Every November, when a roaring fire and warm humour provide welcome if transitory relief against winter’s tightening noose, the folk of Edenbridge in England’s south-east have cheeky fun by burning a villain in effigy. Saddam Hussein, brandishing a machine gun in one hand and rocket in the other, went up in flames in 2003. The next year, they torched Tony Blair.
The victim for fiery lampooning this weekend was of a different ilk entirely: Wayne Rooney, England’s best footballer and its best in decades. Rooney has not provoked or sanctioned wars. He can be uncouth but he’s no dictator. And his only weapons of mass destruction are his nimble goal-scoring feet and his powerful, potato-white physique. But he, too, is now perceived as fair game, a figure of fun, a tarnished icon.
If he’s looking for reasons for his fall from grace, which he may not be, because deep introspection is not Rooney’s thing, the player who has been English football’s hottest property since he scored a wonder-goal against Arsenal as a 16-year-old could blame the prostitutes who recounted in lurid detail in Britain’s ruthless tabloids about how he supposedly bedded them in a Manchester hotel last year, when his wife and sweetheart from adolescence was carrying their child, Kai.
Or he could point to the remarkably public recent spat over his wages with his club Manchester United. Rooney’s tough bargaining and rumors that he might sin by selling his services to United’s cross-town rival Manchester City infuriated fans of the Red Devils. Vandals daubed “JOIN CITY AND YOU’RE DEAD” in red paint on a Rooney poster in the city’s center. More frighteningly, about 30 men, their faces obscured under hooded tops, gathered in protest outside the shuttered gates of the high-security mansion that Rooney and his wife, Coleen, call home, but which critics who revel in mocking the couple have dubbed “Waynesor Castle.”
Perhaps most of all, Rooney could also cite the sudden and largely unexplained disappearance of his ability to score with his feet and pudgy head. Had England’s great white hope performed brilliantly at the World Cup in South Africa this June then fans might have found it easier to overlook his perceived greed and flaws as a man – as they did with other footballing rogues like mercurial Frenchman Eric Cantona, who also played at United, or the English tragicomic midfielder Paul Gascoigne, affectionally known as “Gazza” and loved for his footballing inventiveness despite his off-field torments with booze and mental illness.
As with bonfires, England’s chattering classes have also long enjoyed building up public figures only to subsequently burn them down. That is now true of Rooney, too.
“He gives us very, very, very good publicity,” says Charles Laver of the Edenbridge Bonfire Society, which helps to organize the town’s annual commemoration with fireworks and bonfires of the failed November 5 plot to blow up parliament and King James I in 1605.
“He has brought it on himself. He has decided that he doesn’t want to toe the line. One of the main things was his greediness,” Laver said, speaking by telephone before the nine-metre Rooney effigy was burned before a crowd on Saturday night. Its ears were those of Shrek, the cartoon ogre.
“That’s life, people come in and out of favour,” Laver added. “He’s strayed from the straight and narrow and got in the news.”
But Rooney has always been the news since that goal of 2002 which ended Arsenal’s unbeaten run of 30 games. As such, he became tasty fodder for modern Britain’s hunger for all-things celebrity — perhaps even more so after United sold David Beckham to Spain’s Real Madrid in 2003, leaving tabloids and paparazzi needing other focuses for their lenses.
Boy Wonder
At age eight, he was already wowing with his skills. Ray Hall, a youth coach at Liverpool club Everton that Rooney was a fan of from his earliest days, recalls the stunned silence when he scored with an overhead kick in an eight-a-side match against a Manchester United boys’ team. Everyone started to applaud. “The coach from Manchester United looked down the line to me as if to say, ‘What have we just seen?”‘ Hall says in a video now on YouTube. By age 11, Rooney was playing against boys three years older. At 15, he was playing 18-year-olds and was given time off school to train full-time with Everton. He left school with no qualifications other than football. Rooney now has the words “Just enough education to perform” tattooed on his pasty-white right forearm.
In some ways, even at age 25, Rooney still gives the same impression as when he burst into the nation’s consciousness with that 2002 goal — of being a teenager locked into a man’s body.
Unlike in the United States, where such turnarounds are more models to emulate than to mock, Rooney’s poverty-to-wealth clamber from grimy Liverpool estate to the top of the world’s richest football league grates with some in class-conscious Britain, often inspiring snobbery. Opinion-makers scoff that the Rooneys are white trash personified or, in British parlance, “chavs.” The Times of London felt comfortable once describing his wife, who is building a career of her own in fashion and publishing, as “a girl of average looks, an unremarkable figure and no discernible talent”.
