Pensioner who was king of all our younger days

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Kevin Keegan was 65 last Sunday – Mighty Mouse is now an old age pensioner; the little imp who ran defenders ragged can now ride the bus for free.

For the generations who grew up following Liverpool at the start of their golden era, Keegan – fittingly for a man born on St Valentine’s Day – epitomised the romance of what was once the beautiful game.

He joined from Scunthorpe United, hardly the glamour end of the sporting world, Even now – more than 40 years later – their biggest attraction is their club mascot, the Scunny Bunny.

He cost all of £35,000 – or to put it in context, less than one-sixth of Wayne Rooney’s weekly wage. Even still, this was a risk – his hometown club, Doncaster Rovers, had considered him too short.

His dad worked in the mines before becoming a boiler-maker – solid, working class stock – and he fought in Burma during the war. So Keegan was ‘grounded’ and made a virtue of his humble origins.

And he wasn’t the greatest footballer of all time – or indeed even the greatest player to have pulled on that famous red jersey – but he might well have been the first star of the modern media era.

He was as famous for that poodle perm as he was for his football; he was the biggest star of Shoot! where his observations on anything and everything were gobbled up by the writers and the readers alike.

We all knew he was married to Jean because he was frequently photographed with her by his side, his Bay City Rollers-style jumper and wide-legged parallels showing that he cut a dash off the pitch as much as on it.

Shoot! had a weekly item where they asked a series of set questions of a player – favourite food, favourite music, favourite meal, most difficult opponent and so on – and they had two questions that a small fella with only a growing grasp of big words completely misunderstood.

Miscellaneous likes and miscellaneous dislikes could just as easily have lost the ‘miscellaneous’ prefix and it wouldn’t have led to any misunderstanding – but it sort of added an air of authority to an otherwise fairly standard feature.

Keegan never missed a chance to feature in Shoot! – on or off the pitch, standing beside his flash Ford Capri or sitting on his white leather sofa, Jean serving him tea in a china cup.

He was one of the first footballers to recognise the real potential of media exposure; up to then the best these stars could come up with was part-ownership of a nightclub, a pub or a boutique; Keegan charted a whole new world.

He appeared on Superstars, the BBC programme that pitted stars of different sports against each other in a sort of decathlon.

Such was his insatiable desire for victory, when he crashed his bike, he insisted on a re-run – and his second place finish was enough to give him overall victory.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.