Friday, January 13, 2023
The Beautiful Sleeping Athlete, Part 4
On the morning of his knee operation, Jean-Pierre Adams was in good spirits, despite having his coaching course interrupted by yet another niggling injury. "It's all fine, I'm in great shape," he told his wife Bernadette. It was a routine operation, meant to take only a couple of hours.
Long after it was supposed to be done and dusted, Bernadette had heard nothing from the hospital. She rang, and was fobbed off. She and her children began to worry. On the fifth call, she was finally passed on to a doctor, who told her to come at once.
An anaesthetist, wretchedly overworked and ministering to eight patients that morning, had given Adams an incorrect dose. As if that were not enough, the operation was being overseen by a trainee doctor who was repeating a year. Adams had suffered a bronchospasm, affecting the flow of oxygen to his brain, and had slipped into a coma.
The reason for the patently inadequate care afforded to the former international footballer was that familiar French pastime, la grève. A strike had denuded the hospital of all but its least experienced clinicians. The trainee doctor later admitted, in court, that he was "not up to the task". It was also conceded that since the majority of the hospital were on strike and it was not a vital operation, it should have been postponed.
Should have.
The doctors told Bernadette that there was little hope of Jean-Pierre ever awakening, but she kept vigil by his side day and night. When the hospital he had been moved to in Chalon could no longer look after him, Bernadette took him home - and devoted the rest of her life to ministering to the man she loved, and who she continued to hope would, by some medical miracle, emerge from his coma.
Custom-building a house to support her husband, she named it the Mas du Bel Athlète Dormant - the House of the Beautiful Sleeping Athlete. The word mas, tellingly, carries a connotation of a country estate rather than a simple house.
Supported financially first by Adams' former clubs Nîmes and PSG, and eventually by the French federation as well, Bernadette was able to eke out an existence (and support her children) while attending to Jean-Pierre. Ultimately, after a painful struggle, a court settlement with the hospital relieved her of any remaining financial worries. She cooked vegetables and mushed them into an edible form, and mastered the art of feeding him. She still spoke to him. She got her sons to watch football matches on TV with him. She continued to hope.
But of all Adams' friends and team-mates of the past, very few visited him. And they all tended to give the same reason: it was just too painful to think of their cheerful, larger-than-life friend of days past in such a pitiful state.
Touchingly, one friend who did visit was one of Adams' very first mentors in his professional days. On the occasion of Jean-Pierre Adams' 70th birthday, Adolf Scherer's visit warmed Bernadette's heart. A hero at the 1962 World Cup, where he helped Czechoslovakia to the final, Scherer had settled in France and was a respected veteran at Nîmes when Adams arrived there in 1970.
Perhaps most touchingly of all, Marius Trésor, Adams' close friend and partner in central defence, who had never been able to bring himself to visit, was reunited with Bernadette in early 2020. Forgetting all her resentment, Jean-Pierre's ministering angel fell into Trésor's arms, the two shared stories, and Trésor promised to visit - soon. But then Covid-19 struck.
Jean-Pierre Adams passed away on September 6, 2021. He deserves to be remembered.
