How NOT to be a Football Millionaire - Keith Gillespie My Autobiography (2 page)

1

Best Laid Plans

“WHERE did it all go wrong?”

Isn’t that what a hotel porter once said to George Best? I’ve been asked the same question more than once but, unlike George, I don’t have Miss World and stacks of cash lying next to me. It’s usually posed by a drunken stranger in far less glamorous surroundings.

I never spoke with George, even though his name is interwoven with my life. We shared a dressing room for Billy Bingham’s testimonial when I was a teenager, but shyness prevented me from saying hello. What would I have said anyway? “Hi, I’m Keith, I’m a winger from Northern Ireland who plays for Manchester United, and the newspapers say I’m going to be the next George Best.”

At Blackburn, the dressing room comedians christened me ‘Bestie’ all right, but that was more a reference to my roguish tendencies than the playing ability. The name stuck with me, up to and beyond George’s death in 2005.

I’ve led a colourful life. I doubt that anyone who crossed my path would describe me as a clean-living, model pro. I liked a drink, learned to smoke, and swear by an unhealthy diet. No veg, no eggs, nothing unfamiliar. Nutritionists tried to change that, prescribing a list of foods and giving me a chart to fill out my daily intake. After a couple of days, I ripped it up, and went back on the cheese and ham toasties. I couldn’t be arsed with all that hassle.

I’ve taken a single-minded approach to looking after my body and I insist to this day that it never caused any of my problems. I’m 38 now, and feeling good. I haven’t put on weight. At my peak, my body fat percentage was seven per cent. Today, it’s 10 per cent, well within the ideal range for an athlete.

Club doctors always thought I was a freak. My inability to put on the pounds no matter how I lived baffled them, and tormented less fortunate team-mates. I remember the reserve keeper at Newcastle, Mike Hooper, coming back for pre-season weighing 17 stone. The club put us on the scales every Friday so, in order to shed the pounds, Mike would spend early morning in the sauna and then run to training. On the bus home from away games, we’d stop for chicken and chips, and he’d sit there, looking at it, wanting it, but knowing it was wrong. I could eat a bucketload and report the next day to find I’d lost a pound.

Beer is a similar story. It’s no secret that I’ve always liked a night on the town. The strange thing is, I played the best football of my career when I drank the most. I was out three times a week in Newcastle, boozing as much if not more than the average bloke my age. In hindsight, not a wise move for a public figure. In my younger days, it led to rows, bad publicity, and, inevitably, amateur shrinks put two and two together and came up with the conclusion that I had a drink problem. Incorrect. Let’s make that clear early. Alcohol was the catalyst to mischief in town, but I seldom drank at home, and never needed it to get out of bed in the morning, nor will I in the future. I’ve read what alcoholism did to footballers like George and Paul McGrath, and I’m grateful to have avoided the affliction of that terrible disease.

This man was susceptible to other urges. They didn’t cost me my health, but they almost cost me everything else.

How much money did I blow? One afternoon, I sat in Phil’s apartment to figure it out, once and for all. It’s the closest I’ve come to therapy until I realised that I actually needed therapy.

He scribbled down my recollections, correcting me on a figure or two along the way.

Working out the bonuses was the hard part. The signing-on fees, the appearance money, the inducements. At Newcastle, we received £50,000 a head for coming second in the league, which was huge money in 1996.

By the time I moved onto Blackburn, the globalisation of the Premier League had inflated the wages and the incentives. We earned £1,500 per league point, so two wins on the trot could be worth an extra £9,000. And if you scored a few goals along the way, it helped.

So, the calculations took a while. Eventually, we reached a club by club consensus.

It went like this...

Manchester United £60,000

Newcastle United £1,102,000 [+£250,000 in bonuses]

Blackburn Rovers £3,510,000 [+£400,000 in bonuses]

Leicester City £1,050,000 [+£40,000 in bonuses]

Sheffield United £670,000 [+£75,000 in bonuses]

Bradford City £15,000

Glentoran £43,875

Total £7,215,875

A substantial amount of cash, eh? And that’s only a conservative sketch of the incomings. It doesn’t include boot deals, promotional appearances, Northern Ireland match fees, libel settlements, and all the other elements that come with the territory.

Not that the libel settlements could be classified as a perk of the trade. The £150,000 or so I’ve made from that avenue does not compensate for the loss of earnings from the negative publicity, particularly the episode in La Manga that etched a black mark next to my name. Without the media driven set-up that unjustly landed me in prison – we’ll deal with the details later – my total earnings might have reached the £10 million mark although, as my friends point out, I’d have probably blown the extra £2 million anyway.

