Paul Gascoigne stares at the huge crowd curling round staircase after staircase at Waterstones in Newcastle city centre. He is here to sign copies of his autobiography. ‘Strange,†he says. ‘I used to pinch stuff from here, y’know?†He grins the famous Gazza grin — cheeky, provocative, infuriating, irresistible.
He talks about his stealing in the book — it was yet another of his obsessive-compulsive habits. He would nick things that he didn’t need just for the buzz, and then give them away.
Actually, he talks about everything in the book; the nine nervous tics, the Tourettesian outbursts, the bulimia, the phobias, the depression, the pranks, the car crashes, the alcoholism, the benders, the hypochondria, the blackouts, the cocaine, the domestic violence, the non-domestic violence, the 27 operations, the suicidal thoughts. And that’s before we even start with the football.
He has some story to tell, and, as he says, it’s often not a pretty one. Time and again, over the course of the two days I spend with him, he will tell people that he has decided to do his therapy in public. Now, he says, he has nothing to hide.
Gascoigne is 37 years old, and has done a lot of growing up over the past year. He looks more mature and in better nick than he has for years — trim and fit, with a surprisingly serious expression. The skin beneath his eyes is cross-hatched, laughter lines meeting worry lines, and he is wearing a new-model beard. But typical Gazza, it’s a peroxide blonde goatee.
He’s here with his tiny entourage — father John and Jimmy ‘Five Bellies†Gardner, the only person in Britain famous for being a footballer’s mate. Family and Jimmy Five are two of the few staples in Gascoigne’s life. When he started writing the book, he had moved back with his former wife
Sheryl and her three children (Gascoigne is the father of her son, Regan). He was looking forward to settling down and being a regular dad. But things didn’t work out. Now he is back in Newcastle, using for the time being the spare bed in Jimmy Five’s flat.
Gascoigne has always been a one-off. As a footballer, with his huge upper body and his tiny legs, he looked like a Humpty Dumpty in the making; a triangular non-starter. But he had sublime skills. He had no pace, yet he could use his strength and dribbling to make chumps of defenders. He also had vision — at his best, he knew instinctively where teammates would be without looking; he could bend it like Beckham but with greater pace.
Best of all, he excelled at the top level — in competition for England. He was at the heart of their progress to the semifinals of the World Cup in 1990 and the European championship in 1996 — the furthest England have been since victory in the 1966 World Cup.
Gascoigne made football fun — not only the way he played it, but the way he would turn up wearing a pair of plastic breasts or crazy hair extensions. No manager was quite able to control him. At one time Alex Ferguson was convinced that he could make a man of him, but Gascoigne snubbed him for more money at Spurs. He talks of Ferguson with great affection, and considerable regret.
The contradictions extended to his person. He looked as if he couldn’t give a toss about anything he did (whether it was burping into a microphone, or telling Norwegian television, after being asked whether he had a message for the people of Norway, ‘Yes, fuck offâ€, or, when playing for Rangers, inciting Celtic fans by playing an imaginary flute as if on an Orange march), but in his way he cared about every little thing to the point of crippling neurosis.
Perhaps the lingering image is of Gascoigne crying in the World Cup semifinal after getting himself booked and realising that he would miss the final if England won. But this wasn’t a one-off. When he wasn’t laughing, Gascoigne was often crying. He cried at the end of every season because he loved his football so much and never knew what he would do till the next season.
Now it is unlikely he will ever play again. His great (if fractured) years at Newcastle and Spurs and Lazio and Rangers were followed by hopeless flailing. After promising comebacks at Middlesbrough and Everton went awry, he ended up drifting in his last season, 2002/03, from Burnley to China, and eventually to Wolves reserves. So he decided to quit, and concentrate on his recovery. Now he says the knowledge that he wasn’t what he had been drove him to a breakdown.
Gascoigne spent most of his final six footballing years drinking and denying his affliction. He always liked a drink, but it was only when he hit his downward spiral as a player at Middlesbrough that it became such a massive problem. He was increasingly injured, separated from Sheryl, and dropped from the England team. His friend David Cheek had died in a hotel they were staying in after a night out. At one point, after a four-day binge in Dublin, he considered taking his life.
It was then that Bryan Robson, his manager at Middlesbrough, insisted on him signing himself into the Priory. But the drinking continued, and it was only when he returned from China in 2003 and went for a second time to the Cottonwood Clinic in Arizona that he finally admitted to himself that he was an alcoholic. Gascoigne has now been sober for almost a year and says it’s a relief to use words like alcoholic and depressive.
Does he take antidepressants? ‘Naaaah. I went on them a couple of times, and I thought what I need to do is pack in football, and I quit football and got off the antidepressants and that’s what made us better because I wasn’t getting meself depressed because I wasn’t the player I used to be.â€
I ask him what his latest addiction is.
‘Jelly beans. But I can’t die with that. I can’t die with jelly beans. I went from nine packets to three, so I’m working on that to get it to one.â€
Despite Gascoigne’s many failings, we continue to love him, though it has often been a close-run thing. When Sheryl was photographed with her face black and blue shortly after their wedding, it seemed he might lose the sympathy of the public for good.
In the book, Gascoigne deals with the domestic violence briefly and brutally. He doesn’t simply tell us he hit her, he admits he headbutted her and smashed her head on the floor. Time and again, Sheryl took him back. And so did we.
We searched out excuses for him — Gascoigne was daft as a brush (as Bobby Robson had said), he couldn’t help himself, he wasn’t malign. Gascoigne now says that it is the worst thing he ever did in his life.
Today, there are many middle-aged women queuing up to have their books autographed. They say they want to mother him, and you can see why. He exudes warmth and vulnerability.
‘There you go mate, cheers, all the best.†Everybody gets a thank-you wink and a handshake. —