He has been explaining why it's important for him to say what he believes about the need to repeal the eighth amendment or to speak about consent or mental health, but how none of this would have been possible if he hadn’t radically changed his life
“I’ve gradually had to build myself back together in tiny little pieces," he says and, as he did so, he found his voice.
So he sits in a sofa in JOE’s office and talks about whatever he wants to talk about. He talks about repeal and compassion, about men voting Yes to allow women autonomy. He talks about consent and mental health and drink and drugs, but mainly he talks about a life that was based on escape, a life which only began to make sense when he realised there was no outrunning himself.
When he was a boy, Richard Sadlier would escape with a football. No matter what was going on, he knew this escape would work. He would take the ball to a field behind his parents’ house and kick it against a wall, doing a Match of the Day commentary in his head.
In those moments when he kicked a ball against a wall, he was free from all anxieties and also laying the foundations for a professional football career.
If it was dark and he couldn't play football, he would run a lap around the field and that worked too. Those hours of solitude were all he needed.
“When something was going on in my head that I didn’t like or there was something around me that I wasn’t comfortable with, I just took to a football field. Football was my go-to place anytime I had any kind of struggle and I always felt better after it. And nobody else had to be there.”
Nobody else had to be there and he didn’t have to talk to anybody. For a long time, this worked as a means of escape. This was all he needed. And, of course, it was unconscious.
“I never sat down and said I struggle sometimes to find my voice, I’m awkward saying things. I don’t feel it’s my place to say things. But I’m just going to go for a run and I feel better. I never had that conversation with anyone, it was just what I did.”
Richard Sadlier's solitary hours of practice. He became a professional footballer, but he always wanted to hide from view, to be left alone.
One Thursday night in October, 2001, 22-year old Richard Sadlier scored two goals as Millwall beat West Brom at the Hawthorns. The game was live on TV, Sadlier was man of the match and everything was going well. Now Richard would do his first post-match interview.
He knew what the questions would be: How did it feel to score? Will Millwall stay up? Ireland could be heading to a World Cup, would he like to be part of that squad?
But Sadlier didn’t feel sure enough of himself to answer those questions. He was thinking of one unforgiving audience: the dressing-room and, while he would have to take part in he interview himself, he wanted somebody's else words for the duration of his appearance.
“I remember grabbing Millwall’s manager Mark McGhee in the corridor and saying ‘Here, what will I say?’ Imagine being that unsure of yourself? Imagine being that paralysed at the thought of saying the wrong thing?”
Then he wanted anyone’s view but his own, then he thought there must be some way from him to disappear from view somehow.
This seemed to work. He could escape on the football field and offer nothing when he was asked his opinion which could cause trouble for him in the dressing room.
And it might have kept working as well as it did for 12-year-old Richard Sadlier, who could always escape to the field outside his parents’ house, if twelve years later, having established himself as a professional footballer, he didn’t have to face retirement at the age of 24.
He had a job that allowed him his preferred means of abandon. For two hours every day he trained and escaped and it was going well. Premier League clubs were looking at him and the means of escape had become a career. And then, it ended. Not suddenly, not without warning because his hip injury had been with him for 18 months, but, sudden or not, it didn't matt. What mattered was it ended. All certainty was gone and there would have to be another method of escape.
“I didn’t just lose the job that I had because of my injury. I lost the ability to exercise regularly or to do the things that would have worked with me for years,” he says.
So he found something else that would work, something that allowed him to get out of his head and while there was mainly drink, sometimes there would also be drugs, but the instrument didn't really matter, what mattered was how he was attacking himself, attacking who he thought he might be.
“When I was 12, I could go back to the back of my house, kick a ball and feel better, now I was 24. I couldn't kick a ball, I couldn't run. I was heartbroken and hurt more than ever been before and I thought well, 'I'm gonna get out of my head'. The best way of getting out of your head is drink and taking drugs. So it's a wildly effective way of doing what you want it to do and I wasn't doing with any sense of, 'Oh my God this is going to be brilliant craic this weekend because I'm going to fill myself full of cocaine'. It was, 'If I fill myself full of cocaine, I won't feel what I feel now. It won't hurt this much’.”
