WE SPENT more than £60 million assembling a football team, but Kevin Keegan liked the fans to be able to see them for free while his ambitious chairman plotted the creation of a practice ground and medical centre to rival any facility in Europe, Keegan and his assistant met their players for training a 10.30 each morning in the pretty but comparatively humble setting of Maiden Castle, where they rented a pitch and changing facilities at Durham University's sports ground.
There, unlike at every other big club from Manchester United to Milan, Keegan allowed the fans to come and stand just beyond the touchline and watch the high-spirited practice matches in which he, the European Player of the Year in 1978 and 1979, took a prominent and voluble part. Sometimes hundreds of supporters, many of them unable to afford season tickets for the real games, would gather to enjoy the free spectacle, rubbing shoulders with the men he had brought to Newcastle, the million-pound men of the 1990s, the David Ginolas, Alan Shearers and Faustin Asprillas, whose BMWs an Porsches crowded the car-park.
"A lot of clubs wouldn't do it," Keegan said. "But I think in the north-east, and Newcastle in particular, when they can't get into the matches, how else can they see their heroes? It's a pain in the backside some days but the players have accepted it, and for the young lads coming into the club it's become the norm. That's the way it is. I can do things here that other clubs might think would be crazy."
Keegan may speak the language of Ron Knee and the rest of the ashen-faced supremos, but he is an intelligent and sensitive man who appears, rather refreshingly, to be ruled by his emotions. Although he had a sort of Cliff Richard image in his early days, he was very publicly sent off at Wembley in 1974, during the Charity Shield showpiece, for scuffling with Billy Bremner of Leeds, and hurled his sacred Liverpool shirt to the turf as he stormed back to the dressing room. Eight years later, dropped by England, he vowed never to play for his national team again. His flair for dramatic timing was displayed in the banner-headline transfers from Liverpool to Hamburg, from Hamburg to Southampton and finally from Southampton to Newcastle - where, in his last two seasons as a player, he single-handedly galvanised the club.
He managed a football team with the same impulsive enthusiasm and generosity of spirit that he had used to turn himself from an apprentice of no discernible distinction into a great player, yet he lacked the mental armour-plating with which to ward off disappointment and provocation. At 46 he is wearing well, time having scraped away some of the blandness of his earlier years. But if you prick him, he bleeds - as his great rival, Alex Ferguson, gleefully discovered when his Manchester United team began to overhaul a disintegrating Newcastle towards the end of last season.
There is something particularly sad about Keegan's premature departure from St James Park. Eventually, Newcastle's fans had begun to complain about his failure to make the reality live up to the dream he had shown them. But most neutrals would probably share the feeling that the great adventure which he began at Newcastle owner and chairman Sir John Hall's invitation on February 5th, 1992, deserved to end in the only kind of success football understands: with big silver cup and championship medals.
When he returned to St James Park, Newcastle were not so much the sleeping giants of English football as virtually comatose. A sullen silence had descended over the Gallowgate end, where once the supporters roared endless choruses of the Bladon Races. Three times champions of England before the first World War, five times winners of the FA Cup (but most recently in 1955), the Magpies were next to bottom of the old Second Division, and heading down. The challenge was irresistible to a man who had fended off many similar approaches since hanging up his boots in 1984 but had finally tired of lotus-eating at his villa in Marbella.
"I wanted to take a sick club and make it better," Keegan said. "Here, things couldn't have got any worse. I wanted to be a football doctor and I was asked to come and cure a very sick patient."
THE club was £6 million in debt, with an annual turnover of £4 million. Keegan listened as the unorthodox Hall, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Mao Zedong, offered him a three-month contract. "I said: What's the point of that? Because if we go down ...' So I took it as a consultancy, on a basic wage for the three months to the end of the season, doubled if we stayed up. We battled our way out. Then I said that this club should never put the supporters and the good name of Newcastle United in that position again."
For both men it was something of a personal matter. Hall's father had been a Newcastle miner, as was Keegan's grandfather - "born", as Hall pointed out, "in Stanley", which was the name under which the football club first played in 1881. Keegan's own father had worked in the South Yorkshire coal-field, where his son was born.
Shrewdly, Hall made Keegan his "managing director of football" while bringing the entrepreneurial Freddie Fletcher down from Glasgow Rangers to run the commercial side. Keegan's return coincided with the sudden flood of money from satellite TV, sponsorship and merchandising into English football.
Within three years, on the back of his team's success, the club's turnover had increased tenfold. Every game was a sell-out. Turnstile revenue topped £12 million. A deal with the clothing entrepreneur George Davis brought £8 million a year from merchandising, with more than half a million replica shirts sold. St James Park was rebuilt, at a cost of £26 million. Plans for a brand-new stadium were prepared. In the team, foreign glamour-boys began to outnumber local products.
There had been an early hiccup when Hall refused Keegan the money - which was coming, at that point, from his own family's pockets to buy Peter Beardsley, a former Newcastle star seemingly coasting towards retirement at Everton. The manager walked out and flew back to Spain, where emissaries pleaded with him to return. Once the necessary £1.5 million had been produced, and the manager's judgment had been vindicated by Beardsley's performance, Hall rewarded him with a 10-year contract, something virtually unimaginable elsewhere in the precarious world of English league football. "Getting Keegan on a 10-year contract enables us to plan the long-term strategy," Hall said.
