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Author Topic: The Ex Swindon Town Player Where Are They Now Thread  (Read 4292485 times)
tans
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« Reply #11850 on: Sunday, March 22, 2020, 18:45:15 »

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went in and then I started to get a bit fearful because they were restraining me a lot. I was just flipping out a bit. I can remember the doctor saying something, we got closer and I headbutted him and did his nose. I can’t remember a lot then. I was face down, body to the floor.”

Hooper picks up on the look of surprise on my face. “I was a wild man then,” he explains. “They gave me an injection in the arse, which fucking hurt and then they put a straitjacket on me — that’s a horrible thing.”

Everything about that hospital is ingrained in Hooper’s mind. He can still hear the sound of its secure metal gates sliding open and shut, smell the polish they used on the floor and picture the male nurse who would kick a ball about in the gym at a time when it was as much as he could do to shuffle. “Under medication, once they sedate you, you’ve got no strength, your limbs and muscles are limp, so my legs wouldn’t allow me to do anything,” he says.

Hooper smiles as another snapshot from the past suddenly comes into his head. “We used to watch films,” he says. “And we watched Dead Calm, I’ll always remember it. Research Dead Calm. Fucking mental. He’s (the lead character) a psychopath, goes around killing people on a ship. It’s a good film as it goes. But it freaked me out.”

Where did you watch that? “Inside! What’s going on there?” Hooper says, shaking his head and laughing. “Sometimes you thought, ‘Are they playing mind games with us for their own fun?’ I’ve seen the film again and it didn’t bother me as much. But obviously in there — he’s a psychopath and I’m in with psychopaths. I’m thinking, ‘What the…’”

Hooper spent six months inside that secure unit and believes it would have been a lot longer but for the intervention of his father. In a scene he compares to Morgan Freeman’s parole board hearings in The Shawshank Redemption, Hooper recalls appearing in front of a panel on a regular basis and quickly realising that he was wasting his time. “You’d sit there and you’d get pissed off with them in the end.”

Essentially, he was trying to prove his sanity in order to be released. “Yeah,” Hooper says, smiling, “and how do you do that? Imagine saying to everyone in here (in the coffee shop), ‘Who is the most sane?’ I guarantee it wouldn’t be me!”

Ultimately, Hooper regards himself as one of the fortunate ones. He doesn’t know the full ins and out of exactly what happened, but he was later told that his father parted with “serious money to pay this top psychiatrist” to assess him and get him out.

“If I wasn’t lucky enough to have the parents that I had, I’d probably be institutionalised,” Hooper says. “Mental health has changed so much over that period — we’re going back over 30 years. But certainly for a 10-year period I know people that were stuck in there.”

“Honest, brave, vulnerable, caring, courageous and inspirational. Didn’t know this about Hoops when we played together for a short time, wish I did as I would have given him a big cuddle and listened. We have now reconnected and what a man…it’s OK to not be OK, and so important to talk”

“That’s a great tweet,” Hooper says, listening as I read out the message that Kevin Horlock, the former Swindon and Manchester City player, posted after he learned about parts of his former team-mate’s life story via a podcast.

It seems remarkable to think that Hooper was signing for Swindon, a professional football club in the second tier, four years after being sectioned, put in a straitjacket and thrown into a padded cell.

Adapting to life outside certainly wasn’t easy. Hooper admits to feeling a mixture of shame and embarrassment upon his release. He started to rebuild his life by bricklaying with his dad and playing football for a local pub in Harefield called The Swan, before moving on to Yeading reserves and then Hayes, two more clubs in the area.

Off the field, though, little had changed. “I went back onto the drug scene, straight back on the ecstasy. Coke was quite big back then as well. And when you take coke it gives you that outer confidence, it’s not an inner confidence. I wouldn’t say I was addicted. But every now and then I dabbled. You’d think you’d learn your lesson. Was I trying to kill myself? I don’t know.”

At Hayes, Hooper had what he describes as a slice of luck after Swindon were drawn to face non-League Marlow in the FA Cup in 1995. Swindon, who had been relegated from the Premier League the previous season, sent a scout to watch Marlow. They were playing Hayes that day, and Hooper caught the eye.

Swindon set up a trial game and then invited him in for a week’s training, which anybody who came across Hooper during that seven days won’t forget. Hooper, who played on the right wing at the time, was quite a handful. “We were training in a gym and I was proper flying around, smashing people into the wall and all sorts,” he says. “Ty Gooden said, ‘Calm down!’ I told him to fuck off. I thought what I was doing was normal. I was an idiot.”

