Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya

by Jones, Vinnie

  There were dangerous physical issues, too.

  Tans had only been home for a few days when she suffered a fit caused by the drugs she had to take. She was rushed back to hospital, where she had to stay for a few days; she was vomiting and in a lot of pain. She suffered a punctured lung and had to have it drained for 48 hours. But she finally made it home for good, and then to her friends Joanne and Lee Sinnott’s wedding, where she was a bridesmaid. But that was to be as happy as she got for a while:

  Joanne’s wedding day was to be my last happy day for a very long time. Kaley made me happy, Steve too, but I was so unhappy with myself, the way I felt and looked. My hair and my eyebrows started to change colour. I completely lost my confidence and would find myself crying for hours and not knowing why.

  For two years, Tans covered herself up to her chin, she was so embarrassed by that scar running down her chest. She told the Sun:

  I’ve got photographs that I can’t even look at because I can’t believe it’s me. I was covered up for two and a half years. I wouldn’t leave the house unless I was dressed up to my chin. I was devastated for two years, but one day I thought, ‘What am I doing? This is part of me now.’

  There was some comfort, too, in the form of ‘visits’ from grandad Tommy. Tans was adamant he’d come to her and sit on the end of her bed; he was always in his uniform and his presence calmed her. They had always been so close, it’s not surprising to me that she felt he was with her at such a difficult time.

  Now, I feel Tans’ presence, too. Recently I came home from a day at the golf course and I was eating a meal Kaley had made. It tasted just like how her mum made it and it conjured up Tans for me so strongly that I felt she was there, in that room, sitting with me as she always did, asking me about who I’d played with and how I’d played and what everyone had said and what the weather had been like and whether or not I’d had a good time … and I couldn’t look over to the couch where Tans used to sit, because even though I could feel her presence that night and hear her beautiful voice and sense her everywhere – how she looked and sounded and smelled, and the huge smile she had, lighting up for all of us, all the time – if I turned my head and looked to my right, to that couch where once she’d sat, Tans wasn’t actually going to be sitting there anymore, and not seeing her there would have ruined me. So I kept looking straight ahead, blankly staring at the TV, eating the meal Kaley had made and missing my Tans more than it’s possible to write or think or say.

  Late that summer of 1987, with her new heart beating just fine inside her and her love for Kaley deepening with every minute, Tans had to face another jolt: the new football season had arrived and Steve, who’d missed a bunch of games when Tans had been so sick, had to head off to Sweden for pre-season training.

  Tans writes that she could never have imagined life without Steve, and he wanted her life to get back to something like normal, so he told her to go out with all her mates and have a good time. But when Tans finally got around to having a night out, with Maureen on babysitting duty, it was so painful, despite her best efforts:

  I felt the whole world was looking at me and talking about me. I could not stand it. I shook all night and felt like I was on show.

  That night, I realized how much my life and myself had changed. I was no longer the fun-loving, carefree girl in the crowd. I was suddenly Tanya Terry, the Heart Transplant Survivor.

  From then on, Tanya had a regimen of drugs she had to take, drugs that she was still taking right up to the end … or almost the end. One of the key drugs was cyclosporin, which works to shut down the part of the immune system responsible for rejecting foreign tissue, but is also a drug that can increase the chance of certain cancers. We’d come to see those side effects all too clearly as the years passed.

  There were times, too, in the first years after the transplant, where Tans swallowed her tongue a few times – Steve would have to put his hand down her throat to save her. She would have seizures too, because they were still going through a kind of trial and error with some of her medications. It must have been a really hard time for everyone.

  We’d learn later that what kept her heart going was probably what led to all her health issues at the end. It seems so unfair; but then, everything seems unfair now, without her.

  6

  PRINCESS DI AND STEVE MCMAHON AND PRINCESS DI AGAIN

  As Steve Terry went off to my old stomping ground of Sweden to do his pre-season training, Wimbledon’s pre-season training for the 1987–88 season didn’t get off to the best of starts – we’d lost our leader. Dave Bassett had left Wimbledon in the summer of 1987 to go to manage Watford and I was pretty sure I’d follow him. For a start, it was my club, and second, I’d have followed Bassett anywhere.

