‘Dub Sub Confidential’ wins Sports Book of the Year award

The oldest (and dullest) question for an author is where the idea for their book came from. Still has to be asked though, and so when we gathered around John Leonard, the inaugural winner of the Setanta Sports Book of the Year award for his memoir Dub Sub Confidential, we got a better answer than we deserved.

“When I first got back onto the Dublin team in 2006, I knew that I had been in India smoking opium less than two years earlier. I knew that I had been doing ketamine every day and losing my marbles.

“And I just thought that that journey, from being in the Himalayas smoking opium to winning an All-Ireland with Dublin, would have made a great story. So that was in my head. But then we never won. We didn’t make it with Pillar, we didn’t get it over the line. So I kind of parked it for a few years.”

In time, he came back to it and the result is a unique autobiography that beat off competition from Jim McGuinness, historian Paul Rouse and sports journalists Tom English and Mary White for the award. It's a book in which he spares no graphic detail in his life – little wonder that he used his acceptance speech to ask for a round of applause for his mother who was in attendance.

Drug-head

“I gave the book to her to read and she came back to me after a few days and said, ‘Some of the early stuff is very repetitive. There’s an awful lot of stuff about drugs.’ I said, ‘Well Ma, that’s because there were a lot of drugs!’”

“I’ve always been up-front and I’ve always been outspoken but as regards being really open about being abused as a kid or being aware that I was an alcoholic or a drug-head. Drug-head? I don’t know what that means! Delete that! But to be open about it and honest about it . . .was something I only really learned when I started to get sober about six years ago.

“I have had a blog, soberpaddy.com, for six-odd years now and through that process of me being honest about what I have been up to, you have to confront your demons and revisit your past and all that. You become honest. Otherwise you are going to fall back into your old habits and that’s not something I want to do again. It did come only when I started getting sober, that honesty.”

Leonard calls Stephen Cluxton the footballer he most admires. But he presumes the Dublin captain hasn't read the book. He hasn't spoken to him since it came out, despite a few attempts to get in touch. They lived parallel lives for a while – until they very much did not.

"There were times in the past when I wondered what could have been if I hadn't gone off the rails, if I had kept my shit together back then when I was 17, 18 instead of getting into the drug scene and getting more serious about training, working harder. Stephen Cluxton wasn't around back then and I had three or four years to try to oust Davy Byrne and establish myself around that time, and I didn't.

“At the time I was off messing all over the world, drinking, doing drugs and carrying on and enjoying, in inverted commas, “life”. I did regret it at times. I was in Greece I remember when Clucko got sent off against Armagh and I remember reading that going, ‘What am I doing here on this little island in the middle of nowhere drinking my brains out with nothing going on? Who is this guy anyway? Who is this Stephen Cluxton?’ He’d come in and taken (the place) and then he gets sent off. I was angry and bitter about that as well and that just sent me on to another spiral of deeper alcoholism at the time.”

Dub Sub Confidential is available from Penguin Books, €18.99.