And it hurt. This is what he knows now and didn't want to grasp then.
“Around that period, there was just as much drink as is possible and then I remember waking up at the age of 24 when I’d retired and thinking, ‘I know loads of people who do drugs all the time, I’ve never done it. I don’t want to get caught doing it. I’m in a job where I get randomly drugs tested and I don’t want to throw it all away for a night. But I don’t have that anymore’.”
He might have wondered what he was escaping from, and if there was another way, but instead he just kept going, free, as he saw it, to do what he wanted and what he wanted, he concluded, was to escape.
“There were no structures anymore in my life. The reality of my life at the time was horrendous, it was horrendous being in my head for that period in the build-up to retirement in the weeks and months after it.”
The weeks and months took a familiar path.
“I was wanting to escape the thing that had just happened. I wanted to escape reality. I didn't want to deal with the fact that this - what I felt was this horrendous event - had happened. You get to do that really effectively do that by knocking on a pub door at 12 in the afternoon, going inside, switching your phone off and staying ’til closing.”
Sometimes he felt maybe this wasn’t the way he wanted to lead his life, but if he was always drunk or hungover how could any tell that he didn't want to always be drunk or hungover?
There were moments when the question would jump out and surprise him. A minute where he wondered, “What am I doing here?” or 30 seconds when he asked, “How has this happened?” There might be a brief spell when he promised things would have to change, but the promises wouldn’t be kept.
He could forget them quickly, silencing the questions by his now preferred methods of escape, even if he knew the question would keep coming back, the question he didn’t want to answer.
“How the fuck is this where I’ve gotten to?”
There were times when he kidded himself that he was managing it, that maybe he had an off switch. He moved to Durham for a year when he was training with Sunderland with the prospect of a return to football.
He passed the test and life continued, even as the comeback failed and, in the winter of 2006, he returned to Dublin.
He started a column in the Sunday Independent and there was some TV work, but there was nothing that provided a structure, nothing that stopped him meeting up with the old friends he hadn’t seen since he left home as a teenager so “the messiness continued”.
On and on it went. Even when jobs with more structure demanded more from him, the routes to escape and oblivion were still the same. There was still the same urgency to get out of his head.
In 2010, he started a psychotherapy course, certain that it was his desire to help others that saw him sitting in a room with 31 people eager to make a difference.
“Over the course of the course, in different times, and in different ways, the 32 of us all kind of acknowledged that in some ways we were all there to work through our own shit.”
It wasn’t the most direct way of doing it. “Once you start doing a psychotherapy course, you have to get into personal therapy, you’ve got to start looking at yourself. I would have been thinking, ‘Here’s me going to tend to the needs of other people’. And you just learn all these clever phrases to support other people. I wasn’t aware how much support I needed myself or what I needed to do to access it.”
But he was getting an idea. “My memory of that year between 2010 and 2011 is of the walls gradually caving in around me.”
On a late summer’s day in 2011, the walls came down.
“Nothing happened,” he says, stressing the lack of anything unusual that weekend, except the weariness that it was all happening again.
“Nothing happened in that third weekend of August that hadn’t happened a hundred times before. There was no police, there were no fights, there was no fire brigade, I didn’t smash any windows. There was nothing headline-grabbing from that weekend.”
It was the opposite and that was the problem. “It was just a weekend I'd had countless times before where you go into it saying, “Think I’ll take it handy this weekend’ and then on the Sunday afternoon, you’re three days into a bender, sitting in a beer garden with a packet of fags, a pint of Guinness, and I think I was talking to group of Scottish lads who were over on a stag party. None of my mates were to be seen, they all had the sense that at some point the party ends and everyone goes home. I didn’t have that off switch."
He went to bed that night, saying he would stop and the next day he decided to try and do that.
He didn't drink that day as he promised and he didn't drink the next day either and it just kept going. Days and months without drink. It wasn't always easy, but maybe it was always better, maybe it was now that he could figure out a way to be without having to escape.
"I woke up on that Monday morning having decided the previous night that I’d stop drinking and I haven’t drank since, haven’t touched a drug since.”
