Billy Kenny was once one of the most promising young footballers in England. At 53, speaking in Liverpool on a September afternoon, he wipes away tears as he describes how it went wrong — and who he holds responsible. “I was just a kid and no one was there for me,” he says. “I’m angry with Everton for not looking after me.”
He does not exempt himself. “Listen, I’m no angel. I’ve played my part, but there are other people who played their part in the demise of Billy Kenny,” he says. “So I’m still bitter and frustrated today, at the age of 53. It was an absolute waste of talent.”
As a teenager Kenny was pursued by Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool and Howard Kendall at Everton. He chose his beloved Everton, and for a few fleeting months his talent shimmered — most memorably in a man-of-the-match performance against Liverpool at Goodison Park in December 1992. His teammate Peter Beardsley called him “the Goodison Gazza”, a comparison that proved eerily prophetic. Kenny played once for England’s under-21s in March 1993.
The descent began the same night as his greatest game. Having just turned 19, Kenny discovered cocaine in the early hours of the morning after that Liverpool match. The habit spiralled out of control very quickly, and he retired from professional football two years later, at 21, having played 23 games for Everton, four for Oldham and two for Barrow. He struggled as an addict for years and ended up in prison.
Central to his story is the drinking culture of Kendall’s Everton. Kenny says he hated alcohol at first. His father never touched drugs and drank only a couple of pints on a Saturday night; Kenny would chase him out of the room because he disliked the smell of ale. Then he broke into the first team alongside his idols. Kendall, he says, always wanted the squad to go to the Sefton, a pub near the training ground, and as a first-team player Kenny had to go — as did non-drinkers such as Neville Southall, Pat Nevin and Andy Hinchcliffe, who would drop the drunk players off at the end of the night. Kendall, Kenny argues, should have told him: “Billy, you’re 18, go home.”
The pressure was explicit. Standing with the non-drinkers on a later visit, Kenny took his pint of blackcurrant and lemonade over to the senior players, who laughed at him. A very senior player told him: “You’d better have a shandy, son, because [Kendall] will sell you if you don’t drink.” The next time he dropped his guard, he says, and when he got home his head was spinning and he was sick all over his mother’s house. “They really thought I was in a safe place,” he says. “But I was with a load of alcoholics.” In his book he writes that “it seemed as though most of the first-team set-up lived for the booze”.
Away trips followed the same pattern. The first thing loaded on the coach, Kenny says, was crates of lager and chablis for Kendall. On an early away game in London he was barely drinking, and on the journey home he sat at the front with the assistant manager Colin Harvey, whom he loved, talking football while the rest drank at the back. Then, at half 11 at night, the coach came off the M57 and pulled into the Paradox, the biggest nightclub in Liverpool. That, Kenny says, was Kendall.
In January 1993 he did well against Vinnie Jones and the hard men of Wimbledon as Everton won away, injuring his ankle in the process. Kendall told him he had played a blinder, that the lads were made up with him, and that it would be a real shame if he missed out on the Chinese and a few drinks — he could always put ice on the ankle in the restaurant. Then came what Kenny calls the killer line: “You’ll feel much better after a couple of drinks, lad.” Five months later, struggling with injury, he lost himself in cocaine and ecstasy, and came to adore the drugs, the music and the nightlife more than he needed Everton. His compulsive personality produced three-day benders, skipped training sessions and a slow disappearance from the game.
Asked what he would say to Kendall were his former manager still alive, Kenny answers: “Howard, you should have looked after me. I shouldn’t have been made to feel I had to drink to play for your team.” He speaks of Kendall with ambivalence rather than hatred, noting that the man who once formed an unforgettable midfield with Colin Harvey and Alan Ball, and who became one of Everton’s most successful managers, had troubles of his own.
When Everton terminated his contract in 1994, Kenny felt abandoned. “I needed help. I needed support. Empathy. Guidance. I received none of it.” The club sent him to the Priory in Cheshire, but at 19 he found himself in group therapy with 60-year-old alcoholics hiding bottles of scotch in the garden, and could relate to none of it. He believes the two months there, during which Harvey and Paul Power visited daily to get him fit, were intended only to sell him. Manchester City tried to sign him, but Everton wanted a prohibitive £1m fee — and, Kenny says, had already done a deal with Oldham behind his back, leaving him with no signing-on fee. “It’s a badly run club and that still carries on today.”
At Oldham, then managed by another former Everton favourite, Joe Royle, Kenny felt motivated to try again. It fell apart when Royle left — to manage Everton. He was later sentenced to nine months in prison, six for drink-driving and three for missing his original trial, and served five. In prison he trained in the gym and played five-a-side, with no drugs and no drink. “In a crazy way the only time I’ve had peace in my life was when I was locked up.”
A few years later he avoided a 14-month sentence only, he says, because someone was growing cannabis in his house while he was away and the judge turned out to be an Evertonian. He did not want to go to jail then because his mother was dying. At her wake he left his pint on the counter and walked out of the pub, swearing in her memory that he would never return to drugs. He has kept that promise, and has been off drink and drugs since she died 15 years ago — he stopped on the day of her funeral. Depression has not left him, but he has learned to live with it: “I’m getting three or four good days a week now where for 25 years I didn’t have one good day.”
He still wonders about the road not taken. Liverpool had him travel to and from the 1988 FA Cup final with the first-team squad when he was 14, but as a born Evertonian he rules them out. He spent six weeks at Manchester United in the summer holidays and saw how Ferguson discarded Kevin Moran, Paul McGrath, Norman Whiteside, Bryan Robson and later Lee Sharpe, tolerating neither drinking nor a lack of discipline. “I’d have been perfect for Fergie,” Kenny says — yet he suspects that given the choice again he would still join Everton, because he loved the supporters.
His feelings about the club itself are far colder. He has been back to watch Everton, including a Chelsea game last season, and sees the same faces doing the same things. “All these ex-players who’re connected to Everton are manufactured Evertonians,” he says, calling for the dead wood to be cleared out. “The only legends are the fans.” Otherwise he sees Everton as the club that never looked after him — a theme reinforced by his conversation last year with another former Everton player, Michael Branch, who also wound up in jail and who told him that Finch Farm now offers 17 people to speak to about mental health. “There was no one for me,” Kenny says.
His story is told in his new book, The Goodison Gazza, written by the Guardian’s Jamie Fahey, who grew up on the same Liverpool streets. It is published by Reach on 8 October.