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Fallen heroes from an ugly world of sport
Why is sporting success often linked to excess? Bill Bridge weighs up the latest evidence of misbehaviour beyond the field of play.
IN case you have been out of touch over the past fortnight, Newcastle United and England footballer Joey Barton spent more than a week in Walton Prison in his native Liverpool after an incident in the city at 5.30 on the morning of December 27.
He has been charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm; if he is found guilty, he faces up to five years in jail.
The player, who was out of action on the field with an injury at the time, is already facing charges concerning two other incidents, one of which allegedly took place on Manchester City's training pitch and led to his transfer to Newcastle.
Barton's arrest came just days after a Christmas party organised by Manchester United's first team squad – with each player contributing 5,000 to the kitty – which involved visits to a casino and various public houses before reaching its climax in a fashionable city centre hotel with 100 glamorous young women invited to join in. Police were called to investigate allegations of rape against one United player.
Sir Alex Ferguson, United's manager, has for years taken a stance against football's perceived drinking culture, and was livid when he discovered the outcome of the party. He is understood to have told the senior players who organised it that there will be no repeat.
It was Sir Alex who, in his early years at Old Trafford, moved decisively to remove what he considered a negative force within the club. A school of heavy drinkers, including outstanding players Paul McGrath and Norman Whiteside, was broken up with their transfers.
Later, a similar fate befell England international Lee Sharpe, whose lifestyle did not match the expected standard.
There have been other gifted footballers whose lives have been derailed by a fondness for drink. Perhaps the most famous have been the late George Best, Paul Gascoigne and Jimmy Greaves. Only Greaves managed to see out his career before conceding defeat in his battle with the bottle.
Best famously retired from football at the age of 27 – largely, his supporters claim, because he did not receive the right guidance from his manager Sir Matt Busby. Busby was happy to enjoy the football and ignore the drinking.
Gascoigne, the most talented English player of his generation and one who would have shone in any era, tried to drink dry Newcastle, London, Rome, Glasgow and Middlesbrough. He succeeded only in ruining his health.
Greaves's bad habits were established in daily post-training drinking sessions, when he played with Tottenham Hotspur's double-winning team of the Sixties alongside Dave Mackay, a hard man to best on the pitch or at the bar. Greaves eventually accepted his alcoholism, and next month will mark the 30th anniversary of his decision to not take another drink.
But footballers and drink have not just become companions within the past decade or three; nor are footballers the only sportsmen drawn to relaxing with glass in hand.
Benny Lynch, who many judges rate the best boxer ever to come out of these islands, was born in the Gorbals and his fellow-Glaswegians followed him in their thousands – the Great Depression notwithstanding – as he became undisputed world flyweight champion.
They also loved buying him a drink, and such was the effect of alcohol on his system that Lynch's boxing career was over by the time he was 25. For the remaining eight years of his life he battled against drink and his countrymen's insistence on him having one more when what he really needed was a good meal. He died of malnutrition at the age of 33 in 1946, little more than a vagrant in the city which had adored him.
John Conteh was another world champion who admits that an excessive lifestyle brought a premature end to his boxing ability, while champion jockey Keiren Fallon has spent time in nursing homes fighting drink problems and now, sadly, faces a lengthy absence from the saddle having, for a second time, been found to have taken a prohibited substance. The early-morning excursion by Andrew Flintoff on a pedalo in the Caribbean has become part of cricket folklore, as has the comment by Sir Ian Botham – no slouch himself when it comes to a good night out – that Flintoff's only crime was in being caught.
But it is football which returns with alarming regularity to the front-pages. Why? Some say it comes down to a lack of education; players go straight from school into football and know of nothing else. Their only guidance comes from their peers, who are similarly bereft of experience of life outside football's gilded cage.
Some blame the media, forever prying on the one hand then paying for "exclusives" on the other. Journalists, at least those of a respectable age, look back misty-eyed at the days when sports stars were, in the main, working-class lads who had been granted a God-given talent but kept their feet clamped to the ground.
Players enjoyed a pint and a laugh with the scribes, on the understanding that nothing untoward would appear in print. It was called mutual respect; it has disappeared.
Others say the enormous increases in rewards for players, the amount of spare time they have to kill after training for two hours a day, and the buzz they get from entertaining their friends – some would call them hangers-on – to a day at the races or a trip to a night club all play a part in the hedonistic culture, along with the celebrity wives/girlfriends, the Aston Martins, millionaire mansions and Rolex watches.
Barton has been enjoying himself for some time and has not been on his own but there are signs at last that the game is moving in the right direction.
The Professional Footballers' Association, fully aware of its responsibilities to its members and deeply concerned by negative public perceptions, is making more advice available to footballers at every stage of their careers on subjects as diverse as pensions, options after their playing days, investments, health and how to live a balanced life.
Managers like Arsene Wenger at Arsenal are working hard to change the accepted lifestyle and diet of their players and one of the Frenchman's first charges, Tony Adams, is playing a leading role in giving today's players the chance to avoid emulating his terrifying descent into alcoholism and prison. The only player in the history of English football to captain a championship winning team in three different decades, Adams played for Arsenal from 1983 to 2002 but off the field he led a troubled life, being jailed for four months in December 1990 after being found to be four times over the legal drink-drive limit after crashing his car.
In 1996, he admitted his alcohol problem and the appointment of Wenger as manager a month later provided Adams with the spur he needed to put his life back together. He returned to education and learned the piano, benefiting all the time from Wenger's guidance and advice, eventually telling his story in a graphic, best-selling autobiography.
In September 2000, Adams founded the Sporting Chance Clinic, at Liphook in Hampshire, a charitable foundation which provides counselling, treatment and support for sportsmen and women suffering from drink, gambling or drug addictions and behavioural problems.
Among the foundation's patrons is Paul Merson, a former team-mate of Adams with Arsenal and England, and a man who has gone through his own traumas with alcohol and gambling. Kate Hoey, the former Minister for Sport, and Elton John are other patrons while the centre is supported by the PFA and the Football Association.
Among those who have been receiving treatment in the past few days is Joey Barton. If he can amaze us all and learn from those who have gone before him in recent years then he will grasp what may well be his last chance of redemption.
But with the indecent money, never-ending temptations and hordes of would-be "friends" combining to encourage today's top footballers to swap success for excess, there will be more Joey Bartons. Of that we can be certain.
THE TROUBLED STARS
Ronnie O'Sullivan
With a father in jail for murder, well-documented drug abuse, bouts of depression and a refusal to toe the line, O'Sullivan was the natural heir to the throne of official snooker bad boy Alex Higgins. His halo became tarnished in 1996 he was found guilty of assaulting an official at the World Championship and two years later he tested positive for marijuana. In 2006, he walked out midway through a match against Stephen Hendry incurring a 20,000 fine.
Jennifer Capriati
The young tennis player was just 14 years old when she reached the semi-finals of the 1990 French Open. The next year she took Wimbledon by storm and won Olympic gold, but the pressures of the game proved too much and after being stopped for shoplifting, and arrested for possession of marijuana, her career fell apart. However, Capriati began to rebuild her game and in one of sport's great comeback stories she unexpectedly won the Australian Open in 2001.
Paul Gascoigne
Where to start? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he seemed to have the world at his feet, moving from Newcastle to Spurs for the then record transfer fee of 2.3m, winning 57 caps for England and scoring 10 international goals. At first his behaviour off the pitch was excused as youthful exuberance, but as his alcohol problems deepened he soon looked like a shadow of his former self.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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