When Newcastle roared to the top of the Premiership table at the start of the 1995-6 season, averaging four goals a game, the chairman could scarcely contain himself. "Kevin never ceases to amaze me," he said.
"He's a thinker, he's a great motivator, he's a good PR man, and above all he wants to win. He gets the best out of people - and in industry if you find someone like that you go along with him. It's a quality not a lot of people have got. I haven't got it. And when you've got people's respect, they'll do anything for you."
By this time Keegan had moved himself and his family into a house in the grounds of Wynyard Hall, the Palladian mansion which had been the home of the Marquess of Derry until Hall bought it with the proceeds from the sale of the MetroCentre shopping mall in Gateshead. Keegan began to send the first of his string of 16 racehorses to the stables of Mick Channon, his friend and former striking partner at Southampton, now a successful trainer. Life looked sweet. The trophies seemed to be just around the corner.
But remembering his own background, Keegan refused to get carried away. "I always tell the players, `You've built this stadium - not Sir John Hall, not me. Because by your performance on the pitch you've given people the confidence to com and buy executive boxes, to buy bonds, to buy Platinum Club memberships, even to buy turf from the pitch.' People don't remember the president, they don't remember the manager. They remember the players. And I've said to them, `If you want to be remembered as a really good side, you've got to win something'."
They didn't. And now there must be a danger that posterity will judge Keegan's reign at Newcastle to be merely a confirmation that money does not always buy success. Yet there was hardly a cloud in Newcastle's sky on the day last January when Keegan flew to Italy to add Asprilla, the gifted but temperamental Colombian winger, to a squad that was 12 points clear of the nearest pursuer.
The £7.5 million deal to take, Asprilla from Parma to Newcastle was still a secret, but Martin Lipton of the Press Association happened to be staying in the same Rome hotel and spotted Keegan at breakfast. "When Kevin saw me," Lipton wrote, "he waved me over. He didn't need to say much. His face told me all I wanted to know. He had rarely looked happier. He had the man he wanted, the man who would gild the championship lily.
On the contrary, the tactical confusion sowed by the introduction of the unpredictable Colombian began the unravelling of Newcastle's campaign a disaster rivalling Greg Norman's capitulation to Nick Faldo at last year's US Masters for a hideous slow-motion portrayal of anguish.
"If you score three goals away from home and still lose you'll be disappointed, he said defiantly after his team had lost 4-3 against Liverpool at Anfield in April. But we'll carry on playing this way or I'll go. I don't know any other way." He was as good as his word. The failure to win the title, as we now know precipitated his offer to resign at the end of the season. It was rejected but the sense of personal dissatisfaction refused to go away.
The tactical flaws were obvious, the pleasure came in seeing the team ignore them and win anyway. But for admirers of his insistence that the way to win matches was simply to score more goals than the other team, there was a worrying signal at the beginning of this season, when he hired Mark Lawrenson, the former Liverpool centre-back as a specialist defensive coach.
Putting-five past Ferguson's Manchester United was a cause for celebration, and Asprilla's maverick brilliance kept them in the European Cup-winners' Cup, but a string of other bad results nullified the joy. A 1-0 defeat at Blackburn on St Stephen's Day brought whispers of a possible resignation, which even a 7-1 thrashing of Tottenham Hotspur two days later could not dispel. Now, in the light of Wednesday's resignation announcement, Sunday's 1-1 draw in the FA Cup at Charlton seems an incongruously bleak epilogue.
Yet however enthralling his stewardship of Newcastle has been, perhaps he was always unlikely to become a truly great manager, fit to rank with the Nicholsons, Shanklys, Cloughs and Paisleys. Fuelled by enthusiasm and energy, he has forgotten more about football than most men in his position will ever know, and has integrity to burn. But he does not have the granite core responsible for preserving the sanity and competitive focus of Ferguson, -whose flaring temper camouflages a cold objectivity and who is, after 10 years at Old Trafford, by some distance the longest serving manager currently in the Premiership, as well as the most successful.
Ferguson's managerial equilibrium is probably helped by the fact that, like Liverpool's Roy Evans and Arsenal's Arsene Wenger, he was never a great player. The top-level managers who have publicly suffered from the stress of the job in recent years - Kenny Dalglish, Steve Coppell and Johan Cruyff being the most prominent - reached the very highest peaks in their playing days, as did Keegan. Confined to the trainer's bench, they shared an inability to find an outlet for the passions that had once fuelled their performances on the pitch. Denied the most natural form of expression, those passions eventually consumed them.
This phenomenon is not an inevitability - it remains to be seen, for example, whether the notably chilled-out Ruud Gullit, at one time the greatest player in the world, will be able to develop his excellent start at Chelsea into a full-blown managerial career - but there are now too many examples for it to be dismissed as the product of coincidence.
Keegan may one day give the job another try, perhaps with Doncaster Rovers of the Third Division, his home-town club, where he missed his chance as a schoolboy after turning up too late for a trial. "I suppose that would be fairy-tale stuff," he said the other day. In Newcastle, they know that there are such things as fairy tales. A belief in happy endings might be harder to find.