Hooper ruffled feathers but also did enough to impress Steve McMahon, Swindon’s player-manager at the time, to sign him for a fee of about £15,000. He made his debut away against Grimsby Town, on March 4, 1995, and appeared in a League Cup semi-final second leg at Bolton Wanderers four days later.

There was a rawness about Hooper that stood out, but nobody at Swindon knew anything about his backstory — and that was the way it stayed right up to the day he left. “I didn’t want any of that coming out,” he says. “That was my worst fear. It would have been deemed as a weakness. My personal space would have been interrupted too much.”

Because of the lack of understanding around mental health back then? “Absolutely.”

That said, Hooper now realises that his psychological problems had a direct impact on his performances at Swindon and his ability to cope in that environment. Before one game, for example, he had a panic attack but didn’t tell anybody.

“Whatever was locked in the back of my head from what had gone on was still flying around in there,” he says. “And by that I mean the abuse and the hospital aspect as well — the embarrassment, what I’d gone through in there. It’s fucking tough, mate. That’s proper survival stuff, that is. If you clocked the geezer wrong in the eyes it would… it was fiery in there, massively. And I was scarred.

“I sort of locked that up I suppose and just got on with stuff but I was lost a bit with the football. I thought I was out of my depth. I wasn’t helped in that respect because I hadn’t been through what you boys (young professionals who had joined as apprentices) had been through, so I hadn’t had that day-to-day training. I went in there 23 years old but I was probably an 18-year-old in terms of football.

“I think McMahon just thought I’d hit the ground running. And I couldn’t, really. But then I wasn’t really given a chance either. The one full game I played I got man of the match. Then I got dropped right out the squad the next game.”

Hooper made eight appearances in total for Swindon. He upset McMahon early on by calling him “mate” when he wanted the ball in training — “He told me off. What am I supposed to do, get on my knees and fucking kiss his boots?” — and the two never really saw eye to eye.

McMahon, Hooper says, was one of the last people he would have considered talking to about his mental health issues and it was perhaps inevitable the two would end up falling out. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a running session on a Sunday morning, following a poor result the day before. Hooper wasn’t involved in the first-team defeat and had gone back to London for a night out but was ordered to report like everyone else.

“The physio said what we were doing, something like 8 x 400m, 6 x 200m, and everyone has gone, ‘Fucking hell’. I did the same and tutted. Then he was in my face. So I hit him. He fell over and I got on top of him. It was like a mass bundle of people. McMahon called me that afternoon. He said, ‘You’re fucking sacked.’ He was hammering me down the phone. But I’d already spoken to the PFA, so I knew I was alright.”

Although Swindon eventually agreed to pay up the remainder of his contract, finding another club proved difficult for Hooper and after several unsuccessful trials he was back in the non-League game, laying bricks and occasionally taking drugs.

“Was I thinking about trying to get back into professional football after Swindon? No. I lost my dad and then I think I had a clear mind. Maybe that was because of (stopping) the drugs as well.”

Hooper returned to Hayes and also went on to play for Stevenage and Kingstonian. He was performing well and could more than hold his own at the highest level of the non-League game. Drink and drugs remained a problem, however, until fate intervened one evening.

“The last time I took drugs I was 27,” Hooper says. “I was playing for Kingstonian, my dad had just died, I got wankered, tried to lose myself again, heavy on the coke. We came out of a nightclub and I said to the lads I’d had enough. My head space wasn’t good. I sat in the front of the cab and we’ve all done it, you just start talking. The driver was a Rasta geezer. He was coming at me biblically.

“I’d obviously mentioned my dad and what had gone on — sometimes you use people like that as your therapy because you know you aren’t going to see them again. So I did. I got out at the end and he said, ‘Don’t ever touch drugs again.’ It was one of those moments in your life where someone looks you right in the eye and it almost jolts you. It massively resonated with me. He had a strong Jamaican accent — I can hear the voice now. I went back home and I’ve honestly never taken drugs since. Explain that? Was that him? He was preaching, he said, ‘God’s there for you Dean.’”

Hooper had renewed focus. He switched from right wing to right-wing back at Kingstonian, broke into the England non-League team — “That put my shoulders back” — and got a second opportunity to make it in the pro game at an age when most people would have given up on the dream. This time he wasn’t going to let it slip through his grasp.

