Since the first edition of this book was published in 2009, Peter Mallinger, the Kettering Town chairman, who sold the club to Imraan Ladak, has sadly passed away. As those who read this book will be aware, he was at the heart of almost everything that happened during Paul Gascoigne’s brief time as manager and, because of that, it has been decided to leave the story as it was first told.
In Memory of Derek Waugh
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
1 1 GAZZA? YOU’RE HAVING A LAUGH!
2 2 FIT TO BE A MANAGER?
3 3 GAZZAMANIA!
4 4 I KNOW WHAT THEY’RE SAYING – AND I’LL PROVE THEM WRONG!
5 5 FULL-TIME PROFESSIONAL IN A PART-TIME WORLD
6 6 ALREADY FEELING THE STRAIN
7 7 PLAY LIKE YOU’RE WORLD CUP WINNERS!
8 8 RETURN TO THE DENTIST’S CHAIR
9 9 WHO WANTS A LAMBORGHINI?
10 10 THE DEATH OF GEORGE BEST
11 11 GASCOIGNE SACKED
12 12 GAZZA OR THE DOCTOR?
13 13 BREAKING DOWN … IN GAZZA’S OWN WORDS
14 14 MOORE’S NOT THE MERRIER
15 15 NO HAPPY RETURN FOR WILSON
16 16 THE STRANGE CASE OF RYAN-ZICO BLACK
17 17 ‘I’LL GET YOU ROBBIE WILLIAMS’
18 18 GASCOIGNE’S HIGH PRICE OF FAME
19 KEY DATES
PRAISE FOR 39 DAYS OF GAZZA
Copyright
SHORTLY before midday on 24 September 2005, on a typical Saturday at The Beeswing public house in Kettering, Jim Wykes, the landlord, did what he always does at that time. He left his staff to welcome the lunchtime crowd and climbed the stairs to his private quarters to make himself a bacon buttie and put his feet up. It was ‘landlord’s hour’, and he was only to be disturbed if his sister had nipped over from Melbourne to ask for him. As he hadn’t seen her for 40 years, he didn’t think that too likely.
Wykes hadn’t even got the bacon into the frying pan when he got a call from his barman, Ryan Wilson, summoning him back down to the bar of his recently refurbished pub. ‘Has my long-lost sister turned up?’ he demanded.
‘Better than that,’ came the reply. ‘It’s Paul Gascoigne and Jimmy Five Bellies.’
Wykes, a keen football fan, told Wilson to stop winding him up. Gascoigne was the greatest English footballer of his generation, a huge celebrity who was always in the newspapers for one reason or another. Why would the hero of Italia ’90 and Euro ’96 be in his pub, a stone’s throw from the Rockingham Road home of the non-League football club Kettering Town? But Wilson was adamant it was Gazza.
‘I said, “Leave me alone, my bacon’s on,”’ Wykes recalls. ‘I told him they would be lookalikes, that there’d be some sort of competition on in Kettering that afternoon.’
‘I’m telling you, Gazza and Five Bellies are sat in your bar watching telly,’ Wilson insisted.
Curiosity got the better of the landlord, who went downstairs to see whether he was having his leg pulled. Wykes could only see the back of the two men’s heads as they sat facing the large TV screen in the corner. Still sceptical, he stepped out from behind his bar and walked around to stand in front of the pair. All doubts were instantly washed away.
A big man, Wykes knelt down on one knee in front of Gascoigne, who was sitting in a comfy lounge chair. Before he could speak, Gascoigne said to him in his thick Geordie accent, ‘You’re not proposing to me, are you?’
Wykes laughed, stood up and asked Gascoigne what he was doing in his pub.
‘It’s all a bit hush-hush, but you’ll find out soon enough,’ was the reply.
The doors had only just opened and there was only one other person in the bar. ‘Leave the lad alone,’ Wykes was told.
‘But this is Gazza,’ he replied. ‘He’s a legend.’
While they spoke, his barman began texting friends to tell them of the celebrity in their midst. They dashed to the pub, saw Gascoigne for themselves and began texting their mates. In a rural market town the size of Kettering news travels quickly, and within 20 minutes the pub was packed with people eager to catch a glimpse of Gascoigne, many clutching their copies of his autobiography, England replica shirts and football programmes for him to sign. Failing that, they grabbed beer mats or simply held out their arm for Gazza to scribble on.
‘My daughter’s boyfriend told me he was in The Beeswing,’ remembers Chris Smith-Haynes, a Conservative councillor for the Kettering Borough Council ward which included Rockingham Road. ‘I thought he was talking rubbish.’
On arrival, Gascoigne’s close friend, Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’ Gardner, had ordered a soft drink for himself and a pint of cider for Gascoigne, and, before the pub became swamped, he asked for another cider and a large glass of white wine. ‘On the house,’ said Wykes, who had to pinch himself to be sure that he was buying a drink for a footballer he had idolised at his peak a decade earlier.
The Beeswing is a large pub, and the rapidly growing crowd began to visibly concern Gascoigne. His mood, chilled on arrival, appeared to darken. ‘He was quite happy to sign the autographs at first but when it got too busy he got a bit agitated,’ says Wykes. ‘He saw all these people piling in and thought any minute the press was going to arrive. Jimmy Five Bellies was asking people to give him some space. He didn’t look comfortable.’
Wykes had welcomed the odd celebrity to his pub before, and photos of ex-royal butler and I’m A Celebrity… star Paul Burrell as well as former EastEnders actor Gary Beadle were on display behind his bar. He asked Gascoigne if he would make it a hat-trick. ‘I said to him, “Before you go, my wife would like a picture of you behind the bar with her.” He sneered at me, he didn’t like that at all. He didn’t say anything but just gave me a look that said “no”. The way he looked at me, I knew not to push it. He didn’t want to be pictured behind a bar.’
It was hardly surprising. With his time as the talisman of English football becoming no more than a memory, Gascoigne had been fighting a long-running and frequently unsuccessful battle against alcoholism and hated the press for the way they had regularly caught him out. Pictures and stories of Gascoigne’s drunken escapades were good sellers for the tabloids, and there was no shortage of paparazzi looking to make a few quid for a shot of Gazza with a drink in his hand or staggering out of a nightclub. Gascoigne knew only too well that a photo of him behind a bar, however innocent, could end up embarrassing him in a red-top.
Sadly, Gascoigne had fallen off the wagon so many times since first checking into a drying-out clinic seven years earlier that a picture of him drinking was no longer a surprise. But he had been worshipped by a generation of England football fans and, in a celebrity-obsessed age, he could still shift newspapers. Unfortunately, in the years leading up to his arrival in Kettering, it was nearly always for the wrong reasons: drink, drugs, wife-beating, divorce and a whole host of addictions and personality disorders. When he did make the papers for footballing matters, it was normally only because things had gone wrong yet again.
Everybody queuing for their moment