  After Bassett moved to Watford, I went to meet him and Elton John at Vicarage Road during a reserve game. We talked about a possible move and, as the conversation wound down, Elton said, ‘Where are you going now?’ And I said, ‘Up the pub, the Bell, to have a pint.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I come up and have a beer on the way, do you?’ he said.

  Fifteen minutes later, we all arrived at the Bell in Bedmond; me in my car with Bassett and Elton in his Rolls Royce Silver Spur with driver. The locals couldn’t believe their eyes. We had a few beers and then all of a sudden Elton just said, ‘Right, I’m off then. We’ll get the deal done. I’ll speak to Sam in the morning.’

  But Sam Hammam was having none of it, so I stayed.

  In came Bobby Gould, a very different kind of fella to Bassett. To help him with the training, Gould hired Don Howe, who we all loved – what a brilliant tactician he was.

  But first, Gould had to navigate the ways of Wimbledon chairman Sam Hammam.

  Gould wanted to buy Terry Gibson from Manchester United to improve our defence. The price was £250,000, which Hammam was happy to pay, as long as Gould ate 12 sheep testicles (Hammam also had it written in our contracts that if we ever lost 4–0 we had to attend the opera).

  New players came in, and we tested them hard to see if they had what it took to be a part of the Crazy Gang. John Scales hated it; Terry Phelan later said that for the first six months at Wimbledon, he had no dreams. ‘I used to sit in the bedroom and say my career is gone; where do I go from here?’ Phelan said. Players were locked in the boot of a car, dragged around in the snow, forced to not eat for two whole days. It wouldn’t be tolerated now, but then, it was how we did things.

  And it started to work, at least in the F.A. Cup. We battered West Brom in the third round, 4–1 at home; then Mansfield Town 2–1 away in round four. In the fifth round we beat Newcastle United in the north-east, 3–1, and then the tie that had all of us, but especially me, wincing: at home to Dave Bassett’s Watford (and Watford had Steve Terry at centre back too). We let in a bad goal by their Malcolm Allen and then our centre back, Brian Gayle, punched Allen in the throat and got sent off. Somehow, we turned it around to win 2–1, though poor Gayley never played for the rest of the cup run, which I always thought was a terrible thing to do to him.

  We went a goal down to Luton Town in the semi-final but came back again to win 2–1. Now we were headed to Wembley to face mighty Liverpool in the F.A. Cup Final. (Months earlier, and again affronted by the egos of the bigger clubs, I’d written ‘Bollocks’ on a piece of tape and stuck it across that poxy sign in the Liverpool tunnel, thereby changing ‘This is Anfield’ to ‘This is Bollocks’. We were barred from the players’ lounge for that, I’m proud to say.)

  So just three years after I’d watched Watford head to Wembley, and told myself I’d be there one day, that day had arrived; I couldn’t believe it. Sam Hammam gave an interview which summed up how we all felt: ‘If Wimbledon can do it, anyone can do it.’

  The build-up to the game had all been about how we didn’t deserve to be there and that we were going to get hammered. The prospect of such a humiliation drove us on. One intro to the game called Liverpool ‘the greatest post-war club we’ve seen’. Their
team was filled with stars, not least of whom was a Watford old boy, and former neighbour to Tans, John Barnes. He was no longer living with Annie Nicell on Gaddesden Crescent, and he’d lost one Cup Final with Watford (the one in which Tans had told Barnes’ wife that she recognized me from the bus). Surely, he wouldn’t lose another, not with this Liverpool team around him.

  But Don Howe had done a brilliant thing. He’d said, ‘To stay in this level, you need the quickest back four in the country. They might not be able to play football, they might not be able to pass water, but they need to be the quickest in order to get back and tackle.’ And that’s what Gould put together: he got Keith Curle, who ended up a good player; John Scales and Terry Phelan, who was probably one of the quickest lads I played with over 60 yards – in fact, he was always having hamstring problems because he was so fast. There was Eric Young, quick as fuck; Andy Thorn over 60 yards was very speedy and Clive Goodyear didn’t look it, but he was no slouch over 100 metres either. So we had the quickest back four in the league and it would stand us in great stead in the heat of the Cup Final.

