Michael Kennedy history's hidden hand
Tom Humphries
Locker Room: Occasionally LockerRoom has the need to call Michael Kennedy. If LockerRoom's life of devout atheism turns out to have been a tragic misjudgment and there is, in fact, a Supreme Being somewhere who is pulling all the strings, LockerRoom will first call Michael Kennedy and beg him to negotiate all-areas access to Valhalla for LockerRoom.
Having got past the pearly gates PA who checks the credentials without actually audibly sighing when you confess you are a sinner from a newspaper, there is a little pause before Kennedy's voice comes gently down the line. His tone suggests he is a most benevolent god but of this particular petitioner he disapproves. In fact, he is amused to be hearing the petition at all.
LockerRoom, who is profoundly shallow, instantly repents his low-down vocational ways by beseeching Kennedy in the unfortunate but sincere manner of a skittish spaniel humping the leg of a visitor who is wearing a bespoke suit. A visitor who might just have a string of cocktail sausages in his breast pocket. Kennedy smiles and applies discreet pressure guaranteed to remove the nuisance and stop the tail-wagging.
He traditionally offers LockerRoom the dignity of being placed at the end of a queue. With crushing frankness he lets him know there are literally billions of petitioners in the queue. The long and winding queue - to interview Roy, Stan, Davo, any of the archangels really - is actually a purgatory. LockerRoom may enter purgatory and purgatory may actually cease to officially exist. LockerRoom and many others may be left in eternal limbo with new batteries in their tape machines waiting for a return call.
Yet LockerRoom always looks forward to having to call Michael Kennedy. For a start he takes the calls of journalists, which courtesy is sufficient to distinguish him from just about anybody else with a hand near the levers of influence in Irish or English soccer. And he seems to derive harmless pleasure out of effortlessly thwarting us. A legal mind chatting affably with a journalist without actually saying anything printable or quotable is the equivalent of Einstein rushing through a game of sudoku while having a quick bath.
And then for the caller there is always the thrill of proximity. Knowing that on the other end of the line is one of those people who go about their business with immense discretion but certain genius, a man whose actions can considerably add to or detract from the gaiety of the nation. If life turned all Kafka and you metamorphosed into a fly you'd happily spend a few weeks on the wall of Kennedy's office watching him operate.
He's quality too. When the spivs who run the Premiership hear Kennedy is coming to cut a deal there must be little ripples of fear and loathing running down certain jellyish spines. A pub brawler being told he must fight Ali knows the feeling.
Kennedy is the hidden hand of history. There is a school of thought which says he has too much influence. There is a distrust of him because he doesn't depend on football for a living but rather dabbles in it for favours and almost as a hobby. The fact is he doesn't meddle enough in history.
If we had sent Michael Kennedy instead of Michael Collins to negotiate the Treaty we'd probably own Wales now and have 15 per cent off the back end of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Had he travelled to Munich with Chamberlain, the latter would have stepped off the plane waving the deeds to holiday homes and the rights to a new casino in the Sudetenland for everyone. Kennedy is the only man who might bring peace to the Middle East and, while the Israelis and Hizbullah are enjoying a barbecue at the border, negotiate the book deals.
Kennedy's latest miracle, putting together what Saipan had sundered, is less surprising, perhaps, than it initially seemed. Almost as soon as Saipan had, as they say, gorn orf, Kennedy was the central if not the most visible figure in the search for a solution, and despite all the flak he has taken for it, Niall Quinn was the most proactive and imaginative person at the Irish end of the efforts to get Keane back.
They almost succeeded. Having been left behind alone in the Hyatt Hotel in Saipan to face a long, long journey home, Keane was almost talked into getting on another plane and making the long journey back again. There were two hugely significant voices whispering in his ear he should stay at home: his pride and his manager at Manchester United. In the end only the bungling of third parties in those crazy days in Izumo intervened. Kennedy and Quinn were within a whisker of succeeding.
It was Kennedy's advice which prompted Quinn to attempt that infamous handshake with Keane during the memorable afternoon at Sunderland when Jason McAteer told Roy to stick it all in his next book and Quinn and Ferguson went at it nose to nose in the tunnels beneath the Stadium of Light afterwards. There's been a lot of tough people involved and a lot of harsh things said in the Saipan War but when the dust settled after all the books, documentaries and stage shows Keane can hardly have failed to notice that Quinn's hand remained outstretched.
Kennedy is the ultimate pragmatist in that emotion doesn't cloud his judgment. This column once asked Keane why he had chosen to sell the first rights to his autobiography to the Sun and the News of the World, two publications which had created much grief in his life. Keane explained Kennedy's thinking: both papers were going to be whetting their blades in anticipation; taking a very large chunk of money from them went a good way to neutralising them. Revenge or grievance weren't part of the equation.
Kennedy's remarkable achievement is to have remained not just a figure of influence but a friend to so many of the parties. He brokered Stephen Staunton's accession to the Irish job. He ushered Quinn and Keane over the threshold and out of their playing careers with such delicacy and such attention to their bank balances neither man ever had to wonder about WC Fields's old comment that nobody really knows where Hollywood ends and the DTs begin.
The sporadic controversies which enmesh his clients are seemingly a matter of indifference to Kennedy. They aren't opportunities for self-aggrandising or for getting a fumble in the greasy till. Unusually for somebody who can be designated, in the broad sense anyway, an agent, he comes equipped with detachment. That detachment is his greatest weapon. He can walk away if necessary. And he can reassure his player that if he walks away with him there'll still be good things down the road.
The tales of his brinkmanship in dealing with clubs are legendary. He doesn't come across as a three-card-trick merchant but his father came from Kerry and his mother from Cork, so there is no lack of cutery in the gene pool.
At Sunderland you can be sure the two central figures in the reconciliation have their own private doubts about a long-term working relationship, but watching two of the most interesting men in football try cohabitation again will be box-office gold.
Quinn and Keane are big characters, the first a whole lot tougher than people give him credit for, the second far more flexible. They are fortunate though to be linked through Kennedy, whose influence goes far beyond the veniality of negotiating bonuses and perquisites for wealthy players.
There are rumblings about another round of blood-letting imminent in the FAI. Being employed there must feel like being a passenger in the vehicle featured in Snakes on a Plane. Sign Kennedy up now. Confessor to all sides. Lads, he can bring not just peace, but prosperity with
