This time five years ago, Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock would have been nursing an almighty Christmas hangover while his wife Leah and their two daughters waited for him to get ready. There may have been raised voices and slammed doors, before Neil would leave to meet pals down the pub for yet another day of drinking.
Now though, the 56-year-old footballing legend is looking forward to ringing in the New Year with a clear head. By 2020, after decades of hard partying, drinking and gorging on unhealthy food had taken its toll, Razor’s weight had soared to 27 stone (171kg) and his heart had developed an arrhythmia.
Doctors told him he had weeks to live if he didn’t change his ways, and friends were worried. Robbie Williams video-called him from LA begging him to stop the drinking, while Robbie Fowler was having concerned conversations with Leah behind his back.
It wasn’t until a furious confrontation with his old pal and England teammate Paul Merson – caught on camera in the ITV reality show Harry’s Heroes: Euro Having A Laugh – that Razor realised how serious the situation had become. The show, ostensibly about Harry Redknapp getting a team of former England legends fighting fit so they could take on the Germans once again, showed Merse begging Ruddock to cut down on his drinking, saying “you were like me nine months ago”.
Strictly Come Dancing star Paul – who has openly spoken about his own battles with booze, cocaine and gambling – told his friend “I care for you” before Neil shouted at him to “f*** off*.
But the pair soon made up and Razor tearfully admitted Paul had a point. Months later, he found himself on an operating table not knowing whether he would wake up from his heart surgery. Typically, he hadn’t told his family the risks of the procedure: doctors would stop his heart, then shock it to get it back into a normal rhythm.
“If you don’t come back to life after seven zaps, that’s it,” he grins from his kitchen in Ashford, Kent today, looking happy and 10 stone lighter after having a pacemaker and gastric sleeve fitted. “[After] three zaps I came back. [Before the surgery] my heart was going 140 beats per minute at rest, that’s like when you’re running a marathon. My blood pressure was through the roof, at night my heart was stopping for a few seconds at a time. I was getting headaches, but it was God giving me a message, telling me something’s wrong.”
Merse’s intervention was the wake-up call he needed. “I’d got myself in a bad routine – Friday night, go out for a drink. Sunday afternoon, go for a drink,” he says. “Having the surgeon telling me, ‘the way you’re going, you could be dead in two months’… I can smile about it now but at the time it was quite scary.
“Having the operation’s got me out of that silly routine. I used to put my friends first and my family second, but nearly killing myself made me realise I needed to switch that round.” In 2022, after the successful heart surgery, Neil had the gastric sleeve fitted to tackle his weight, with 70 percent of his stomach removed to control his calorie intake.
Razor, as he was nicknamed by his teammates, started drinking heavily aged 16 when he was first signed to Millwall and the older players took him under their wing. “The older players controlled your life back then. As a youngster you wanted to be accepted by the team, so if they said we were going out to drink, you went out to drink. I always called it Mad, Sad, Bad or Glad Disease – any emotion you get, you go out for a drink.”
As an impressionable teenager, Neil’s drinking quickly spiralled and he used booze as a crutch. “A man’s got a problem, you go down the pub, have a couple of pints and don’t talk about it. Especially in my era, it was a sign of weakness if you had any problems. You grew a pair and got on with it,” he says.
Over his decades of boozing, Neil reckons he spent “hundreds of thousands” of pounds on alcohol. “I used to kidnap people – strangers – in the pub and tell them, ‘You come with me, I’ll buy you another drink. I’ll pay for everything.’ I just wanted someone to drink with.”
His boozing frequently got him into trouble with his family and teammates. Once he was arrested when someone threw a bottle at a car and Harry Redknapp, then his manager at West Ham, was called. “He went absolutely bananas. He was out with his wife, with San, and he got a call saying ‘Razor’s got arrested’, so that spoiled his Christmas. It was a couple of days later I told him who it actually was and he was my friend again. I think he was quite proud I hadn’t grassed the other two up!”
Another time, when Neil was playing for Liverpool, he lent his brand new Porsche to a friend who wrapped it around a tree. “I got arrested because it was my car, though I wasn’t involved. I won’t name [the culprit] but he still owes me £64,000!”
Since kicking his unhealthy habits, Neil has found solace in the simple things. “I love my garden and I take the dogs out.” He and Leah have five pooches, who Neil spends hours each day walking. “I never used to do the school run because I was always too hungover, but now I’m up at 5.30, 6am every morning and as soon as I wake up I’m out of bed.
“I take my 14-year-old daughter Kizzy to school and when we get close to the gates I put the windows down and turn the music up so she gets embarrassed. It’s much better than waking up with a sore head.”
This year, Neil is teaming up with Alcohol Change UK to encourage more people to take part in the Dry January challenge, in which people pledge not to drink alcohol for the whole month. According to research, nearly one in three men (32 percent) are aiming to reset their relationship with alcohol by giving it up in January because they feel their consumption affects their fitness, energy levels, health, diet and sleep quality.
The charity’s Try Dry app even calculates how much money you can save each day of not drinking. “Everybody eats and drinks too much at Christmas, so it comes at the right time,” says Neil.
For him, wife Leah has been the guiding force behind his new healthy lifestyle. “She feels proud of herself because she was the one who kept me going,” he says. “She kicked me up the backside, got me to have the gastric sleeve.
“She found out all the information, found the best surgeons and did all the late-night googling after I’d gone to bed – because I’d have shouted at her if I’d known what she was doing, ‘I don’t want to do that, there’s nothing wrong with me.’
“She’s proud of me because together we’ve got through it, so we’re proud of each other. She’s been my rock for years. She’ll still tell me off, I’m s***-scared of her!” he laughs. “We’ve been together 20 years in June so she’s heard all my lies, all the excuses, so I can’t get away with anything anymore!”
*Join the millions of people going alcohol-free at the start of 2025 by downloading the Try Dry® app and taking part in the Dry January® challenge by Alcohol Change UK. Find out more at www.dryjanuary.org.uk .