Kevin Keegan's ancestors fled the Irish Famine to work in the mines of Newcastle. His grandfather, whom he never knew, was a hero in one of Newcastle's worst pit disasters in which 100 boys and men died. Growing up in Doncaster, Keegan saw his father sacrifice his lungs to bronchitis, silicosis and cancer.
The man who was to become the most famous footballer of his generation started life as a scrawny, wheezy scholarship boy who was smart but played fool. Everyone - with the exception of an encouraging nun named Sister Mary Oliver who played soccer with her habit whippiing around her knees - told him that he was too short and frail to play football. Yet he had incredible self-belief.
Keegan's intense passion for football, his almost religious devotion, began when he was barely old enough to lace up his own football boots. Football isn't a matter of life and death, it's far more important than that, Keegan's mentor, Bill Shankly, once said and Keegan knew it was true. This extraordinary belief carried him through a breathtaking rise in which his toughness, willpower and willingness to learn made up for what he lacked in natural skill. He played for Liverpool, Hamburg, Southampton, Newcastle and, his greatest honour, England and by the age of 33 was a millionaire living in blissful retirement on a golf course in Marbella.
But even the most powerful dream goes sour sometimes and nowadays Keegan, having revitalised Newcastle - a legendary team which had lost its spirit - can't come to terms with the fact that Newcastle is no longer his. He can't accept that soccer has grown to be about big business and stock flotations and is no longer purely a sport. Ever since he was "pushed" out of Newcastle United, as he tells it, Kevin Keegan can no longer bring himself to watch the team he led to near-glory play a match. Keegan became manager of Newcastle United in March 1992 and within five years had lifted the team from the depths of despair to join the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool at the very pinnacle of the game. The club broke the world transfer record with the £15-million signing of Alan Shearer from Blackburn Rovers, and was about to be floated on an eager stock market for £183 million in readiness for the building of a new stadium to accommodate the waiting list of 15,000 supporters who were clamouring for season tickets to see one of the most exciting teams in Britain.
Having brought Newcastle to that point, Keegan felt at one with them. Keegan's passion for Newcastle pumps like adrenalin through his new autobiography, as does his overblown sense of betrayal. How many managers would be disappointed by a £1million pound pay-off (after all, he points out, it's worth a mere £600,000 after tax)? January 7th, 1997, was the day the most appalling rift of Keegan's life occurred. Newcastle supporters fell into a collective state of shock and betrayal when the board abruptly announced that Keegan had resigned. Having drawn with Forest, lost at Coventry, drawn at home with Liverpool and finally having lost to Blackburn Rovers by a single goal on St Stephen's Day last year, Keegan felt he had lost his "big chance"; he was no longer capable of inspiring and motivating his players. What the fans didn't know was that behind the scenes there was intense pressure on Keegan to tailor his management decisions to suit the banks rather than the game and the players. After buying Shearer, the club was in financial trouble. Forced to raise £6 million in order to help Newcastle pay off a huge bank loan Keegan started making decisions which he knew were wrong. He sold two of the younger, promising players - Chris Holland and Darren Huckerby - for a total of less than £2 million. The board refused to give the fans the reasons and Keegan was taking all the flak with the fans and the media.
As the financial pressure built up, a desperate Keegan started talking to the board about selling Les Ferdinand, who could easily have drawn £6 million. By the time Newcastle lost to Blackburn it had all become so unbearable that before leaving the stadium that day he told the board that he would go at the end of the season. They shook hands on it and Keegan reckoned the board had time to sort things out quietly, to start talking to Kenny Dalglish or Bobby Robson about replacing him.
That's not what happened. Anxious about the effect Keegan's departure would have on the "float", the directors gave Keegan an ultimatum on January 7th: either sign a two-year contract, or leave that every day. He chose to leave - as they must have known he would, for they had the papers ready for him to sign. They cut his salary off instantaneously and made an abrupt media announcement. Ten months later he remains a deeply wounded and insecure man. He is still coming to terms with the cold behind-the-scenes politics that made his relationship with Newcastle so brittle that it could be broken in a day. He expected Newcastle's owner Sir John Hall at least to meet him socially. Yet, other than one brief telephone conversation initiated by Keegan, the two men who built up Newcastle together have never spoken despite the fact that they live only 300 yards apart in Wynyard Wood. Today, Keegan clings to Wynyard, proud that the estate was once the home of the owners of the mines in which his father and grandfather laboured. It's the American dream, transplanted to the North of England.
But like the American dream, it was all too shallow. It's a central contradiction within Keegan that he relishes his wealthy lifestyle - the golf, the horses and the swimming pools - while despising the view that football is about making money. "Many clubs are talking about turnover and not about people. . . That is the sort of greed that prompts the launch of yet another new replica shirt in the belief that the punters will have to buy it come hell or high water," he writes.
Today he is committed to Fulham, owned by Mohammed Al Fayed, and is hoping for another chance to build a team from the bottom up to glory. He would like to manage England and writes that he was the first choice before Glenn Hoddle was offered the job. Basically, though, his autobiography is less about the future and more about his hunger for the fans he loves to understand him and accept him, as if he yearns for them to say: "You're still one of us, you still have the dream."
Kevin Keegan My Autobiography is published this month by Little Brown. Price £16.99 in UK
Kevin Keegan: even the most powerful dream goes sour sometimes.