“I joined Peterborough and had new confidence, really. I went in the changing room and stamped my authority without being as aggressive as Swindon. At Peterborough, I think I was a nicer person. I was starting to find myself a little bit at the age of 27. And there were some good players in there — Matty Etherington, Simon Davies, Adam Drury…”

Across four seasons, Hooper made 136 appearances for Peterborough and proved plenty of people wrong. Maybe he proved something to himself too. “I’m very proud of that,” he says. “I wanted to nail it. And I felt like I’d done it then.”

Yet there was also something else that happened while he was at Peterborough that felt every bit as significant. Following his father’s death and the trauma that caused him, Hooper went to see a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that affects moods. The diagnosis arguably came a decade too late.

“I actually think it was there all my life,” Hooper says. “I always thought that I was special in one way or another. If you look into bipolar, it’s like a grandiosity thing, where you believe that you’re better and bigger than anybody else. And I think it’s a bloodline too. But that’s a deeper story.”

Hooper pauses for a moment. “Have you ever seen Shutter Island? If you watch that, you’ll understand what bipolar means. You’ve got to watch that film.”

One Christmas, during a break at a golf club with Peterborough, Hooper decided to tell someone in football the story that he had kept secret throughout his career. Steve Castle was Peterborough’s player-coach and Hooper had a lot of respect for him. More than anything, he trusted Castle.

“He sort of took me under his wing. And it just felt alright to tell him,” Hooper says. “But it broke me. I was crying.”

There is no real explanation for what Hooper was planning to do when he left home one morning five years ago and it is certainly not an easy story to tell. That Hooper wants to address it publicly, though, is a message in itself: it’s so important to talk.

For Hooper, it is also his greatest source of pride that he is still here now, living his life to the full, enjoying watching his son and daughter grow up and taking huge pleasure from helping others, whether that be finding a couple of seconds to be courteous to someone on the high street or trying to help a professional footballer who is going through the sort of mental health problems that threatened to overwhelm him.

Hooper puffs out his cheeks as he thinks back. “There’s a place called the Nine Arches, near Denham station, and I go down there quite regularly,” he says. “I remember that day a mate of mine was fishing. He had no idea what was coming. I even had a cup of tea with him and a little smoke.

“I’ve got two beautiful kids, so everything seemed fine. But I just decided, ‘I can’t be doing this.’ And I think now, looking at what I’ve dealt with on the suicide aspect, that is quite common in the ones that actually carry it through — they don’t say fuck all.

“I was so lucky that that homeless guy stopped me in my tracks. I was on my way. I would have gone over. The mindset I was in, that’s it. I was going up on the train track — 100 per cent. It was from here to there (six yards away). But the homeless guy threw me. He was startled. And I was too.

“I had a guilt trip of what was racing through my head at that time. We got into conversation and I think I said, ‘Thank you.’ I had a few tears. I explained that I had two kids. And he said, ‘Why? What are you doing?’ We just sat and talked. We talked about his life, I talked about my life. An hour, two hours, passed. Stupidly, I remember doing this — I went back the next day with a load of cash. And he didn’t take it. He didn’t want it. It almost insulted him.”

That homeless man was called Paul and the two still occasionally bump into one another now. Hooper left a beanie hat “on his bench” a little while ago and, through the work that he has done since to help people with mental health issues, he knows exactly how Paul must have felt after their first meeting.

“If you have suffered anything, or something has been detrimental to you, and you can pull someone out of that, that’s got to be the best thing in the world, hasn’t it?” Hooper says. “And going onto the suicide one, even bigger. You’re literally saving someone’s life by what you’re saying or what you’re doing.”

Hooper goes on to talk about how he got involved with helping the Offside Trust and became “obsessed” with charity work after getting to know Jess Shepherd, the inspirational and brave little girl from nearby Ruislip who passed away in 2018 after suffering with cancer for seven years.

He would like to do more and more to help people. Hooper wants to put together a team to provide a counselling service for those with mental health problems — something  he believes everybody suffers from in one way or another — and he plans to open up a boxing gym not far from where we are talking.

On top of all of that there is his family to think about too. Hooper acknowledges that Sharon, his wife, has been “pretty much my carer and hasn’t had any help at all dealing with someone like myself over a 30-year period”. They split 18 months ago and have just sold their house but remain extremely close. Hooper describes Sharon as his best friend and he still sees plenty of his children. “Hand on heart, they’re all I’m worried about,” he says. “So if I come away with whatever I come away with (from the house), I’ll be alright for a little while. And then I’ll chase my dream.”

