The freckled kid from Liverpool with the magic touch is becoming as famous for his gambling as he is for scoring goals, writes Andrew Fifield
Merseyside, 1995: On a windswept playing field off Liverpool's Penny Lane, the city schoolboys' under-11s are playing a league match. There are no barbers, firemen or bankers, just a few devoted fathers and the teams' two managers. Suddenly, a stocky, freckle-faced kid bursts out of a midfield melee and storms towards goal.
"Pass it!" bellow his coach. "Beat yer man!" cries a dad. The kid does neither. Instead, he looks up and catapults a 35-yard shot into the roof of the net before turning to the gobsmacked crowd, shrugging his shoulders and flashing a goofy grin.
Merseyside, 2002: At Goodison Park, Everton are deadlocked with Arsenal as stoppage time approaches. In the stands, 36,000 Scousers are howling for a winner. On the field, the stocky kid from Penny Lane is now in a royal blue jersey. He receives the ball 35 yards out. Ahead of him, Arsenal's back four stand imperious; to right and left, nothing - his team-mates are exhausted. The kid doesn't need them. He takes aim and swings his right foot: the ball curls and dips over David Seaman and almost breaks the net. As Goodison erupts, Wayne Rooney holds his arms aloft and breaks into his familiar toothy smile.
It was at that moment that Rooney's life, so beautifully simple on the school playing fields of Liverpool, became complicated. His picture-perfect goal propelled the Everton academy trainee earning €120 a week into the stratosphere. A week later, he turned 17 and signed a professional contract worth €18,000 a week; two years later he signed for Manchester United for €41 million.
WAYNE'S WORLD IS now a very different place, its highs and lows encapsulated in the events of a typically turbulent week. On Sunday, Rooney helped United to their ninth successive Premiership win by scoring another stupendous goal against Arsenal. Earlier that day, the 20-year-old had woken up to lurid headlines about alleged €1 million gambling debts. Then, on Wednesday, he accepted £100,000 (€145,000) in libel damages from two newspapers over articles which falsely accused him of assaulting his fiancée, Coleen McLoughlin.
He has had to grow up, and fast. But though his body and wallet have swelled, Rooney is in many ways still the same kid from Croxteth, a neglected estate in Liverpool's east end. The impish enthusiasm is still there, a throwback to how the 11-year-old Rooney would race from the De La Salle High School to Everton's Bellefield training ground to practise on his own before the session began and then leave immediately afterwards to kick a Coke can around with his mates. So, too, is the devotion to his family. Rooney recently bought his mother, Jeanette, a £20,000 (€29,000) cruise as a Mother's Day gift and took a vast entourage of relations on holiday to Mexico.
Then again, Rooney should be grateful, for it was his family who first fired his sporting fervour. His father, Wayne senior, was a boxer; Uncles Vinnie and Billy played semi-professional football; Jeanette helped shape her son's bullish physique with plates of his beloved sausages, beans and chips. Even Grandma helped. The six-year-old Wayne would antagonise her by smashing a ball against the pebble-dash on her house.
"Nan didn't think it was funny," recalled his cousin Thomas. "She'd hear the stones fall and yell 'Wa-a-ayne!' He'd get a slap."
She is not the only one to have struggled to control the young tearaway. Since exploding on to the professional scene he has attracted a worrying element of bad publicity. Some has been trivial, such as the sanctimonious condemnation of his nervous gum-chewing while he accepted the 2002 BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year award. Some has been more serious. In 2004, reports appeared detailing a brawl which erupted at the 18th birthday party organised by Rooney for Coleen. Then, Sunday newspaper revelations forced him to admit that he had frequented massage parlours and brothels in Liverpool.
Rooney's youthful misdemeanours were indulged as long as his playing performances remained faultless, but his on-field discipline initially matched his chaotic private life. His first red card came at Birmingham two months after his first league goal.
In November 2004, he was substituted after 42 minutes of England's friendly with Spain to prevent him being sent off. Just last year, an enraged Rooney responded to a shock defeat against Northern Ireland by telling his captain, David Beckham, to "f**k off".
