Destroyed by a football drinking culture: The sad story of Everton’s lost teenage genius Billy Kenny, the ‘Goodison Gazza’, charts the demise of Paul Gascoigne and Norman Whiteside. All three deserved better

When Paul Gascoigne arrived at the launch of a documentary about his life, a few years back, he was too damaged and psychologically fragile to go through with a planned Q&A. With an audience awaiting him at Soho’s Charlotte Street hotel, he slipped away.

Billy Kenny, the one-time Everton prodigy who Peter Beardsley once called ‘the Goodison Gazza,’ does appear for our meeting at Liverpool’s Slaughterhouse pub. But behind his bravado, there are the same signs of fragility and agony about a game which briefly cherished him but played a part in his near destruction.

As a 19-year-old playing a man-of-the-match role in the Goodison Park Merseyside derby of December 1992, Kenny had the world at his feet. 

So, asking for his memories of that hallowed turf seems like a way of reminding him that, despite everything, he has some indelible experiences. What did Kenny see as he walked up the 13 whitewashed steps onto Goodison pitch for the first time? What were the sounds or smells of playing in that crucible?

But 34 years on, he seems lost in the fog of all that followed, as he fell out of the game inside two years. When his mind drifts back to his first game on Goodison’s turf, for his high school team in a national youth cup final, he can only recall that it turned out to be ‘one of the worst of my life.’

 He was too busy looking for then-manager Howard Kendall and his assistant Colin Harvey in the stands. Desperate to be accepted into the club which, he says, he would have given his ‘left leg’ to play for.

The excellent autobiography he has completed with journalist Jamie Fahey vividly depicts the way the teenage Kenny walked into an Everton drinking culture presided over by Kendall – who had his own serious problems with alcohol – and drifted into cocaine addiction.

Within hours of sealing victory in that Goodison derby, Kenny was accepting a friend’s offer to extend his celebrations at the Setter and Vine pub in Anfield and then Club Fridays, a Liverpool nightclub, where amid the general adulation for him, the 19-year-old casually accepted an offer of cocaine. ‘I crossed the wrong white line,’ he says of what would become a career-ending addiction.

Fahey’s attention to the small details of this life story make you grieve for Kenny in those car crash few years when he was till rescuable. And rage for the fact that Kendall plied him with chablis and Guinness in what was a scandalous breach of responsibility.

But some of the book’s understated moments reveal that he was not the only one self-destructing in plain sight, back then. Called up to Everton’s first team away to Tottenham Hotspur late in the 1991-92 season, Kenny, a substitute, spots Gascoigne wolfing down fish and chips on the Spurs bench. 

‘He caught me off guard by asking if a I fancied a few chips as I got out to warm up.’ No-one seemed remotely inclined to steer Gascoigne away from his chips.

Norman Whiteside, then an Everton player, also materialises as an immensely positive presence in the world of the gauche young Kenny and one of the few pros actually wanting to guide him. 

‘He taught me all about patience,’ Kenny writes. ‘Talking me through games – a little message here, a reminder there. He told me to relax, to calm down and not get too distracted by wanting to do it all.’ When a friend of Kenny’s finds a gold chain Whiteside had misplaced, he made sure to get £50 to him by way of thanks.

Yet Whiteside’s own career was about to end at the age of 26, through injury. ‘His obsession with ale left me confused at times,’ Kenny writes. ‘I do wonder how much more Big Norman could have achieved without premature exposure to the worst aspects of football culture back then.’

As we speak, the ‘what-ifs’ radiate out through Kenny, who sips on a beer. Manchester United and Liverpool chased his signature back then and he met both clubs’ managers, Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalglish. 

Had he taken that road to Old Trafford, he would have encountered Ferguson, a manager who drummed out the heavy drinkers and instilled the discipline Kenny badly needed. ‘It would have been different,’ he says.

Kenny had a connection with Ryan Giggs, whom he knew by his original name Ryan Wilson as the two of them sparred in youth football. ‘Ryan went on the right path and if I’d taken the same one things might have been different,’ Kenny reflects once again. 

‘I’ve been watching the Wayne Rooney Netflix documentary and that makes me smile, too, when you can see the team he’s got around. Would Wayne have had that success If he’d played under Kendall? That’s what goes through my mind. I’m just glad he never did.’ 

Rooney was fiercely protected by David Moyes, his Everton manager. Would it have been different for Kenny with Moyes at the helm? ‘I think so,’ he says.

When Kendall had gone, manager Mike Walker made a half-hearted attempt to get Kenny to see sense. Only teammate Gary Ablett, who died at the age of 46 in 2012, made any substantial effort to help him. 

Kenny was summoned to the Everton boardroom and sacked when a urine sample revealed cocaine. He played 23 games for Everton, four for Oldham, two for Barrow and served five-months of a nine-month prison sentence for drink-driving and missing an original trial. For a few glorious months, he was an England under-21 international but it was never to be.

Kenny wasn’t the only one confronted by a culture in which, to quote Pat Nevin’s memoir, Kendall ‘believed in the usefulness of alcohol as a bonding tool.’ Over at Liverpool, players like Terry McDermott drank hard and were none the worse for it. But he was a perfect storm – brilliant, vulnerable, mistreated – in a careless, brutal era.

There would be a vestige of hope to take from this tragedy if Kenny might take on a role warning new generations of prodigious talents about not making the same mistakes he did. 

The point doesn’t seem to register with him, though. The look behind his eyes tells you that the lost career haunts him and the pain doesn’t seem done with him yet.