It occurred more than 15 years ago now but the cancer battle which Alan Stubbs faced head-on and won still informs every nuance of his life: the memory of it, the physical agony he endured, the death of a friend in an adjacent bed. Stubbs says he feels deeply privileged to be the Hibernian manager but nothing feels better than simply being alive.
This weekend an embattled Stubbs and Hibs face Inverness Caledonian Thistle in a bid to reach the Scottish Cup semi-finals. Two weeks ago their progress appeared rampant before a trio of defeats to Morton, Dumbarton and Queen of the South abruptly halted them. Hibs now lag Rangers by 14 points in the Ladbrokes Championship and it has triggered some familiar, disparaging comments.
“Certain remarks made about Hibs irritate me,” says Stubbs. “I understand that in the past the club has got itself into certain positions, but then not got the job done. So I am working to try to change that perception about the club.
“But I think for anyone to say of Hibs, ‘oh, they’ve bottled it’ is a huge indictment. We had lost one game in something like 26 or 27 matches before these recent defeats. So if people want to say ‘they’ve done a Hibs’, well, that’s a hard one to take, given how well we’d done.
“This could still be a very exciting season for Hibs. We’re in the League Cup final, the quarter-finals of the Scottish Cup, and we’ve got a great chance to get promoted. We’ve still got a huge amount to play for.”
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He entered a dispirited Easter Road scene in June 2014, following the Terry Butcher debacle and relegation. It was a big call by Leeann Dempster, the Hibs CEO, to push for Stubbs, then the Everton under-21 coach. Stubbs is hellbent on repaying her.
“I feel I have been given an unbelievable opportunity at one of Scotland’s most prestigious clubs,” he says. “Everywhere I look inside Easter Road there are pictures of great, and I mean great, footballers from the past. My ambition is to bring back some good times, and put this club back where it belongs.
“I honestly believe in fate. For me to have made my comeback here for Celtic in 2001 after my cancer battle, and then for this to be my first managerial job, seems strange. I had suffered a second bout of cancer and made my playing return at Easter Road after being out for four months. I got a standing ovation that day from everyone in the ground. It was very emotional for me. To see the whole stadium – the Hibs fans too – giving me that ovation is something that will always live with me. I had a lump in my throat.”
Stubbs was struck down with two types of cancer within two years from 1999 – first testicular cancer and then by a tumour which was embedded at the base of his spine. It was eye-watering just to hear him describe the shock and physical agony he was made to endure after one eight-hour operation.
“With my first cancer, they had to do a biopsy on my testicle. They offered me some options and said, ‘d’you want a false one inserted?’ I said ‘listen, I’m not vain, I couldn’t care less, just do what you’ve got to do.’ So they removed my testicle, and from the biopsy it was confirmed I had testicular cancer.
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“I was back playing within six weeks of that. Everything seemed fine. But I was going back for scans every three months, and it was after about another 15 or 16 months that a radiologist said to me, ‘Alan, there is something new showing up on your scan.’ Within 24 hours they came back to me and said, ‘we’re sorry, but your cancer has come back. You have a tumour at the base of your spine.’”
Stubbs says he will never forget the dire weeks that followed. Every day the memory of it spurs him on.
“I underwent some very aggressive chemotherapy and it all started to kick in: I started to lose the hairs on my legs, and then my hair started to fall out. The chemo reduced the tumour in size and they said to me, ‘good, right, we’re going to go in there and get it out.’
“It was a tumour the size of a pea. They had to cut me right open, and remove all my organs via my stomach to get to the tumour. But the surgeon who had to give me the epidural needle, for pain relief couldn’t get it into my spine. My muscles around my spine were too strong to get the epidural in. I was leaning over a bed, my spine bent, a nurse holding my hand, and I could feel this needle grinding against my bones.
“The surgeon tried and tried to get the needle in, but he couldn’t. He said to me, ‘Alan, listen, I’m really sorry, but it’s not working…I’m going to have to go in a bit higher up your back…hopefully it will still give you pain-relief.
