Arsenal legend opens up on his battles with alcohol & addictions faced by stars

Tony Adams is sitting at the head of a table in a downstairs room at a townhouse in Marylebone. He is wearing a purple suit and a white shirt. The man looks dapper. He looks flamboyant. He looks happy. He looks well.

He will be 60 later this year. He says he has decided against a big party with former team-mates and older friends and family. He has decided against razzamatazz. Instead, he is opting for a night with a dozen people who have played different roles in his road to recovery from alcoholism.

Because this year is not just his 60th. On August 16th, it’s his 30th, too. It is 30 years since he announced he was an alcoholic. It is 30 years since he went on a 44-day bender after England were knocked out of Euro 96. It is 30 years since he started to get his life back.

Adams does not mince his words when he talks about the havoc that his addiction wrought upon his body and his life so he talks about his anniversary in stark terms. ‘I'm really proud that I've not pissed the bed for 30 years, guys,’ he says. ‘I'm incredibly proud.’

Adams, captain of Arsenal under George Graham and Arsene Wenger, and Terry Venables’ England skipper during Euro 96, has released a book to commemorate the anniversary and act as a celebration of recovery, too.

Titled ‘1996’, it is written with the help of his friend and long-time collaborator, Ian Ridley, who first documented his struggles in their seminal book about the hidden life of one of Arsenal’s greatest ever heroes, Addicted.

But when Adams talks about addiction in modern sport, he knows that times have changed. He knows what is happening out there because of the work done by his Sporting Chance Clinic and his Six support network that provides help for mental health and addiction issues.

There are some sportsmen and women still in thrall to alcoholism but the landscape of addiction now is dominated by athletes who have become dependent on prescription pain-killers and players who are hooked on gambling.

In the States, the former NBA player Rex Chapman wrote a confessional book of his own about being brought low by a crippling addiction to the opioids Vicodin and OxyContin, as well as a destructive gambling habit, and Adams sees the same things happening in the UK.

‘We’ve seen that Tramadol has become an issue with rugby players, right,’ Adams says. ‘We’ve had a couple of suicides recently. There have been issues with jockeys and a young footballer, all Sporting Chance clients.

‘The figures are still on the rise, you know. It’s the new generation. It's like all this awareness, everyone coming forward, starting to talk about this stuff, and we just haven’t got the resources to deal with it.’

So what does Adams see when he looks at Tiger Woods, for instance? What does he see when he reads about a great sportsman involved in a series of car accidents where a common link appears to be a reliance on medication to ease the chronic pain caused by a succession of back surgeries?

‘I see an addict,’ Adams says. ‘I mean, to be completely honest with you. And if he wants to come to my rehab, then, there's a place in the room. If he wants to change, make a change… There’s a man that… are we indulging him? I think people are starting to say: “Look, you’ve got a problem here.”

‘I think more of those people are needed. What I did, I kind of avoided everyone that told me. The Lee Dixons of this world were kind of going: “Tone, what the **** are you doing?’ And I was like: “You’re a bit weird.” And Martin Keown might say something and I’d go: “Martin’s a bit strange.”

‘You kind of ignore people or get rid of them, because you don’t want to have a look at yourself. So, he doesn’t really want a look at himself. And if I was speaking to him, and I do know someone out of that neck of the woods, I’d be just saying: “Do you want to have a shower?”’

Taking a shower, presumably, means getting clean but Adams knows that significant obstacles are still placed in the way of footballers trying to deal with addictions to painkillers and gambling.

‘What’s happening here is that they've changed their drug of choice,’ Adams says. ‘Gambling is an epidemic, you know, within football and society. Okay, you can have your sponsorship in football, but every 14 seconds on television, there’s an advert for a gambling company. I’d stop the advertising and I’d say there should be a three-to-five-year plan for ending gambling-related sponsorship.

‘When you see the adverts that say “this is a protection warning” and “gamble responsibly”, all the addict sees is “gamble”. It’s like when you tell kids not to run. They run. They’re legging it down the road. To a gambling addict, they see an advert that says “gamble responsibly” and they think “I’m going to have a bet”.

