Meet the football maverick who failed a Liverpool medical TWICE after a summer of sex

It is one of the great football yarns, the tale of how Frank Worthington came within a hair’s breadth of joining Bill Shankly’s Liverpool in the summer of 1972. 

The story was widely revisited in the days following the charismatic former England striker’s death four years ago, and it is easy to see why, for in many ways it captures the essence of one of English football’s most noted mavericks.

Yet it is also an episode tinged with sadness, a path not taken towards a door that would never open for Worthington, who counted Huddersfield Town, Leicester City and Bolton Wanderers among the 24 clubs he represented in a career spanning more than a quarter of a century.

‘If I had played for Liverpool I would have been inspirational,’ Worthington told this newspaper in 2016, less than a month before his daughter announced he was battling Alzheimer’s (a claim he immediately denied). 

‘It would have been big time, I would have gone higher and higher. I would have been more than Kevin Keegan or Kenny Dalglish, as I had more skill.’

That was a big claim, given how deeply embedded Keegan and Dalglish are in Anfield folklore. Yet, on the red half of Merseyside, the prospect of a strike partnership that combined Keegan’s speed and industry with Worthington’s swashbuckling creativity was, for a time, the talk of the town.

It was not only on the pitch that Worthington’s reputation preceded him, however, and while his talent held obvious appeal for Shankly, his individualism and rakish lifestyle seemed out of kilter with what the Liverpool boss normally looked for in a player.

‘Frank was a maverick, he was the most wonderful player,’ recalls Phil Thompson, a former Liverpool captain whose own Anfield career was in its formative stages at the time. ‘Flamboyant, I think you would call him. 

‘But it was quite left-field, Bill Shankly going for him. We’d come from Roger Hunt and Ian St John, who were not only centre-forwards but workaholics. They had a team ethic, whereas Frank had this individual brilliance, he could do something out of nothing. Getting one of those flair players, it wasn’t something that we were used to.

‘Frank was such a wonderful, lovely man, and you could see him mixing in the dressing room. But I think we all were wary of his lifestyle. Would that always be to [the liking of] our lieutenants Joe Fagan, Bob Paisley and Ronnie Moran? It would have been difficult for them to accept his lifestyle at the time.’ 

To judge from his assessment of the qualities Shankly valued in a Liverpool player, the decision to pursue Worthington may have caught Geoff Twentyman, the late Liverpool chief scout in whom Shankly placed implicit trust, similarly flat-footed.   

‘Shankly wanted, above all, to know about the lad’s private life, what he was like, did he go out drinking every night, what his home background was, and so on,’ the late Geoff Twentyman, Liverpool’s former chief scout, told Shankly biographer Stephen F Kelly. ‘He liked players with character.’

Worthington was certainly a character, but how far his private life dovetailed with Shankly’s clean-living principles was another matter. A shaggy-maned roisterer renowned for sporting cowboy boots and under-utilising the top few buttons of his shirts, he was also an Elvis Presley devotee who routinely treated team-mates to a rendition of Are You Lonesome Tonight? on away trips.

The irony in that choice of song was palpable, for Worthington was rarely alone of an evening. Here was a man who did not so much play the field as the entire countryside, dating a seeming endless array of models and beauty queens. His first wife, Birgitta Egermalm, was a former Miss Sweden; his second, Carol Dwyer, was a former Page 3 girl. 

Once asked by the British football magazine Shoot to name his previous clubs, Worthington replied: ‘The Playboy, Tramps and Sandpiper’ – before identifying ‘birdwatching’ among his hobbies. 

Put it this way: there was a reason Worthington entitled his 1994 autobiography One Hump or Two? – and it was not down to a natural fascination with camels. 

So as Shankly drove to Huddersfield to negotiate a deal for the 24-year-old striker, whose 18-goal tally in the 1969-70 season had been instrumental in returning the Terriers to the top flight, he must have known what he was getting himself into.

But neither that knowledge nor the club-record fee of £150,000 required to prise Worthington from his boyhood club were about to deter the Scot, for the simple truth was that Liverpool needed goals. 

Roger Hunt and Ian St John, who had combined to score 341 goals in 386 appearances in the 60s, had left the club, while Keegan’s partnership with John Toshack was still in its infancy. Worthington, who had just been called up to the England under-23 side, was seen as the solution.

That might have surprised Sir Alf Ramsey, who was stunned when Worthington, true to form, pitched up at Heathrow airport for the international tour to eastern Europe wearing cowboy boots, a red silk shirt and a lime velvet jacket.

‘Oh s***, what have I f****** done?’ Ramsey reputedly exclaimed – although his misgivings may have been allayed when Worthington marked his debut with a goal in a 3-0 win over Poland.

With Worthington yet to learn of his impending move to Anfield, he flew back to London to find Peter Robinson and Roy Lambert, Huddersfield’s chief scout, awaiting him. The trio drove to the nearby Ariel hotel, where they were met by Shankly.

‘Do yer wanna come and play for Liverpool?’ enquired the Anfield maestro. ‘We need yer, son.’

