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Johnny King was more than just the most successful manager Prenton Park has ever known.

He was Tranmere's Bill Shankly, a football manager who built exciting and successful football teams and won the hearts as well as the respect and admiration of supporters.

The love affair lasted long after King reluctantly stepped aside for the last time in 1996.

He left behind a legacy as a tenacious wing-half, captain, a bright and innovative coach and as a manager who, in two spells in charge of the team, won three promotions and in the second - 1987 to 1996 - took the club from the old Fourth Division to hammer on the door of the Premier League.

In his own words he took the modest Wirral club "on a rocket ride to the moon". For many players and supporters, it was the ride of a lifetime.

IN PICTURES: Johnny King's Tranmere years

King won the hearts of Tranmere supporters to such an extent that they commissioned and paid for the statue in his honour that stands at the entrance to Prenton Park.

That is a rare honour, because the statues of other great Merseyside football figures, Shankly included, were paid for by the clubs.

As a manager King was both influenced and inspired by Shankly. He took advice from the great Liverpool manager and, after his passing in 1981, kept a portrait of Shankly on his office wall.

Anyone talking to King in his office at Tranmere's Valley Road training ground saw Shankly over his shoulder.

'He had a talent for absorbing the ideas of the managers he had worked with'

As a player King made 411 league appearances in a 14-year career. He began at Everton playing in the top-flight between 1957 and 1960.

He moved on to Tranmere following a brief spell at Bournemouth.

He helped Rovers to win promotion out of the Fourth Division in 1966–67 after several near misses before he signed for Port Vale in June 1968.

He then helped the Valiants to promotion out of the Fourth Division in 1969–70, before he joined non-league Wigan Athletic in May 1971.

But it was coaching an management where King really made his mark on the game.

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He had a talent for absorbing the ideas of the managers he had worked with and mixing them with his own.

King always acknowledged his good fortune. He said: "I was very lucky to have played and worked under a succession of managers with strong characters and distinctive ideas.

"I learned things from all of them and used bits and pieces of their methods in developing my own style."

King applied those lessons adeptly.

In his second spell as manager at Tranmere, when he was able to operate on the platform of financial stability provided by chairman Peter Johnson, King was able to draw most effectively from the wisdom he acquired as a player and coach.

Apart from Shankly, King also spoke of others with great reverence, notably the former Tranmere boss and general manager Dave Russell, ex-Port Vale, Newcastle and Everton boss Gordon Lee and Ron Yeats, who served Liverpool as a centre-half, captain and later chief scout.

'King, though slight in stature, developed into a tenacious wing-half'

The first manager King encountered when signing for Everton as a teenage part-timer in the mid 1950s was Cliff Britton.

King remembered: "He gave me my kickstart in football. I was a part-time player because my parents wanted me to have a proper trade so I was serving time as an apprentice plumber as well as playing for Everton.

"At 19 I was playing for Everton's first team and still working on a building site in the week."

King, though slight in stature, developed into a tenacious wing-half, became a full-time professional and played around 50 senior games for Everton.

Meanwhile, Britton was succeeded briefly by fitness enthusiast John Buchan, then John Carey, who began laying the foundations of the Everton team that would become a major force in the early 1960s.

When Carey signed a pair of talented wing-halves called Jimmy Gabriel and Tony Kay, King was advised by team-mate Bobby Collins that his days at Goodison might be numbered. They were.

He was wooed into joining Bournemouth but after six months on the south coast he decided he'd made a mistake and headed back to Merseyside to join Tranmere.

The manager who signed King, Walter Galbraith, was quickly succeeded by Russell and King, as club captain, soon found himself in the regular company of one of the shrewdest men he would ever meet in football.

Says King: "He was a very clever man. You could never pull one over Dave Russell. People said he was canny and he was certainly that."

'He briefly turned to window cleaning to put food on the table'

Russell applied Scottish thrift to Tranmere's expansion plans so arguments with the captain about wages and bonuses for the players were not uncommon. After one such row, King found himself transfer-listed.

He left in 1967, conceding he could only learn from a man like Russell, and signed up for another wily operator at Port Vale, Gordon Lee.

He said: "Gordon Lee knew how to get the best out of what he had available. His teams were perhaps not the best to watch but he knew how to get results. He would not ask a player to do things they were not capable of."

After injury forced King to hang up his boots he briefly turned to window cleaning to put food on the table and insisted he enjoyed the experience.

But it wasn't long before Tranmere came calling again. The new player-boss, Ron Yeats, needed a coach and Russell, by then the club's general manager, recommended King.

King said: "Ron was still commanding as a player and he had a very powerful presence in the dressing room. Players were a bit in awe of him.

"He brought some great players to this club: Ian St John, Willie Stevenson and Tommy Lawrence from Liverpool. It was a great thrill for me to coach players of that calibre."

It was Yeats who initially invited Shankly, recently retired from Liverpool, to oversee Tranmere's training sessions and make some suggestions.

Far from feeling slighted, King was thrilled. He recalled: "I never thought I would get so close to Bill Shankly. He loved players and he spoke to them with intense enthusiasm.

"He was able to infuse that bit extra into people by the force of his personality and the way he used his words. It was mesmerising. I wasn't one for keeping quiet in those days but I knew it was the time to say very little and listen."

'Shankly approved King as the best young manager in the country'

Unhappily for Tranmere, Shankly's visits were only spasmodic and in 1975, with the Liverpool veterans gone and the team sliding towards relegation from division three, Yeats was dismissed by chairman Bill Bothwell.

Not long afterwards, King found ambition conflicting with his strong personal regard for Yeats when he was put in charge on a caretaker basis.

He recalls: "I said to Ron 'is it okay by you if I apply for this job?' and he replied 'yes wee man, go and do it'.

Shankly provided advice and inspiration throughout King's first full season in management as he led Tranmere to promotion from Division Four.

They went up playing the bold attacking football that was to become the trademark of King's teams down the years.

Shankly approved and recommended King to Sheffield Wednesday as the best young manager in the country.

King stayed at Tranmere, arguing he had a better group of players, but many of those players had to be sold because of financial issues, the team's fortuned declined and King was dismissed in 1980.

King worked in non-league football with Northwich Victoria and Caernarfon Town before answering the call to manage Tranmere for a second time in 1987.

It was in this spell that King revealed his genius for team-building; mixing together footballers from diverse backgrounds: internationals from top-flight clubs mixing with graduates from nonleague football and the youth team.

'Tranmere knew how to win and they knew how to party'

King pulled them together and made them into a team that bonded tightly on the field and off it. They knew how to win and they knew how to party.

Team building was a subject in which King would speak with passion and often in colourful language.

Another of King's famous quotes, the one about baking a cake - "making sure all the ingredients are right and blending them carefully to ensure a perfect result" - best illustrated his talent.

All of his teams shared common characteristics. They played adventurous attacking football using wingers and overlapping-full backs and boasted outstanding strikers.

King said: "It all came down to having a recipe and the right players to make it work. We had that at Tranmere so we were able to entertain and achieve success at the same time.

"As a player, a defensive wing-half, I was principally a destroyer whose job was to win the ball from the opposition and give it to players on our side who were good at passing it.

"Every team needs a destroyer or two but I could not watch a team full of John Kings.

"I wouldn't want to be associated with negative football. I always liked to have a bit of style in my teams."