Jean-Pierre Adams and his guardian angel / Disappearance of Jean-Pierre Adams / SOFOOT.com – SO FOOT

On this sunny afternoon in May 2017, Bernadette Adams was fed up. Tired of the swallows that had invaded the awning of his pretty house in Caissargues, the residential suburb of Nîmes. They were “Cute at first” , then they ruined his terrace, forcing him to lay nets. Fed up with the shrill noise of his videophone, which sounded too often to his liking. “Once, it’s the caregiver, once the physiotherapist, another time the cleaning lady” , sighed the wife of Jean-Pierre Adams, who took care of her husband day and night since the accident of anesthesia which had plunged him into a vegetative state in 1982. But also fed up, basically, that this videophone doesn’t ring as often as it used to. “Everyone is giving up on me. There, I think I’m at my wit’s end. ”

Until the death of Jean-Pierre Adams, on September 6 after 39 years of suffering, Bernadette however never stopped taking care of her husband. Twelve years of trial to have the errors of the hospital recognized, which turned a banal knee operation into a deep coma, first, and then a return home in June 1983. When we visited him , in 2017, Jean-Pierre was installed in a state-of-the-art American medical bed obtained thanks to one of his sons, an electrician in a hospital. Small tonsure on the top of the head, the former footballer alternated the phases of sleep and the awake phases, eyes in space, but wide open. Bernadette’s days were regulated like music paper: getting up 6:45 a.m., having breakfast, shopping during the first visit of the caregiver, physiotherapist, who places Jean-Pierre in a seated position between 12 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., return from home. caregiver, housekeeping, dinner and bedtime.

And no question of dropping the case: “Lately, I tell myself that I’m going to let go, that I’m going to put it somewhere, she said at the time. But if I do that, it’s its end. No one will ever be able to take care of it the way I take care of it. ” Because she was convinced that he could still feel emotions, Bernadette placed every day on her record player the albums of Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and the flower of Motown that her husband particularly appreciated.

Golden wedding

Bernadette and Jean-Pierre will have been married for 52 years. They had met in 1967 at a ball in Montargis, and the nuptials were only one year old when she had taken him to Rouen for a first test with Kader Firoud’s Nîmes Olympique, in 1970. Jean-Pierre had returned the next day, by surprise, to the workplace of his wife, a saleswoman-retoucher in a lingerie-shirt shop in Gien, in the Loiret. “There, he told me that he was going down to Nîmes with the team to sign his contract, retraced Bernadette in 2017. He left for a month without me. I then joined him in a Simca 1000, with one of my sisters and our little one. At the time, they had to travel the kilometers between Fontainebleau and Nîmes, there was not the motorway until the end. ”

What she didn’t know was that this highway would lead to success. Because Bernadette saw her husband shine with Nîmes, then with the sexy Nice of the 1970s, and soon form the famous “Black Guard” in the French team with Marius Trésor. “It’s Ștefan Kovács (predecessor of Michel Hidalgo at the head of the Blues, Editor’s note) who nicknamed us like that after a victory in Poland, smiles Trésor. Jean-Pierre was a rock. When the attacker did manage to get out of his clutches, there wasn’t much left, so it was very beneficial to me. ”

Jean-Pierre Adams and Marius Trésor

Bringman, especially from his arrival at PSG in 1977, Jean-Pierre Adams will have finally had an intense career, but short. After a gently sloping end in Mulhouse then in Chalon-sur-Saône, he opened his sporting goods store with great fanfare, before fate cut short his conversion. Over the years, his former teammates had, for the most part, stopped visiting him, either because the sight of Jean-Pierre saddened them too much, or because they were too old to make the trip. Bernadette was disappointed, but she never gave up. “I hope all the same that one day he will wake up” , she convinced herself again in May 2017.

A few weeks earlier, Chuck Berry, the inventor of rock ‘n’ roll, had broken his pipe at the age of 90. As it was one of the idols of her husband, Bernadette had made him listen to some pieces of it on their old turntable. “When the music started, his eyes widened, I could have sworn it meant something to him. It was one of the rare times when I thought I perceived a sign of lucidity. ” Coincidence or not, while she was talking about the anecdote, a tear had started to flow down Jean-Pierre’s cheek. His wife had gently wiped his face. Four years later, Jean-Pierre Adams is no more, but the soundtrack remains.

By Ronan Boscher and Thomas Pitrel