Which is what? “Helping others,” Hooper replies. “And that’s whether it’s monetised or not. You know when you’re doing it. It could be just a hello, it could be opening the door.

“Look at that old man sitting there,” Hooper says, gesturing towards an elderly gentleman who was in the pub when we arrived more than an hour and a half earlier and hasn’t moved from his chair. “He’s obviously very, very lonely — go and have a couple of words with him. That’s what I’d like to do.”

As we finish up, I tell him that it takes bravery and courage to talk so candidly about his life story, which, quite frankly, is unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. “My mind is telling me that even now, in this talk that we’ve done, I haven’t done enough,” Hooper says. “There is so much more to my story that could then open up someone else.”

Hooper takes a sip from his pint of Guinness and leans back in his chair as he contemplates everything we’ve discussed. “I’d love to sit here and say that I’ve got the answer to life — I think that’s what I was always looking for,” he adds. “I haven’t got that but I’ve certainly got the answer to my personal contentment. And it ain’t money. It’s nothing like that. It’s just being open and honest.”
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Costanza

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« Reply #11851 on: Sunday, March 22, 2020, 19:00:09 »

Got really close to getting Dean on the pod about a year ago. Talked on the phone a couple times, he mentioned tenstuff mentioned in the this article etc

He wasn't ready to go for it at that stage but I'm really happy that his sorry is getting out there.
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pauld
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« Reply #11852 on: Tuesday, March 24, 2020, 10:41:05 »

For those longing for a bit of Tom Smith action:

https://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/sport/18329296.former-swindon-town-midfielder-tom-smith-aiming-return-professional-game-let-go-club-2018/
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« Reply #11853 on: Sunday, March 29, 2020, 19:06:48 »

Luc Nijholt currently playing 'live' on the BBC, Scottish Cup Final 1991.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/football/52063379

Edit: and Malpas on the other side.
« Last Edit: Sunday, March 29, 2020, 19:12:53 by Cookie » Logged
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« Reply #11854 on: Wednesday, April 1, 2020, 21:14:00 »

According to SSP's twitter, in about 18 years or so from now we'll all be singing "Super Sidney Parkin" as SSP mk 2 bangs in his debut hat-trick. Congrats!
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Valid Pint

« Reply #11855 on: Sunday, April 5, 2020, 08:49:29 »

BBC reports Charlie Austin has described symptons.
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« Reply #11856 on: Sunday, April 5, 2020, 09:37:06 »

BBC reports Charlie Austin has described symptons.
About two weeks ago?
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Peter Venkman
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« Reply #11857 on: Sunday, April 5, 2020, 09:48:14 »

About two weeks ago?
Yep was all over the press 2 weeks back.

https://www.lancs.live/sport/football/football-news/charlie-austin-west-brom-coronavirus-17958526
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« Reply #11858 on: Sunday, April 5, 2020, 14:21:03 »

OK. What's the latest? Is he OK?
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« Reply #11859 on: Thursday, April 9, 2020, 18:51:40 »

http://www.swindon-town-fc.co.uk/Person.asp?PersonID=ONSLOWLE

https://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/announcements/deaths/deaths/18365505.Les_Onslow/

Not sure if this has been reported elsewhere, but if not ex-player Les Onslow passed away on 31 March aged 93 (brother of Roy)
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« Reply #11860 on: Saturday, April 25, 2020, 07:14:35 »

Jerel Ifil's daughter will be on Britain's Got Talent tonight. From what I can gather she does rather well.
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« Reply #11861 on: Saturday, April 25, 2020, 07:21:30 »

I'm pretty sure she's already been on the The West End with the production of 'School of Rock'.

Congratulations to the Ifil family.
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Nomoreheroes
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« Reply #11862 on: Saturday, April 25, 2020, 19:38:55 »

I don't watch the program, but saw this post as SWMBO was watching in the other room. Relayed the fact that a former Town player's daughter was on just as she came on. She was absolutely brilliant!
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tans
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« Reply #11863 on: Monday, April 27, 2020, 11:22:56 »

Ricky Shakes retires
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« Reply #11864 on: Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 10:08:59 »

Not an ex town player as such but he played on trial in several friendlies for Town in pre season this season, Ted Smith, former Southend keeper retires from football.

https://www.echo-news.co.uk/sport/18406856.ex-southend-united-goalkeeper-ted-smith-opts-retire-playing-24/
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