Nearly seven years later, he is happy to talk about it, happy to look back on a life that is unrecognisable, an existence that seems to confirm Bernard Malamud’s words that "we have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live after that”.
Sadlier is living this life, amazed that he managed to get anything done in his old one when there was no off switch, but aware of all he has learned.
“The amount of things I do in my week, 80 per cent of them would have to go if I decided to drink. I just know how I am- if I go out tonight, I’ll still be out three nights later so there’s a cost to that in how you spend your time. Things are different now.”
If he has views on many things, how other people drink isn’t one of them.
“I don’t have opinions on other people drinking, I’m not judgmental, I’m really comfortable being in the company of people who are drinking or drunk. My girlfriend drinks. I’ve no issue with any of that. I’m just at a place where I go, ‘You know what, I don’t drink. It doesn’t suit me. If it suits you, fill your boots but it just doesn’t suit me’.”
Instead, he has found a life that suits him, a life he might not have imagined or expected to bring such contentment. “15 years ago I just played football, that was my job. It was all I did. It was all I wanted to do, it was my main focus and it was everything. There are so many things there at the moment.”
So he does what he wants to do and ignores the noise. He ignored the noise when he spoke out for the Yes campaign and the noise that told him to doubt his own views isn’t around so much these days.
“Even to sit down in this interview with you. I didn’t deliberate in my head for weeks on end, should I talk about this or not. I didn’t ask you what questions to ask. Ok, well, this is me, this is just some of the things I’ve gone through, this is some of the stuff I think now. Just talk about it.”
This is quite a transformation. So now he just talks about what he wants to talk about. There was a time when that might have bothered him, but then there was a time when everything would have bothered him.
The 22-year-old who wanted Mark McGhee's opinion on how it felt for Richard Sadlier to score for Millwall is gone.
Then he wanted anyone’s view but his own, then he thought there must be some way for him to disappear from vie. At that time, he always thought, "surely there is a better view than mine to hear, so just tell me what yours is and I’ll just be the vehicle for letting people hear it.”
Now his voice is being heard quite a lot and he has no problem expressing a view, although occasionally he has concerns.
“What I’m trying to avoid is being one of these people who has a view on everything - but I do have a view on a lot of things. And a lot of the issues that seem to be in the public domain at the moment.”
His appearance on Second Captains with Sinead O’Carroll after the Belfast rape trial was one of those moments when his voice resonated because he seemed to be offering a solution to the anger and confusion.
When he was asked if he was prepared to publicly support the Yes campaign in next month’s referendum, he didn’t need to think for too long before he gave his answer.
He knows that life is complicated, which is why he’s voting yes when the alternative is retaining the fundamentalist Eighth Amendment.
He doesn’t expect anyone to vote the same way because he goes public, but he thinks men who think they have no part in this conversation might decide to do the same if he explains why.
“I can understand why men feel alienated from the conversation. I believe this is an issue for women to decide which is why I’m voting ‘yes’. A ‘yes’ vote hands the decision back to the pregnant woman.”
The footballer who needed to check with his manager before doing a post-match interview is now happy to speak out on one of the most important issues in modern Irish history.
The need to escape is gone. Nothing he has done in recent years would have been possible without the decision he made in a pub on an August Sunday in 2011 and which has been confirmed by every day he’s lived since.
The ground is a bit firmer underneath me these days. I was all over the shop when I stopped playing football, I was all over the shop when I was drinking, I was all over the shop when I stopped drinking and drugging. I’ve gradually had to build myself back together in tiny little pieces.”
As he did, he found his voice and if that bothers you, Richie Sadlier won’t be concerned. There are more important things to worry about. He’s had more important things to worry about.
“It’s ongoing, I’m not sitting here thinking I’m sorted, but I’m at a stage now where I’m far more comfortable just being myself. Whether that means talking openly about some of the things I’ve gone through or talking openly about my view on the referendum or any of the other things, I’ll do it and I’ll go home and walk the dog and go to bed. And I’ll get up tomorrow and do whatever’s on the schedule for tomorrow.”