I always tended to spend what I had in my possession. My relationship towards money probably mirrored my attitude towards life when the going was good. Impulsive, reckless, unthinking. When it came to real responsibilities, I always veered towards the ‘why do today what you can do tomorrow’ school of thought. The brain switched off.

With cash, there was no tomorrow. All that mattered was having enough for the next race, the next round, the next taxi home with the girl I just met ten minutes ago.

Gambling emptied my pockets, decimated the short-term cashflow. Truly, I haven’t a notion how much I squandered. There’s no way I can put a figure on it. Between all the lost afternoons in the bookies, the ill-advised phone bets, and the multitude of opened and closed accounts, there’s no coherent paper trail to reach a definite conclusion.

I didn’t gamble away all of my money, however. If only it was that straightforward. While I had an unbelievable ability to back the wrong horse, that poor judgement extended from the racetrack to the decisions I made in day-to-day life.

My savings were directed towards people that I shouldn’t have trusted. It was too late when I realised I’d done my money. My race was run. The taxman caught up far too easily.

This is my 2013. It’s leaving home in Bangor, County Down, on the north-east coast of Northern Ireland, at lunchtime, and embarking on a 149-kilometre journey to my place of work. Longford Town is a semi-professional club in the midlands of the Republic of Ireland, vying for promotion from the second tier, the graveyard of Irish football. A good home gate is 500 supporters, although our 4,000 all-seater stadium is above average for our division, a reminder of better times at the turn of the century when they won a few trophies.

I knew nothing of their existence when Phil mentioned them as I sought to rebuild after bankruptcy. Now, my football life revolves around this small, community club.

The straightforward route from Bangor to the City Calling Stadium takes me down a variety of country roads. Sometimes, I take the long way around to get some extra time on the motorway but, usually, I negotiate my way through the towns of Armagh, Monaghan and Cavan until I reach the N55 at Granard, which brings me into the county of Longford, just 30 minutes away from my destination. I arrive at the ground over two hours before kick-off, and head straight for the dressing room to change. At this level, we don’t have the budget to gather in a hotel for a pre-match meal before a home game. I’m expected to have eaten earlier in the day. Afterwards, a local pizza company might dispatch some of their produce to the ground, and I grab a slice before throwing the gearbag into the back seat, and starting on the return journey through the night.

I break my trips by making phone calls. On the way down, I’ll call my daughters, Madison and Lexie, who live in England with their mother. Madison, the eldest, is five and quick as a flash.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“But you know where I am, Daddy, I’m talking to you,” she’ll say.

After the match, I might call Phil to talk it over. I don’t know any footballer who can switch off after a game. If I’m lucky, I reach my house at 1.30am and then it takes me a couple of hours to shut down, although I know I’ll be woken by my baby son, Nico, when the sun comes up.

Before I put my head down, I remember to reach into my gearbag for the package I take with me everywhere and pour a glass of water from the tap. I pop a couple of green and gold Prozac tablets into my mouth and wash them down. This is my daily dose of medication, a regular routine when you suffer from depression. It’s a recent development, and a secret to all but a few people. Two and a half years of stress since the bankruptcy wore down the tough exterior, the shield of denial that I brought everywhere. I’ll be seeing a psychologist until they decide I don’t need these pills anymore.

I can always trust the body to look after itself, but will never be sure of the mind. The grind of driving alone for hours leaves it vulnerable to all sorts of thoughts. To shut them out, I mostly switch the car radio to Talksport, catching up on the news from the world I once inhabited. Craig Short, an old colleague of mine, said I was one of the most knowledgeable footballers he’d ever met. Most people would expect that statement to be followed by a punchline.

But I’ve always loved quiz shows. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, The Weakest Link, The Chase, Eggheads, whatever it may be. My idea of a good afternoon in the pub is sipping a pint and testing myself on the touch-screen brain teasers. My competitive instinct always drew me towards them. That’s why I still love the buzz of the Thursday night table quiz down the local with my brother-in-law and the gang. We take it seriously, and it bugs me when I can’t think of a fact that I should know.

When it came to my own affairs, however, I always pleaded ignorance to relevant questions for as long as possible. I preferred the distraction offered by useless information, the crucial distinction between intelligence and common sense.

I can recite all sorts of facts off the top of my head. I know that the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’ dated back to 1887, when the British Prime Minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury), was accused of nepotism for appointing his nephew to the position of Irish Chief Secretary, but I don’t know how a Premier League footballer, who considers himself to be a smart guy, managed to turn £8 million into nothing.

I wish I could adequately explain how he chose the wrong friends, failed in two marriages, and wound up in a Mental Health Assessment Centre, looking for solutions from a strange man in a white jacket.