  On the field before the game I couldn’t get the smile off my face. I was natty in a grey suit and blue and cream mottled tie, but as a team we were scared. And we fed off that fear. In the tunnel we were shouting ‘In the hole!’ – a reference to an unfortunate moment previously when I’d promised Kenny Dalglish that if he fouled me again, I’d rip his head off and shit in the hole.

  But before we could get at Liverpool, we had to line up and meet Princess Di. Imagine me, a lad who two years before was playing for Wealdstone, now on the famous Wembley turf shaking the hand of the most famous woman in the world.

  I wonder if Tans was watching that day. I wish I could ask her. I know her dad was, because he’s told me. But no one can remember if she watched. She was never much of a football watcher. But according to Kaley, she sure liked the hot dogs.

  Fourteen minutes into the final I smashed Steve McMahon, just to prove that we didn’t give a shit. That tackle was planned weeks earlier; we’d noticed that McMahon would show for a ball in from the full back, turn and play it the opposite way. Well, I was waiting for him.

  It was a crunching tackle, let’s say. On the way down, he elbowed me and split the skin under my eye – fair play to him for that. Referee Brian Hill just pointed for the free kick and on we went. These days I’d be sent off for a leveller like that, no question. Fash said the tackle ‘started at [McMahon’s] neck and ended at his ankle’, which seems about right.

  On 37 minutes, Dennis Wise whipped in a great free kick, and Lawrie Sanchez glanced a header past Bruce Grobbelaar; 1–0 to the Crazy Gang. After an hour, John Aldridge went down in the box – penalty. It was clearly a great tackle by Clive Goodyear. Afterwards, even Aldridge, in all fairness, said it wasn’t a penalty. When pens like that are given, you do wonder if the fix is in; would the powers that be really let a team like Wimbledon beat a team like Liverpool?

  But just because the ref gave them a dodgy pen, doesn’t mean you automatically score them … and it’s sometimes made harder when your opponent keeps yelling that you’re going to miss it, as we all did to John Aldridge. Aldridge stepped up and fired it to Dave Beasant’s left, but Dave flung himself and turned it around the post. It was the eleventh penalty Aldridge had taken that season and the first he’d missed; it was also the first penalty ever saved in an F.A. Cup Final.

  We were going to do it; we were really going to do it.

  At the final whistle, my socks around my ankles, I put my arms up in the air and almost accidentally hugged the ref. Then I went running off to celebrate; I didn’t know where. On the telly, John Motson was saying that the Crazy Gang had beaten the Culture Club. He also said, ‘Her Royal Highness applauds one of the great cup shocks of all time. It’s a weird and wonderful world if you come from Wimbledon. The background from which these players have come has made the moment all the more satisfying. They couldn’t have dreamed it, one or two of them, bearing in mind where they were two or three years ago.’

  He got that right, did Motters.

  But, me being me, there was still controversy to create. I felt like it was my day; the press, who’d counted us out, couldn’t take my medal away from me. To most people, we were scum, we were nothing, and they would see our victory as a disaster in football history. And those feelings of anger at how we’d been written off just came out of me that afternoon. And in my fervour to point out that we’d had the balls to win, I banged my gonads into Bobby Gould’s face (he was kneeling on the Wembley turf and was wearing the actual F.A. Cup trophy on his head at the time). Gould wasn’t happy about it, but I’d made my point – it took stones to do what we’d done.

  The celebrations never seemed to end; I even went to the Bell in Bedmond to see my mates. But eventually I headed home, to a new house I’d just bought in Hemel Hempstead: 5 Hunter’s Oak.

  I thought this was my life, started for real. I’d won the cup, I was Jack the Lad, I was in magazines and all the back pages. Little did I know that my real life was yet to start, right there along Hunter’s Oak.

  7

  GEORGE THE RABBIT

  I have had my new heart for four years today. I do not feel very happy though as now it’s broken.

  – from Tanya’s diary, 18 May, 1991

  The rest of my life started thanks to George.

