Sometimes I write things feeling very clear-headed about where I’m going, but don’t often express myself in the way I wanted to. I rely on the readers to keep me right when I do that, and so for those who’ve asked, and pointed some stuff out, thanks.
This one is for you, and I welcome the chance to expand on my original point about the character of Paul Gascoigne.
Because there’s something I should have made clear; I am not writing about him at all.
I’m writing about his alter-ego, the one they call Gazza.
I know people who have experienced – and are experiencing – mental health issues.
I know people who suffer from alcoholism.
I worked briefly in the social care sector, but it goes beyond that.
I am socialist and a humanitarian.
Those who know me know I would never make light of those things or dismiss them in any way. The trouble is, I’m a guy who writes a blog and for the most part that’s as much as anyone out there does know. I don’t put my own personal experiences in these articles unless they are relevant; I am not the story.
But because of that remove it’s easy to misunderstand my intentions, or my views, and for that reason I am always happy to clarify them and explain. If I offended some people earlier that was certainly not my intention.
I would say they misread me, but perhaps the simpler truth is that I just didn’t explain what I was thinking clearly enough.
Allow me to try right now.
I’ve written before about the dilemmas professional footballers face. I wrote last month about how Brendan has sought to guide our young players into good habits, into looking after themselves, into handling the spotlight and the attention and the money. Not everyone has the benefit of that kind of guidance. The game is littered with ruined careers and lives. The dark underbelly of football has long been recognised, but rarely properly explored.
I feel for every one of them.
But Paul Gascoigne isn’t one of them, not really.
This guy was the architect of his own destruction. He didn’t fight his demons. He fed them.
And one of the clubs he played for – and we know which one I mean – fed them too.
This guy never was a role model. He never was a model pro.
Gascoigne has many issues. But none was ever bigger than the one he created himself, the one he and the rest of the world refers to as Gazza, the monstrous alter-ego he crafted so he could behave like a yob, so he could offend who he pleased, so he could do as he liked.
No footballer, no person in the public eye in the UK, ever so carefully plotted his own route to destruction.
Throughout his life he had people trying to steer him onto the path of self-preservation.
Time and again he personally chose the one of self-abuse.
This isn’t about his alcoholism. That’s a disease, and it’s not about willpower and it is not about IQ. Go to an AA meeting. I’ve done it, I’ve been there, with a friend. It’s one of the very few settings in which you’ll find high fliers sitting in the same room and with the same emotional experience as those at the very bottom of the heap. The people at those meetings all know what real bottom looks like. They can all tell stories that would rend your heart.
Gascoigne grew up with tragedy. He was always prone to depression.
There are elements of his story which are tragic.
But many people have experienced the same sort of start in life. A lot of them found redemption in music, in art, in self-expression of one sort or another without going off the rails completely. At some point they got on top of it.
We can trace some of his demons to those which plagued him throughout his life, but not all.
In fact, I find that his defenders often use those experiences as a convenient shield against other stuff, the stuff that is just plain wrong, that just defies excuse.
On his final game as a Spurs player – an FA Cup Final – he was carried off on a stretcher after a spectacularly brutal challenge on Notts Forest player Gary Charles, which resulted in him fracturing his own cruciate ligament. It was a monstrous act, one that would have ended his game whether he’d hurt himself or not, and which might well have ended Charles’ career with it.
In the aftermath the focus was not on the vicious nature of the incident but on what it might mean for his big move to Italy.
His life has been one long story of people missing the point.
That move was long delayed; whilst he was in recovery for his broken leg he injured it again whilst out getting plastered in a Newcastle nightclub. The points in his career where he took seriously things like professionalism, self-discipline and fitness were few and far between.
Someone with less talent would never have been tolerated.
Moving to a foreign land, and exposure to a new culture, should have been the makings of him. Instead he treated life there with almost cavalier disrespect. It was around that time when he crafted Gazza, the persona that was to haunt him forevermore. In the parlance of psychoanalysis Gascoigne is what’s known as “an addictive personality.” No narcotic was ever quite so heady as when he started shooting up with himself.
On his first meeting with the owner of his new club he greeted the Lazio chairman in his native Italian; anyone who’s ever heard Gascoigne speak knows he’s barely got the intellect of a soldier ant. When Newcastle’s chairman Stan Seymour described him as “George Best without brains” he meant it literally. So he had to have worked on that greeting for a while to make sure he had it just right. And what was his message to his new boss?
“Tua figlia, grande tette.”
Which is simply translated as “Your daughter has big tits.”
