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WHY I SAID NO TO THE ARABS BY JOCK STEIN…….EVENING TIMES 10 AUG 1978 by Helen Speed
Their love affair has gone on for the past 20 years. Right now their relationship is undergoing a definite shift of emphasis but there is absolutely no sign of an outright break. Mr Jock Stein, you better believe it, is still in love with Celtic football club.
He didn't say so himself, he wouldn't. He's a man who hates what he calls 'gush'. But if you have half an eye and half an ear you very soon get the message when he starts to talk about that old, green striped darling of his.
You see, while Celtic has a lot to thank Stein for – he feels that he has a lot to thank Celtic for. 'Celtic', he told me, 'brought me back from the dead'.
Stein, 53, looks much younger than on television, dresses in sharp jackets and slacks, claiming he is bad at clothes. Patronising he isn’t. Wary, yes.
Next week, marking his transition from manager of Celtic to an illustrious place on the board, there is Monday’s testimonial game, Celtic versus Liverpool and Tuesday night’s dinner with actor Sean Connery and Southampton’s Lawrie McMenemy as guest speakers. Even the Secretary of state will be there.
‘The worst moment will be walking out to the middle of the field on Monday night’, he said, laughing and drawing a rueful hand across his face.
‘I don’t mean to sound reluctant because the fact that Liverpool – European Cup winners themselves – are coming to play here is the biggest compliment I could have got out of the game. It will be an emotional occasion; all my family will be there including my two sisters from Burnbank. But one way or another next week will be an ordeal I can tell you.’
Approaches have been made to lure him from Glasgow, from Scotland, even from Britain. ‘I’ve just turned down a contract which would have given me a year in Kuwait as a consultant’, he said, ‘Jean would have gone if I’d wanted to go, but I said no. There are my ties with Celtic and deep down I know Jean is a homer. I went to London, met a very nice Arab chap at his flat one morning and as we talked I began to smell herbs cooking.’
‘I have to go now I said to my host, but he wouldn’t let me. ‘No, no, no, Mr Jock’ he said, ‘you must eat lunch with me’. It was sheep’s eyes I dreaded eating and of course it was sheep’s eyes and rice, great big platefuls, that he served!’
‘I considered his Kuwait job and finally turned it down. It has been the oddest close season I have known for 20 years. There was too much going on here. The Arabs wanted me to leave within three days and it just felt wrong at the time. Friends in the game say I’m crazy but I have no regrets although in one year I’d have earned more than I could save in a lifetime here.’
‘It hasn’t been money that’s kept me at Celtic park. I’ve done what I’ve done out of passion. Compassion? No, passion. See, Celtic have been wonderful to me. You’ve heard of people coming back from the dead? Well it was Celtic that brought me back from the dead.’
Burnbank born, he was the miner son of a Lanarkshire miner, a kid who had played football as a junior and as an amateur. ‘I was about 26 when I went to play non-league football in South Wales’ He made it sound like darkest Peru.
‘Someone had recommended me so off we went, Jean and me. Today you read about young players transferring to a big new job, lovely house waiting for them and a fine big car at the door. Well, it was nothing like that going to Llanelli, a rugby playing steel town.
‘In fact Jean and I still talk about it because for the life of us we can’t imagine what possessed us to go. We had a nice council house here and down there we had to move in with people we didn’t even know. Down there I felt lost to the game. It felt like the twilight of my career and then after 18 months everything changed, Celtic brought me back to Glasgow to play in and encourage a young reserve team. It really was like being brought back from the dead.’
His resurrection here on the home scene has precisely that fairytale quality which has inspired generations of little boys to kick balls at street corners and dream of growing up greatness in a football strip. From that reserve job (which was the start of that legendary authority he exudes) he moved into the first team for six years, becoming Celtic’s captain. Coaching experience followed and he left to manage Dunfermline and Hibs.
Thirteen years ago back he came to wear the Parkhead crown. To Jock Stein himself it was never a job, it was an extension of himself, part of the family, a way of life. ‘When I leave’, he said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be completely severed from this club. It’s 20 years of your life, isn’t it?’
When he looks at the game today he takes pride in the lads he has seen doing well. Billy McNeill, Celtic’s new boss – ‘He’ll do his own thing for that’s the kind of man Billy is’, is one. And there’s Bertie Auld, Tommy Gemmell and Willie Wallace.
He admits that to manage either Celtic or Rangers is to shoulder a unique managerial burden because of the fans’ inbred rivalry. Stein, as it happens, is non Catholic. The Celtic players, he informed me, are mixed.
‘Rangers don’t want troublesome followers and neither do we’ he said. ‘Outlaw football tomorrow and it wouldn’t mean an end to hooliganism and vandalism. They are part of the social behaviour today, I think the general behaviour of kids nowadays is different altogether from what it was and their antagonisms are getting keener.’
‘People like to follow success and both teams have had a fair share of success down the years. When Celtic won the European Cup, the first British team to do so, we opened a wider vision of football for Scots people. To repeat that will take time but the fact we have done it once is an encouragement to the club to work towards in the future. When you think of the money that English clubs could have laid out it was an achievement for us to get there first.’
He drank tea and the hotel staff drank him in. Men made little detours to our direction to sneak looks at him. Women tip-toed forward with pens and bits of paper, seeking autographs for wee Joseph or wee somebody else. He signed and smiled when they were gone.
‘No one ever wants an autograph for himself or herself, it’s always for someone else!’ In a football mad city like Glasgow it’s inevitable that a man like Jock stein should have the celebrity status of John Wayne.
‘People think that football is all glamour and glory’, he said, ‘but it isn’t. Players and managers are just men doing a job. It’s bloody hard work too.’
Talking about being a manager, he told me, ‘I don’t think the best players have made the best managers. I was fortunate in that I was finished playing when Celtic put me into coaching. Management isn’t something you can teach or pass on to someone else, any more than you can pass on common sense to someone who hasn’t got any.
‘Understanding people is a big part of it and I’m all for wives going to matches because it gives them an appreciation of the pressures a husband in the game has to endure. My wife goes to games and she has a great understanding.
‘As a manger you can be boss, father-figure, everything and anything to young players. You have to let them tell you their troubles because troubles off the field can be reflected by troubles on the field. All week you work towards something and on the day when they step over that white line, you are powerless to help. You just have to sit there and suffer it out until half time.’
He admits to having butterflies in his stomach at the start of a game and when I said that, come September, he’ll have Saturdays to himself and no worries, he said no, he’d go to matches and watch Celtic as he’s always done. ‘Any problems’, he said, ‘will be someone else’s problems but I’ll still be involved….within myself’.
Football has left no room in his life for hobbies. Bowling was an early love of his and he likes golf and test cricket and, big match rugby or a day at the races.
English football? ‘If I went to England it would only be for the money’, he said.
What I was to be sure and not do was to make him sound nice. ‘If you make me sound nice they’ll say that’s not him. Don’t make me into a cuddly toy.’
Who could?