One in Four

Alistair Campbell gives a plug for tonight’s Inside Sport programme on BBC One.
A long, long time ago, back in the mists of time, I remember seeing a TV documentary about Everton Football Club. The thing that stuck in my mind was an interview with the Everton and England goalkeeper, Gordon West. When asked a question about the game, West got extremely agitated and said he hated it, hated every moment of it. Back then, stuck in a lousy job going no-where, it seemed almost incomprehensible to me that a man at the top of his profession, being well paid for what we happily did for nothing, wasn’t actually in love with the job.
Since then of course, we have become more aware of the pressures on top sportsmen. Tony Cascarino in his biography showed that he was riddled with doubt, fear and insecurity, and when one-on-one with the goalkeeper he heard voices in his head telling him he was going to miss (the voices were invariably right when he played for us anyway). And in celebrated cases Brian Clough was an alcoholic, Stan Collymore suffered from depression and Paul Gascoine has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Numerous other footballers have had serious problems with alcohol, Frank Bruno and Marcus Trescothwick have both had mental health issues, and the tragic case of Robert Enke last week showed that being a top sportsperson carries with it its own stresses and pressures.
If you imagine going to work only to find 40,000 people in the office ready to crap on you from a great height for every little mistake, whilst the television shows it to millions more over and over again in slow motion, you begin to get a picture of what it must be like in that sort of goldfish bowl. The rewards are very, very high, and the lifestyle can appear attractive to those of us in a different, much more mundane world, but the consequences can be very severe and very damaging to the individuals themselves. As Alistair Campbell says…

I think we are potentially close to a tipping point in terms of having proper understanding of mental illness. The more that people speak out about it, the more normalised the debates should become so that eventually admitting a mental illness is no different to mentioning flu, cancer or a broken leg.