Watching Kevin Keegan sitting beside that shiny opportunist David Davies last week while they announced what Kev would be doing in his spare time over the next few months it was hard not to reflect that the most interesting, revealing moments in Keegan's life are those when life has ruffled his perm.

All the hours of soundbites, all the ghosted biographies and all the expert analysis slots have told us nothing of the fundamental truth of Kevin Keegan. We know he is flaky but nobody is going to print that.

What an encapsulation of the spirit of modern professional sport last week's press conference was. Keegan all blow-dried and presentable sitting beside Davies a PR man run amok and now acting as chief executive of the FA. Davies it was who ghosted the Hoddle biography which should have had them both sacked. Davies it was who presided over ushering Hoddle out and Keegan in. Does this man represent the character of soccer?

Keegan certainly isn't what everyone would like him to be. He is media friendly and shallow, in contrast to Hoddle who was media hostile and shallow. Neither man was a rocket scientist and neither was well-rounded - but that ain't part of the job description anymore.

I remember fondly the 1974 Charity Shield game between the Leeds team of all talents which had won that year's league and Keegan's clunky Liverpool side which had beaten Newcastle in the Cup. Keegan and the immaculate, angelic and sorely-missed Billy Bremner got into what the eminently decent old school of sports journalism would call a "shemozzle" and were both sent to the line. Tempers didn't subside quickly and Keegan joined Bremner in a display of schoolboyish petulance and threw his jersey away.

For those of us who were weekly readers of the orthodox soccer magazine SHOOT! this was a ticklish business. Both Kevin and Billy contributed weekly columns which showcased their sensitive literary sides and gave we saucer-eyed fans a rare glimpse at the complex emotional machinery of two soccer romantics.

The following Thursday the boys had a good chuckle over the whole thing and both looked forward to buying their old mate a pint next time they met. It was the first time that I realised that the powder puff of corporate PR would always be dabbed over any cracks or wrinkles on the sporting face. Journalists always do their bit.

Years later Kev broke free again. Driven to near dementia by Alex Ferguson's pinpricking words and his own Newcastle team's Belleek delicacy, he departed from the bland old script and startled ITV viewers by appearing to have a nervous breakdown when asked a simple question about Manchester United.

Strange thing is that from a lifetime of achievement and servitude to rich men (Mr Hall and Mr Al Fayed are but the latest benefactors) those two little outbursts are about all I admire Kevin Keegan for. Two little moments when he broke free from the paddock and stripped off the marketing veneer.

Television and media coverage has benefited sport hugely over the past three decades, but in a very critical way we have killed off a key element of our own enjoyment. Last summer Ger Loughnane appeared to be in orbit somewhere above the GAA world and as a community we gazed up at him and marvelled at his lunacy. Not everything Loughnane said was agreeable, but it was exciting that he said it. Returning from a World Cup which didn't offer up one memorable quote to find Ger in full flow was a thrill.

Sports people speak sportspeak all the time because they are afraid to utter anything else outside the 300-word vocabulary issued to stars. They use sportspeak because that's all we in the media let them use. If they stray from the agreed script we are so overcome by the sensation that we distort all the significance of what was said.

A few years ago Phil Babb, then of Coventry and Ireland, used to contribute regular column to this paper, starting before the 1994 World Cup. It started out very well. Phil was a young fella going places, he had a lively interest in journalism and an unlikely appreciation of the world outside football. Good stuff. However as Phil moved up in the soccer world, joining Liverpool having been a World Cup star, his words became stingier and less varied and the attention and stardom callowed him.

One column fell at the end of the week during which Eric Cantona kicked a spectator in the head. Phil Babb made a few light-hearted comments the overall effect of which was to express wry collegial amusement at Cantona and vague disapproval of the practice of assaulting paying customers.

The column appeared on Saturday. The following day one of the more diseased English tabloids picked up a couple of the quotes and tucked them under a headline which suggested that furious Babb had slammed thug Cantona. The following week the letters began arriving at Anfield addressed to Phil Babb, hate mail from everywhere. Some fans had thoughtfully taken old-fashioned razor blades and glued them into stiff envelopes just along the line where one might run one's finger to open the envelope.

Coincidentally Phil lost his appetite for writing not long afterwards. Not long ago when a colleague from this paper approached him for a brief interview, Phil said that he "couldn't be arsed."

This crippling apathy, if not the poor manners, is understandable. The media interest in sport is rabid, but the level of maturity brought to bear on analysis of the participants is so low that the breadth of interest and range of topics to be discussed has been drastically reduced.

I remember once in the course of a dead interview with a hurler inquiring what was the last movie he saw and his eyes narrowed and he said what do you want to know that for? Sad.

We struggle with anything outside the parameters. A player says he wasn't in last night because he was at a school play becomes the theatre-loving full forward for as long as he plays. Being caught reading a book is a similarly indictable offence.

IT WOULD be nice to think that Kevin Keegan was appointed, however briefly, because he has the breadth and strength of personality to deal with the strange demands of being England manager. He hasn't the dimensions, but he plays the media game well and for a lifetime of banality he has been rewarded.

It would be nice too to think that Ger Loughnane will flow freely this summer unbowed by the tyranny of talk radio shows and chastising columnists. He will.

We have all connived to make the theatre of sport a little bit more phoney. At least Loughnane is one real life connected to reality.