Chris Kamara has vowed to fight his speech apraxia after admitting he had been in “total denial” over the condition.
Kamara, better known by his nickname “Kammy”, is a loved TV personality, having become a key part of Sky Sports’ football coverage on Soccer Saturday. The 64-year-old former midfielder left Soccer Saturday at the end of last season to pursue new challenges after 24 years of working on the show.
In March he revealed his apraxia of speech diagnosis and said he would need to "take a back seat" from TV work. He has since launched a BBC podcast with his former Sky Sports colleague and close friend Ben Shephard, but admits that he still struggles with speaking some days.
“A bad day is struggling to get the words out. You speak and, sometimes, another word comes out,” he told the Daily Mail. “I'm not sure how many adults have beaten apraxia, but I certainly intend to be one of them.”
Apraxia of speech, or AOS, is a condition which means people have difficulty getting their lips, jaw, or tongue to be in position to express themselves and sometimes leads to slurring of words. Kamara says many people have asked if he was drunk before he revealed his diagnosis earlier this year and that matters were not helped by his own failure to come to terms with his reality.
“I was in total denial,” he said. “I did not want to accept it, but I'm no fool. Twitter, family, colleagues, when they're all saying, ‘Are you all right? What's the matter with you?’ Eventually, you think, ‘I'm going to have to face this’.
“I didn't want to. I thought I could hide it. Now, people tell me they knew there was something wrong, and I thought I was masking it. It was my therapist who said to me, the day I accept my condition is the day I will start healing. It took me a good 20 months to do that.”
Kamara says he has some days where he can talk freely without difficulty, only for the apraxia to return and make other days hard. As well as his BBC podcast, called Proper Football, he still works for Channel 4 and Channel 5 on Ninja Warrior and Cash in the Attic.
In order to do so he has to use an oxygen chamber and undergo hyperbaric treatment every day. “Every time I think I've beaten it, it comes back to bite me. Patience is a virtue,” he said. “I have microcurrents going through my body for seven hours. Everyone wants a quick fix, but it has to be done slowly.”
Kamara says there are no plans for him to return to Sky Sports, or Soccer Saturday, which has entered a new era after losing Kammy and axing Phil Thompson, Charlie Nicholas and Matt Le Tissier as pundits.
