Tragic truth behind sport's fallen stars: suicide lurks says Dean Windass

Dean Windass is a bit of a character. Talented, effective, funny. As a professional footballer he never ­played for the glamour clubs in Manchester or London, but he did okay. He earned R5 million a year, bought high-fashion R2 000 T-shirts and “every new car” on the market.

A month ago, he attempted to kill himself. Twice. He’s not ashamed to admit: “I felt I had no purpose any more, I had nothing to get up for.”

Like Gary Speed, the former Wales manager who hanged himself in his garage in November, Windass is 42. He retired from football two years ago. And he simply can’t handle it.

Though South Africa has no detailed history of former sports stars attempting suicide, the British are awash with them. Frank Bruno, the former world heavyweight champion, tried it. So did Paul Gascoigne, perhaps the greatest footballer of his ­time. Two of England’s most popular sportsmen – yet nothing was done.

Windass admitted to the Sunday People’s Katie Hind (who kindly gave me her permission to reprint the quotes): “Just over a week ago I hit rock-bottom and decided to end it all. I took an overdose first – and when that didn’t work tried to hang myself.

“I have cried every day for the last two years since retiring. People outside football think we have it all. I felt so alone and believed I had nothing to live for. I was in a hole that I didn’t know how to get out of.

“I need to sort myself out which is why I’m speaking out now.”

This week Windass attempted to seek counselling at the Sporting Chance Clinic, run by former Arsenal and England star Tony Adams, who also suffers from depression.

But Windass was told he cannot check in until next month for therapy sessions because the centre in London is fully booked with other former sportsmen and women who desperately need help for a range of problems.

In a statement which may resonate with former sports stars in South Africa, he says: “I hope by speaking out it may help anyone else who is feeling as desperate as I was and that the PFA or FA can help. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me, it is my fault, but hopefully it will help some people like me who are out there.”

Windass admits he had it all after his Wembley play-off winning goal in May 2008 against Bristol City which sent his hometown club Hull City into the Premier League for the first time in their 104-year history.

That goal alone was estimated to be worth £60 million (R720 million) in TV revenue. He played at the top for 19 years with Middlesbrough, Sheffield United, Bradford City and Aberdeen as well as Hull.

He admits: “I wasn’t in the superstar bracket but I was pulling in well over half a million pounds a year, so money was no object. Harvey Nichols was my middle name. I would buy £200 shirts, I’d live in D&G and Prada. Every time a new car came out, Audi or BMW, I would buy it. Top-of-the-range cars were my thing.

“I had a big family house in Leeds worth over a million. I was treated ­like a superstar wherever I went. Now I am living off what little savings I have but they are running out. I did some work for Sky Sports which I loved but that came to an end.

“I’ve tried really hard to get a job. I did all of my coaching qualifications while I was playing. I put my CV into loads of clubs for a coach­ing job but you don’t hear anything back.”

Windass, a rugged, no-nonsense player with a ­nose for goals and entertainment, shrugs: “People have this image of me as this big strong man who can take anything life throws at him. But I’m not ashamed to say I wanted to end it.”

After his retirement as a player at Hull two years ago, Dean turned to booze, often downing 10 to 15 pints of lager and lime. His 18-year marriage to Helen, a 45-year-old police officer, fell apart. He was estranged from his sons Josh, 18, and Jordan, 12.

He admits: “I was aggressive, I’d smash glasses and Helen had had enough which was understandable.

“There were arguments and arguments and then I went off with some­one else. I met her in Hull in a pub. I moved into her house. I split up with her last week.”

And that was when he hit his low­est point. He explained: “Just days ago, alone and drunk at my home in Hull, I swallowed a load of tablets – I think they were painkillers.

“Luckily a friend turned up and made me throw up. I knew I’d been a fool but I couldn’t shake off the depress­ion.

“The next day another dark cloud emerged so I drowned my sorrows with half a bottle of amaretto liqueur.

“I was just over an hour’s drive away from my wife and family in Leeds but it felt like the other side of the world. I thought ‘I don’t want to be in this world any more’.

“I tried to use a bedsheet to hang myself and tied it to a handrail at the top of the stairs but it was too long.