So, back to the original question. Where did it go wrong?

Let me try and explain.

2

Having A Ball

FOOTBALL was my childhood. I grew up in a country ravaged by the violence of the Troubles and yet, long before my profession gave me a protective shell, I was unaffected by it. Some people don’t believe that could be possible in Northern Ireland, but it was my reality.

My Dad, Harry Gillespie, worked as a prison officer in the Maze, the notorious home for paramilitary prisoners, during the height of the violence. A year before he got the job there were hunger strikes; a year after there was a prison break where one of the other officers died. But he never took the stress from work home with him; it must be in our genes. Sitting down and revealing our deepest thoughts to our loved ones is the last thing the Gillespie men are likely to do. Instead, we just try and block it out and move on to the next day. I think my Dad wanted his kids to have as normal a childhood as possible and I appreciate why he did that. I’ve no doubt that he encountered some terrifying people, but we barely talked about the pictures that were on the evening news every night.

It helped that Bangor, a wealthy Protestant town, largely escaped the unrest. There were a few incidents in the early ’70s, long before we moved there, but while other parts of Northern Ireland constantly suffered, I led an idyllic existence by comparison. At least that’s how I remember it anyway. We were 13 miles from Belfast and one day a bomb went off with such force that we felt the reverberations in our kitchen. Truthfully, I couldn’t tell you when that happened. I could look it up and pretend I remembered every second, and suggest that it had a huge impact on me. But that wouldn’t be honest. I occupied my own, happy world, aware of bad things without really paying too much attention. Sure, security checks were a way of life, and I knew I had to be careful on my trips to Belfast. Yet, I was born into that environment, so this was normal. I never knew any different.

I spent my early years in Islandmagee, a quiet peninsula seven miles from Larne, a seaport on the east coast of Northern Ireland. Dad is from Larne. My mother, Beatrice Thornberry, hails from Kilrea in County Derry. When I was born on February 18, 1975, I already had a two-year-old sister, Angela. Three years later, Heather arrived.

Both my parents came from the Protestant community. Mum’s father, Robert Thornberry, was in the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and moved around a lot with his job. She lived on the same street in Kilrea as a budding Catholic footballer, a young Martin O’Neill. They weren’t friends, although I remember my grandad speaking a lot about the O’Neill family – especially after the 1982 World Cup when, against all the odds, Billy Bingham took our wee country to the finals in Spain, with Mum’s old neighbour right at the heart of it.

That tournament is my first vivid football memory. Before that, Dad watched football on Sunday afternoons and I used to cry because I wanted the Muppet Show so we had to rotate on a week to week basis until, all of a sudden, I tired of Kermit and wanted the football instead.

Dad was a Manchester United fan, going right back to his memories of the coverage of the Munich air disaster and the Busby Babes. Then, George Best came along and the connection between Northern Ireland and Old Trafford was strengthened. Dad passed his love for United onto me and Norman Whiteside, a 17-year-old from Belfast, became my hero in the summer of ’82. He became the youngest player to feature in a World Cup, and I was captivated by him.

They were a magic couple of weeks. The win over Spain is the abiding memory. I can picture the goal clearly, with Billy Hamilton charging down the right wing and crossing, their goalkeeper Luis Arconada half clearing, and Gerry Armstrong smashing home the loose ball. Mum was in the kitchen and smacked her head on a cupboard door as she rushed to find out the cause of the big cheer from the living room.

We lived in a two-storey house, the last of a row in a working-class estate, a blessing as we had a big grass area next to us with a football pitch. On those long summer evenings, I ran around imagining that I was Whiteside, flying down the wing, dodging tackles. Dreaming that one day it would be me.

I collected my first goal bonus when I was eight. The occasion was my first 11-a-side for Rathmore Primary School, and I banged in a hat-trick. Dad had promised me 20p for every goal.

Football gave me an identity in my new school. Moving to Bangor was hardly a big switch; two of Mum’s brothers lived within six miles and her parents eventually moved there. Dad’s family in Larne were only 18 miles away. So I found settling quite straightforward, although my favourite sport helped a lot. While Dad had togged out at a high enough amateur level, there was no real football pedigree in our family. It turned out I was quite decent at it. I entered Rathmore at P4 level – P7 was the oldest – and I was instantly promoted to the school team. The teachers spotted me in the playground. Like any kid, I loved getting the ball and trying to dribble around others, and I seemed to have more success than most. I didn’t know how good I was, but I copped that getting put in with lads three years older than me was a compliment.

