Burridge Says Contemplated Suicide...Burridge Q&A

A number of Burridge photos at www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1372062/John-Burridge-interview.html#ixzz1IGSFp2AC

Daily Mail - Inside the crazy world of John Burridge By Michael Walker
Reporting from Dubai

Hello, my name is John Burridge, I'm 45 and I am here because I am addicted to football and I can't play any more.

With those words one of the most extrovert introverts the game has ever seen announced himself to a group therapy session at The Priory. It was 1997 and Burridge had just been sectioned by his wife, Janet, and one of his many former managers, Kevin Keegan.

Burridge had become reclusive, and suicidal. He felt his reason for living - football - had disappeared.

Character: John Burridge at the Le Royal Meridien Hotel in Dubai
'If I'd had a gun or a cyanide tablet I would have used them,' said Burridge. 'That's how bad I was. I was looking for a way out.

'Then three men in green boiler suits arrived and knocked my door down. They say it's men in white coats who come, but it isn't. I fought them but they stuck a needle in my a*** and knocked me out.

The doctors told me: you're a manic depressive because you can't play
football now'I woke up in The Priory. The doctors told me straight, ''You're a manic depressive, because you can't play football''.'

Burridge was past his 43rd birthday when, on loan at Manchester City in 1995, he became the oldest player ever to play in the Premier League. It is a record he retains.

It was still not the end of a playing career that began at his hometown club Workington in the old Fourth Division at the end of the 1960s.
Along the way the goalkeeper, whose hyperactivity could make Paul Gascoigne seem like a calming presence, clocked up 28 more clubs.

'Budgie' Burridge became a legend, the biggest loveable headcase in football. He is in Blackpool's Hall of Fame, at Hibernian he is a hero.

He adored the adoration that flowed for his never-been-seen-before somersaults. He sat on the crossbar in one game. He wore a Superman outfit under his kit playing for Wolves. He avoided signing for Derby County in 1984 by climbing out of manager Arthur Cox's office window. He was then chased down the road by Cox carrying a teapot.
Job seeker: Burridge has a book to promote, but is desperate to get back into football

In all, Burridge played almost 800 games for clubs from Aberdeen to Southampton. But while player-coach at Newcastle under Keegan, before a game against Arsenal, Burridge began to cry.

'What's the matter?' asked Keegan. '"I want to play, boss, and I can't",' I
said. 'I knew my time was up. I knew the three o'clock buzz, which I'd had since 16 in Workington, was gone. I didn't go in on the Monday or the Tuesday, and started making excuses. Eventually my wife rang Kevin. All of a sudden the men were at the door.
I fought Bob Stokoe at 19. He went for me in the tunnel and

I just went boom, boom!'It's the tears of a clown, isn't it? All clowns are depressives. It happened to Gazza, Paul McGrath. You lose fame. Gazza has the same reputation as me to an extent. But Gazza loves football, he's so passionate about it. But when it goes, for him it's drink. You become suicidal.
'I was never a drinker. You don't play until nearly 44 if you're not dedicated. I was Mr Dedication. But when my football fame went I wanted to commit suicide. I didn't want to drink, I wasn't like that.'

The Priory helped Burridge. The drugs worked and he got some perspective when the person next in the group stood up and said she could not cope since her husband and children had been killed in a car crash.

When he got out another of his former managers, the late Ian Porterfield, invited Burridge out to Oman in the Gulf. There he has been ever since, coaching, managing, commentating on local television - he has learned Arabic. But he lost the Oman coaching job in January and now feels another gulf. He is back on medication, but Burridge is still in love with football.
As he said morning beneath a palm tree in Dubai, while moving sugar sachets around to demonstrate the 1980 Crystal Palace back four: 'It was the dedication to football. Ninety-nine per cent of players do it for the money. They pack in at 29, 30 now, because they don't love it.