“I was quite drunk and couldn’t get it to work so I got a belt instead. At that point another friend came round so I couldn’t go through with it. Now I’m trying to get better, get back on track. I don’t want to be miserable every day.”

Windass admits the death of Speed, a rival on the pitch, had impact. He said: “He must have been feeling in a similar way to me. When I heard the news I thought that could be me and I continued down that dark corridor of depression.”

“People outside football think we have it all, but we don’t. Look at Stan Collymore (a former England striker, now a radio presenter) and what he’s been through with depression. There’s this assumption ‘he’s a footballer, he’s all right’.

“Everyone thinks that Dean Windass is a laugh and a joke and a kid blah blah blah, and got loads of money and his ­wife and kids are lovely. But that’s all a mask. I was in piec­es, I couldn’t stop drinking or crying. I’ve cried every day for the last two years.

“With no job I’d get up, go for a run and hit the pub. I could still play the big guy because everyone knew me and wanted to buy me a drink.

“But after necking pint after pint I’d take my frustrations out on the family. The follow­ing day I’d repeat the same pattern and tell my wife I was popping out to buy a paper. I couldn’t get work anywhere and blew nearly all my savings. I couldn’t even afford to pay for my son’s motor insurance.

“I scored the winning goal at Wembley to get Hull into the Premiership and foolishly thought I was made for life.

“After I finished playing for Hull I got an assistant manager job at non-league Darlington with Colin Todd which was my dream but we got sacked. It wasn’t a lot of money but it wasn’t about that. I wanted to coach – I wanted to manage.

“That ended and I became increasingly depressed.”

Now Windass is appealing to football’s governing body: “The Professional Footballers’ Association or FA need to help us.”

With great candour, he confesses: “Footballers? We’re not the brightest but you play football all your life.”

This story ran in South Africa's new Sunday tabloid Scoop! last Sunday, along with a long list of sporting suicides and a contact number for local sportsmen who have been where Dean was. For further information see www.scoopnews.co.za.

Peter Roebuck: Is this the final, damning truth? Can it be any clearer?

Sadly, the one of my New Year's resolutions is falling down around my years as I write. I promised last night to leave the Peter Roebuck situation alone, not to harp on about the sad suicide of a fine cricket writer with a dark side.
But my twitter mate Arthur Matebula (www.twitter.com/@bossarthur) changed all that when he sent me a link to Adam Shand's piece on Roebuck, printed in the New Year's Day edition of the Melbourne Age in Australia.
On the day of his death, and given the circumstances surrounding his plunge from a sixth floor hotel window, I watched all the glowing eulogies drop. What a great man Roebuck was, they said, waxing lyrical about how he was never scared to tell the truth. Bollocks. So I wrote http://neal-collins.blogspot.com/2011/11/peter-roebuck-eulogy-nobody-will-have.html, tagged "The Eulogy Nobody Will Have the Courage to Publish".
I also took the time to warn the Johannesburg Star's chief sports writer Kevin McCallum not to eulogise too glowingly about a man convicted of abusing three South African teenagers. He chose to ignore my advice and told readers of his once-respectable tome to wear black armbands at The Wanderers for Roebuck when the second Test between South Africa took place a few days later.
The response to my blog and subsequent warnings was immediate and overwhelming.
McCallum blocked me on Twitter, the rest of the cricket writers, Australian and South African, accused me of homophobia and bitterness. Go to the blog now. Read the 200 comments that came in. Many of them were disgusting but delivered from behind the coward's shield of anonymity.
Most were from cricket lovers, some were from transparently sent by cricket writers I have frequently shared a press box - and a drink - with.
The truth is contained, emphatically, in Shand's lengthy, carefully researched piece http://www.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/the-roebuck-tragedy-a-tale-of-love-beatings-and-blackmail-20111231-1pgmk.html
You hope for apologies in these situations. When you get it right and everybody else gets it so badly wrong. You hope people will appreciate the courage it took to write that blog that day. And you hope that they will finally recognise the logic behind it.
How can we eulogise about a cricket writer who preyed on young men, using his status as an international globe-trotter to attract young men? I'd always suspected it, but the manner of his death was final confirmation. And I couldn't have been the only person who realised that.
A man who set up charities and a home near Pietermaritzburg to further his warped, perverted habits, so clearly revealed by Shand's piece had to be exposed.
But no. Apologies are scarce. Instead, the great and the good of cricket held a major commemoration of Roebuck's death at Sydney last month before the Test match against New Zealand.
His estranged family in England have used the alarming silence on Roebuck's true nature to launch an anti-South African tirade, suggesting the police were in some way responsible for his death. I must question their motives.
And just today, Luke Alfred writes a piece in the South African Sunday Times, completely missing the point and lauding Roebuck for his attack on Zimbabwe and their president Robert Mugabe.
Of course, those attacks were motivated by Roebuck's need to impress his young, penniless Zimbabwean students at Straw Hat farm in Pietermaritzburg, an attempt to further his perverted empire.
Roebuck got away with masquerading as a kindly old buffer for years, as the Age proves today. His mates in the cricket-writing clique chose to ignore his procilivities, choosing to see them as mere eccentricities.
A former public school boy with a penchant for handing out hidings? No. More than that. The bloke was a predator, a manipulator of helpless youngsters who depended on him.
That's the truth. I'm glad I wrote it. Ashamed of those who chose to ignore the evidence, preferring to eulogise about his undeniable cricket writing skills.
So to Howard Donaldson, Malcolm Conn, Kevin McCallum and the rest, read http://neal-collins.blogspot.com/2011/11/peter-roebuck-eulogy-nobody-will-have.html and http://www.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/the-roebuck-tragedy-a-tale-of-love-beatings-and-blackmail-20111231-1pgmk.html.
Then tell me if I was right. And apologise. You can find a link to do just that immediately below this blog. And don't hide behind the anonymous tag to have another blast. Nobody should stoop so low.