It also introduced me to a lifelong friend, Jim Allen, who would later act as best man at my second wedding. He was in P6 and his back garden leaned onto the school grounds. Our house was nearby and I spent most evenings kicking the ball about with Jim and the other lads from the area. We’ve been best mates since. Jim has always looked out for me. There was a dark alley that linked our estates and, at night, when we finished playing, Jim would stand at his end and watch me sprint down it just to be sure that I made it to the other side safely. Through the years, I’ve trusted people that I shouldn’t have, but Jim never let me down.

Our team started winning games and I was picked to play for our district. Soon, I was playing wherever I could, even with the Boys Brigade, effectively a Northern Irish version of the boy scouts, who only offered one thing that I was really interested in. My Dad and his friend Morris McCullough started a team called Bangor West, and started entering lads from our age group in tournaments. Even though we were basically formed from nothing, we went to Belfast and won the Northern Ireland Indoor Championships. They said I was the star player, but I didn’t really think about that. As in later life, I tried not to think too hard about anything. All I wanted was to get the ball, and enjoy myself.

By the time I turned 12, teams from Bangor and beyond were regularly approaching Dad to ask about my availability. Joe Kincaid, a scout for Glasgow Rangers, came forward with the most attractive offer. He was part of a group that had set up a schoolboy team in Belfast called St Andrews. Joe knew where the best young players in the country were, and wanted to bring them together. I agreed to come on board, and linked up with a group of lads that would dominate the local scene all the way to U-14 level. It was the perfect way to get noticed.

One weekend, Dad was standing on the sideline watching us rack up another win when a guy sidled over and introduced himself as Eddie Coulter, a scout for Manchester United. He asked Dad if I would be interested in coming along to the Manchester United School of Excellence – a group of 16 to 20 players from Northern Ireland who trained together in Belfast every Wednesday night. It was a no-brainer – I think Dad was more excited than I was.

When I turned 13, Joe fixed me up with a week at Rangers, where I did enough to be asked back, but I eventually said no to that offer. That’s because I spent the following week at Manchester United. No other club mattered.

The climax of my week in Manchester was the moment when Alex Ferguson called me into his office. I was terrified. It was during the school holidays so there were loads of us there trying to impress, plenty of games for the coaches to look at.

The first team were knocking around the place and I got to meet Norman Whiteside and have a treasured photo taken. But the most exciting part was looking over in the middle of a match to see the manager of the club standing on the sideline. Back then, Fergie was under pressure, with a winning reputation from Scotland that had failed to immediately translate to his new job. That didn’t bother me. All I knew was that the manager of Manchester United was looking at me play, so I’d better do something.

He had watched me before, a specially arranged match involving the lads in the School of Excellence. I’d met him, and posed for a pic, but this was a completely different scenario. I was surrounded by top kids from around the UK, all of whom had the same ambitions. I concentrated hard. And I felt I was doing well. Dodging the tackles, scoring goals. Just like the Rathmore playground.

Still, when the week ended, and everyone was sat in a canteen waiting to go into the manager’s office for an assessment, nerves crept in. Part of me couldn’t believe that the first-team boss would have time to speak with every kid on trial, but he was very much involved. And the first thing that struck me was that he knew everybody’s name.

“Come in, Keith,” he said, with that familiar Glaswegian twang, as I gingerly pushed open the door after my name was called. He continued speaking, but the words were going over my head. All I wanted was the verdict. “You’ve done really well,” he declared, “And we want you to come back.” I walked out feeling ten foot tall, and desperate to tell everybody the news.

The process sped up from there. Eddie, a lovely man who sadly passed away in 2011, arrived at my house with a pre-contract agreement and a pen. Then, I was flown over with my folks for a game with Middlesbrough, where they gave us the red carpet treatment. The night before, Fergie and his wife Cathy came to our hotel to have dinner. That was intimidating. I can’t imagine what it was like for my Dad, a lifelong Manchester United fan, but the grown-ups seemed to get on well and chat politely. I just tried to mind my manners and say very little. I can’t even remember too much of what the conversation was about. What I do recall is Fergie reaching into his pocket at the end of the meal and producing a crisp £20 note for the waitress. I’d never seen a tip like that before. We knew that by coming out with us, he was obviously making a big effort and when Dad mentioned that we liked to go and watch Northern Ireland in Windsor Park, he promised to sort us tickets for the next home game. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need,” he stressed.

The following day, he allowed me into the dressing room before the match, and I was introduced to the rest of the players. Maybe new recruits were brought in all the time but, to this bright-eyed kid, it was the biggest thing in the world. Bryan Robson scored the winning goal, and I went home awestruck by the experience.

Concentrating in school on Monday morning was that little bit harder.