The Rooneys acknowledge that intrusion is a cost of the fame they’ve cultivated in part by selling photos of private moments to gossip magazines. Only they know what they are genuinely like behind closed doors and it’s wise to be wary of the tabloid caricature of a shallow and spoilt couple. But it is also striking how Rooney has abdicated responsibilities and his fate to others. Outside football, much of the rest of life seems to leave him at best ambivalent.
In his biography of 2006, the year he turned 21, Rooney explains that he let his dad do the talking when an agent came to their home when he was a teenager. “I kept out of it, couldn’t be bothered with all the business stuff and legal talk,” he says. “I just slept, curled up on the floor.”
He doesn’t vote — “Not interested,” he says — nor read newspapers or follow world affairs. He leaves money matters to his advisers.
“I don’t really bother about those things much,” he says. “I know I’ve got three apartments in Florida and a villa in Marbella [Spain] … But I haven’t seen any of them, just the photographs.”
Indeed, outside appearances are that Rooney has not fully matured — or not had to — into adulthood. Like other footballers, he has a “passion” for cars. He likes TV and says he plays online games at night, logging in with a pseudonym after once making the mistake of using his real name, eliciting hundreds of messages.
“I’m brilliant at doing absolutely nothing,” he says in the biography, My Story So Far.
Luckily for him, he’s brilliant at football, too.
His right-footed drive from 30 metres against Arsenal made him the youngest player to score a Premiership goal. Not long afterward, Rooney signed his first professional contract, multiplying his wage nearly 200-fold from £75 to at least £13 000 per week, at just 17.
He was England’s youngest international and youngest-ever scorer. His 34 goals last season for United helped distract from the indebted club’s questionable decision to sell stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tévez to Real Madrid and to Man City, respectively.
Then, Rooney the goal-scoring machine seized up.
At the World Cup, Rooney’s zip and touch were gone. He still charged around, as he does, for the ball but seemed lost, a shadow of himself. He scored in practice but not when it counted in matches. England tumbled out in its first knock-out game, losing 4-1 to Germany. Rooney only distinguished himself in the wrong way — by sarcastically sneering “Nice to see the home fans boo you. That’s what you call loyal supporters” into a pitch-side camera after a limp 0-0 draw with Algeria in an earlier group game.
“It just didn’t click,” Rooney said in a televised interview four months later. “There was nothing physically wrong with me, so I just can’t see why I didn’t perform and it still puzzles me.”
Aware that Rooney’s stock was slumping post-World Cup, tabloids had a field day with the tawdry details of his supposed paid-for “romps” with women the year before. Again, the impression was of a little boy lost, out of touch with reality. He was reported to have paid a hotel employee £200 for a packet of cigarettes and to have been wracked with guilt after sex with two women, sitting on the bed in a fluffy white bath robe, holding his head in his hands.
That Rooney speaks in his biography of visiting brothels as a 16-year-old leant credence to the stories. It all looked awful for Coleen, who forgave his teenage errors and of whom he has spoken of devotedly — how they saw Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me on a first date and how, before his 18th birthday, he proposed marriage in a gas station’s forecourt.
“The Rooney story is one perceived as epitomising the excesses of top-level modern English footballers: economically over-rewarded; immensely powerful due to their special skills; and living their lives according to a moral code that is both different, and abhorrent, to many people,” says Simon Chadwick, director of the Centre for the International Business of Sport at England’s Coventry University.
“At the same time, the story is about a player, skillfully represented by an agent, who publicly played out his contract negotiations at a time when his off-field activities were open to serious question.”
In a curious negotiating strategy, Rooney suggested that the United team which Alex Ferguson has managed to multiple trophies in his 24 years in charge was no longer good enough. That riled some of his teammates. It also cut close to the bone for United’s American owners, who have been criticised for loading the club with debt. Then again, diplomacy has never been Rooney’s strength: One of his lesser records, again back in 2002, was being the youngest player in the Premier League to be red-carded.
Just as football made him, so it could now prove Rooney’s salvation. When the goals return, bad headlines will recede. As Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard explains, “Sometimes, when you’ve got an issue off the field, you know football can be a release from that.”
But the question is when. While Rooney has been absent with an ankle injury, Ferguson’s new 22-year-old striker Javier Hernández of Mexico has been a good stand-in. The more goals he and others score, the less important Rooney’s return seems to become.
So much so that the club has sent him to the United States to train with Nike, one of the sponsors that has stuck with him.
“We feel it’s in the best interests of him and the club to have a change of scenery for a while,” said United assistant manager Mike Phelan. “He needs the conditioning and he can go there without the attention he’d get around here.”
It’s all a bit mysterious and hardly makes Rooney appear essential for United. Out of sight, perhaps, but not out of mind. — Sapa-AP