Bert Kenny's gone broke
By Peter Badel From: The Sunday Telegraph May 22, 2010 11:50PM
BRETT Kenny knows if he doesn't laugh, he would probably cry.
"There's a lot of former players like me," the Parramatta legend says.
"We're just working, trying to get by week by week. I'm watching my money. I'm no multi. But, hey, I had a big win at the races the other week."
As he put NSW Cup side Wentworthville through their paces last Thursday night at Parramatta Stadium, it is impossibly hard to imagine Brett Kenny has become the rugby league legend residing on Struggle Street.
While Jarryd Hayne pockets $500,000 a season for unfurling the type of magic Kenny weaved before him, the man known as Bert watches every last penny.
Two months ago, he moved back in with his elderly parents. At 49, he is earning $30,000 a year coaching a park football side. Once the tax man takes his lot, Kenny is left to survive on about $2210 a month.
After 265 first-grade games, 17 Origin matches, 17 Tests and four premierships, he is set to cut the cord with rugby league forever.
The tragedy is Kenny cannot imagine his life without rugby league.
His immediate dream is to secure a coaching gig in the NRL. The father of three has given himself two years to make the big time, or he will find himself at Centrelink. "Things haven't worked out financially, there's been a bit of stress, and it all starts to fall apart," Kenny says.
"I've moved back in with my parents just recently. I'm not too bad. I guess you could say I'm getting by, but I'd like to be sitting more comfortably.
"I've only got a 12-month contract with Wentworthville. The pay is pretty ordinary. It's not enough to live on.
"It would be nice to have a better paying job, but it's very difficult to even get some casual work because I'm getting paid a part-time wage for working full-time hours.
"I've set myself a time limit to coach at the highest level. I'll give it two years, then I'll walk away from rugby league and I won't worry about it any more. I'll do something else. There's no point flogging a dead horse and waiting for next year. I can't keep living like this."
Kenny, who with scrumbase cohort Peter Sterling masterminded the most successful era in Parramatta's 63-year history, knows what you're thinking.
How can one of the game's greatest players possibly be reduced to earning as much as an apprentice mechanic?
Where is the flash car, the luxury boat, the opulent home, the investment properties, the bulging bank account?
The answer, Kenny concedes, is difficult to find.
It is trapped somewhere between a marriage breakdown that forced him to sell the family home, the less lucrative, semi-professional pay days of the 1980s and his own inability to parlay his footballing success into a post-retirement comfort.
Kenny's biggest contract arrived in the early 1990s, just before he quit in 1993. It was worth $150,000 a season, almost five times the then average wage of $32,600. "But I was getting taxed 50 cents in the dollar, and every year I found myself paying more tax," he says. "Being paid just twice a year didn't help."
When he hung up the boots, he never settled in the workforce and struggled to cash in on his fame.
He drove a truck for Berri Juice. He dabbled in commentary. He worked on building sites. Invariably, Kenny found his way back to rugby league, coaching Penrith's Jersey Flegg side to the 2006 premiership before being sacked.
"I've done all sorts of things," he says. "I remember one day a delivery driver came to deliver something, he was outside my place for a while and finally he came to the door.
"My wife went to the door and he said, 'Oh, is this where Brett Kenny lives, I'd thought he'd be in a bigger place than this'.
"I felt like saying, 'Yeah, I've got three other houses, I'm renting them out'. He expected me to be living in the Taj Mahal."
Kenny says he isn't jealous of today's stars. "No, I'm not," he says. "Jarryd Hayne is making $500,000, but good luck to them.
