Kevin Keegan, twice European Footballer of the Year, is England’s captain as they bid to win the European Championship. His qualities as a player and a man are at the heart – many would say, are the inspiration – of England’s football revival. Ian Wooldridge went to Hamburg – to the home Keegan is leaving when he returns to play for Southampton next season – to interview the player who believes that leading his country is the greatest honour of his life.
Uncompromisingly reliant on such solid values as the work ethic and unblemished family life, they advocated hard work in return for hard work, immediate relief for those contemplating exile because of punitive taxation, and a sharp jab in the ribs for those shoddy British industries which flood foreign markets with machines that bust the moment you turn the switch on.
"What I always tell them," said the young chairman on the sun terrace of his £160,000 house, with the two Mercedes in the drive and the 600 trees in the grounds and the two Old English sheepdogs lolloping about on the immaculately-mown lawns, "is that if they’re that keen they should go and live there. It’s quite true that Communists have all got the same. They’ve all got nothing."
Over lunch, amid the velvet drapes and cut crystal of the Homes and Gardens dining room, he spoke movingly and at length about the long-term motivations of growing up at 25 Spring Gardens, Doncaster, a terraced house whose architectural features included a sentry-box lavatory at the bottom of the garden and a tin bath in a neighbouring outhouse.
Where he is today is in transit between Hamburg and Southampton – and en route to his first million. "Within two years I know I shall be a millionaire," he said, "a genuine millionaire, not a paper one." He announced it in the matter-of-fact tones of a man revealing he has just scooped a £25 fourth-dividend on the football pools.
Keegan’s character is the best thing imposed on British football in years. It differs little under cross-examination from that which you see on the field: shrewd intelligence, darting switches of attack, a driving, head-down intensity born of the knowledge that 105 per cent effort can yield 110 per cent in dividends.
"I wouldn’t dream of criticising George Best," he said. "In many ways he made me. But he also made mistakes. It is up to us to learn from them."
It is quite some burden, particularly when you suspect that half the world regards you as a money-grubbing, unpatriotic arriviste, which is how Keegan was seen by some following his highly lucrative departure from Liverpool to Hamburg, his business associations with foreign firms competing against British rivals and in committing the primordial sin of just becoming very rich.
Some workers made redundant by a fork-lift manufacturing firm in Coventry had read that Keegan was lending his name to endorse the reliability of a fork-lift truck manufactured in Germany. Their grievance, and an appeal to the England soccer captain instantly to sever his connections with a Kraut company unparalysed by strikes, received some prominence in the British newspapers.
Quite what an international footballer is doing in the field of fork-lift trucks may bemuse those who do not understand the wonderful world of endorsements. It is simply a fact of marketing life that if stars of the status of Keegan say a product is good the public flock to buy it. It is a process that demands much integrity, which Keegan has, but it is also mostly money for jam. The knack is in being famous and unblemished in public life. Then the endorsement contracts roll in and the cheques follow.
He has also made two Fabergé TV commercials with Henry Cooper, long lost to the prize ring but still without peer in the public idolatry ratings.
Keegan grew strong in a happy, united home despite the fact that his miner father took years dying of bronchitis, silicosis and, terminally, cancer. He endlessly thought up fund-raising schemes: car-washing on Doncaster race-track, window cleaning, splitting up market boxes into bundles of firewood. Most of the profits went to his mother.
Conversely he speaks with pride of what his father did when the local Tory agent tried to hire the Keegan front room in Spring Gardens as an election office. "He offered Dad £35 for the day, which then was just about what he earned in two weeks. My father threw him out."
It led to a mild embarrassment when his agent, who also fixes commercial contracts for the England national soccer squad, landed them a deal with Courage Breweries. Keegan, who now drinks rarely and has never smoked, refuses to endorse alcohol or tobacco. The conflict troubled him. It was ammunition for the snipers.
What they also failed to see, as I did by chance when Keegan went to train with Hamburg, was the arrival of 33 boys and five masters from a school in Gateshead. Keegan, deep crow's-feet of end-of-season exhaustion cut in triplicate beneath both eyes, instantly reacted. He hired a room behind a restaurant and, when training was done, signed autographs and bought them Cokes. It was spontaneous and uncalculated.
He is still upset by the autographed football, bought and posted at his own expense, which never reached a British army base in Germany. "They probably think I never bothered," he said.
Keegan’s academic career was crowned by two O-levels, in history and art. "The only future that seemed open to me," he said in a line that he may just have used before, "was to become a religious painter."
After an apprenticeship with Scunthorpe United came the years of idolatry with Liverpool and then, as Britain’s entry into the EEC opened up free movement of labour in Europe, there was the controversial move to Hamburg.
For several matches they refused to pass the ball to him. Even mediocre players can make a genius look foolish. In deep misery and frustration Keegan lashed out with a fist and struck an opponent who had constantly been kicking him instead of the ball.
Gone, too, was the xenophobia he had felt from sections of the German crowd. "He won them over in a typical Kevin way," said Jean. "One of the early problems was the language barrier. Fortunately my German helped. We sat at home night after night playing Twenty Questions in German.
Today he speaks idiomatic German very fast. He has also started learning Spanish. "Only," explained Keegan very quickly, "so that I shall know what’s going on at the World Cup in Spain in 1982."
He is equally uncompromising in many of his ideas, which often sound like the terse little homilies you read on desk-calendars. Thus: "A man who does not know his worth is not worth anything."
He added, surprisingly: "Technically I’m probably the worst player ever to win the title of European Footballer of the Year. I can’t do the circus tricks. I’ve had to live with my limitations. What has got me through is my work-rate. I always tell kids that they don’t need to be born footballers. If they work, work, work they can get to the top."
He cannot comprehend people not living a similarly parcelled life, with every minute of every day set aside for positive activity. It is what disappoints him about England.
What may seem a contradiction is, in fact, a calculated step. He knows precisely where he is going, which is into business after football. At 29, he admits, the training is getting harder every year. "At Hamburg we are trained up to the pitch of Olympic athletes and some mornings when I get out of bed I can hardly walk."
Between now and then Kevin Keegan will drive on, leading from the front, inspiring by example. He knows no other way to work or play. He reminds you exactly of what Britain was before bloody-mindedness set in. He could, of course, have made it to the top in any century in which he lived.
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