That’s not the behaviour of someone emotionally damaged. It’s the behaviour of a lout, pure and simple.
It’s a calculated, wilful, insult.
And so it went on for his time there. Gazza. One of the lads. Playing the role. Acting the fool.
And the fool swallowed him whole, as was wholly predictable. Before long the alter-ego had swollen so much that it simply engulfed him. The Italian media couldn’t stand him. They thought he was the personification of English yob culture, and he hated them right back. He assaulted a couple of them. He famously belched into a microphone. He behaved at all times like their very worst perception of him. He revelled in being offensive.
He enjoyed his notoriety.
If it wasn’t walking around wearing fake breasts, the infamous Hong Kong session or the numerous acts of thuggery on the pitch it was the atrocities he committed against his ex-wife off of it. He blames his depression for those things now; other people suffer depression without turning into an animal. Egotism, and an inescapable sense of “having the right” is all that’s needed to make a man lay his hands on a woman. Everything else is an excuse.
And what excuse do his defenders offer for his racism and the numerous acts of it for which he’s been charged?
One of those was against his own bodyguard and you have to marvel at the kind of low-life who would racially abuse the person who is paid to protect him. Or maybe you don’t. That kind of person is all too easy to understand.
It was by no means an isolated incident.
Which is to say nothing for the latent sectarianism he embraced, wholly, at Ibrox whilst playing for Rangers, a club which did more to push him down his current road than anywhere else, regardless of what some might say in their own defence now.
The whole culture of the club was toxic to someone like him; aside from the whole “steeped in the West of Scotland and Ulster” aspect, bad enough on its own, there was a heavy duty emphasis on “the team that drinks together wins together” and all that outdated 1980’s cobblers in which Smith and his cohort put such great store.
Smith now says he started to worry about the player’s drinking eventually.
At what point?
When it started affecting team selection maybe.
Before that “Gazza” was the life and soul of every party, as many in the ranks of the club have confirmed since. Their own concern for his wellbeing can be measured against the guilt they all have to feel for channelling the monster the way they did.
It makes me laugh to hear how that club “tried to help him.”
Gazza the prankster scaled the heights of absurdity during that time too; I wonder if they feel even a pang of remorse now when they laugh about how they indulged that side of his personality? Did they ever stop to wonder if it was a good idea?
Today someone suggested that I “get a grip” because I referenced his notorious flute-playing.
I was told that was a team-mate at the wind up, something he bumbled into innocently, not understanding the magnitude of if or the implications. The first time, maybe. But he did it twice in front of our fans and continues to do it when in front of select audiences to this day.
He now knows exactly what it means and what its connotations are.
Of course, the irony of all this is that much of Scotland would feel the same sense of disdain for him that I feel if he hadn’t wound up at Ibrox, trying to save the last vestiges of a shredded career. Just pulling on that blue jersey covered a multitude of sins, and continued to allow his many, many, many negative qualities to be forgotten or ignored.
Had he washed up in England somewhere the media would have tolerated his indiscretions for about five minutes.
Here in Scotland, where he was the proverbial big fish in a small pond he got away with them for years.
And he still does.
That I have to explain myself at all here is just part of the proof of that. Some people know full well what I’m trying to say; they just don’t like me having a go at their hero. They have strange taste in idols. It makes you wonder who else they regard as role models.
My verdict on Gascoigne has nothing to do with the shambling wreck he’s become. It’s about what he is, and that’s nothing to do with his mental health issues or his addictions. His biggest problem has ever been Gazza, and he made that one himself.
Gazza is the jolly face he put on the unrepentant bigot and thug who’s always been there, just outside the public gaze.
Gazza is someone we can laugh at. Someone we can enjoy.
It was Gazza who cried the crocodile tears that made an entire country, desperate for a new footballing mythology, cling to him like a comfort blanket.
He wasn’t the first to fool large numbers of people with a public show of emotion.
Not the first to be misunderstood by giant swathes of the population for a show of sentimentality.
People forget that one of the marks of the anti-social personality is a profound sense of selfishness.
They know he cried for himself, but forgot what it means.
And that has followed him, somehow, in a way his noxious behaviour never has.
That was the first time the world realised that Gazza was someone it could pity and the pity party hasn’t stopped since except that it it’s all a fake, a great con job and it always was.
Gazza was a monster, and just last week he was on tour.
He wasn’t the first to realise you can fool some of the Peepul all of the time.
Not that some of them were fooled.
They know who he is.
He’s one of their own.