GOOGLE the name John Carling and you are led to a series of newspaper articles which begin with the same sentence.

“A former footballer was jailed . . .” How many times have we read that? What happened to this ex-player, however, is quite the saga.

Carling is hardly a household name, but he easily could have been. As a young kid growing up in the 1980s, nobody in the Tayside area scored more goals, which is why Dundee came calling with a contract.

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He did okay, injury and bad luck did for him, but ended up a huge success in his professional life after football.

So why then in December 2013 was he found in a KFC in Dundee drunk, when banned from alcohol by a sheriff, in possession of a three-inch lock knife, and arguing with the staff.

The man I meet in a smart hotel beside the River Tay is neatly dressed with a face older looking than it should be. It’s been nearly three years since Carling touched a drink and he’s ready to tell his story.

Not for money, or sympathy or even redemption. This now 43-year-old just wants to set the record straight and be afforded the chance to resurrect his life and career, and importantly help others.

“I have no secrets, there are no skeletons in my cupboard now,” Carling tells me before without so much of a pause giving me his life story. He starts with the day he was almost murdered three weeks after his 14th birthday.

“I started playing football seriously when I was seven for a local Sunday boys’ team. I was a striker even then, I always scored goals, and did well right from the off.

“There was a lot of talk about senior clubs being interested in me. I was watched by loads of scouts. And then it happened. I was subjected to an unprovoked and serious assault – the charge was attempted murder.

“I was stabbed ten times and ended up on a life support machine with a punctured lung. It was horrific, absolutely horrific, but in those days you just got up and got on with it, and that’s exactly what I did after I recovered physically. There were no psychologists, no mental health treatment, none of that. It was a living nightmare.

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“The football saved me at that time but I never dealt with it, the significant psychological impact the stabbing had on me.

“Since I got sober, and this is the last couple of years, I’ve had to deal with the fact that it is Post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]. When I heard that I thought ‘nah, it was 29 years ago’ but the medical professionals were right. I then found myself reliving it – all the time.

“The one thing that kept going around in my head is that I slipped on grass trying to get away, otherwise they wouldn’t have got me [I was too fast], and I can always remember them saying ‘stab his balls’.”

The more Carling talks about it, the more it makes sense that his life was never going to go to plan from that awful evening. Nobody was found guilty.

“The only one I felt was when my lung was punctured – it was like a sharp kick. They just walked away and left me, the b*****ds. I knew I was in trouble because I couldn’t breathe. I somehow managed to get to my feet, knocked on a couple of doors for help, but nobody answered. I found out later on that the neighbours were scared.

“Eventually a guy I knew from school did answer his door. He told me that I needed an ambulance but I kept asking him to phone my dad because he was just down the road.

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“I remember telling them to look at my back because it was stinging. I can laugh now but the lad said: “John, it’s stinging because your back is slashed to f***.”

This was April 1989. Six weeks in hospital followed, including a period in intensive care, and yet he was back kicking a ball that year.

Jim Smith was a player at Dundee and a family friend and brought Carling to the club’s attention.

Dundee United also sniffed about but Jim McLean didn’t want a lad who had been in trouble.

Carling signed “S” form for Dundee almost immediately and then went full-time on the same day as Neil McCann. He also went to Italy and Poland with Craig Brown’s Scotland Under-16 Youth team with, among others, Robbie Winters and Paul Ritchie.

He was fit and scoring goals. But it didn’t happen for him. Carling had not dealt with the stabbing. Therapy was something posh people went to.

Carling said: “I joined Arbroath and played the best football of my career. I was coping a bit better with things.

“But my knee was always a problem. I had my first operation at 18 and was never the same player and was more or less finished by the time I’d reached 24, having then dropped down to the Junior ranks.”

This is when his life after football started to really take off.
Carling was smart. He achieved an MBA from Edinburgh University Business School and subsequently had good managerial jobs. But then everything changed in 2000 when he was headhunted by a leading company in Edinburgh.

“Up to that point my drinking was pretty sociable. I worked very hard and was a young man, but it was really only a few beers during the week. Then I got this great job with big money and, wow, the drinking was something else.

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“I was always fiercely ambitious so went along with it. Honestly, every day we’d have liquid lunches and be out at night entertaining clients. A huge amount of travel, all over the world, hotels, first-class air travel and, at 26, I was well on my way to becoming an alcoholic.”

The jobs changed. The status got bigger. The money better. The drinking more frightening.

Fast forward to 2007. “I was staying in Falkirk and travelling back and forth to Leeds every week, in addition to extensive travel throughout the UK and beyond. I would have a drink daily after work, I sometimes had a drink before going into meetings and would drink on the train and in the station bar sometimes before going into work.

“I was on a salary of £83,000 a year plus bonuses which took my earnings over £100,000 pa. I drove the best car, had two big houses, all the trappings of a successful guy . . . but I would drink every day because I was desperately unhappy with life . . . and my mental health certainly took a beating.”

Carling’s honesty is admirable but also, perhaps, a weakness. I have opted to leave out some of the stories to protect those who were not in on the interview. But in 2011, everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

“I was caught by the police four times over the limit. I’m utterly ashamed. Do you know when you think things can’t get any worse, and that thought had crossed my mind more than once, well it did get worse, much worse.

“I lost my driving licence, my marriage, my daughters, family, my house and had to resign from my job. And I was still drinking all the time, culminating in one day when I found myself standing under a tree, in the rain and drinking from a bottle . . . in a suit – that’s when I knew I needed help.

“That led to a period in the Priory in 2010, and when I got out after four weeks I maintained my sobriety for all of 50 days. Want to know how I celebrated? I had a drink.”

Then in 2013, a pal suggested they go away camping.

“I bought this knife, and I know how this sounds, to use when we were away. It was in my pocket. I’d had some drinks, obviously, got a bottle of wine and was going to get a curry on the way home. For some reason, I walked into KFC and an argument started. It would have been my fault. The cops were called and because I had a record and was told not to drink by the sheriff – can you believe that, that’s how bad it had got – they arrested me.”

Carling was sent down for 23 months.

“Prison was horrible. I was very apprehensive. I kept my head down and somehow got through it – being an ex-footballer certainly helped, and I ended up running the prison team!”

Carling was duly released and worked hard to get himself sober, and it has undoubtedly been his biggest battle.

It was then he started to talk about the attack and while he is not about to blame everything on it, his behaviour was of someone desperate to escape something. 

“I wanted to give something back and am now a director of Recovery Dundee – a fantastic group of people who are all in recovery themselves.

“I would love the chance to work with young footballers and people, educating them on the dangers of addiction – I have a tremendous amount to offer. I have lived the life, so I can warn them.

“All I want is a second chance to resurrect my life and career – I’m inherently a decent, hard-working man who just hit a brick wall and paid a heavy price for his mistakes.”

That he has.