Gazza, the Clown Prince
By Tom Dunmore • Feb 21st, 2008 • Category: World Football Culture • 4 responses
Given the news today that Paul Gascoigne has been sectioned — detained under the Mental Health Act at the Hilton Hotel, following a further string of bizarre behaviour — a further sad tinge of poignancy is added to all those old photos of Gazza clowning about, and those memories of his magic on the pitch.
We always knew, of course, that he wasn’t “normal”. The tantrums, the tears, the typical clown-trait of guising his misery in ever more bizarre jokes and comic behaviour fooled few as the joke wore off in the 1990s, at the same time his play on the pitch lurched erratically.
The story of his rise and fall has already been told in Ian Hamilton’s brilliant book, Gazza Agonistes, in which the author asks, “Perhaps this hero was never really meant to be heroic? Maybe there was something in his personality that ran counter to the fantasies his soccer gifts induced? Was Gazza actually ‘ill-fated’?”
Let’s remember, now, that Gascoigne was once almost the world’s best footballer — and perhaps he was, for brief moments here and there from 1989 to 1991. He was the man who relaunched interest in English football to the stratosphere it’s in today.
For those of my generation, he was our first footballing hero: after the debacle of Euro ‘88, the tragedies of Heysel and Hillsborough and English football’s exclusion from Europe, his performance at Italia ‘90 reconnected us to the global game.
Gascoigne’s abilities as a football marked him out as distinctly alien to the English game. Josez Venglos summed it up perfectly after Gascoigne tormented his Czechoslovakia team for England in an audition for a 1990 World Cup spot: “Gascoigne does not look like an English footballer”, he said.
Gascoigne ran, arms flailing, with so much power and purpose it seemed impossible he could keep the ball on a string under his feet, but somehow he did, taking over the world stage as if it were his backyard.
After England’s defeat in the World Cup semi-final, and Gascoigne’s infamous tears, 120,000 camped out at Luton Airport to welcome him home. And he showed up wearing a pair of giant plastic boobs.
As Hamilton puts it, “There he was, the apotheosis of yuk, and grinning wickedly as if he had pulled off some comic coup.”
He was fodder for the tabloid press, his every turn detailed, a love/hate relationship that utterly baffled Gazza, a kid who always just wanted to be loved.
It was this celebrity that Gascoigne’s naturally fragile personality could not handle. He was not a man with the dullness of a Beckham or an Owen who could take the national spotlight unblinkingly, nor had he brains enough to deal with it rationally. Sadly, it is not a surprise to find him in the state he’s in today.
This is the Gazza I like to think of:
Tom Dunmore is the editor of Pitch Invasion.
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Poor man. It is not any real surprise I suppose that he has ended here. Gazza’s story makes me think of an epic late nineteenth century novel - the dizzying rise, the hubris, the inevitability of the fall, the lovable but fundamentally flawed genius, the insensate cruelty of the society which builds him up and tears him to pieces. It’s all rather Dickensian.
A friend here tells me that when he played at Lazio he was often to be found in the bar at a petrol station on the Via Cassia, which heads out towards the biancocelesti’s training ground at Formello. My mate used to bump into him there sometimes at about 9 in the morning, having a beer and a bag of crisps, hanging out with the petrol pump attendants. And he’d go back after training. He could have gone anywhere in Rome but that’s where he felt comfortable.
He is a man wholly without any of the qualities necessary for stardom other than incredible ability in one tiny field, and it was his fortune and his misfortune that he was born into the time and place which enabled him to display that genius. He seems to have no interior resources at all: nothing to draw on, neither discipline nor confidence, responsibility nor self-acceptance. And he has apparently never found anyone capable of helping him to develop any such qualities. I hope he gets well.
Nearly made me cry, that. I loved Gazza as a child, but it’s time for him to forever leave that name behind and just be Paul Gascoigne– if only he knew who that was without the drink and the football. He still has plenty of time to get better and begin a new portion in his life, but does he know what he can do without football?
A great video the second one, really makes you appreciate just how good a player he was, I’d kinda forgotten just why he’d become such a star in the first place but that reminded me. He really had it all at one stage in 1990 and if it wasn’t for that stupid tackle in the Cup Final in 91 then I reckon it could have turned out better for him. If I remember rightly he was out for at least a year with that knee injury and it was probably during that time - when he was bored - that his drinking took off and, sadly, what has shaped his life since. I really hope he gets his life back on track soon because he was a legend. He needs something to focus on and maybe a job with the FA doing something in the game could be a starting point. He needs to get some proper counselling but, with the right treatment, he can get better.
Pitch Invasion - Gazza, the Clown Prince
Another Gazza article but well worth checking out for the vids. Tis such a shame he lost the plot.