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The big man
Cardiff, September 10, 1985 Jock Stein collapses in the dugout. Scottish football loses arguably its greatest manager.
Twenty years later, Archie MacPherson outlines just what qualities meant Stein would forever be …
Jock Stein’s last words on the night of September 10, 1985 contain a poignant reminder of that self-assurance he had always tried to transmit to his Celtic teams to help elevate them above the ordinary in times of adversity.
“It’s all right, doc. I’m feeling better now.”
The final defiant whisper came from the large frame lying on a treatment table at Ninian Park, Cardiff, even as the water in his lungs was about to extinguish his life.
From the moment he had collapsed minutes earlier, enraged by the antics of a photographer and having tried to grapple him out of his line of sight, the medical men knew he had been doomed, as the chronic lung-heart fragility he had carried for years was irrevocably swamping his defences.
Professor Stewart Hillis, the SFA physician in close attendance at the time, remembers these last words, almost with a sense of privilege that he had been there to hear something as touchingly prosaic and solicitous, even as Hillis knew the end was inevitable and that the big man was beyond rescue. Stein’s words, for the first time ever, were to carry no weight. We had all become accustomed to him having the last word, and for events to pan out, mostly favourably, according to his command.
Eighteen years prior to Cardiff, for example, on May 25, 1967 he had walked into the Celtic dressing room in the Estadio Nacional in Lisbon to address players steeling themselves for his final communique. All he said was: “Right, lads. You’ve made history. Go out and enjoy yourselves.” He had judged that that was all that had been required.
His body language in the days leading up to that had already borne eloquent testimony to the preparedness he wanted from his players.
For you would see him like a caged tiger, prowling around the opulence of the Palacio Hotel in Estoril as if he had missed his daily intake of raw meat, and desperate for release from this luxurious captivity. His players were smitten by this primordial desire to survive and conquer, for essentially they went out and ran the legs off Inter.
As you look back over his career you feel you could be entering that classical debate, Nature versus Nurture, in trying to fathom what motivated this man and stoked his ambitions. He made his professional debut as a 20-year-old with Albion Rovers on November 14, 1942. Talking to many witnesses since that time and having been in his company so often during his managerial career, I identified three factors which seemed to be crucial in his emergence from obscurity to becoming the most influential figure the Scottish game had ever produced.
Firstly, he was basically an intelligent man. Then there was his hard-headed pragmatism which enabled him to adapt to changing circumstances, especially when he joined Celtic as a player.
And, thirdly, perhaps looking deeper into the core of his personality, he was driven at the peak of his powers by a profound dislike of Rangers.
T here is evidence from his early days at Rovers that he was a volatile personality utterly self-confident from the very first. He was quick-witted and sharp. He was the one to lead the discussions in the team talks and make the criticisms. He was the wages negotiator. In 1948 he assured his colleagues that the £9 a week wage was all that they could expect from the club. Soon after that someone spied his pay docket and discovered he alone was on £10 a week. Here was no mug.
Celtic players in later years seeking wage increases were consequently faced by a man who would not have been out of place wearing an eyeshade and dealing cards over the green baize.
John Hughes, after a particularly successful season, approached him to ask for a 15% increase. Before he could open his mouth, Steinsuggested that in life you sometimes had to be shown how to keep your feet on the ground and that he was going to offer 15% less. Hughes ended up pleading for what he already had. On the other hand, Stein was nurtured in an environment which clearly shaped the way he looked at the world. In his early twenties, as a miner and a heavy gambler, and occasional bookie’s runner around Burnbank, he had been honing the skills of survival, and learning the value of the pound in your pocket, in a variety of circumstances.
Working 1,000 feet underground in his formative years certainly shaped an appreciation of the value of life itself, for in a period between 1942 and 1943 seven men were killed near him in the Bothwell Castle pit on the banks of the Clyde. Proximity to such events would tend to provide natural body armour for the vagaries of life. But it was his dealings with people in his home neighbourhood that helped mould his outlook and construct his attitudes.
He had been raised in a crucible of sectarian division. Burnbank, although hardly ghettoised, had a sectarian social structure which determined in which pub you would drink, where you would stand in the open air to have a blether with your pals, and even who you courted.