ROONEY IS DEFINED by his volcanic temperament. He may now be a multimillionaire, but when he sprints out of the tunnel on Saturday afternoon, he is still the street kid who scrapped with kids twice his age on Croxteth tarmac. Those days taught him how to take a bruising and how to dish one out, an experience he shares with his good friend Steven Gerrard, who grew up on the city's notorious Bluebell estate. Muzzling Rooney's aggression would muffle his impact.
"His temperament is a positive," suggested Diego Maradona, a man who knows only too well the destructive pressure that comes with being a footballing Messiah. "It will make him fight on the field and conquer adversity. You can't be a saint and still be successful in football. The sport hurts."
Rooney now knows that only too well. He is routinely battered by beleaguered defenders, but it is the emotional pain which cuts deepest. Sorest of all was his decision, in August 2004, to leave Everton for United.
"It is tough for Evertonians because they see me as one of their own, but I want to move on for myself," he announced at the time.
Rooney's farewell to Merseyside was significant on many levels, not all of them sporting. The leaving of Liverpool can be traumatic. This fiercely proud, insular city occupies a special place in Britain's psyche: it is a place which treasures the qualities - cultural, social, humorous, even linguistic - which make it unique. It breeds an extraordinary civic pride but, for those who are seen as the city's standard-bearers, the atmosphere can be suffocating. As Ian Hart's John Lennon tells Stuart Sutcliffe in the film Backbeat, "We're gonna be big - too big for Liverpool".
Wayne Rooney became too big for Liverpool. The scrutiny was too intense, the pressure too overwhelming, the distractions too tempting. At Manchester United, the on-field expectations were raised but Rooney was allowed to breathe again, in the privacy of a mock-Tudor mansion in rural Cheshire. He was also sheltered by the protecting arm of Alex Ferguson. United's manager insists on acting as a surrogate father to his young players and Rooney joined the likes of Ryan Giggs, David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo as teenagers who became men under his watchful eye.
"He came to the club who can handle most things because we get the most attention," said Ferguson. "When our players walk down the street they get photographed. There is tremendous pressure. But the players here have good reputations and we look after them well."
Ferguson has been true to his word. Despite the occasional lapse, Rooney has matured at Old Trafford. He still collects yellow cards with frightening frequency but he has been sent off just once in the last three and a half years. The aggression Rooney inherited from his boxer father has not disappeared, but it is now channelled more usefully.
"I want to win every game," he reflected, "but I'm also a young lad and I'm enjoying learning." Even the recent gambling furore is unlikely to send a reformed Rooney off the rails. The sums involved may be enough to make most punters wince, but this is someone who earns €90,000 a week and boasts many lucrative endorsement deals. For a young man with more cash and time than he knows what to do with, such predicaments are hardly surprising. Ferguson will be unimpressed by the hysterical headlines but he can hardly preach to his protege: his love of horse-racing almost matches his affection for football.
BESIDES, ROONEY HAS more pressing issues on his mind. United, inspired by their talismanic forward, have moved within striking distance of Chelsea as the Premiership season enters its end zone. But even a first league title would pale next to the triumph of lifting the World Cup in Berlin on July 9th.
Rooney's international memories are not entirely happy ones: he scored four goals at Euro 2004 before hobbling off in the quarter-final against Portugal, taking England's hopes with him. But World Cups are stages built for bright young things and this could be his year. If it is, we already know how he will celebrate: a goofy smile and a plate of sausages, beans and chips.
TheRooney File
Who is he? Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United and England forward with the body of a bull and a temper to match
Why is he in the news? Betting debts, libel settlements . . . oh, and he regularly scores goals for Manchester United too
Most appealing characteristic As Alan Partridge would put it: "He's got a foot like a traction engine."
Least appealing characteristic Prone to the sort of four-letter outbursts that would make a docker blush
Most likely to say "F**k"
Least likely to say "I think you probably have enough Prada bags, Coleen."