Gary Speed suicide leads TEN fellow footballers to seek help for depression

TEN professional footballers have sought help for depression since Gary Speed's inexplicable suicide on Saturday night.

Despite the fact that his agent and best man Hayden Evans - as quoted on this site yesterday - insists the Wales manager did not suffer from the condition, it appears his parting has led to a "scramble" for help at the Sporting Chance Clinic.

Their chief executive Peter Kay said: "I think it's almost inappropriate that anything good can come out of such an awful occurrence.

"But over ten players have contacted me since that news broke. That means ten people are seeking help. That is an unusual amount. If that can be deemed something worthwhile coming out from such a tragedy then so be it.

"When people are voicing the fact they've considered taking their own life, you have to understand that is one stage before the situation Gary got to."

Funding for the clinic, set up by former Arsenal and England talisman Tony Adams, comes partly from the Professional Footballers' Association. Its chief executive Gordon Taylor yesterday said players with mental health issues needed to find the "courage to ask for help".

As the footballing nation continued to mourn Speed's demise, concerns have been raised surrounding the Werther Effect, where talk of suicide leads to a lemming-like rush to the clifftop. The argument is this: If Gary Speed — great footballer, successful manager, rolling in money, still in good shape, handsome, lovely family, respected by all — can’t soldier on, how can anybody?

