Jimmy Johnstone obituary – The Herald

The naughty wee boy who became king of the Jungle Brave to the end, we salute the Greatest Ever Celt

THE death of Jimmy Johnstone represents another watershed in football. The little fellow from Viewpark on the eastern edge of Glasgow was a footballing genius, spreading improbable joy and excitement in people's lives, and not just among Celtic fans.

One by one mortality is picking off the Lisbon Lions. But, to use the phrase given fresh coinage in football recently, in Johnstone we have just lost The Special One.

We are left with a fantastic and joyous memory. He was a player with as much backyard natural talent as any produced in Britain in the post-war years, all packed into his 5ft 4in. In Johnstone's case, the memory is only embellished and made faintly comical by the fact that there was something very Scottish about his heroism. That's to say, he was tragi-comic in the way that his life, in football and beyond, became a caper which involved no end of skirmishes with the bevvy.

In a series of interviews I conducted with Jimmy over the years, he made one memorable comment, totally unprompted, which I've never forgotten. Jinky tended to speak in half-sentences, his feet having been far more eloquent than his tongue, yet like a lot of footballers, he had an unnerving habit of producing confessional gems which had a poetic truth all of their own.

Johnstone said to me: "Just getting through each day now with a clear conscience is a fantastic pleasure for me."
I knew exactly what he meant. When the lights went out on his football career at the premature age of 30, he found the classic consolation in alcohol. Most of the 1970s and 1980s became an alcoholic fog for Jinky and there were many nights during this period when his wife and children had no idea where he was. With fame and celebrity, as is well established, self-destruction is often a by-product, and Jimmy could attest to it.

That lovely sunny afternoon in 1995 when I sat down with him, his life back on track, I knew exactly what Jimmy meant when he spoke about having a clear conscience.

Johnstone is renowned for magnificent triumphs in football but, as a footballloving kid of the early 1970s, my memories of him in the flesh comprise that special, thrilling kaleidescope: a moving sequence of images of the wee man, in his greenand-white hoops, tearing someone to shreds.

As a kid I remember sitting in the old north stand at Hampden Park – the barelyupholstered wreck which stood perilously on splintered stilts – and peering down on the irrepressible Johnstone. Hampden in those days always reeked of Woodbine, and from these scented seats I watched Johnstone and Celtic in a series of oddly-remembered games: versus Hibs in (I think) the League Cup, and versus Airdrie in a highscoring affair in (I think) the old Dryborough Cup.

To me these were the reallife moments to be applied to the TV footage, seen then and since, of Johnstone against Inter in Lisbon, against Madrid on the Di Stefano game of '67, as well as the epic Leeds United clash at Hampden in 1970.

Once the football came and went, and the alcohol had washed over him, by the mid1990s Jinky was back in clover and, at 50, training in his tracksuit every day to keep his bird-like frame in shape. And then one day, he told me, it just happened.

He felt numb. He felt a strange tingling in certain areas of his body. Sometimes his arms would seem especially heavy. Having consulted with Roddy MacDonald, the Celtic doctor, Jinky was referred to Professor Ian Bone, the specialist in neurology at Glasgow's Southern General Hospital, who conducted a series of tests before saying something to Johnstone that was only mildly scary because it was incomprehensible. "You've got motor neurone disease, " Prof Bone told him.

The last four years have been a heroic battle for him. MND, or the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis version of it which Jinky had, meant he required every ounce of his old bravery. In a hospital in New York City they curled Jimmy up into a tight, foetal ball while inserting needles through his vertebrae and into the spinal canal to withdraw fluid. A surgeon also spoke to Jinky about stem-cell research, which he was eager to pursue.

For any writer blundering into this MND scenario with Johnstone, it brought its own pain. Before I went to see Jinky three years ago, I decided I had to familiarise myself with the illness, and was appalled by what I found. The pain, the sheer misery it inflicted, was shocking.

I remember my eyes momentarily welling up with tears when I spoke to Keith Anderson, now a Sunday Times journalist and son of the well-loved Aberdeen director, Chris Anderson, who had died of the disease. "I watched my father being slowly crucified by it, " Keith told me. When I went to see Jinky the following day I had to make a special point of hiding what I'd learned about his illness.

Mercifully, it is over now. Jinky is gone and at peace. But in another sense, of course, equally mercifully, he isn't really gone at all. As they said that night in September, 2002, when they bestowed on Johnstone the title of Greatest Ever Celt: "Thank God for videotape."