‘As for the idea of free bets, it’s like saying to me: “Go on, have a drink, Tony, this one's on the house. Come on, have a line, there's a bit of coke. Go on, son.” Yep. It's the same as that. Have a free bet.

‘It's becoming insidious. It's mental, you know, I always give the example of a breathalyser. You can't see if someone is three times over the gambling limit. You know what I mean? You can't. There's no signs. It’s really difficult to detect.’

Adams’ own problems, he says, were partly bred in the bone and he reveals in ‘1996’ that his son from his first marriage, Oliver, also developed an addiction to booze and is now also a recovering alcoholic.

‘My grandfather was a really serious drunk, angry, used to go down the pub and come home, and, you know, had a bunch of keys on the table,’ Adams says. ‘If you'd said a word, they’d end up in your face.

‘So what do you do? You go inside, don't you, when you’ve got rage around the place. As a small child, I had panic attacks at school. I didn't come home and say: “Hi, dad. I had a panic attack.” He was on the docks when he was 12. He'd be like: “What are you talking about, son?” You know “get a job, get a real life”.

‘I'm not blaming them. It's just that it's a fact. It's just the way that they were brought up. I got all the wrong messaging, that I was to toughen up and suppress, suppress, suppress. And I think that's where my problems came from, and I realised football did that for me. It suppressed.

‘It suppressed until I put everything down, and then started to work through the fear and the self-loathing and stuff, and that was a long journey, six years, first six years of recovery, you know, lived on my own. And got to know myself warts and all, and realised that I've still got a big nose, but it's okay to have big nose.

‘As far as my son goes, when I was drinking, I was kind of killing myself but when you're watching someone that you love self-destruct over 10 or 12 years, it's one of the most gut-wrenching, emotional things that I've ever done.

‘He flew out to China in 2018 when I was there, and I opened up a little bit, started to tell him about a few things what I did. He couldn't identify with any of it. He went: “I don't know what you're talking about”.

‘And then he came to me, April 23, St. George's Day, a couple of years back and said, “Dad, I'm f*****. I'm done.” So I took him to a meeting and introduced him to a sponsor. And he wanted it. And it’ll be three years in July that he’s been clean.

‘He’s moved to Portugal and he’s set up an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on the beach every Saturday. He set up a new meeting. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.’

Adams’ old team, of course, are jousting with Manchester City to try to secure their first league title for 22 years and Adams wonders whether his struggles with alcoholism in the 90s contributed to a previous period of drought for the club, when they went from 1991 to 1998 without winning the championship.

‘You're only as sick as your secrets,’ Adams says, ‘and when I went to the guys in 1996 and told them, they went: “Well, we've been telling you that for the last couple of years, you’ve become a running joke.” We won the league in 91 and then we didn’t win it again until I sobered up.

‘A lot of the lads were drinking heavily with me and then suddenly there were three of us in recovery. Until then, we were drinking and drinking and I got them all divorced. They were so pleased when I sobered up.’

So Adams will have a 30th anniversary celebration this year on August 16 and the release of his book counts as part of the festivities. ‘It's a celebration of recovery,’ Adams says. ‘And it's hope, and it's someone that's living a fantastic life because he's got recovery.

‘It was such a pivotal year for me. I changed from this character, this bully, this captain, with the mask on, and then all of a sudden I'm meditating, and dropping pearls of wisdom to the other lads from religious books and stuff and they're like… ”Jesus”.

'I think this will be the end. There’s no need for any more writing now. As a guy, I’m going to go into the sunset and live a fantastic life. But I thought it would be good to document it. The people who read it will be the people who need it. There’s no ego in this book. It’s what happened to a man. It’s the year that changed my life. So celebrate it – we’re living free now.’

1996: Reflections on the year that changed my life by Tony Adams with Ian Ridley is published by Floodlit Dreams in paperback, £11.99 and in hardback exclusively at http://www.floodlitdreams.com, £14.99.