The phone pinged and a notification popped through.
“I didn’t want you finding out from anywhere else, but just to let you know that firstly, I’m OK,” the message began and, like any rational human being in those circumstances, my heart sank. In my experience, you don’t get random texts from mates telling you everything’s fine unless there’s a big “everything’s actually not fine” on the way, and the caveat that followed from Steve Harper was difficult to process.
Advertisement
I read words and phrases like “two CT scans” and “angiogram” and “hospital” and then the scariest of all, “subarachnoid haemorrhage”, and can remember thinking, “Jesus, no, this isn’t meant to happen”.
People, images, flashed into my head; Steve’s wife Lynsey and their kids, the bond our families have, our similar backgrounds, those dressing rooms we shared at Newcastle United — him a goalkeeper and me a striker — the elation of victory, the agony of defeat, rooming together, the conversations and frustrations, the drinks and meals out, the brutal banter.
And although Harps ended his message with “Colliery lads are made of strong stuff” — he grew up in Easington, a County Durham mining village — I have to be honest: my thoughts briefly turned to Gary Speed, another close pal, another former team-mate, and that dreadful news from 12 years ago that he was dead. On that day, I’d been the one to ring Steve and let him know.
The bigger picture is that this is not a sad story. It’s the opposite. Nearly four months on, Steve is fit and well, he looks good, he’s back at work as Newcastle’s academy director — a job he was born to do and is bloody brilliant at. But I suppose it is a story of perspective, of taking a step back and second chances.
And it’s about friendships in football, which are often very fleeting.
That isn’t the case with Steve. I’m not an outwardly emotional person — it’s just the way I’m built — but I know to my core that he has my back, something which is very precious. Way too precious to lose.
Steve laughs when I tell him I began planning my eulogy when he sent his text. Dressing-room humour is not for the faint-hearted and enough time has passed for us to add this to the list of acceptable subject matter. We are sitting in his office beneath a portrait of Sir Bobby Robson, our old manager at St James’ Park. Above the academy’s front door is a sign which reads, “Today is your opportunity”.
I ask him to retreat to September 4 to talk me through what happened.
“It was a Monday night at the end of a random day at work, probably a little bit more stressful than usual, but nothing out of the ordinary,” he says. “I was here until about 8.30pm watching youngsters train on the astroturf. I got home, my eldest son made me a cup of tea at 10pm — he never does that, so it sticks in my mind — and then I stood up to go to bed.
Advertisement
“I got one of those head rushes, but this was like a bomb going off — a sharp, stabbing pain at the back of my head. ‘That’s funny’, I thought because a normal headache tends to be behind your eyes or in the sinus. I went to the bathroom and was sick and started shaking. My wife said, ‘You’ve got food poisoning or an infection or something’.
“Your body just sends you messages, though. I’d gone to the spare room to lie down and I remember thinking ‘I’m not going to get to sleep’. My head was killing me. And then it was, ‘I don’t want to go to sleep — this isn’t right’. By that time it was 10.45pm and I decided to call 111. I got through at about the fifth attempt because I’d tried 101, 121… Obviously, when you’re having a brain haemorrhage you don’t think straight!
“They told me to come into hospital, so Lynsey dropped me off at the RVI (Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary). I walked in and immediately heard a Geordie voice shout ‘ower here, mate’, so I went to reception. They asked for my name: ‘Steve Harper’. They asked if I’d been there before. I said, ‘Yes, 10 years ago, when I gave you £120,000 ($153,000) of my testimonial money’. Again, I was having a brain haemorrhage!
“I was seen straight away, taken into a room and started throwing up again. I had a CT scan, then a CT scan with dye and then I was having a neuro angiogram where they go in through the groin, which is not fun.
“I’d had a bleed in my brain. A blood vessel had burst. It was diagnosed as a non-aneurysmal subarachnoid brain haemorrhage. They call an aneurysmal haemorrhage the ‘widow-maker’ – chances are you don’t make it to hospital. I was in for eight days and the care was fantastic, but the blood rattling around in the brain has to settle somewhere and causes irritation and affects balance. It was difficult.”
Advertisement
How does he feel about it now?
“I was unlucky to have one but lucky to have this type where you’re expected to make a full recovery,” he says. “They used a really good analogy when I was in hospital, to think of yourself as an iPhone where the screen is fine but your download speeds are compromised and your battery is really low. That’s how I felt. My battery was at five per cent.
“I’ve had some mental health challenges in the past which are on the record and the aftermath for me was more about, ‘Is this going to happen again?’, and that’s not a good place to be in. It happened on the Monday night, on the Tuesday it was, ‘I’m alright, I’m still here’, Newcastle released a statement about what happened and the good wishes I got from everywhere was incredible. But then it just hit me.