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“After that eight-hour operation I had the worst pain you could possibly experience. I can’t describe it to you – it was excruciating, it was unbearable. I was in intensive care, and I had a nurse with me all the time, and I was nearly crying with the pain.
“I kept saying, ‘please, give me pain-killers…please, I need more pain-killer.’ I was on a morphine drip but you can only have so much at a time, and it wasn’t working. I was begging them, ‘more pain-killer, please, please…’ But the nurse said, ‘Alan, I’m sorry…there is nothing more we can give you.’
“After about four hours of this, all of a sudden my body shut down. I couldn’t feel a thing. I had overdosed on morphine. I was basically a corpse in that bed. I was lying still and I couldn’t move a finger or a toe. The only thing I could physically move were my eyeballs. That was the scariest bit for me in the whole experience. I thought, ‘I’ll never get my feeling back.’”
But Stubbs did get his feeling back and he walked out of that Glasgow hospital four days later, a week earlier than is the norm. He is now 44 but surviving led him to re-evaluate his priorities.
“What it did for me was, it made me realise that I lived in a false bubble as a footballer. It is a totally false world. I was very well paid. You get the best of everything. If you don’t feel well, you’ve got a doctor on hand. If you need a scan, you get one within two hours. You are so, so privileged. And you take it for granted. You just expect it.
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“Coming from my background – a working class area in Liverpool, and me being a kid who had to fight for everything all the time – to suddenly be so pampered like this was incredible. When I look back to it all now – taking all these privileges for granted – I feel uncomfortable about it.”
I asked Stubbs: did any of this experience make you either more religious or spiritual? “There was an element of that,” he replied. “I wasn’t very religious before my cancer. Did I believe in God? Yes. But I would always look at certain things in life and say, ‘well, if there is a God, why does that happen?’ But I didn’t pity myself during my cancer. I just accepted it – it happened.
“I might want to say, ‘why do all the drug dealers in the world not get cancer, or all the bad people not get illnesses?’ but I know life doesn’t work like that. I don’t look at myself as an inspiration. I just know I’ve joined a prestigious club – I’m a cancer survivor. I’m thankful for that. I’ve been able to come out the other side and speak about it.
“I feel very comfortable talking about it. I feel no trepidation at all in speaking about testicles. I can happily talk about me only having one testicle – I couldn’t care less what people say. I would sit in front of 100s of people and speak about it – it doesn’t faze me whatsoever. Because if there is just one person in that room, who takes something encouraging away with them from what I’ve said, then it is worth it.”
He is immersed in his work at Hibs, and passionately devoted to restoring the great old club. But Stubbs says one memory of those fateful days in hospital keeps coming back to him, especially when he is around football fans.
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“When I was going through my first blast of chemotherapy, there was a Celtic fan on my ward who was obsessed with walking past my room and looking at me. Maybe I was one of his heroes, I don’t know. I was reading the Lance Armstrong book at the time, and I showed it to this lad. He was really struggling to come to terms with his illness. I ended up signing my Lance Armstrong book and giving it to him. He was overwhelmed.
“When I went back for my second blast of chemo, he should have been there, but he wasn’t. The cancer had taken away his life. It was one of my saddest moments going through my illness – when I went back to that ward, and his face was no longer peering into my room, and the nurses told me he had died. It is that memory which makes speaking about it – for me – so important. I know I was lucky.”
No less important to Stubbs in the here and now is the current, sudden malaise at Hibs. Following three defeats, tomorrow’s cup quarter-final against Caley Thistle at Easter Road has a heightened significance.
“I’m at a special football club. Wwe’ve had these setbacks but it just makes us more determined to prove people wrong,” he says. “I’ve had to prove people wrong constantly in my life, from when I was a wee lad, and I’m still having to do it. I’ve faced certain challenges in my life, when I’ve been knocked down, and it’s about how quickly you can get back up. That will always me my motto: when you get knocked down, you get back up again.
“I liked a challenge as a player, and it’s the same for me as a manager. I want to fight for things. I don’t want anything handed to me on a plate.”