nation of youngsters into a frenzied bunch of partygoers. One small tablet would let you forget all your worries, love a complete stranger and dance like a prat. The fact that it could also quite possibly kill you was less talked about. They say (it’s ‘they’ again!) ‘you should try everything once’ but I’m not sure about ‘everything’.
During this season, the fact that my brother Mark had returned abruptly from Liverpool University may have encouraged more nights out than usual. With his return came a new circle of friends, older and wilder than mine. Mark had left for university a quiet and unassuming lad, but hell did he return ready to party. He had morphed into Liam Gallagher, but more aggressive, he was drinking like a fish and was as clued up about gear as Shaun Ryder. I could and should have said no to the endless nights out, but I didn’t, I just gave it the large one and went with it. I suppose there was a bit of peer pressure, but it was definitely weakness on my part. Were I to try to psychoanalyse my behaviour, it was probably a replacement for the thing I felt was missing in my life, regular first team football. I am both disappointed and philosophical about that era in my life, and even though I know I was young and impressionable, as we all have been, I still find it hard to recount some of those memories, because I do feel that my lifestyle off the field cost me a fair bit on it. They say that you only learn from your mistakes though, and I certainly bloody well did that!
I know both Mark and I look back with regret, but him more so than me, as it is only now, after a lot of soul searching, broken relationships and unfulfilling jobs, that he is finally living up to his own expectations. He is currently doing a law degree at the tender age of thirty-eight. In that time I have moved fifteen times, played for ten clubs, got married, and had three children, so perhaps moving away from the area did me good after all!
Even with the nights out and the drinking, I still maintained some focus on football. Incredibly, I would get home after a night out, and go for a run around the local streets, more often than not still in my going out clothes. My mentality was that this would then rid my body of the drink. I would also have a huge glass of water, as if the combination of both acts would somehow help cancel out alcohol consumption.
If our group of lads hadn’t gone out drinking or clubbing, we would sometimes take a drive out into the country where the lads would take an exotic cocktail of mind-bending substances (this was at a time when LSD would cost a fiver). I was the only one with a car, so I could probably see the madness more clearly as I had to be ‘with it’, they didn’t. It all seems like total and utter madness now. I would wholly discourage dabbling in any of these death-risking, career-wrecking vices, and I’m sure some of my old mates would agree. That is, if they are still compos mentis.
Some of our mates spiralled so far out of control that even heroin became a feature of their lives, which is surely the worst possible sign that they had completely lost the plot. I know drugs are rife in a lot of towns and cities across the country, but at that time, and particularly in our area, drugs seemed to be a huge problem. And I’m not sure if you can justify the lads’ behaviour by citing the circumstances they were in – as far as I could tell, they seemed to have decent family upbringings. However, whichever way I look at it now, everybody in our group of lads seemed to be intent on pressing their self-destruct button.
Was it bad luck that led to this? Probably not. Was it bad judgement? Maybe. One of us would manage to get into a fight or do something stupid with almost certain regularity – I lost count of the amount of brand new Ted Baker shirts I ruined after scuffles!
The best example I can give of the lads’ behaviour is that of big Sam Capes. He was the ‘big man’ of the group, to us a gentle giant really, but to everybody else the lad who was always known as the hardest kid around town. Sam loved his motorbikes and, boy, would he push the boundaries. I always had fast cars, and I took some pretty stupid risks at times but Sam was in a different league. He would pull a wheelie at eighty miles an hour and laugh about it; he would fly past us on country roads like Barry Sheene. My brother has had the misfortune of being on the back of Sam’s bike at one hundred and sixty miles an hour. That might sound unbelievable, but the bike could go even faster than that, and my brother’s testament to the story is enough. My brother said he was actually relieved when the police pulled them over for speeding. Sam just chuckled and asked one of the policemen how much he had left in the car, to which the officer replied, ‘Nothing, you were pulling away at a fair rate of knots.’
Sam laughed again and said, ‘Bloody hell! I knew I should have carried on.’
Mark, on the other hand, was just delighted that the ordeal was over. Sam got a ban but he was soon back on the bike.
Off the bike, he was also as brave as a lion and would fight anyone. The problem for Sam was that, when you are pushing things to the limit, something usually has to give.
The bike cost him first. He fell off at over a hundred miles an hour, and with another friend of ours, Garry Soper – Gaz – on the back. As Sam lost control of the bike that sunny afternoon, Gaz flew off into the side of the road and into a bush, and although he was pretty smashed up, he was fairly lucky. Sam on the other hand slid across the tarmac for around a hundred yards, slicing his arms and legs up as he went. Gaz crawled out onto the road after the accident, to find that Sam had managed to walk back to check if he was OK, before collapsing. This was no mean feat, considering the injuries he had. Sam ended up having to have his fingers pinned, he had to have a fair amount of skin grafts, and suffered a pretty horrendous leg injury.
We went to see Sam in hospital afterwards and in his typical fashion he just laughed it off. Six months after that incident, and after a further lads’ night out had escalated into a full-on fight with another group of lads, Sam suffered another serious injury. He had been bundled, pretty aggressively, into the back of a riot van (usually used more to calm things down than anything more serious). I escaped the honour of being thrown into the van that night as the main officer in charge was a local police chief who knew me, and knew the consequences of me being in trouble – thanks again, Doug!
In the scuffle, Sam had his finger bent back, and although he had complained to the officers on duty that night about the pain and the swelling nothing was done. To cut a long story short, and to sum up the madness and sadness of that time, Sam got gangrene in his finger and ended up losing it few days later. This was a man mountain of a lad, who ended up pretty much broken, all in the space of six months. It is not what was meant for Sam, that I am sure of. I know we were all young and full of bravado and confidence, but his accidents exemplified the lifestyle everybody was leading.
Nowadays, if I returned to my old haunts and walked into Willy’s Wine Bar I would probably see the same old faces. I would almost certainly see my old mate, Gaz. Gaz and I were thick as thieves back then. I had a lot of time on my hands and so did he. He was another fit young lad, also on a mission to drink and party hard. When he was about fourteen, on Christmas Day, his mum had walked out on the family, never to return. I think this had a profound effect on him, as ever since then he too seems to have had one finger on the self-destruct button. However, one incident in particular was severe enough to shock even him. His party piece at Willy’s Wine Bar, every New Year’s Eve, was to swan dive from the upper floor window down to his adoring public outside. Yes, you have guessed it, on one New Year’s Eve, the adoring public forgot to catch him. Gaz fell straight onto the pavement. He survived, but it was a very lucky escape, and Gaz has now stopped doing that particular stunt – I think! As a further indication of the kind of events that occurred around then, one of the other lads in our group was involved in a hit and run which nearly killed him (he was hit), and another’s flat nearly burnt down. It was certainly a pretty crazy time.
In those days football clubs did not give advice on or about drugs, nor was there any drug testing. At Grimsby Town, after a home game I had played in, I went to the toilets which were outside the players’ bar, only to see one of the opposition’s players puffing away on a big old reefer. And he went on to play for England many times – if I’d known