“It got to the stage where I said to Lynsey, ‘I don’t want any visitors’. I turned my phone off, turned the world off and knew I had to get through it for myself. I drifted in and out of sleep for 36 hours and went to all those dark places; fortunately, I’d seen that particular movie before. It was about living with what might have been, wanting to see my kids grow up. There’s no manual for how you deal with it.”
Steve’s voice is thick. It is hard to hear this. At the time, I’d responded to his text with something like, “Let me know if I can do anything, can I help with the kids, can I make life a bit easier?” but what can you really say at that point?
“I’m still waiting for the bunch of grapes,” Steve shoots at me now.
Football is a tough sport, more so when we played. You build up walls. You think of yourself as Superman, although life sometimes has other ideas. “But I am indestructible,” I say to Harps and he laughs.
“You really are, in your own head,” he says. “You would think that after 27 years or however long it’s been, I might just see a little chink in the armour, but you’ve got that iron shield. You’re probably the toughest person I’ve come across in football. The most stubborn, too.”
Advertisement
And he says: “You’re not going to put an arm around me, but there are different ways of supporting people. I know you’re there for me.”
Sixteen weeks on, Harps feels “fine”. He never had a great memory for names, he says, and “I’ve got a brilliant get-out clause now — I can just say ‘brain issues’.” I can testify to one peculiar after-effect which emerged when we went out for dinner early into his recovery and he suddenly asked who was looking after my dog. My dog died two years ago.
Occasional lapses in memory are common at that stage of recuperation Harps tells me, but they’re long gone now. And then, with a straight face, he calls me “Graeme” — intentionally — and now it’s my turn to laugh.
“When something like this happens, your initial thought is, ‘b*******, I don’t need this, I want to live’,” he says, “but you go home from hospital and it’s, ‘Phew, I’m still here’ and then it becomes, ‘Right, I’m bored now. I’ve watched Deadliest Catch, I’ve got through Yellowstone, I’m too young not to do anything’. I’m fortunate that through football and business I don’t need this job, but I want to do it — for the right reasons.”
But he looks at life through the prism of before and after his haemorrhage. “Yeah, I do,” he says. “I feel different. I have to.”
In terms of why it happened, there are few definitive answers.
“There are multiple causes, but they can’t narrow it down,” Steve says. “I just think it was my relentless drive at work for two and a half years. Working too hard, basically. My mentality was to come in and attack the role. I wanted to try to fix everything for everybody and fix it all yesterday. That’s not good. It’s not the right balance. So it was probably self-inflicted.
“If anybody is reading this, the thing I’d love them to take away from it is that you shouldn’t have to get into an acute situation where something has to give for you to reflect on how much you’re doing and the toll it might be taking. In spite of what you might think, nobody is indestructible.
Advertisement
“Pavel Srnicek, a hero of mine, passed away at 47, which was a terrible, terrible shock. Shaka Hislop collapsed on television and thankfully he’s alright. This happens to me at 48. All of us former Newcastle keepers. Shay Given thinks he’s starring in a remake of Final Destination!”
And that sets me off again. Steve has always been a world-beater at deadpan. “I’ve got to make light of this,” he says. “It’s a way of coping.”
As he says, his approach to work has had to change.
“I’m more structured now,” he says. “Previously, I was open all hours. I would walk past conversations in corridors, realise there was an issue and want to stop and solve it. But in my time here, the academy staff has grown by 50 per cent. We’ve got a really good, high-calibre, forward-thinking, progressive group of people and I’ve got to allow them to get on with their jobs
“I’ve part-owned a business, but there’s absolutely nothing else like an academy manager role. The challenge is dealing with 160 kids and 90 staff. You’ve got an inbox constantly full of other people’s issues and it’s only when you have time out and have only one thing to take care of — yourself — that you realise you can’t neglect it.”
Harps is five years younger than me. He was still playing for Newcastle’s reserves when I joined from Blackburn Rovers in 1996, but he broke into the first team a couple of years later and we hit it off. Our parents had a work ethic and we’d taken that into our own careers. We had similar values in life. Both of us loved a laugh.
“We can take the piss out of each other,” Harps says — and he’s right. There are never hard feelings. We’re also honest without falling out. We’ve always told it straight and accepted it.
“When you were toying with retiring as a player, we both had dogs — yours was still alive! — and we used to have the occasional walk,” Harps says. “You told me you were wondering whether your time was up and I think it was only me and Paul Ferris (the former Newcastle physio, now a successful author), who had the b******* to say, ‘Leave the stage when the audience is asking for more’.
Advertisement
“As it turns out, you stayed on and broke Newcastle’s goalscoring record, which you might have mentioned now and again! But you say what you think your pal needs to hear and don’t worry about the repercussions.”
Our friendship was tested — or could have been — when I (briefly) became Newcastle’s manager in 2009. Steve was still playing and knew me well enough to know he wouldn’t get special favours.
