Gazza: My Story (19 page)

My wages started at £22,000 a week, and were due to go up by about 10 per cent every year. So I was well and truly in the money and I was determined to spend it, mainly on my family. I bought them all houses and cars and holidays. It seemed the least I could do, after all the support they had given me.

When I had first watched Lazio training, on that visit with Glenn Roeder and my dad before I signed, I was a bit nervous. Their technique and fitness did seem better than ours in England, and I wondered whether I would be able to keep up.

When I eventually arrived, I was also, of course, worried about the language. I had had a couple of Italian lessons in England before I left, but I didn’t bother with
anything after that. The club did offer me more lessons, but there didn’t seem much point when I had a translator available when I needed her, to help me get settled in, an Englishwoman whose name I’m not going to mention as she later wrote a book about me. In the end, I just picked up a bit of Italian as I went along, enough to get me by on the pitch or in shops and restaurants. The first words I learned were swearwords. I reckoned I’d be needing them.

Lazio employed about sixteen bodyguards, just to look after the players. I was told I would be guarded night and day. I thought it was a joke till I learned how intense and passionate Italian fans are. In Italy, footballers can’t go anywhere without being pestered. And if your team is doing badly, they’ll wreck your car, attack your house, throw things at you in the street, beat you up.

When I first moved into my villa in Rome, I was amazed to see two blokes hanging from the trees at the front, beside the gateway. I didn’t dawn on me at first that they were my own personal security guards. When I realised who they were, I invited them in and got them pissed.

One of them nearly shot me one night. I’d got up to go to the toilet and, as always, I had to shut each door five times after me. He heard the doors being banged
about and thought there must be a burglar in the house. Suddenly I found a gun being held to my head and this thug saying to me, ‘
Non ti muovere!
’ – don’t move – before he noticed it was me.

Before long, though, they got to know me better, and the same two guys were usually assigned to me, Gianni, who I called Johnny, and Augusto, who spoke good English. We all became good pals.

On the first day of proper training, when I was going to meet the whole squad, I went into town and bought twenty copies of a Teach Yourself English book. I got into the dressing room early and put one each on their benches. They thought that was hysterical.

My debut in Serie A eventually came on 27 September 1992 at home to Genoa, sixteen long months after I had last played a competitive game. It was shown live on TV, in Britain as well as in Italy. Just before half-time, Mario Bortolazzi whacked me in the knee and I went down like a sack of spuds. The crowd fell silent, thinking I’d been badly injured, but I got up and shook the guy’s hand, ‘Thanks, mate,’ I said. In Italian, of course. The game ended in a draw. I didn’t actually manage the second half as I’d got a dead leg after another knock, which hit a nerve, but I was OK for training on the Tuesday.

I was in the starting line-up for the next game, against Parma, who were the Italian Cup-holders, and we thumped them 5–2. My new team-mate Giuseppe Signori recorded his first hat-trick in Serie A and I like to think I helped him get it. I came off about twenty minutes before the end, as I was getting tired, but I got a standing ovation. I felt great, played great and, most important of all, my knee felt great.

In the dressing room, Valerio Fiori, our goalie, spoke good English, as did Claudio Sclosa, who was my room-mate when we played away. Maurizio Manzini, the general manager, was very fluent and he was always helpful. Dino Zoff, however, didn’t speak any English at all, so my conversations with him had to be translated. One of the first questions I asked him was if it was OK to have a pint of lager now and again. He said it was OK by him, as long as I did the business on the field. He gave me the number 10 shirt, which is considered a big honour in Italy. Many of the best players in Italy have worn number 10, including Platini, Maradona and Roberto Baggio.

Next we played away to AC Milan at the San Siro. They were the league champions and had an unbeaten run of forty games behind them and stars like Van Basten,
Gullit, Rijkaard, Maldini and Baresi in their ranks. That game was live on TV everywhere. We scored in the first five minutes, but after that we never touched the ball. We were stuffed 5–1 and Van Basten got a hat-trick. It was probably a great one to watch on TV, and a good advertisement for Italian football, but I certainly didn’t think it was that terrific.

In the dressing room, I went mad. Our team was a fucking joke, I said. They were all useless. What were they thinking of? In England, we would always fight, fight, fight to the end, even when we were being outclassed. Dino Zoff told me off. ‘
Stai
zitto
,’ he said, which means shut up. ‘
Tu non capisci uncazzo del calcio Italiano
.’ You know fuck all about Italian football. Which, of course, was true.

I think the other players probably realised I was over-excited, and deep down, they knew as well as I did that we’d let ourselves down. None of them held it against me. In fact, I never had any trouble with any of my Lazio team-mates, no rows or fights or anything. They were all very good, and we got on well.

The more games I played, the more I became aware that the players were not as technically brilliant as I’d first thought. They just did some things differently.
They’d keep the ball at the back for hours, so you thought, fucking hell, get a move on; then, suddenly, they’d come to life once they reached the last third. That’s when you saw their speed and skill and cleverness. That’s when they did the business.