No answers to the questions swirling around Gary Speed's death

The mystery surrounding the tragic death of Wales manager Gary Speed deepens. Yesterday, his close friend Alan Shearer asked the question everyone needs answered. He said simply: “Why Speedo, didn't you give me or one of your other close mates a ring, if you were feeling so bad?”
And Speed’s agent Hayden Evans, best man at his wedding to wife Louise, failed to cast any further light on the 42-year-old’s apparent decision to hang himself in the garage of his Cheshire home on Saturday night. He said: "Louise is bewildered. They didn’t argue. She just doesn't understand it."
A post-mortem will be held today at 3pm GMT where details of Speed’s death will be clarified. Current reports suggest he may have hung himself at around 11.30pm on Saturday night. Police were called to the house in Huntingdon at 7am on Sunday morning and the news of his death was released just before Swansea City – the only Welsh side in the Premier League - kicked-off their game against Aston Villa.
After a minute’s silence filled with warm applause, Speed’s former Newcastle team-mate, Villa goalkeeper Shay Given, was inconsolable, weeping openly as a 0-0 draw which should never have been played dragged to a conclusion. What was it Bill Shankly said? “Football isn’t life and death. It’s more important than that.” Bollocks.
But the mystery remains. Speed appeared on BBC’s Football Forum in Manchester on Saturday morning, where he talked on air with former Leeds team-mate Gary McAllister, making jokes and promising to play golf next week. He then watched a televised game with Shearer in the studio.
As rumours of a row with Louise and a possible kiss-and-tell story lurking in the tabloids swirled around the internet, Hayden told The Sun this morning: "Gary and Louise were happily married and anyone who knows them will tell you that. This is why it's a mystery.
"We genuinely at the moment have no clue whatsoever what has caused it and I have been with the family all day. Everybody is asking the same question and no one has an answer. We are all in shock."
Many on Twitter have asked if Speed suffered from depression, blamed for the attempted suicides of boxer Frank Bruno and footballer Paul Gascoigne, sportsmen of similar ages over the past decade.
But with Speed taking Wales 70 places up the FIFA rankings in less than a year and widely revered for being a level-headed veteran of 840 games including a record 84 games for his nation before his retirement, there is no suggestion of any mental illness. Never has been.
Hayden, who said Speed was “happy as can be” when they spoke on the telephone on Saturday night, insisted: “Bouts of depression? None whatsoever. The one thing the family and me - as one of his closest friends - would totally refute is that. There was no indication of any problems and never has been."
Shearer is equally mystified. The pair played together at Newcastle for six winters and still take family holidays together. He said: "The question I keep asking myself and have done since I heard the dreadful news is 'Why? Why Speedo, didn't you give me or one of your other close mates a ring, if you were feeling so bad?'
"Why he couldn't have picked up the phone for a chat in those moments before he did what he did, I'll never know. None of us will.
"I was with him on Saturday watching the Stoke game and arranging next weekend.

"He was coming up with his wife to stay at my house. We were going to various charity dinners. I left the studio, shook his hand and said, 'See you next weekend.' Unfortunately I won't."
Shearer, like so many in football this week, is finding the loss of one of the game’s most respected players impossible to accept: "This just doesn't happen to one of your best mates. My wife is in bits. We just keep thinking of Louise, the two boys and his mum and dad. I can't imagine the pain they're going through. I can't get my head around the fact I was with him and he was happy, joking.
"We were having a laugh and joke about golf trips and holidays that we went on together last year. We were planning our next holiday in Portugal next summer with the families and the kids.
"I played against him many times, but when Kenny Dalglish signed him for Newcastle straight away we struck up a relationship. You're bound to have arguments along the way in football — but no one ever did with Gary.
"No one had a bad word for him. He was what you'd describe as a proper bloke, a proper man. You could depend on him."

Hold the black arm bands: The sad closing chapter in Peter Roebuck's life exposed by his final victim

And so, finally, the truth is out. Broken not by the South African Police, who witnessed the suicide of cricket writer Peter Roebuck, and not by the cricket writers, who continue to eulogise about their dodgy colleague.

Ultimately, the awful truth comes from the man last abused by Roebuck, the former Somerset captain convicted of common assault against three 19-year-old South Africans in 2001.

When Roebuck threw himself 70 feet to his death out of his Newlands Sun hotel window on Saturday night at around 9pm, he did so after being confronted by two policemen and a 26-year-old called Itai Gondo.

When I dared to question the nature of Roebuck's death and his proclivities in life, I was widely condemned for homophobia and scandalous innuendo - though many appreciated a more honest obituary than the ones being written by his fellow cricket writers on Monday morning.

Gondo puts that shameful minority in their place. He explains how he was lured into a meeting via Facebook by the articulate former Millfield and Cambridge graduate, a man granted a position of status as a cricket writer and commentator by unquestioning ABC and Fairfax executives despite his 2001 convictions.

Gondo describes himself as a "penniless refugee" from Zimbabwe who knew one of the "adopted sons" who live at Roebuck's "cricket coaching" home in Pietermaritzburg.

Roebuck, 55, soon started signing his messages to Gondo "dad" as he lured the vulnerable 26-year-old in to his clutches with tales of how he looked after his "17 adopted children" and how he would help Gondo through university.

