‘Alcohol gave me such a good hiding and by the end I did not want to live’
Tony Adams tells Paul Hayward why Sporting Chance clinic is still fighting in its 20th year
Saving souls has no end, and even after 20 years of his inspirational Sporting Chance charity, Tony Adams can see a new opponent gaining strength: gambling, which he calls an “epidemic” in football, eclipsing even the old temptations of drink and drugs.
Proud of his charity’s everexpanding work, Adams, the former Arsenal and England captain, knows there will be tears later at the anniversary dinner. Already at Mottram Hall in Cheshire he is welling up as he finds new ways to describe his own ascent from alcoholism.
“I’ve done this podcast with 12 people who’ve been affected by Sporting Chance,” he says. “Every Sunday I do it and I’m just in floods of tears. All these people who have got well, and got their lives back.”
Amid the emotion, there are shocking stats. The Professional Footballers’ Association helpline, linked to Sporting Chance, took 653 calls last year, with 40 per cent coming from retired players.
“If it’s an addictive disorder then 70 per cent in football relates to gambling,” says Colin Bland, the chief executive. Adams joins in: “I drank for effect because I didn’t even like the taste. But the thoughts and feelings are all the same, when I talk to a gambling addict it’s exactly the same thoughts and feelings that I went through. The addict, in particular, is very complicated.”
With its 14 stakeholders and high profile, Sporting Chance’s reach is growing. Adams says: “We got the cricket contract 18 months ago, we’ve been working with cricketers, we’ve been working with women; there’s a lot of women in our game now [and] there seems to be more panic attacks, anxieties.
“Similarly, if you work with jockeys, there’s pills, there’s specifics for that industry. And addictions with football – we’re talking gambling. Premier League. It’s a bit of an epidemic. For the jockeys, cocaine really helps for weight loss and stuff, there’s a lot more coke heads, and we’ve ended up [doing] some fantastic things with the guys at the moment.”
If recovery can have a figurehead, Adams is arguably the one, and he still sees old friends and team-mates fighting battles he “won” by going “clean and sober” – a phrase he uses a lot. Take Paul Merson: “Paul has bounced around at the bottom for a long time now. He is 10 months without a bet and pray to God he has got it this time. Not everyone is as lucky as me.
“The stats are against us. Most people do bounce around at the bottom or die or go to prison or intensive care. That’s the 650,000 who are floating around. And they swap addictions; 85 per cent of people are cross-addicted, so they can swap addictions.” If this sounds bleak, there is an underlying sense of possibility in the work he started when sportsmen and women were still looking to private hospitals, such as the Priory, for salvation.
As honorary president of the Rugby Football League, Adams reveals that 650 players have asked for guidance since 2011 “They know where to go for help. They’re an emotional bunch. Emotionally literate.” He has a favourite phrase borrowed from Ian Ridley, the author and fellow Sporting
Chance stalwart: “God didn’t save me from the sea to be kicked to death on the shore.”
His own story still reveals new layers. “I think when I got enough pain and I was broken enough, and I got to my bottom, it enabled me enough to ask for help,” he says. “But I needed a lot of pain. Alcohol gave me a good hiding; prison, intensive care, p---ing myself, s---ting myself, still not giving up. Sleeping with people I didn’t want to sleep with. I’d never do that today, but that’s where it took me.
“I have to remind myself, at the end of my drinking I did not want to live, but I didn’t know how to kill myself. I was at ‘jumping off point’, we call it. I got there, and only then was I able to ask for help.
“I got smacked once in the Railway Tavern in Rainham; I got too lairy. My experience of the addict is: huge ego and low self-esteem. And when I had a few beers I remember dancing on the table and this guy just comes and chins me, he said, ‘Stop being so f---ing…’ I think he was trying to tell me I was being an absolute idiot, in his own way.”
And at Arsenal, when people challenged him: “I had nothing to do with them obviously, I always thought they were weird and idiots. I was the captain of the club, so made sure I bullied basically everyone else. I made sure that if anyone else was totally together that they were boring or glum. Lee Dixon? ‘What an a---hole Lee is. He’s got to be wrong! He’s got to be educated. He’s northern!’ There you go: ‘He’s northern’. You ain’t going to talk to Dicko.”
We break to talk about Arsenal’s decline, and even here Adams sees patterns of people being stuck: notably, Arsene Wenger, his old manager. “I think he has so much identification with me because, at
‘The stats are against us. Most people bounce around at the bottom, or go to prison or die’
the end of the day, he was probably an addict. He couldn’t let go at the end, he’s a typical addict, he’s not letting go,” Adams says, meaning Wenger’s final years in charge.
“He’s completely obsessed with the game. It maybe cost him relationships and maybe other stuff, and I think it cost him his job.
“It’s been b----- depressing the last 10 years,” he says, blaming bad recruitment. “You get players two ways – academy, or buy them in. We haven’t had the money to buy them and I don’t think we have had the network to be honest. And I don’t think running with agents is the way to do it. Seventeen backroom staff gone, six scouts gone, Stevie Morrow gone, probably the best academy scout in the country has been sacked.”
Three hundred people are starting to gather in the Cheshire countryside. “Well, it’s emotional stuff,” Adams says: “It’s a lot of people to be dead without me. And I would be dead without Bill Wilson [the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous]. So I’ve passed the message on. For one ex-drunk that’s f---ing amazing. I’m sorry, that is just gobsmacking. And it’s not me, I don’t feel like it’s me. It’s gone through me, it’s gone through me and out the other side.
“I always give [the example of ] Danny B [his anonymity is protected]. He’s living out of the back of his cab. His mum committed suicide when he was 23, he played for Tottenham as a young pro. He didn’t pick up a bet until he was in his thirties. And by 39 he’s wanting to kill himself, has lost everything … I mean he’s been abandoned all his life, do you know what I mean?
“And then, turned up to my clinic, living in his cab, 26-day programme, nine years’ recovery without a bet. He’s got his kid back, he’s got his life back. That’s crying material. The guy’s living the dream, like I am.”