Robbie Fowler is the wealthiest sportsman in Britain, a property tycoon, racehorse owner and goalscoring phenomenon. So why do many people think he is a football failure?
In a remarkably candid interview he talks exclusively to Sarah Edworthy about drug addiction, his astonishing early success, and why he should still be playing for Liverpool Sunday September 4, 2005 The Observer
We are standing in a spacious kitchen painted a dusky pink colour that, were it a lipstick or nail varnish, would be called Plum Beautiful or Berry Sorbet. On the large pine dresser stand baby photographs, christening snaps and paint-your-own ceramic plates daubed with the sentiments 'I love you Daddy' and 'To the best Daddy in the world'.
Children's reward charts are pinned to a wall and here, in this orderly world of Aga and shiny marble worktops, Robbie Fowler, with a toddlers pink hair clip in his hand, is showing me a recipe for a Bedazzled Fairy Mountain cake. The Toxteth Terror, eh?
Having met Robbie on several occasions through his great mate Steve McManaman, I've always found him reserved but friendly, generous and endearingly quick with deadpan one-liners. For the purposes of this meeting, however, I canvassed a number of people and found plenty who are more convinced by the caricature of a boozing, immature, overpaid footballer on the slide to oblivion.
As Fowler told me when we met at his home in Caldy on the Wirral - where somewhere through the trees Rafael Benitez, Jerzy Dudek and Ian Rush are neighbours - it is an image that annoys him because it is profoundly untrue. 'I'm just not like that,' he says flatly. His Scouse accent is not of the pronounced sing-song variety. Critics of Fowler, who was 30 in April, like to call to mind three images when they speak about him: the notorious line-sniffing goal celebration against Everton in April 1999; the moment when he taunted Graeme Le Saux during a game at Chelsea; and the odd worse-for-wear snatched nightclub photograph.
Never mind Robbie's side of these stories (of which, more later) or the universal truth that one man's prank is another's vexation. Those images tick the boxes of three taboos for those with role-model status - drugs, sex and drink. At the same time, Fowler is held in huge affection for being 'mischievous, but a good guy'; 'a true Liverpool kid'; and 'a record-breaking scorer of supernatural precision'.
And he is lamented for being forced out of Liverpool, as some would have it, by former manager Gerard Houllier. The official club website states simply: 'Robbie Fowler is a Liverpool legend and a Kop hero who will never be forgotten.'
He was a sensation from the moment he scored on his debut, against Fulham, in the Coca Cola Cup on 22 September 1993. In the return game, at Anfield, he scored five. Less than a year later, against Arsenal on 28 August 1994, the 19-year-old scored what remains the fastest hat-trick in the Premiership (in four minutes, 32 seconds), already on his way to becoming the fastest Liverpool striker in history to 100 goals. On 1 November 1994, Liverpool drew up a contract that made him football's first teenage millionaire. He was 19 and would go on to score 171 goals in 330 games.
'Everyone was saying, "He's too young",' Graeme Souness, who gave Fowler his debut during his troubled time as Liverpool manager, told me when we spoke. 'But I would go and watch him in the reserves - it would be a misty November night, there would be a throng around the goal, the ball would end up in the back of the net and I would say, "That's Robbie who's got that", and it always was. He had a fantastic sixth sense of where to be, a unique eye for a goal. He could conjure them from nothing. I would put him right up there with Ian Rush as one of the greatest poachers.'
To the Liverpool faithful he was known simply as 'God'. Since our arrival at God's divine family home - 'Edwardian, would you call it, Robbie?' 'Lived-in, I'd say' - there's been a fluid conversation going on about the fairy mountain birthday cake between Robbie's wife, Kerrie; their three blonde daughters, Madison, six, Jaya, four, and Mackenzie, two; and Kerrie's mother, Maureen. The girls are on their way to Tesco to buy the ingredients for the cake and Robbie wants to clarify what the excitement is all about. With the children gone and the photographer setting up, Robbie and I sit outside on a Cliveden-style stone terrace that runs the length of the house.
At the far end, neat box hedges retain the formality of a house built in 1910 for a Merseyside ship-company owner. Close to the table where we sit, a pop-up pink Tinkerbell play tent marks the other end, which houses an indoor swimming-pool. In an inner courtyard, washing is neatly pegged out on the line. As we look out over the garden and landscaped playground area, the conversation ranges between trampoline safety (Robbie is a worrier), the usefulness of a heated pool as a means of exhausting young children and the importance of school for building social confidence. All three girls attend a local private school, where they mingle with, among others, Liverpool midfielder Didi Hamann's brood. Away from football, Robbie's idea of an ideal day is, he says, 'to play golf at St Andrews - I've always wanted to play there - come home and mess around with the girls, then go out for a meal with my wife. That would be perfect.'
