Love at first sight

There's nothing like the energy and impudence of a young athlete smashing into the big time. Paul Hayward recalls the prodigies that burned brightest - and the ones that faded away
Wayne Rooney and Paul Scholes
Everton's Wayne Rooney muscles aside Manchester United's Paul Scholes. Photograph: Phil Noble/PA

A disembowelling was about to take place at Old Trafford in the autumn of 2002 when Everton sent on a pugnacious, street-tough 16-year-old. Manchester United were to win 3-0. These were not the most auspicious circumstances for a revelation. But I walked to my car that evening certain I had just seen the next great English footballer.

Wayne Rooney took to the field the way Vikings used to arrive on beaches. His first significant contribution must have rendered Sir Alex Ferguson instantly covetous. In the tight press box, I felt myself lurch in my seat as Rooney collected the ball 30 yards out and barged two household names aside before shooting just over the crossbar.

The aggression, the assurance, the audacity. Physically, Rooney was a human knuckle-duster. He was quick, low to the ground and decisive in his movements. He had adhesive feet and a blasting shot. But there was more: a proprietorial air, a certainty that his talent established him as the equal of any man in red. This was the lad who had been warned on the Everton training ground by Alan Irvine, David Moyes's assistant: "Speak to me like that, son, and you'll be back in the youth team," to which Rooney had replied: "No, I won't."

In the lives of professional sports-watchers a premium is attached to these moments because they open up the future. The glow of discovery is partly a private game of testing one's own judgment. Did I just see what I think I saw? Are my instincts correct? These revelatory experiences can distort objectivity, because the assessor (scout, journalist or fan) becomes too eager to defend his first impression. But they also bind us to an individual's story, good or bad.

Twelve days after Rooney cleared out the Manchester United midfield to take up his shooting position, he joined the flow 10 minutes from the end of a home game against Arsenal (he was "fuming" to have been left on the bench, according to his first autobiography), and leathered one in from 30 yards. Arsène Wenger, in the opposing dugout, described him as the finest native talent he had seen since coming to England. Rooney, nicknamed "Roon Dog" by his team-mates, was still five days short of his 17th birthday.

The obsession with prodigies reflects the modern cult of youth but is also an expression of grandstand faith. A belief in renewal is what keeps fans going back for more when results are telling them not to bother. Rooney was a Croxteth boy, a blue-souled Evertonian who was Goodison's riposte to Steven Gerrard and the United constellation that came to claim him. To stay optimistic, the fan wants to believe that the teenager trotting on to the pitch is better than the veteran trudging off. The whiz-kid joins the fray, of course, without the aloofness, the entourage and the narcissism which many older spectators associate with today's Premier League one-man corporations.

Students of flat racing are especially well qualified to emote on prodigies, because they spend their hours in bushes, or in Newmarket pubs, trying to ascertain the name of the next invincible creature: the flying machine who can be backed at 33-1 for the Derby before he has seen a racetrack. The gallops, amid the birdsong and the heat shimmer, is the purest place I know to imbibe the fantasy of instant, profitable discovery. When a French-trained horse called Arazi coasted home in the prestigious Breeders' Cup Juvenile for two-year-olds in America in 1991, I just knew I had to return the following spring to see him run in the Kentucky Derby, in which he flopped. In racing, a carpet of ripped-up betting slips marks the route from promise to obscurity.

Prodigies are sport's equivalent of love at first sight. They are a gamble, full of unknowns. Wenger is the great high roller of the football casino because he asks us to consider talent not how it is today but how it might look next week. Cesc Fàbregas is the ultimate vindication of this theory, but there are other young Arsenal players who lead us to doubt Wenger's assumption that potential always blossoms into effectiveness.

The Premier League, to its credit, has a good track record of helping wonder boys to maturity. Fàbregas was one. Cristiano Ronaldo graduated from showboating teenager to match-winning world No 1 in our pinball league. Last season I studied another Everton greenhorn, Jack Rodwell, against Arsenal in London and placed an internal bet on him to become a major England international. With Theo Walcott, the reservation always was that he would need to add special awareness and interplay with his team-mates to his natural speed and directness. Wenger has steered him down this path.

Michael Owen was the Wayne Rooney of the 1998 World Cup and was Walcott's inspiration. Owen's slaloming goal against Argentina was the best possible expression of youth's fearlessness, its determination to transport a script from parks and junior football to the bigger stage. Youth's joy-bestowing power was on parade last season when Manchester United's 17-year-old Federico Macheda strode from the Carrington academy to score important goals as the team's league campaign was faltering. These are the days before self-conscious calculation intervenes, as golf's Justin Rose found when finishing tied for fourth as a 17-year-old amateur in the 1998 Open.