I could find no evidence to suggest he held any particular sectarian view, although many of his pals were in the Orange Order. He married a Catholic at a time when the ultimate social stigma was to “turn”.
He did not go as far as that, but hardly blinked in the process of being unorthodox. Where he was decidedly mainstream was in his youthful support of Rangers. The Albion Rovers players of his day will tell you that the first thing he wanted to know when he came off the park was how Rangers got on. So here we had a man surrounded by sometimes poisonous sectarian pressures, earning a pittance, leaving to take up full-time professional football for the first time in Wales, with non-league Llanelly, at the age of 27 in 1950, and then being made an offer by Celtic Football Club just over a year later.
This is where the sober pragmatist kicked in. He knew what he had to do, although appreciating it would cause a stir among his ain folk.
He told me once that when he returned home after signing for Celtic, his closest friend for years, little realising Stein was in the house, paid a visit to his mother and when told Jock was in the next room, walked out of the house and never spoke to Stein again.
His father, while clearly not as extreme, could never bring himself to utter any words of encouragement before an Old Firm match, although his mother always wished him well. The lads at Burnbank Cross, a Protestant redoubt in those days, shunned him.
His resilient personality helped him rise above this but it clearly left him with a deep-rooted resentment which fuelled the passion he poured into what he considered the greatest challenge of all: playing Rangers, any time, anywhere.
When his side beat them 2-1 in a Scottish Cup final replay at Hampden in 1971, he came skipping off the pitch in a manner which looked to me like he was dancing on the grave of his past loyalties. Crossing from the other side of the divide lent Stein a special sense of mission whose prime aim in life was for his club to replace Rangers as the dominant force and to grind them under his heel as a personal rejoinder to those who had shunned him.
Indeed, after one controversial and stormy game in 1970, which Celtic won 3-1, the SFA laid down the law to both clubs about discipline, echoed by Celtic chairman Sir Bob Kelly, who came into the Celtic dressing room before the next Old Firm match to urge the players to uphold the club’s tradition of fair play. Stein waited until the chairman had cleared off, closed the door and said to the players: “You can forget that effing nonsense.”
But in that same spirit the pragmatist in him realised that the job he had taken on at Parkhead required spilling out of the manager’s office and taking on these forces he felt had little respect for the club and at best patronised them. You could say he gave birth to the modern manager.
Celtic had needed a voice which rose above the traditional whine emitted occasionally from boardroom level. They got it. Never before had we heard football explained to us the way he could. Hardened journalists were shaken as he championed the club’s causes with evangelistic wrath at times. At times, his withering wit could send you home to seek your mammy’s hug.
And, while his brilliant insights into the game, his tactical nous, his uncanny ability to read his opponents’ intentions were special attributes, it was his handling of men which distinguished him from others. If there was one occasion which epitomised the grip he could exert on minds, both on and off the field, it was in Prague on April 25, 1967.
Celtic, leading Dukla 3-1 from the first leg of the European Cup semi-final, were to play one more game to become the first British side to reach a European final. It ended 0-0. Before an hour had elapsed after the match Stein had convinced even his own chairman that he had had to sacrifice Celtic’s cherished tradition of attacking football and play defensively to achieve that result. “I’ll never resort to these tactics again – never,” Stein said. That has always been the accepted interpretation of that game. But it is pure myth.
As Bobby Lennox told me 20 years later: “If the big man set out a defensive pattern for us, then I must have missed the team-talk.” Stevie Chalmers said: “Not a word was passed on to me like that. We just couldn’t keep the ball long enough.” Jimmy Johnstone assured me: “He only told me to play my usual game.”
Jim Craig said: “The first remarks he made to the press immediately after the game were misinterpreted and when he saw the angle the press were coming from he let it ride, and then encouraged it.”
This was the master and commander in full spate. He needed to put a positive slant on a game in which his side had been vastly outplayed, and gave assurance to the entire Celtic community that it was Celtic, not Dukla, who had called the shots.
Stein’s death 20 years ago not only heightened our appreciation of that particular achievement in 1967 but of the whole glorious, revolutionary era which his presence provoked.
Nature might have bestowed genius on him. But I suspect that, more than that, as life delivered him some hefty kicks, he kicked back more strongly. And he became a giant.
Archie Macpherson is the author of Jock Stein: The Definitive Biography.