Gondo, with no knowledge of Roebuck's previous convictions for caning young men in his care, wasn't too worried when Roebuck apparently agreed to the meeting by saying "Okay my boy, bring stick in case I need to beat you!"
A two-hour meeting at a Cape Town hotel followed before the inevitable. Gondo claims Roebuck "pinned him to the bed and launched a sickening sex assault" according to the Sun newspaper in London.
Gondo, who was not paid for his revelations, said the attack finally came to a halt when his telephone rang. He claims: "I was in shock and told myself that it couldn't be happening."

Gondo then tells how Roebuck apologised on Facebook the next day. He sent this message: "Worried bout u, hope u ok". Gondo responded: "One day the long arm of the law will catch up with your evil misdeeds."
Gondo, traumatised by Roebuck's attack, then reported the incident to the police, bringing a charge of sexual assault. When the police arrived to question him, Roebuck called a friend for legal help - and when his colleague returned, Roebuck had departed through the window.

A source close to the investigation in Cape Town, quoted by The Sun, said: "Gondo needed money to go to university. He is not gay and is not a sex worker. He contacted Roebuck after a friend said he might sponsor him. But he said Roebuck pounced on him.

"It has left him traumatised. He got away but was so shocked it took days for his girlfriend to talk him into going to the police. Roebuck was about to be arrested when he jumped from the window."

This morning, Gondo reveals he is having counselling after the horror of his past week. The police say they are examining Roebuck's lap top computer to confirm the facts.

Clearly Gondo's statement to the Sun will rile Roebuck's vociferous defenders. They will say Gondo is a rent-boy, out to make money. They will claim he is an agent of Robert Mugabe, send to finish Roebuck, a critic of the Zimbabwean regime. They will insist Roebuck was thrown out of the window by the notorious South African police - but it truth that sort of thing ended with Apartheid.

Others will claim Roebuck did nothing wrong before he leapt to his death, that attempting to have a relationship with a 26-year-old man is no crime.

And of course, they'd be right. Caning is not strictly against the law. Neither is propositioning friends on Facebook. Assaulting them, attempting to control them, using you status as a famous cricket commentator to force them into a compromising situation is what I'm on about. Especially when you have convictions for similar offences against vulnerable young men in your care.

So those - like Kevin McCallum of the Johannesburg Star earlier this week - who suggested Roebuck's parting is a time for a wailing and gnashing of teeth are, to my mind, utterly wrong.

McCallum suggested both South Africa and Australia should wear black armbands for the man who captained England just once - to an embarrassing one-day defeat against The Netherlands - even after I'd send him a heads-up over Roebuck's dodgy past.

Last year, Rodney Hartman, the doyen of South African cricket writers and a leading light behind the hosting of the 2003 Cricket World Cup, was not even granted that privilege following his - natural - death. Today in the press box at The Wanderers as the second Test gets underway, many of those who commented anonymously on this blog, calling me all the names under the sun, will squirm uncomfortably at their key boards.

I suspect some even knew about Roebuck's past, his modus operandi when it came to social contacts. But they chose to stay silent and rave about his "brave, fearless, scathing" cricket writing.

For balance, you should now read http://www.crikey.com.au/?p=259676 - but note the author himself back-tracks on the murder allegation in his own comments section. I do not judge Peter Roebuck. I am simply attempting to present the alternate version - the grubby side - of a grim suicide.

And Roebuck, let's face it, is not fit to fire up my old Rand Daily Mail colleague Hartman's lap top. End of.

Peter Roebuck: the eulogy nobody will have the courage to publish.

Peter Roebuck threw himself out of a sixth-floor hotel room window at around 9pm on Saturday night. His death at 55, while covering Australia’s cricket tour of South Africa, sparked a plethora of glowing tributes from cricket writers all over the world.

A decent opening bat and superb scribe, such eulogies failed to spark any feeling in this writer – and I suspect many cricket followers around the world felt the same. It turns out a uniformed policeman was questioning Roebuck at the time of his death in Cape Town.

We will never know for sure, but the word from a good source is this: the cop was questioning him about yet another sexual assault in a city where penniless young men are known to offer themselves to rich tourists to earn a few rand. He called a cricket-writing colleague to demand a lawyer then, with the policeman still in the room, he leapt to his death.

A great cricket writer yes. A great man? No. He spent his life calling a spade a spade on the cricket field but in the end, he dug his own grave.

