TAO. REMEMBER TAO? Yes, we will always have Tao.
The club. The beach. The memories of old champagne wars fought by proud veterans.
Was it day or night? We weren’t sure. Should we be eating or swimming? Who cares.
I’m having flashbacks. A previous visit to Vegas is running through my head like a fucking Tarantino movie as we enter Tao.
Matty: What’s that dance?
Della: Na, that’s coke.
TSF: Fuck sake, grab her legs … get out the fucking way … open the door!
We move outside. No limo. Fucking Third World.
TSF: TAXI!
Cut to hospital.
Della: She’s gonna fucking die, she’s choking!
Matty: No she’s not. Look. Keep slapping her face. Be cool. HELP! SOMEBODY FUCKING HELP! You’ve got to relax.
Doctor: Right here, guys. OK, what has she taken?
Della: Cocaine, I think.
Matty: You think?
Doctor: OK, and what’s her name? CAN I GET A CART HERE, PLEASE? Come on, man. Her name, what’s her name?
Trolley arrives and the girl is taken away.
Matty: Why don’t you know her fucking name, Della?
Della: Why would I?
Matty: You were dancing with her!
Della: No I wasn’t!
Matty: You said she’d taken cocaine.
Della: I said I thought she had. I don’t fucking know, do I?
Matty: Then … who is she?
Slow realization that nobody knows who the girl is.
Della: She’s just some girl that he picked up off the fucking floor!
TSF: She needed help.
Matty: Ah for fuck’s sake, you fucking idiot! Now the police are gonna talk to us, you twat. They’re gonna want to know who gave her the coke, and what are we gonna say?
Della: Who did give her the coke?
TSF: I don’t fucking know, do I? What shall we do? Let’s just do a runner back to the hotel room.
Della: Yeah!
Matty: And then she dies? And the doctor tells the police three fucking English lads came in with her at three a.m.?
TSF: And the CCTV has probably clocked us coming in with her to be fair. I probably shouldn’t have grabbed her legs in hindsight.
Della: NO, BUT THAT’S YOU, ISN’T IT? YOU DON’T FUCKING THINK!
Big brawl between the players in the hospital lobby. Well, a brawl, but a trying-not-to-draw-too-much-attention brawl.
Two hours later. Players sitting down in the lobby. Concerned but falling asleep.
Doctor: OK, who wants to take this young lady home?
TSF: What?
Doctor: You guys did the right thing bringing her in. You see this bracelet right here? It’s for epilepsy.
TSF: Epilepsy?
Matty: She doesn’t look paraplegic.
Doctor: Uh … no, epilepsy. It’s when the brain suddenly becomes overloaded and the body goes into a seizure.
Blank stares.
Doctor: Anyway, good job, guys. Look after her, and if she has a relapse call me using the number on this card, OK?
Turning to girl.
Doctor: And keep drinking lots of water, OK? And maybe take a day or two off from the partying, huh?
Girl: OK.
Doctor walks away.
Girl: Soooo … who are you guys?
Della: Hi, I’m Della. I pulled you out of the club and got you to the hospital.
TSF: Really?
Girl: Thanks so much. So, where are we going now?
Let’s not kid ourselves. We come to Vegas to commit as much debauchery as possible, away from our WAGs, in a place where the cameras can’t follow and where the saying ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ is a mantra that is followed so rigidly that two players I know have those very words tattooed on their inner bicep. They both go to Dubai now anyway. Good luck on that honeymoon.
But this incident didn’t stay in Vegas. At least, the girl didn’t stay in Vegas. Six months later, Della took her from the bright lights of The Strip, where the girl worked as a party girl, back to the dim lights of Wigan, where he married her without a welcoming line of girls in petal-filled bathtubs. She lived the dream backwards.
I think of her as we enter Tao. How is Wigan today?
History lesson (because this book is basically an academic work of social history).
Of all the champagne wars fought in this sprawling club, there has to be a redeeming moral. When somebody disses you to start a champagne war, you can either take it on the chin, or you can give as good as you get. And if you were like us back in the heyday of the Premier League, in a Neverland where nobody knows you, with your looks tended and your ego rampant, then, my friend, you were gonna get a fucking war.
Now think fast shots of girls frantically ferrying champagne bottles back and forth with sparklers in the tops. Making your point is messy … and expensive. People have suggested that a fizzy water war might have less devastating effects on the participants. But devastation is the point. It must be inflicted. Widespread devastation.
Now think exhausted girls lying on the floor. Smoke of battle clearing. Tell-tale $1 tips from TSF lying about their persons.
But a point? There is none. In Vegas that is the fucking point. That is the Tao of Vegas.
(And this book is nothing if not a primer on important philosophies of the world.)
So when we enter Tao, and once I’d finished thinking of Wigan, I scoped the place to check that there was no fucker in there who would engage us in a champagne war. At huge personal risk, but with the mind of a military strategist, I had just saved Steve $60K. It would seem a pity to lose it now buying champagne for somebody we didn’t rate.
In fact it would be immature.
I was thinking sensibly. It would soon be time to get out of town.
Any time you leave Las Vegas without a criminal record, and with most of the belongings you came with, is a good time.
Money will come to you again. And if it won’t, well, you shouldn’t have gone to Vegas in the first place.