Worthington did not need to be asked twice. With terms agreed, the group made their way to Merseyside the following morning to complete the formalities. As Shankly, Robinson, and future manager Bob Paisley looked on, Worthington signed his new contract; all that remained was a medical.

What happened next was to change the course of Worthington’s career. A blood pressure test returned an unexpectedly high reading. The club doctor repeated the procedure several times, but the dial remained stubbornly unaltered.

‘It’s just tension, son,’ said Shankly. 

Determining that a little sunshine would soon return his new prize to full working order, Shankly packed Worthington off to Majorca. It proved an uncharacteristic misstep by the Liverpool manager.

With an eye to the main chance every bit as sharp as his eye for goal, Worthington used the trip to unwind in his own inimitable style – and never mind that he was dating Carolyn Moore, the reigning Miss Great Britain, at the time. 

There are differing accounts of what went on during that Spanish sojourn, and no doubt the episode became embellished over time. 

Worthington said in his autobiography that he joined the mile-high club with a random stranger on the outward flight, later became intimately acquainted with a young Swedish woman and her mother, and also hooked up with a Belgian model. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has also been claimed he suffered a dizzy spell at one point that left him laid out on the floor of his hotel bedroom. 

Whatever the reality of it all, the bottom line is that Worthington returned to Merseyside with his blood pressure higher than ever. His Liverpool career was over before it had even started.

‘I’m sorry, son, but as much as I want to, I can’t sign you,’ Shankly told him. ‘I can’t afford to lay out a record amount to bring in a player with a question mark hanging over his head.’

Like the rest of his Liverpool team-mates, Thompson remained in the dark about the background to the episode. Long after the event, though, it would come up in conversation between the pair.  

‘We didn’t know how, why and what had actually happened at the time,’ Thompson recalls. ‘There was talk of medicals, there was talk of other things.

‘it was only many years later, now and again being in Frank’s company – now this is only allegedly – that he actually said, if I can remember, he’d had the most wonderful summer. He drank, he sunbathed, and everything else that he would get up to. 

‘Frank came back and his blood pressure was through the roof. He’d been drinking and partying and enjoying his lifestyle, and of course his blood pressure was too far exaggerated to take a risk. Whether Bill Shankly had wondered why it was inclined to be like that, I don’t know.’ 

Again, there is an undercurrent of sadness to this jack-the-lad tale that is too often overlooked. Worthington’s father Eric had died not too long beforehand, leaving him with an abiding sense of loss. 

‘The hardest thing that ever happened to me was losing my father, who I miss greatly to this day,’ Worthington would say almost a quarter of a century later.

Did that devastation contribute to his self-sabotaging behaviour that summer? Perhaps even Worthington himself would have struggled to answer that one. But grief confers a different perspective on life, and it would be foolhardy to dismiss the possibility that there were weightier things on his mind than the loss of a promising career move.

‘There was no point in getting upset,’ said Worthington. ‘I just told myself it was their loss.’ 

History tells a different story. 

Liverpool won the league and UEFA Cup that season, and would go on to claim a glittering array of domestic and European silverware throughout the 70s and 80s. 

Worthington went on to Leicester, where he would claim eight senior England caps – too modest a haul for so sweeping a talent, even in an era where Ramsey and his successor Don Revie rarely put their faith in flair. 

On the face of it, Worthington remained unfazed. 

‘People say I have squandered a fortune on women and booze,’ he would quip on the after-dinner circuit. ‘But it is better than wasting it.’ 

Yet Worthington would later describe not joining Liverpool as ‘by far my biggest regret’, reflecting with remorse that it meant he never had the chance to showcase his skills in a team challenging for titles.  

‘It would have been nice to have played with Frank for a little bit,’ says Thompson. ‘We were of a mindset where we all knew our jobs – we had to work, but listen, we partied with the best of them, our era, and we were famous for it. 

‘He’d have fitted in, in that department – and maybe he would have been astonished by how much we partied! But it would have been lovely for Frank, linking up with the Terry McDermotts and Jimmy Cases of this world. We were all good social animals.’

No appraisal of Worthington’s career would be complete without a nod to his most celebrated goal, scored for Bolton in a First Division game against Ipswich in April 1979.

It began when Worthington, stationed a couple of yards to the left of the penalty spot, intercepted a flick-on from Alan Gowling with his back to goal. 

With a trio of defenders converging, Worthington brought the ball down with a cushioned header, juggled the ball twice in the D, and then flicked it over his head, catching the Ipswich players flat-footed as they tried to push out. The coup de grâce came in the form of an immaculate volley, drilled low and hard into the bottom left-hand corner.

‘It was something sensational, says Thompson, ‘it was one of the great goals, one of those moments that’s engrained in your mind.

‘That’s what he was, a free spirit who could produce those moments of magic.

‘Whether it would have worked at Liverpool, we will never know. But I think it’s probably one of those moments in Frank’s life – not his career, in his life – when he’s probably going, ‘Oof, what might have been’.