hours later, Paul arrived from Newcastle United – the new record signing – and I became his unofficial “minder”, staying at the same hotel initially, then later sharing a house.
Everyone was after him – from Liverpool to Manchester United – but “El Tel” had used his charm on Gazza, just as he had on me.
Paul was never nervous about playing. He had cost £2.2m, but he did not see that as an issue because he was so talented.
He was an odd combination – shy, but a real practical joker; one of the brightest young talents in the game, but so insecure as a person; generous, funny, apparently happy-golucky, but riven by strange habits, doubts, medical conditions, character quirks.
In the early days, if we went out for something to eat, he would finish off his main meal – then order three desserts and make himself ill.
I never understood. It was hard to know even what to say.
All was not as it seemed with Gazza, who became one of the most famous faces on the planet at Italia 90 after those tears in the semi-final, yet he was so insecure.
Fellow Spurs player Steve Sedgley was nicknamed “Long Neck” for obvious reasons.
One day, as Venners took training, all the players were on the pitch in a circle around the halfway line. Gazza was late.
As always, the boss was asking me where he was.
Just as I was about to make an excuse, he turned up with someone alongside him, carrying a brown sack.
The sack was moving as if something was in it and, as Venners was about to yell at Paul for being late, the bag was opened and an ostrich ran out, wearing a Spurs shirt. There was a No.7 and “Sedgley” written on the back. The lads just fell about laughing.
Gazza also turned up to training in what can only be described as a camper van.
It looked like an old-fashioned Oxford van or one of those “recreational vehicles” you see in the States.
He put a traffic cone on the top and said to one of the fans at the ground, “Look at what the lads have done there, John. Will you get that cone off for me?”
John, a “super-fan”, who was a regular at training, climbed up and quick as a flash, Gazza jumped in the front and floored the van, the accelerator pressed down as far as it would go.
John’s legs were hanging off the back as he shouted, “Please stop, you are going to kill me”.
One of my favourite tales came after Paul had left Spurs for Lazio.
When he returned to the UK, he would stay in a hotel near Hyde Park where the manager was a mad-keen Spurs fan.
He loved Gazza so much, all the Tottenham players got to stay for free. On one visit home, Paul took the manager out for the night, got him drunk, somehow found his passport, flew him back to Rome and, en route, shaved off all the poor fella’s hair and eyebrows.
He woke up in Gazza’s place in Italy not having a clue where he was, or how he had got there.
Then he looked in the mirror to discover all his hair and eyebrows had gone as well.
When he asked Paul for some kind of an explanation, there was none, except for the usual.
“It was for a laugh,” he said
with that impish grin. The manager returned home, bald and very angry. There were no more free rooms after that.
If we were driving to a game, Gazza would tap the rear-view mirror all the time because it had to be exact for him.
It could be before a game against Man Utd, but he would make me turn back to see if he had locked the door, or if the TV remote was in alignment.
One day, I was driving to White Hart Lane on the A10 when he insisted we go back, which meant driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway. He was holding his wallet up in the front seat, pretending it was a police warrant card while I was flooring it.
Once, he ran up a £25,000 bar bill, but his eccentric behaviour continued long beyond the Spurs days.
Around 2001, I woke to find I had been bombarded with messages, saying he was coming to Blackpool to see me.
He went into the Tesco down the road and started shouting, “Does anyone know where Stewy lives?”
There was a mate of mine in there who gave him the street, but not the door number – but he found me. It was a lovely summer’s day, so we had a BBQ in the garden. For a bit of fun, Gazza went through his phone ringing up famous people.
Eventually, he got through to Robbie Williams and made him sing his hit Millennium down the phone to my daughter Chloe and her school pal, who could not believe it. He also rang Dale Winton. I was thinking, “How did Gazza meet Dale Winton?”
When he went to the Italia 90 World Cup, Paul would call to tell me about his progress. He said he was forced to get some sleep ahead of the last-16 game against Belgium, but thought he ended up putting in his worst performance of the tournament.
So, the day before the quarter-final against Cameroon, he went out in the heat and played three sets of tennis.
It reminded me of when Spurs had a game at Portsmouth.
Paul got up in the middle of the night and played three sets of squash before going back to bed. When Venners found out, he hit the roof. His squash opponent was dropped from the squad, but Gazza played. And he still gets in touch. “No caller ID” flashes up and I know exactly who is calling – it is Gazza back on the drink.
The calls can be at three, four, five in the morning.
You fear it could be bad news, so you take the call – before the desperate dread of what is to come.
I want to say, “I have kicked the drugs habit and don’t need to drink. You are a different man in drink, Paul, and when you call, you are too far gone to listen – I hope you listen now”.