The Everton scarves gave the game away. “Would you like a lift?” inquired the voice from behind the half-opened front passenger seat window of a swanky car stopped at traffic lights near Hammersmith station in London.
“Yes please, Mr Chairman,” I replied eagerly, before leaping in the back with my Evertonia-adorned sons, Conor, 9, and Dom, 8, and their (tentative Manchester United-supporting) friend Stephen.
And off we went to the match, courtesy of Bill Kenwright, actor, theatre impresario, chairman of Everton Football Club – and even then (in October 2011) an increasingly quaint relic of a bygone footballing age. The local-lad-done-good millionaire luvvie living out his dreams as a walk-on part in a rapidly changing drama about ruthlessly remote billionaires and oligarchs.
The boys were stunned. “Do you REALLY own Everton?” asked Dom suspiciously, after I’d explained that of course getting a lift with a stranger was still a no-no but this impromptu invitation by the owner of Everton football club was a little bit different.
Unconvinced, all three boys grilled the chairman – and the immaculate chauffeur, his long-time partner Jenny Seagrove – over the next 20 minutes or so as we crawled towards Fulham’s Craven Cottage for an early afternoon Sunday kick-off.
Sensing their disbelief, he offered a few exclusive insights on that day’s team in an effort to prove his identity. The two new lads were starting: Apostolos Vellios (a David Moyes bargain-basement teenage striker from Greece) and the enigmatic Real Madrid loanee Royston Drenthe. The game plan? Keeping Danny Murphy quiet in the middle of the park, apparently.
The chat soon turned to favourite players. Tim Cahill featured prominently for him; for them, Mikel Arteta, recently flogged to Arsenal for a fee that would eventually become known as “The Arteta Money”.
By the time he’d reassured Stephen that his flirtation with Manchester United could have been a whole lot worse – “as long as it’s not the other lot across the park” – he’d won them over. As he did me by talking with customary emotion about growing up as a blue, the famous Grafton nightclub (Google it), the “school of science”, Harvey, Ball, Kendall, the golden vision of Alex Young and the unforgettable Bayern Munich night in the 1980s glory years.
The front two also listened intently as the back four told what must have felt like an eerily familiar tale of two young souls, cruelly separated by fate. They lapped up every word of the story of Rooney the goldfish sadly dying prematurely shortly after Euro 2004 yet his bezzy mate Moyes was still swimming strongly after all these years despite getting half his tailfin bitten off by a hungry one-eyed cat after being pawed unceremoniously out of his bowl. It was Blood Brothers meets Finding Nemo, the dramatisation of a true story produced and directed by Kenwright’s backseat Evertonians just a few miles from the West End.
More serious questions from me about Everton’s lack of financial clout and inability to break free from the prison that was between fifth and seventh in the Premier League and regular European football at the time elicited a candid response. “I just need to find David Moyes more money,” he said more than once, apologetically. Prophetic words.
Under huge pressure to sell up to a bona fide billionaire, the lifelong Everton fan who presided over the longest trophy drought in the club’s storied history eventually found one five years later. But look how that’s turned out.
For many, especially in an age of binary social media judgments, this will be Kenwright’s enduring legacy. But even my brief window into his soul revealed there was much more to it: the unheralded acts of kindness (many examples much more generous than giving us randoms a lift to the match have come out since he died on Tuesday), the giddy sentimentality and civic Liverpool pride, and of course the fierce Hillsborough solidarity and “they picked the wrong mums” speech in 2013.
Kenwright symbolised the black and white era chronicled with brutal tenderness in Of Time and the City, whose director, Terence Davies, also died this month. Forget about the controversies over selling key players (Rooney and Arteta), flawed dreams (ground moves) and controlling shares to Farhad Moshiri, the best transaction ever completed by Kenwright in my eyes was the half-hour sales pitch to my sons about what Everton means, when he somehow connected them to their own grandparents’ generation, an age before a tribal working-class pursuit became a plaything for billionaires, oil-rich superstates and sovereign wealth funds.
For the record, the patter didn’t work on young Stephen. He still supports Manchester United. But he’s not yet had a lift to the match from the Glazers.
