Having made it over halfway, Tony Adams has become the surprise success story on this year’s Strictly Come Dancing.
The former England defender and Arsenal ace have continued to improve week-on-week throughout the BBC One dance competition – despite the naysayers.
But it’s certainly not the first challenge he’s faced.
Twenty-six years ago, Tony, 55, was in a very different place after years of alcoholism almost destroyed him.
At his lowest point, his booze benders saw him sleep with prostitutes, black out and end up in intensive care.
Then his torment finally ended at 5pm on a Friday afternoon in August 1996, when, after a six-week bender, he drank his last pint of Guinness, stopped to get some fish and chips, and went home to detox.
The following Monday he joined AA and hasn’t touched a drop since.
The bender that ended all benders kicked off minutes after England’s defeat in the European Championship semi-final, which Tony had been at the helm for.
After refusing to drink in the build-up to the tournament, back at the dressing room he reached for a beer and the wheels were in motion.
“I look over to my right and there it is. The fridge with all the drink. That’s what I want. I pull the ring from the can and lager slips down my throat. It’s only Carling, but it tastes like Dom Perignon,” he wrote in his autobiography, Sober.
“The team sit around the bar, drinking beers, talking about what had happened. Slowly people go to bed, but not me – 3am, 4am, I’m up and drinking. I’m an alkie so that’s normal. Nothing out of order, but I drink to pass out. Eventually it’s what I do.”
The next day, as his teammates headed home to partners and family, Tony – whose first wife Jane Shea had left him and taken their children – realised he had nowhere to go. So he went to the pub.
He wrote: “That’s the start of a six-week bender. Benders like that are hard to explain: I’m lost, bewildered, confused.
“You know what? There’s no use in over-analysing it – I’m just getting smashed the whole time, day after day.
“Everything is about the booze and it becomes a blur. Out in a pub garden or at a club, sometimes eating, often not. Personal hygiene? That goes out the window.”
Talking candidly about his lowest ebb, he admitted to sleeping with prostitutes despite not enjoying it.
“I can talk about these stories now and laugh as I survived, but I was getting into serious situations. I’d leave strip clubs with numerous girls, paying for sex and hating every minute of it,” he continued.
“I’d wake up having p*ssed myself or worse. The thing is, if you’d knocked on my door on one of those days and said: ‘Come on, Tone, look at you, you’ve sh*t yourself, you’re a mess,’ I’d have laughed it off.”
After reaching rock bottom, Tony turned his life around and went on to win four major trophies as a player before retiring and going into coaching.
He set up charity Sporting Chance in 2000 to help footballers and other sports stars recover from addiction.
Mirror.co.uk
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