On… Gazza
From ball to bottle
“He was a genius, an artist, but he made me tear my hair out.”
Dino Zoff – Gazza’s manager at Lazio.
“Gazza didn’t just play football — he lived it, felt it, and breathed it in a way few ever have.”
So begins Alan Shearer’s foreword to Eight, not the first Paul Gascoigne autobiography I’ve read, but perhaps the most revealing.
Many of the stories you might know already. There’s the light-hearted ones; putting a snake in Roberto Di Matteo’s suit jacket pocket, commandeering a double decker bus in Marble Arch, the dentist chair, Italia 90 camaraderie, shooting and eating Terry Venables’ Dad’s favourite pheasant.
Okay, that last one maybe not so light-hearted…
And there’s the darker ones.
How when he was 10, his six-year-old pal was hit by an ice cream van and died in his arms… shortly after Gazza had promised the boy’s mother he would look after him.
The bust-ups with Sheryl.
Missing the birth and finding out his son’s name in The News of the World.
Being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Raoul Moat.
But there’s plenty of new stuff in Eight too. According to the book:
After the 1985 FA Youth Cup final at Vicarage Road, Elton John poked his head into the dressing room to say ‘well done son’ to Gazza, but retreated when Gazza, who was in the bath with the trophy, begged him for a song. Elton later asked Gazza, post 1990, if he fancied staying in London with him and his boyfriend. “Fuck that, I thought… Elton’s a good lad, but I didn’t fancy it!”
Before we beat the Scots in 1996, Gazza was in such an acute state of pre-match excitement Bryan Robson had to create a makeshift fishing rod out of medical equipment, just so Gazza could pretend he was fishing in his bath in the Burnham Beeches hotel, and calm down.
Gazza was wearing Teddy Sheringham’s size 10-and-a-half ripped boots against the Dutch in the Euros 4-1 demolition (Gazza’s a size 9 and had forgotten his boots).
Jack Charlton called him a fat bastard and made him train with Great North Run founder Brendan Foster to shift some weight off of him.
He fell down some stairs drunk in a New York hotel… was helped to his feet… and the guy picking him up was Phil Collins.
Another thing that made me sit up was his sheer goal return, everywhere he went. Up to a goal every other game… from midfield… including 19 in 1990/91 for Spurs.
But most of all Eight gets into the troubled, tortured mind of Gazza. The book is structured across the eight primary emotions of surprise, anticipation, anger, fear, disgust, trust, joy and sadness and he talks about each in relation to his life. We see him driven mad by childhood tragedy, dysfunctional family, phone hacking and OCD… then reaching for an escape anywhere he can find it… first on the football pitch, then in booze, then in drugs, and at one stage, 50 cans of Red Bull a day.
The only time Gazza was ever truly free was on the football pitch. He was an incredible player because he never, ever doubted himself on the turf. Out there, playing, he was fearless, clear-minded, unencumbered by the paranoia and self-loathing that would blight the rest of his life. But it only ever lasted 90 minutes a time…
Interestingly, for a man like me looking to promote male reading and writing, one of the only other things that seems to give him relief is writing poetry.
If it works for him, maybe it’ll work for you too…
Eight is a great, insightful, experimental sports biography that anyone who wants to know more about Italia 90 or Euro 1996 should read… and let’s face it, that’s all of us. It’s also a compelling insight into living with mental health difficulties, and how these can be exacerbated by heavy-drinking
So why do we remain fascinated by Gazza? For me it began when I saw him at Millwall, playing up to the crowd, which I’ve written about here. I’ve seen him grow, highs and lows, but I could say that about a lot of players. Why do we feel the way about him the way we do, when we don’t feel the same about Beckham, or Kane?
It’s not just the tears in Turin. It’s everything that lay behind them.
Because in life we admire looks, and talent, and even courage.
But we fall in love with vulnerability.
++ Which player did you fall in love with first? How do you cope with difficult times? And which sporting biography should I review next?
- - -
Shhhh…
Of course, one of the major reasons for Gazza’s descent into self-doubt and destructive paranoia was the phone hacking scandal… his most personal private information and conversations, mined, monitored and monetised by tech-savvy amoral corporates, without his consent.
Sound familiar?
- - -
I nearly cried…
… when I saw my piece on fiction and football had made it into Pitch magazine’s World Cup special.
I have such great memories of one-off World Cup magazines from my childhood, so to be featured in one was just brilliant.
The magazine is a great read too – every World Cup covered, a feature on the ill-fated North American Soccer League, plus some deep dives on messed up campaigns, Cape Verde, and an amazing French team that didn’t qualify.
Pitch magazine’s Substack can be found here. Check out the World Cup special here.
- - -
Lovely review and another book to read this summer