  George is a rabbit. (Or was. He had an unhappy end, but we’ll come to that.)

  Things went south at Wimbledon pretty quickly after the Cup Final win. The season following it was disastrous for me. It had started badly: on a pre-season tour of the Isle of Wight, I’d gotten into it with a defender called Dave Woodhouse who was playing for what amounted to a village team. Bobby Gould, the manager who’d taken us to the island for some obscure reason, had been livid that I’d gotten sent off and suspended me from the team, meaning I missed the Charity Shield (he might have still been pissed about the moment after the Cup Final when I’d shaken my stuff at him – who knows?).

  After that, things only got worse – that season I was blamed for ending Gary Stevens’ career with a tackle, but if you watch the video it’s clear I got the ball (I’d also gone right through my mate John Fashanu, who was tussling with Stevens, so there was no intent to hurt anyone – why would I try to injure my own teammate?)

  Then, a few months later, in a game against Everton, I caught Graeme Sharp with a late one on the top of his boot and, in the subsequent melee, Kevin Ratcliffe did his best Meryl Streep impression by pretending I’d headbutted him – honestly, if I had, he wouldn’t have gone down in stages. (I actually think they had to add some extra time at the end of the game to make up for how long it took him to swan dive to the turf. I’ve worked with some great actors in Hollywood, but Ratcliffe that day? ‘And the award goes to …’) Of course, it being me, I got sent off again and it was clear that Bobby Gould and his assistant, Don Howe, were getting to the end of their tether. My reputation was that I was a nutter and that I couldn’t play football, but do you really think a guy who won the F.A. Cup wasn’t any good? Yes, I was tough, and some of my tackles were as sharp as cheddar, but I never set out to hurt anyone. And I could play a bit; my first touch was solid, I could pass and shoot, I was good in the air, I scored goals and I was a leader.

  None of it mattered. By the end of the 1988–89 season, Leeds United were interested in me and when Sam Hammam makes up his mind, he makes it up quickly. And so I was off to Elland Road.

  Off the field, things were great. I was now a fully-fledged star; I had a nice little three-bedroom house on Hunter’s Oak and now I had a big move to Leeds United. I rented out the Hunter’s Oak house and moved north.

  I did a year at Elland Road, then I went to Sheffield United – which was a disaster on the field, though off it I became a father to a little boy called Aaron (me and his mum didn’t last) – and then I moved back south to sign for Chelsea. I got rid of the renters and moved back into my house on Hunter’s Oak.

>   At the time there was a great lad playing for Chelsea called Joe Allon. Joe was from Newcastle – he was one of Gazza’s mates and he was hilarious. But back then, even though he’d been transferred from Hartlepool to Chelsea (imagine that happening now!), when he came south, he was living above a pub in Beaconsfield, of all places. We hit it off brilliantly, and as he was in a fix with his digs, I had him move in with me at number five. (Of course, given what people thought at the time, Joe’s subsequent lack of success at Chelsea, where he only played 14 times and scored twice, was blamed on yours truly. The soccer rag When Saturday Comes wrote, ‘Rumours in Hartlepool suggested Joe and his flatmate, Vinnie Jones, had hooked up with an old mate from Newcastle days called Paul Gascoigne and that lager-fuelled mayhem had been unleashed on west London.’ Which was bollocks, by the way. But it shows that my reputation wasn’t doing me any favours.)

  I wasn’t done with trying to fill the house, either. Yet another friend, Dell, had been kicked out by his missus (Maureen – she later became my housekeeper in Watford of all things). So sure enough, Dell moves in, too. So now we have a proper bachelor pad. We’re living the life. Or, we think we are.

  I was still single, and I could never imagine it any other way. Maybe I still held a flame for Tanya Lamont who was now Tanya Terry – who knows? Either way, I wasn’t about to settle down; I was playing for Chelsea in the top flight, I had a F.A. Cup winner’s medal and I was finally on some good money. Deep down did I wonder what it would be like to have a real relationship? Probably. But in any case, lightning, in the form of a fucking rabbit, was about to strike.

  One day after training, Joe and I were sitting at home when we heard laughing from outside. Joe went to the window to report what was happening.