In truth, Robbie hates going out. 'I get paranoid about people staring at me. Even now I don't deal with people looking at me. I can't do it sometimes. I can't go out. I don't know how to react when people stare. It's not like they're trying to work out if it is me - I've got one of those faces I think that people automatically know. When I was young, meself and Stevie Mac would walk through town. He'd put a cap on and no one would know him, and I'd try and put a cap on but it seemed to make people recognize me more. I couldn't even get away with wearing a cap!
I've always liked a laugh but when I look at how I've been portrayed over the years, it's been exaggerated. An image has stuck for most of my career and it isn't flattering. I hate the idea that people are looking at me like I'm some sort of thick, ignorant scally, or thug, who doesn't care about anything.'
This week Robbie Fowler publishes a remarkably candid autobiography. Why? He doesn't need the money: he is, after all, the richest sportsman living in Britain, his estimated fortune of £28 million accumulated from football and his ownership of close to 100 properties. He has also pursued an interest in horse racing, forming the Macca & Growler Partnership with McManaman and owning a string of horses, of whom the best-known and last survivor is Seebald.
Fans delight in teasing him about his property portfolio, singing, to the tune of 'Yellow Submarine', 'We all live in a Robbie Fowler house'. 'They sing another great one, too, something about rent ... ' he laughs. 'The investment is something in the pipeline that I could manage when I retire, but for now I leave all that on the backburner. I've got a financial advisor who deals with it so I can concentrate on football.'
With his close friend David Maddock, he has written his life story animated with intimate, quirky stories as you would expect, but driven primarily by his concern at how he has been misrepresented and at the way certain untruths about him have become undisputed convictions that continue to torture his family.
He has never spoken out, for instance, against what he describes as 'the vindictive whispering campaign' about an alleged drugs problem. 'That myth really, really irritates me,' he says firmly. 'If people only knew the reason why I grew up hating drugs so much, maybe they'd have been a little slower to throw this mud at me.' Later, he explains how two of his cousins died through drug abuse and that he had grown up knowing that 'drugs are nothing but evil'. 'What struck me most in working on the book,' he continues, 'was just how far I have come. I've come from living in our house in Toxteth to what I've got now. I've worked hard for it, and I'm proud of that.'
What he shares with most other top-flight English footballers - with, as he puts it, 'Rooney, Stevie Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Beckham, Scholes, Macca, Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand' - is an inner-city council-estate childhood. '
Coming from such a background doesn't mean you're thick, or a thug, but it does mean you have a certain outlook on life to begin with.' Emerging just a year after the Premiership was set up in 1992, when money from Sky was enriching the game, Fowler quickly became famous and wealthy but without the benefit of the media training and lifestyle guidance that many young players receive today.
As he writes: 'I was a cheeky little lad who played football every night, pissed around with his mates, and overnight, literally overnight, came fame. Nothing had changed in my routine, except that when I went down the chippy and got me special fried rice, it would be wrapped in a newspaper that had my picture all over it. It's no wonder I struggled to come to terms with it all ... Every game I played, something seemed to happen that made me a little bit more famous, or a little more notorious. I never analysed it, never thought about where I was heading or how I should react. I just reacted how I always reacted, instinctively, cheekily, sometimes stupidly. And I had the time of my life.' When you're a teenager from inner-city Liverpool, you don't have any training on how to deal with the sideshow that comes with success. 'I've made plenty of mistakes, I know I have, and during my time as a footballer things have changed so that the spotlight is now even more intense. You have to be even more of a role model, a sensible, mature, intelligent professional, even if you're a cheeky little lad who's come from an inner-city council estate and put football before his studies.'
But he always had respect for the game as drilled into him at Liverpool by youth coach Steve Heighway, assistant manager Ronnie Moran and fellow striker Ian Rush. He was taught how to play for the team and how always to pass to the man in the best position. 'It strikes me that these days, clubs don't even want players who can truly play any more; they just want athletes, quick guys who don't have a football brain, can just run and run; some of them, Jesus. I can never imagine acting like that. Have a laugh, yeah, dick about, but don't give it the Charlie Big Bollocks. It's inevitable now, because everyone is a superstar, even if they're just an average player, and maybe that was part of the process set in motion when I signed that contract in 1994.'
Robert Bernard Fowler was born in Liverpool on 9 April 1975, to parents whose families had both lived in Toxteth for generations. His dad was a labourer before he started to work on the railways. Robbie's paternal grandfather was a Liverpool fan who used to dance on the piano in the local pub to celebrate victory. His maternal grandfather, from whom he reckons he's inherited his prankster sense of humour, was a good Catholic, 'who would get a few drinks down him on 12 July when they had the Protestant marches, and he would then go out and lead the parade!'