Roebuck, one of many first class cricketers who forged a career after attending the fantastically privileged Millfield School in Somerset, was a bespectacled sort who first came to the world’s attention when he got rid of Ian Botham, Viv Richards and Joel Garner when he was captain of his county.

That was my first interview with the bloke, back in 1986. As I went in to the treatment room in Taunton to chat to him one-to-one for the Sunday Mirror, a young Somerset player at the time, who prefers now to remain nameless, jokingly warned me to “watch my bottom”.

The discussion went well. I came to no harm. I kept my back to the wall, I guess. I was young and naive. I didn't get a spanking but that comment stuck with me. Roebuck, everybody in the cricket world knew, was “dodgy” like so many other British public schoolboys who grew up in a boys-only school with jock-straps and lewd magazines for company.

Of course, he was right to banish Botham, Richards and Garner from the County Ground, he told me. They thought they were bigger than the club. The former England Public Schools captain neglected to mention the book he’d written with the great Beefy, how he’d clung on to Botham’s coat tails to get where he got.

While Botham was flamoboyant and popular, Roebuck was considered dull and unimaginative, though he did once captain England at a time when nobody else wanted to. Against the Netherlands. Unthinkably, they lost.

In all ways, removing the titanic trio from Taunton was simply a case of Roebuck asserting his personality on a thriving county cricket team that took years to recover from his machinations.

Roebuck retired from professional cricket in 1991 and went to captain Devon, a minor county in the English cricketing set-up. That he had tactical nous – and a penchant for writing about the game – was never in question.

But then the dark secret began to emerge. In 2001 he was convicted of “common assault” against three young South African cricketers who had come over to coach and learn the game (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1359991/Ex-Somerset-captain-caned-young-cricketers.html). Keith Whiting, Reginald Keats and Henk Lindeque, who were all 19 at the time, were procured while Roebuck was working overseas as a commentator. Roebuck persuaded them to live at his house while they were “under instruction”.

The first victim said at the time that Roebuck asked him to bend over and delivered three “forceful strokes” for failing to do his daily excercises properly.

The legal counsel at Taunton Crown Court said: “Roebuck then pulled the boy towards him, in what appeared to be an act of affection. He then asked if he could look at the marks on the boy’s buttocks, something which he in fact did.”

The second teenager was beaten by Roebuck when he failed to keep up on a run. He, too, was left feeling “considerable distress and humiliation”.

The third boy received similar treatment, being beaten by Roebuck and asked to show the marks.

The second boy, now living South Africa, said: “I did not consent to any assault but he is a dominant person who makes you feel that you must do as he says.”

Roebuck was originally accused of indecent assault for those acts, which occurred between April and the end of May in 1999. He eventually pleaded guilty to common assault. Tellingly, the judge said: “It was not appropriate to administer corporal punishment to boys of this age in circumstances such as these. It seems so unusual that it must have been done to satisfy some need in you.”

Roebuck said he warned the three South Africans he would use corporal punishment if they failed to obey his “house rules” adding he though they were “from a culture in which corporal punishment was accepted”.

Roebuck was sentenced to four months in jail for each count, with the sentences suspended for two years. Roebuck’s defence counsel insisted “more than 20 other promising young cricketers” had stayed at Roebuck’s house while receiving coaching and had never complained about any inappropriate behaviour.

Knowing his proclivities were now out of the closet, Roebuck began spending most of his time in Australia. There, his objective, hard-hitting writing went down well with the Sydney Morning Herald – and he was snapped up as a commentator for the ABC.

Soon, he was referring to Australia as “us” rather than England. He could offer withering critique of the fading Aussie cricket machine without fear of being contradicted.

And he could use his status as a public figure to continue his wicked ways. Strangely, where so many others would have been questioned over their criminal record, Fairfax newspapers and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation never bothered to check in to Roebuck’s past.

Look, Peter Roebuck was a fine cricket writer. But he used his status to procure vulnerable young men. That’s fact. The manner of his death and the reasons behind it will probably be hushed up. Cricket’s like that. Hansie Cronje and Bob Woolmer ditto. Some may feel we should consider Roebuck’s talents in his obituary. I think we should focus on the truth.