“I’m sure you’d have done well given time, but deep down I probably didn’t want it to happen,” Harps says. “Not just because of what it might have done to our relationship, but also thinking, ‘This is going to be so hard for you’. It was almost the perfect storm that season…”
I jump in: if we’d had a decent f****** keeper, we wouldn’t have been relegated!
He hits back: “If we’d scored in the last couple of games we would have stayed up. We’ve had this conversation before and it tends to get more ruthless as the night goes on!”
Mike Ashley, who was then Newcastle’s owner, never got back in touch with me following the team’s relegation and any potential for awkwardness with Steve evaporated. The truth is I’m very proud of him, the longest-serving player in Newcastle’s history and still connected to the club, still influencing it in a positive way.
I tell him about my pride and he returns the favour. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be the England centre-forward and the most expensive player in the world, but I’m sure you had to protect yourself to keep that tunnel vision,” he says. “I feel fortunate to be let through those barriers.”
A dressing room is a confined space where you go through emotional extremes, but players are like ships passing in the night. You get to the end of your career and you’re lucky if you’ve got five mates. I certainly feel lucky that Harps is one of mine.
Advertisement
I ask him to describe me in a few words. “Funny, stubborn, driven.”
I call him hardworking, dedicated and honourable.
“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Steve says.
If all this self-analysis is beginning to sound too serious, Harps breaks the spell, chuckling as he recalls my fury at being dropped by Sir Bobby towards the end of his spell as Newcastle manager.
“We roomed together and I had to listen to you moan on for the rest of the night — when you get angry there’s this vein that comes up on the side of your head and it was pulsing away,” Harps says. “I used to try to go to sleep first. You’d always ask me to leave a light on because you’re afraid of the dark and all I can hear is this big sighing. ‘Still awake are you?’ I asked. ‘Yes’.”
I’m not scared of the dark, I insist. I just like to go to sleep with the light on.
“Ah, so you can show a chink of vulnerability after all,” Harps replies with a big grin, but I’m not having that. Time to move this conversation on.
A little while earlier, at Steve’s request, I’d stood in the academy canteen in front of players and staff and spoken about my own experiences in football. I cut ribbons to officially open the Lewis Miley and Elliot Anderson rooms, the names of which will be changed and rotated every time a graduate makes a Premier League start for Newcastle. The Lewis Miley room has a window which looks up to the first-team training ground — a clever, aspirational touch.
“I love this job,” Harps says. “I had 20 years here as a player and I care; trying to make it better every day gets me out of bed. I was fortunate to be in place when the takeover happened because it’s allowed us to accelerate things. I got it at the right time to be able to grow it with some capital backing.
“Dan Ashworth, the sporting director, has been fantastic with me and right from the start the owners have shown a keen interest in what we do. Amanda (Staveley) and Mehrdad (Ghodoussi, the co-owners) visited us early on and regularly ask for updates. We’ve come a long way in a short period of time but we can’t pat ourselves on the back just because Lewis has broken through. We have to keep pushing.”
Advertisement
Even now, despite being a regular in Eddie Howe’s squad, Miley, 17, comes back here twice a week to continue his education. “You don’t notice he’s here,” Harps says. “He’s not flash. Everybody wants to speak to him but he’s unassuming and sits quietly and does his work. It’s just testament to who he is.”
Not so unusual, I say. When I was an apprentice at Southampton, I had to go to college.
“Which CSE did you get?” Harps says, to which I provide a well-worn response: I’ve got a master’s degree in scoring goals, pal.
Steve has heard it all before.
As a boyhood Newcastle fan who had to leave the region to pursue my dream of playing professionally, I find all this incredibly exciting. A few years ago, the club was barely breathing, let alone functioning, and now talented and committed people like Harps are steering it. And it’s only just beginning.
When Miley started against Chelsea last month, when Michael Ndiweni and Amadou Diallo, two other academy graduates, came on, I sent a text to Harps and said I would give him a shoutout on Match of the Day. “No, don’t mention my name, just the academy,” he replied, which sums him up. “It’s a collective effort,” he says now. “Everybody here — kit people, chefs, security, everyone — has played a part in that story.”
I refer to Chelsea and Manchester City who, like Newcastle, have had an influx of investment but have excelled at producing players and boosting their own coffers. “Their academies were a dozen years ahead of us, but we’re closing that gap and closing it quickly,” says Steve. “We have to create our own model.
“To just throw money at something without the foundations in place isn’t sustainable. With Dan’s guidance, with the excellent backing we’ve had from the club, we can look at systems, people and processes. We can grow it.
Advertisement
“You almost want to grab the TV remote and fast-forward two, three years into the future, to see what it looks like. This club can gather momentum quickly in both directions, but everything is snowballing in the right direction. I knew I couldn’t walk away from that.”
For this reason and plenty of others, I’m very happy he’s still around.
(Top photo: The Athletic)