Rose, who then missed 21 consecutive cuts, remains on that interminable road from happy upstart to major title winner, just as rugby's Danny Cipriani bears all the imprints of the modern prodigy who becomes a celeb before he has properly applied his talent. Yes-men and deal-makers are disinclined to remind today's starlets that it was a gift for playing sport that got them to the front of the queue for Chinawhite in the first place, and that to violate those skills before the 21st birthday cake has been baked is to risk the whole enterprise. Gavin Henson, who pre-dates Cipriani's front-of-the-paper notoriety, is now unlikely to earn even a passing mention in the recitation of great Welsh backs.

In this era, few sportsmen have advertised the potential of youthful brilliance to endure better than Sachin Tendulkar, who scored his maiden first-class century at 15 years and 232 days. As in showbusiness, the sports star who conquers a game from the outset confronts a second, longer battle to maintain that elevation. Lester Piggot rode his first winner at 12 and made a successful comeback at 54. Boris Becker won Wimbledon at 17 years and 227 days, in 1985. No one could accuse him of being a fly-by-night.

Tiger Woods, meanwhile, is sport's foremost example of parental engineering leading not to teenage burnout but a machine-like brilliance that owes its relentlessness to obsession and dedication in childhood. Woods should have been bad news for toddlers. Parents might have extrapolated from his monoglot preoccupation that geniuses can be manufactured from three years old and up. Most recognised the futility of trying to replicate character traits that are missing from the majority, such as an ability to thrive under acute strain, or a willingness to keep applying ourselves when there is already £10m in the bank.

For every five-year-old Woods, there are doubtless a thousand tubby country club weekend players who coulda been a contender; for each hyperactive Rooney there is a Micah Richards, for whom instant fame scrambles self-awareness. Richards looked the epitome of a modern mobile international defender until he lost his way. There is still time for him to remember what brought him to prominence in the first place. Managers all say that motivating a young player who has a Maserati on the drive by the age of 19 is an increasingly hard art, but the top ones are brutal in their purges of those who think they can use big football clubs as riverboat rides.

More and more the game relies on the manufacture of reputation, and therefore of price tag. A salutary case is Freddy Adu, the supposed wunderkind of football in America, who was last seen on loan at the Portuguese club Belenenses. The world's top scouts and managers know him now as Freddy Adieu.

A brief history of precocity

1948 A horse called The Chase comes first at Haydock Park, and 12-year-old jockey Lester Piggott records his first win. Six years later, he wins the first of nine Derbys.

1958 At 17, Pele becomes the youngest goalscorer, then hat-trick scorer, then tournament winner in World Cup history as Brazil romp to victory in Sweden.

1970 Nadia Comaneci, who went on to score "perfect 10s" in the '76 Olympics, wins Romania's national gymnastics championships aged eight.

1971 Wayne Gretzky becomes the most feared 10-year-old in ice hockey, scoring 378 times in 85 games for junior Canadian team the Brantford Nadrofsky Steelers.

1985 Boris Becker wins Wimbledon, unseeded and just 17. He is the youngest ever Grand Slam men's singles champion and goes on to win five more slam titles.

1988 At 15, Sachin Tendulkar scores a world record 664-run unbroken partnership with Vinod Kambli in a school game and makes his Test debuts the next year.

1990 A year before turning professional and immediately winning a record 38 consecutive matches, 15-year-old Ronnie O'Sullivan notches his first 147.

1997 Having broken various "youngest ever" records in juniors and doubles, Martina Hingis wins the Australian Open at 16 and becomes tennis's youngest ever No 1.

1998 Already a world champion, American figure skater Tara Lipinksi wins gold at the Nagano Games and, at 15, is the youngest ever Winter Olympics medallist.

2002 A jug-eared teenager scores a sensational winner for Everton that ends Arsenal's 30-match unbeaten run. The world says hello to 16-year-old Wayne Rooney.

2004 Skipping the college basketball leagues to join the NBA straight from school, LeBron James is named Rookie of the Year - at 19, the youngest to date.

2008 Swimmer Eleanor Simmonds, 13, wins Paralympic gold in 100m freestyle S6 in Beijing. Within months she is appointed the country's youngest ever MBE.

• This article was amended on Tuesday 22 September 2009. We said that Manchester United were winning 3-0 when Wayne Rooney came on as a substitute. In fact, all three goals were scored after he came on the pitch.

Today's best video

Today in pictures