'I love football. I've got no interest in golf or horses, no other interests. My life was football, training for football. All my life was built around football. When it ends, nothing. What else is there to live for - seriously?
Days in the life of a football fanatic Burridge signed for Bob Stokoe's Blackpool in 1971

Going to Wembley with Villa for the League Cup final in 1977, with Brian Little

Training hard for Palace in 1980

Palace take a 2-0 lead over Ipswich, 1979

Celebrating Palace's promotion to Division One with Ian Walsh in 1979

Burridge gets down and dirty during a Palace training session in 1980

Playing up at a Palace photocall in 1978


Can I play, please? coaching Arsenal at Rangers in 1996


'When you love something as passionately as I do and you can't do it, people call you nuts. They call you crazy. But basically I am totally in love with football and there's no other life for me. There's nothing else I can do. Life. Nothing else.'

Someone searching for the root of John Burridge's dissatisfaction would seize quickly on his childhood. It could have been penned by Charles Dickens or DH Lawrence. Thomas Hardy was the name Burridge plumped for.

He was born in 1951 in a Cumbrian pit village 10 miles from Workington. His father, Jim, was a miner. As is revealed in Burridge's newly released, vivid autobiography, Jim was as hard as the family address: 38 Concrete Terrace.
'It was a strange place but it was home to me,' said Burridge. 'The houses were condensed in a single terrace. There was no hot water, just a shallow brown sink, oil cloth on the floor, no cooker. All the cooking was done on the fire. There was no central heating. It was like living in the 18th century.
'There was an outside toilet. It always stank. You could never get the smell of my dad's Old Holborn out of it. 'We had electric, but we didn't have a kettle. The kettle was on the fire.

'You had a bath once a fortnight. Or on a Friday my dad would have a bath in the wash-house. I'd scrub his back - miners had black baths.
'I'd scrub it with a brush and carbolic soap. About an inch of water. Then it would be my turn, then Mum's, then me sisters'. Then we'd pour the water back into a pot and do the clothes in it. My house made a Brazilian favela look like a five-star hotel.
'I'd go poaching salmon with me dad. We chased rabbits with ferrets. I'd clunk them on the head when they came out the hole. Bang! Dad would skin the rabbits. We'd have rabbit and salmon, we lived off the land. Everybody did it. It was like Thomas Hardy. If my dad caught a big salmon he'd take it into the hotels in Workington or Cockermouth to sell.

'The Queen's Head was the only pub. Every weekend my dad would be there p*****. But when he had too much he'd batter my mum. That's why I never celebrate Christmas because that was the worst time.
'My mum just had to take it. There was nowhere to go. It was a harsh existence for a woman. My mum would be picking coal off the slagheaps - to sell. Those times made me.'
It made young Burridge hard. He would help his father down the pit and worked on a farm.
'At 15 I was a man,' he said, and that recognisably broad back is still there at 59.

But Jim Burridge didn't like football - 'poofs' game'. He did not like using the outside toilet either and would throw urine through the window into the back yard. This made the day the manager of Stoke City came to sign 16-year-old Burridge most uncomfortable.
'Tony Waddington drove all the way from Stoke in his big car,' recalled Burridge. 'He could hardly get it down the back alley.
'Well, it was wash day, and the back yard was covered in p***. My dad used to go out the window. It had accumulated. Waddington had this Prince of Wales suit on. He's gone a*** over t**, hasn't he? The stink!
'He came in anyway and offered an apprenticeship, which was £5 a week in those days, no matter the club.

'My dad's first question was, ''How much?'' 'Five pounds plus accommodation,' said Waddington. 'Dad said, "F*** off. Get out me house".
'He had driven the whole way from Stoke, the manager, got covered in p*** and was told to f*** off. That was it.
The same for Blackpool. It wasn't, "Thanks but go away". That was the language. Can you imagine Roberto Mancini trying to sign me?'
The local club, Workington, had more success. Burridge made an immediate impact.
'I got my nose broken in the first game - deliberately, blatantly - and a rib broken in the second . . . deliberately. But we'd won and after the second one, where I'd played well at Oldham, the headline was: The Courage of Burridge.'

Jim Burridge refused his son's offer of a ticket, though not long after, when his son was injured by another robust attacker, a man ran on with a pint glass and threw it over the opposition player. He was led away by police. It was Burridge's father.
'He'd rather pay to get in than take a ticket, but it showed his compassionate side, that he'd come to see his lad.'

