|
|
 |
| |
When the beautiful game turns ugly
Glenn Helder once dazzled crowds at Highbury with his skill and represented a glimmer of hope at a grim time in Arsenal’s history – but, as a new film reveals, gambling and a near brush with death ruined his life and career, writes Richard Osley
GLENN Helder is angry his showboating talents with a football haven’t made him a millionaire, even if by his own account it was his flashy BMW which helped save his life.
His gambling debts running out of control and high-interest loan sharks on his tail, the one-time Arsenal winger was discovered slumped by the roadside a few years back, fighting for consciousness. Police officers found him eyes-closed and confused from downing 20 highly potent sleeping pills.
Whether it was a cry for help or a genuine attempt at suicide, it marked the lowest point for a man whose name still resonates with football fans in north London.
With his frizzy mop, Jheri curl hairdo and a penchant for over-the-top tricks with the ball, Helder was one of the first foreign footballers to be given that semi-racist “exotic signing” label by the cliché-ridden hack population in the Arsenal press box.
Equipped with speed and skill, his first matches at Highbury were full of promise – tantalising close control and the ability to spin past defenders as if, like those hoary old clichés have it, they weren’t there.
He turned up from Holland in 1995, in the days before entire teams consisted of players from abroad and on the cusp of the multi-million pound television sponsorship deals which turned football into the bloated, gold-plated industry it is today.
He cha-cha-cha’d around opponents, raised hopes and then, almost as quickly as this Dutch glamour boy had come, he had gone – dropped and sold on not just by Arsenal but dumped by the raving egos of the Holland international side as well.
In a flash, a star in the making had been taken from us and nobody really knew why. His name – or his hairdo at least – still haunts the fans who remember Arsenal’s bluesy mid-1990s, a fractured time before Wenger, Henry, Fabregas et al and the Emirates Stadium.
But then, just last month at the Amsterdam Film Festival, a documentary about this unpredictable figure suddenly emerged – Glenn Helder, C’est La Vie – to fill in the gaps.
Film-maker Jessica Villerius has spent days with Helder, charting an angry decline from the Premier League to jail via too many casinos and a brush with the psychiatrist’s clinic.
The transformation is striking. Helder’s head is bald, his worry lines stretched with anger and bitterness. A bulging-eyed talking head, Helder spits out missive after missive: his ex-wife’s boyfriend at the centre of most of his wrath. He is angry that footballers make more money now than they did when he was playing and claims those who came after him have more help with the pitfalls faced by young men with too much money and adulation.
Some have claimed he might suffer from a narcissistic mental illness – but he refuses to accept the diagnosis.
In 40 minutes, he wavers. Sometimes the world is to blame, sometimes he admits he is a “loser” who has brought most of his misfortune on himself.
At Arsenal, Helder got injured, spent more time running up casino debts than training and was shipped out by Arsene Wenger. A destructive cycle began. He failed to impress elsewhere, the high-stakes gambling continued and then he was sent to jail for beating up the new partner of the mother of his child. Not long before, he had thrown the sleeping tablets down his throat.
He describes the scene: “I went to the place where everyone stops to sleep, near a roadside restaurant I pretended to be asleep and I took 20 of those bloody pills. I was lucky because people noticed my car. Everyone was asleep but that car stood out. It was a BMW 8 Series. By coincidence a police car drove by. If they had been five minutes later, I would have been dead.”
It’s a sad admission for anybody who first saw him twirling down the wing in an Arsenal shirt, a perfect example of a wasted talent.
He tells Villerius’s film mournfully: “Behind the smile, my heart is black as coal.”
As teams like Manchester City and Chelsea attempt to attract the world’s best talent with wages that go up as the rest of the world’s economic fortunes go down, Helder is agitated that he now has a pension paying “less than what a beggar makes”.
Whether he is narcissistic or not, Helder watches old VHS tape of his only Arsenal goal, getting “goosebumps” and agonising over what might have been.
He adds: “When I go for a job interview people say: “You mean you’re the Glenn Helder? They think I’m joking. They expect me to drive up in an expensive car. But I go there by bus or train. Let’s face it, I should have been a millionaire by now, with my talents. And that’s putting it mildly.”
He looks up and with those worry lines appearing deeper and deeper he adds: “Nowadays players are taken care of. The clubs even give them underwear.
“You’re responsible for your own actions but I should have gotten a harder smack on the head. There were warning signs but they weren’t strong enough.”
For all the pain he has been through, Helder is hard to like – so stubborn and angry, you want the curly-haired showboater to somehow time travel back on to the screen.
Yet, his fight to get access to his son and a lifetime of debts is a worthy warning sign for the footballers in fast cars unlikely to be thinking about what their 30s and 40s and beyond will hold. There will be other Glenn Helders, maybe not to such a near-suicidal extreme, that find out that when the game ends, what comes next is not always as fun.
|
|
|
|
|
|