Johnny and Augusto, my security guards, remained great friends of mine. All Lazio’s bodyguards worked for Italy’s leading security firm, Mondiapol, who also looked after the country’s money. When I found out that one of their jobs was guarding some huge bank vault, I got them to sneak me in with Jimmy. I sat on this huge mountain of money, about £50 million. I started chucking wads of it in the air, which wasn’t part of the deal – Johnny and Augusto had made me promise not to touch it. Jimmy has a photo of me throwing that money about, unless he’s lost it, the dozy sod.

The club paid for my accommodation. I hadn’t long moved into my first villa when I found a nine-foot snake by the pool. I immediately insisted on moving. In my next villa, getting up one morning to get ready for training, I found a two-foot snake in the bedroom. I wasn’t as scared this time, because it wasn’t so long, so I just whacked it with a broom.

I took the dead snake with me to training, and
when everyone else had got stripped off and gone out, I put it in Di Matteo’s jacket pocket. Yeah, Roberto Di Matteo, the one who later went to Chelsea. He comes in after training, has a shower, gets dressed and puts his hand into his pocket. He went apeshit. It was hilarious. But no, he didn’t get too mad with me. He was just relieved it wasn’t alive.

I went to training one day on a motorbike, a sort of mountain bike scrambler thing, which the owner of my villa had left behind. I hadn’t intended to use it, but my Mercedes had a flat tyre and I’d had a row with Shel, who’d gone off in her car, so in desperation I just jumped on this bike and rode off in a temper. I had no insurance, no helmet and I didn’t really know how to ride it. The club had hysterics. All that money they’d paid for me, and I could have killed myself.

I did have one nasty driving incident, towards the end of that first season. The fans, as usual, were all over my car, hanging on, and in trying to get clear of them I ran one of them over. There were tyre marks on his leg and he was badly bruised. I gave him my number 10 shirt, by way of an apology, to keep him quiet, but he told the press anyway and everyone had a go at me, including the president.

I later met, on a plane, a reporter who had written some of the worst things about me. I smiled at him – and then punched him in the bollocks. I told him that was for writing lies about me when he didn’t know anything about me. He said he would tell the police. Nothing happened, but it didn’t help my relationship with the press.

Another time I was out shopping with Shel and we were being followed everywhere by this photographer. He’d already got loads of pictures, so I told him enough was enough. ‘When I come out of this shop,’ I said to him, ‘if you are still here, I’m going to thump you.’ I came out and he was still there, smiling a silly smile, so I hit him. He called the police and Shel and I had to give a statement. I apologised, and forgot about it, but of course the press didn’t. Overall, you’d have to say I didn’t handle the press very well in Italy.

During that first season I got the ’flu at one stage and had to miss a few days’ training, so I wasn’t surprised I wasn’t picked for the upcoming league game. I was, however, surprised to find I was in the line-up two days later for some sort of benefit match with Seville, in which Maradona was due to play. I couldn’t understand why I was thought fit for one and not the other. I came
to the conclusion they didn’t want me to play in the league game in case I got injured, but needed me for the Maradona extravaganza as they were making a lot of money from it. So I thought, fuck it, and went off to EuroDisney in Paris for a couple of days, taking Shel and the kids as a treat.

Manzini rang me at my hotel and said I’d got to come back for the Seville game. I said I wanted £120,000 extra to play in it, otherwise I was staying, to recover from the ’flu. He agreed, so I flew off to Spain. I had quite a bit of champagne on the plane, being afraid of flying, and arrived half-cut. All the lads cheered when I appeared in the dressing room. We were a goal down when I beat five players to score, even though I was still half-drunk, and the game ended 1–1. I didn’t shake hands with Maradona afterwards. I was still furious with him for his hand-of-God goal against England in the 1986 World Cup.

I didn’t get my £120,000. Instead the club said they were going to fine me £20,000 for going off to Paris without permission. I said to Dino Zoff, ‘Fuck off, that’s it. I’m leaving, then.’ He was, I hardly need to say, disgusted by my behaviour. He had been one of Italy’s all time greats: he was a World Cup star, he had a record
number of caps, and yet he had to put up with all this. Mostly, I did get on with him well, though, and I think he liked me. He told me his plan was to make me captain of the team. He would buy me a racehorse, and I could always have the odd day off. But that was in my early days at Lazio, the honeymoon period.

I wasn’t match fit, again, when we met Juventus, but I was there, in my Lazio blazer, in the VIP seats. And so was David Platt, in his Juventus blazer – he wasn’t playing that day, either. As we were walking to our seats, there was this bloke pestering us, sticking a microphone in our mouths, up our arses. We were not supposed to talk to the media at all at that time – there had been some row or something. Platty, of course, being smooth and polite and well brought up, said nothing, and just smiled. I decided to give him a big belch. Jimmy would have been proud of me. It was simply a joke, the sort of thing I could have done in England and no one would have been bothered. What I hadn’t realised was that my belch was going out live on prime-time TV, just as the whole nation was sitting down to dinner and waiting for the big match. The reaction was incredible, unbelievable. There were front-page headlines everywhere and it made all the TV news
broadcasts. It was even raised in the Italian Parliament, where it was condemned as an insult to the Italian nation. Lazio were furious with me. My main crime was that I had belched while officially representing the club, wearing their blazer. I had therefore disgraced the club, let down its good name.