Burridge was on his way to being signed by Bob Stokoe at Blackpool for £20,000. He was still a teenager - and a skinhead - and after his debut at Everton when he kept a clean sheet and had Alan Ball swearing at him, Stokoe 'took me to Hepworth's and bought me two blazers and two pairs of flannels', saying, ''We're playing Manchester United on Tuesday night''.'
When the United team bus pulled up at Old Trafford, Burridge was waiting in his new clothes. He got autographs from George Best and Bobby Charlton, then went in goal.

Stokoe left for Sunderland but then came back to Bloomfield Road in the FA Cup. Burridge saved a penalty, Sunderland were knocked out and Stokoe kicked Burridge in the tunnel.

This led to the line yesterday: 'I was 19 when I fought Bob Stokoe.
'He went for me in the tunnel and I just went boom, boom! He smacked his head on the way down. My temper was up. He'd have been near 60 then but he was fit. I'd seen him in fights before, one with Jimmy Scoular at Cardiff. I knew what Stokoe was like. I knocked him out but he was asking for it.
'I've had a few fights, one with Mark Hateley, Hibs v Rangers. George Graham, I had him in the dressing room at Palace. Lazy b*****d. Good player, but wouldn't chase the ball. I was over the table to him. Alex Miller, my manager at Hibs. I fought him in Airdrie. I fell out with Ossie Ardiles (over the Falklands).

'Stokoe was a character. I wasn't frightened of him. It's not like Ron Saunders at Villa, I was frightened of him.' Stokoe may not have known that Burridge was an accomplished teenage boxer. He fought at York Hall, Bethnal Green, and won. 'My uncle Tyson took me down on the train. Tyson Burridge, he played professional for Castleford.'

After Blackpool, Burridge was transferred to Aston Villa. He loved it but not 'that ogre Saunders'. So he moved on to Palace (under Terry Venables), then QPR, Wolves, Sheffield United, Southampton, Newcastle and Hibs. Between 1993 and 1997, Burridge signed for 20 different clubs as he became a freelance replacement. He did not play for them all.

'It was at Palace when I was happiest,' he said. 'Palace were a huge club but in the Second Division. We got promoted and it was our first game back. Ipswich had some team - Paul Mariner, Arnold Muhren, Eric Gates, Terry Butcher.

'I did a somersault when we went 2-0 up. The crowd went crazy. When the fourth went in I thought I'd climb the crossbar. I sat on the angle and shouted to the crowd, ''It's a great game from up here and I'm seeing it for nowt''.
'Venners came up to me after and said, ''Budgie, that's the best thing I've seen in my life''.' He became known for his warm-up routine, the first player in English football to have one on the pitch.

'The first time I did it was at Old Trafford. People said I was crazy but I was warming up. I'd do somer-saults, handstands, stuff that Nani does now. I was doing that in 1976.

'No-one ever warmed up before that. They'd watch the 2.30 race then get changed. I remember Glyn James sitting on a radiator. I asked him what he was doing. He said, ''Warming my hamstrings''. That's how it was. People thought I was a nutcase but I wasn't, I was in the future. I became famous.
'I did other things, I was the first keeper in England to wear gloves. I'd seen Sepp Maier wearing them. I had to get them from Germany, you couldn't get them in England. Pat Jennings and Peter Shilton rang me for pairs.
'Under Venners I could be myself. As long as we were winning I could do anything.'

Burridge has won a few, lost a few since. He moved out to Oman and discovered Ali Al Habsi, now Wigan's keeper. He declined the offer to work for Saddam Hussein's son Uday as Iraq manager. And he was almost killed when hit by a car while riding his bike.

But it was as if January's dismissal by Oman had hit him harder.
'I was out of work, I am now and I'm suicidal now.
'Seriously, I've put myself back on chill pills. I'd feel not wanted. That's how I feel.
'When you're on drugs, everything's lovely. But deep down you're depressed.
'I want to get out into football again. What else is there to live for?'

Budgie: The Autobiography of Goalkeeping Legend John Burridge in published by John Blake on April 4.


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