We packed the bags, left tips for the maids. Checked the place for anything we might have forgotten. And anything worth having. I could vaguely recall buying a diamond bracelet for my wife. But there was no diamond bracelet. Maybe I had imagined it.
There were two diamond rings lying in our fruit bowl, though.
Fuck me! Boys, we nearly forgot our $500 rings.
At McCarran Airport we saw a familiar face. A manager nobody in the game particularly likes. This man had been responsible, as we saw it, for the systematic bullying of many of our friends and fellow players. He was a dinosaur, a man who would pull out all of the stops to get his way at a player’s expense. When a manager wants to get rid of a player there are two ways to do it. The right way and this guy’s way.
The right way is to keep integrating the player and treat him with the same respect as the other players so that he doesn’t cause any problems and comes to understand naturally that he isn’t playing in the team and should probably move on.
The other way, the wrong way, is to arrange friendlies at the other end of the country on a Tuesday night and send the player travelling with the youth team by Transit van. Then to have him in on Sundays to do absolutely nothing. Just to bugger up his day and his family life and generally make him feel as excluded and alienated as possible.
This manager had done that to many of our friends.
One of the lads suggested he call in a bomb scare on the manager’s plane. But after five seconds of intense deliberation, it was decided that nobody fancied playing in the distinctive orange kit of Atlético Guantánamo. But apparently, after the plane had taken off, the police got word that there was a man smuggling drugs in his stomach, who would be bringing his cargo in on flight BA117 from Las Vegas.
If you were flying in or out of Heathrow on that particular day, you may remember that there were widespread delays. It makes me smile every single day to think of a rubber glove with a copper’s stout finger in it vainly exploring the arsehole of that most masculine of men.
I had my own shit to get through anyway. Penance for a start. Inhaling a box of paracetamol made me feel halfway to recovery. It was as if I had more than one hangover though. They were stacked in holding patterns above my head. One would land. I would deal with it. The next one would start its descent.
Never again, I said. And right then I really meant it.
I made the drive out to Birmingham’s jewellery quarter to visit a Jewish guy I knew called Hash. Hash was one of the smartest people I’d ever met. He had an incredible business supplying jewellery to any footballer who wanted it. Rolex watches? Go to Hash. Engagement and wedding rings? Talk to Hash. Birthday bracelets and necklaces for your WAG’s birthday? Hash was your man. Even the black players, who like to have specially made-up unique pieces such as diamond crucifixes (while they live lives devoid of virtue), went to Hash.
For four or five years, Hash cleaned up. He never asked where anything came from and, crucially, he never fleeced you on the price.
That’s what I mean by smart.
That day I went to see if Hash could rip off a Tiffany eternity ring my wife had had her eye on for a while, and which would now go some way towards appeasing her in the light of my Vegas trip. The diamond bracelet I had bought her had been stolen, or had got lost, or had never existed. She knew what went on during these kinds of trips, but this one was going to be a particularly hard sell.
Hash didn’t have a shop; he had an office above one. There was no name on the door, and the room was sparse, just a horrible fake walnut tabletop perched upon cold metal legs, with two swivel chairs finishing off the look. It was all set up for a quick escape.
Hash showed me the rings he currently had available and steered me towards the one he wanted me to buy, as all good salesmen do. A beautiful eternity ring.
We agreed a price, and as we shook hands on the deal he spotted a glint from my wedding finger and asked me what I was doing walking around sporting a woman’s engagement ring in full view of the world.
I could only vaguely recall what the ring was doing there. Oh yeah. It was easier to wear it coming through customs than to explain its presence in my luggage. I was about to tell him where it had come from, but as I opened my mouth to talk, I was immediately shot down.
‘No, no, no,’ said Hash, ‘I don’t want to bloody know where it came from. Can you get it off?’
With some gentle persuasion, the ring came off and I handed it to Hash, who put it towards the eye he’d covered with a jeweller’s loupe, which he used to read small marks on silver items and to check the clarity of diamonds.
Hash examined the ring for about a minute before lowering the loupe and looking me dead in the eye.
‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked.
I didn’t, but the next time you visit the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, remember to check out the scratch on the glass partition on the walkway to the entrance. It was made by a three-carat diamond ring. One of a pair bought for $500 in a moment of drunken impatience from a black guy who had to leave Vegas immediately. So he said.
Turns out they were the real deal. One hundred per cent genuine.
Hash opened the briefcase that never left his side, delved inside, and handed me £23,000 in cash.
‘What about the eternity ring?’ I asked.
Hash just grinned at me. ‘It’s a gift for your wife,’ he said.
I never saw him again.
Aside from wondering down the years whether or not I was now a bona fide international diamond smuggler, I also sometimes wondered what exactly happened to Hash. He had such a fantastic business and was fair to us players when most people looking to sell us things were intent on ripping us off.
About a year ago I was with another group of footballers I’d once played with when Hash’s name came up. ‘Terrible what happened to him, pal,’ said one of the players. Apparently he had been in a hotel room in the UAE, selling watches to two men posing as footballers from the Middle East, when at some point in the proceedings they stabbed him to death, before making off with his briefcase.
Anyway, that was Hash while he still had his health.
And that was us while we still had Vegas.