“You learn to bury it”. Jermain Defoe could be talking about one of his 325 career goals. Then he takes a deep breath.
For a player whose name was frequently in the tabloids, he is not sure people ever really knew him. Defoe is better remembered as one of Tottenham’s greatest modern goalscorers, a perhaps neglected England option, and later a Sunderland hero.
More than a decade on from the most traumatic period of his life, he is finally ready to talk. “You’ve still got pain inside you, but I think I could hide it,” he tells i. “I could get on with my day, like nothing’s affecting me, but really it is.”
While at the European Championship with England in 2012, he received a phone call. “I just knew,” he recalls – but it all started long before that.
“I lost my Nan in 2008. Then I lost my brother in 2009. Then I lost my Dad in 2012. Then about eight weeks after that, I lost my cousin Hannah. Four people in the period of a few years.”
At the time, Defoe – now 41 – was 29-years-old. “It is young to go through that. When I lost my Dad, I was at the Euros with England. I had to fly back to come to the funeral.
“That summer, what should have been one of the proudest moments of my life, being at a European Championship with England – it’s the pinnacle, you don’t really get better than that apart from the World Cup – what should have been a good experience was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of football. I had to go to the hospital every day after training before we flew out to the tournament.
“When I landed in Poland, getting a phone call and having to come back because my dad had passed away. When you go through that, and you’re trying to heal – I had a break, I went back to Tottenham pre-season, I got the phone call about my cousin Hannah. It was something else you have to try and deal with. You never forget it. But for some reason I’ve just always felt I have to carry on– I have to be strong.”
The same year as losing his father and cousin, the case of his half-brother Jade – also known as Gavin – finally went to court. The Old Bailey heard how the popular MC from east London had been killed on a night out by a single punch.
Football was, and remains, Defoe’s escape – he is now an U18 coach at Spurs with managerial ambitions. He has been making a biopic of his life, Defoe, which has given him a chance to watch back his goals – something he admits he does regularly anyway. When he recently moved house, he took with him boxes and boxes of memorabilia: shirts, pictures – and he takes a moment to look at the boots he was wearing when he scored five goals against Wigan at White Hart Lane.
“Football helped me in a big way,” he says. “Because when I felt like that, what’s going to make me happy? Training, playing. You’re not thinking about anything else. But it doesn’t go away, it’s in you. It’s traumatic because it was one thing after another. I don’t really know how it affected me. At the time, I felt I had no time to sit in the corner and feel sorry for myself. I felt like I had to be strong for other people around me that were struggling.
“Maybe it comes from football. The generation I grew up in, it wasn’t a thing – it’s different now, people feel more comfortable coming out and speaking if you’re struggling. Back then, it was just ‘get on with it’. Even little injuries, ‘get on with it’. You’ve got to be tough. I’ve got pressure on me, I need to perform, I’m getting paid to play football, fans demand a level of performance so I have to do that.”
If football was an unforgiving, unsympathetic environment, Defoe makes one exception – Harry Redknapp.
“When you do your coaching badges, they teach you how to coach – but people skills come natural, that’s upbringing. Someone like Harry understands when he needs to have a conversation with someone. Even the times I was going through so much, the manager would call me in his office. He’d speak to my family. It’s so important.”
Redknapp had been Defoe’s first coach back at West Ham, the club the striker left to join Spurs after the Hammers’ relegation. It prompted a wave of abuse that he was ill-prepared to cope with, but it had not been an easy decision.
Defoe grew up in east London, his mum working multiple jobs and cleaning toilets to support him after falling pregnant with him at 17. West Ham was his dad’s team – he had not attended Defoe’s youth games at Senrab, a club which also produced the likes of Ledley King and Sol Campbell, but he would watch his son play for West Ham from afar.
“Even though I never had a tight relationship with my dad – my mum and dad split up when I was really young – I understand that my dad was dealing with his own battles. It was tough but the times I’d see my dad, he always told me he’s proud.”
Defoe says his family was his main motivation as a player – but since retiring, he knows the buzz he got from scoring goals has gone forever. Can he recapture it as a manger? “You can’t. No way. It’s the nearest thing you get to playing, but in terms of that buzz, that drive, nowhere near.”
Yet Defoe has, through the most desperate of circumstances, gained more perspective than most. In 2017, Bradley Lowery, the six-year-old Sunderland fan he had befriended, died aged six after a battle with neuroblastoma, a rare form of incurable cancer. Lots of footballers do charity work and try and help youngsters – Defoe once pulled his car over to play football with a group of kids, many years later discovering that one of them had been Harry Kane – but this was different.
Defoe was Lowery’s idol, walking out with him as his mascot at Wembley and the Stadium of Light. He visited him regularly in hospital, and struck up a friendship with his family that lasts to this day.
“You moan about certain things, you’re human, but that experience with Bradley it does put stuff into perspective. You’re lucky to have what you have and count your blessings. Your life could be a lot different – you could be a parent that’s going through something like that. For a child that’s so young and not even getting the opportunity to live life. How can you prepare yourself to go through something like that with a child?
“One day I went to the hospital. I walked in and [Bradley’s mother] Gemma said ‘he’s had a bad day today’. But she said, ‘he’s just been speaking about you all day’ and she said ‘Jermain’s coming today’. And as soon as you walked into the room, now he’s happy. It was so hard for me to understand.”
It is only now he has finished playing Defoe feels he can truly reflect: “My career, family members that I’ve lost, Brad.” Late in the film, he admits he still finds it difficult, as a high-profile footballer, to trust people – he was once told he was expecting a child, only for a late DNA test to reveal he was not the father.
Defoe’s love for the game has not dimmed, though, and he has “100 per cent” decided he wants to become a manager next – eventually. “We’ve seen it – there’s no guarantee that just because you’ve played at a top level for 20 years that you can just become a great coach. I don’t want to be one of those players you get an opportunity and you don’t do well and then you don’t get another job – all the hard work you’ve done and then you get the opportunity and you’re not ready.”
That will no doubt come in good time. For now, Defoe says he is “good, happy, grateful, blessed”.
Defoe will be available in UK Cinemas for one night only on 29th February. Tickets are available at https://defoethefilm.co.uk/
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