For the other forty-nine or fifty weeks of the year, football was the main sport. As I got older I loved the game more and more and gained confidence to play against the boys who were a few years my senior. We’d sometimes play ten-a-side down the park and when it was raining a game of ‘hackarama’ topped our agenda. It was wet and slippy and perfect for dirty big rasping slide tackles. Believe me, no prisoners were taken. The younger ones had to be tough because the older lads wouldn’t hold back. I wasn’t intimidated because I was big for my age. I was about eleven or twelve at this stage, and the older boys called me ‘Tyson’ after Mike Tyson. I had a stocky build and a really thick neck. I didn’t mind the nickname but I’m glad it never stuck.
Dad would sometimes come and watch us playing. When the game was finished, the lads would head off for a juice or a sweetie, but not me. Dad would keep me behind to do some jogging and sprint work. I used to be raging with him for doing it to me but it was all part of his grand plan!
My close mates at the time were Chris Reid, Derek Inglis, Gerry O’Donnell, Stuart Beaglin, Paul Baird, Chris McEwan and my good mate JP Curran. Chris Reid was my best pal and still is. I’m still in contact with Derek and his family. Stuart is a Motherwell diehard and JP is a close pal. We didn’t go to school together but were close and he has since moved to Dubai. I’ve been over a few times to see him and his family. I feel fortunate to have such good friends around me. We would do anything for each other and you can’t put a price on that.
Because I chose to try and go down the career path of being a footballer, I did have to sacrifice a few nights out and different things. My social life was non-existent at times, but it has all been worthwhile. I’ve been proud that I started my career that way and still have the same attitude. In terms of preparation, I’ve never done anything in the game that I shouldn’t have. I’ve never had a drink forty-eight hours before a game. I believe if I worked as hard as possible, made sacrifices, then I would be able to achieve pretty much anything I wanted to. Of course, I’ve had a bit of luck here and there, but I also believe that slice of good fortune is possibly a reward for dedication and desire.
Most young boys want to become footballers, but very few make the grade. Many teenagers have unbelievable ability but you need more than that for football to become your full-time occupation. When I was a teenager, still at school, many players my age had twice the ability I possessed, but they weren’t totally committed and refused to make the necessary sacrifices by putting the hours in and walking away from any potential scenarios that would jeopardise a future in the game of football at professional level. They allowed themselves to be easily sidetracked. If I didn’t have football then I don’t know what I would have done in life. I appreciate every day how lucky I am and the people close to me don’t let me forget it. They would quickly batter me down to size if there was ever a hint of getting carried away with myself. The friends I’ve had from school days would also not allow me to be arrogant or ‘Billy Big-Time’. They know me as Lee from Wishaw Academy, Knowetop Primary and Dalziel High School.
Moving to high school was a nerve-racking experience. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to be in Chris Reid’s classes. Both of us and Derek Inglis would meet most days with four or five of the other guys and hang about together. Andy Devlin was one of them. He was the school captain and is a good friend of mine and is a sports journalist. He helped me and my family deal with the media pressure when I joined Rangers. We remain close, and I’ve also a lot of time for his two brothers, Euan and Alan.
My first day at Dalziel High was one I will never forget. Dad bought me my uniform and a fake Raleigh schoolbag. I got a new pair of boots as well. My mates were all cutting about in Timberland boots and quality sports footwear but I wasn’t. I had to settle with desert boots a size too big for me and my trousers were skin-tight. I was mortified, but what the hell. I decided to go the full ten yards and put almost a full tub of gel on my hair, which made it look really greasy, which wasn’t my intention. I went to school looking like a teddy boy and my mates laughed at me all the way there. I was so embarrassed.
At least I felt safe at school as my brother Wullie was there. He was popular and would always look out for me. As we got older, sharing a room with him became quite an experience. He would go out and drink some weekends and come home drunk. At one stage I had a fish tank full of amazing tropical fish with all the glitzy trimmings, such as a little sunken ship at the bottom of the multi-coloured chips on the pretend seabed of plastic plants and little divers. It was my pride and joy. I had silver sharks, all sorts of fish and the best filter to keep it clean.
One morning I woke up to find Wullie vomiting. It was a disgusting sight but what made it worse was the fact he had the top of my fish tank open and was being sick into it. I was totally devastated. My heart sank. It was the only thing I had. I looked after those fish really well and my brother was killing them. I still haven’t forgiven him.
My point to him was spew-up on the carpet or on your bed but not into my fish tank. His argument was that Mum would have gone mental if he had ruined the carpet or the quilt, so the fish tank was the safest bet. I had to clean it all. Luckily I didn’t waste any time in getting stuck in and that meant none of my fish died. But my relationship with Wullie lost a bit of life. I didn’t speak to him for months.
On another occasion he woke up with a hangover and some light-sticks he’d brought back home with him from the raves he used to attend. He was desperate for a drink to quench his morning-after thirst and cut the top off of one of these things with scissors. He mistakenly thought it was a flavoured twist’n’squeeze drink and swallowed the lot. His stupidity meant he had a glow-in-the-dark tongue. I laughed for ages and looked on that as being a score draw after the episode with my fish.
He was also really noisy when he came home drunk but was a sound sleeper. That meant I could get up in the morning and steal the change from his pockets to go out with my mates. Chris and I would meet up and first thing he would ask was, ‘How much did you get from your brother?’ I was paying the attempted goldfish murderer back bit by bit!
Chris has two big brothers and a big sister. His parents are fine people. His dad is full of patter and opinionated and his mum is always asking if you’re okay and asking about your well-being. She prefers to ask after other people than talk about herself.
I had a much more steady and straightforward relationship with Gregor. I used to wear all his clothes and splash on his after-shave. When he left school he went to university and got his degree in Risk Management. He was also a part-time DJ. I would go into his room and have a shot on his decks but I wasn’t the best. Gregor got me into all sorts of music, like the Stone Roses. Wullie got me into Pink Floyd and Dr Hook – hey, when you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard. To this day, I still listen to them all.
In my eyes, Gregor was always trendy and had all the clothes and seemed to go partying all the time. I used to watch him play in the Pro-Am at Wishaw Golf Club. He played for their team and I’d walk round with my dad when he was playing a match. I looked up to him and thought I wanted to be like him when I got older.
I also looked up to Wullie, but in a different way. Wullie played football and was brilliant at it. If he put his mind to something nothing would stop him succeeding. He won Joiner of the Year when he left school. Celtic also came in for him when he was at school. He went for a trial with them but it was only for one game and it didn’t go to plan. He should have been given another chance. It was Celtic’s loss. I’ve no doubt in my mind that if he’d stuck at football a little longer than he did and been a little bit more dedicated he would have gone to the top. So, in a way, I used to look at my brothers and wanted to be like them both. I was always in the corner looking at them thinking, ‘I want to be like you two.’
They’ve been a huge influence on me and so have my parents. Dad drove me on as a kid and Mum would always stick up for me when I was younger. She is fiery and often speaks her
mind. One example that will always stick with me is when she used to say to my brothers about bringing girls home. Her usual line was ‘So-and-so isn’t good enough for you. Look at the size of the arse on her.’ We would slag my mum’s backside but when we did, she would just look back at us and say, ‘Not a bad backside after three kids. Wait till it hits your woman.’ All good fun. She is also very stubborn and rarely backs down on anything, and absolutely nothing fazes her.
I grew up loving her mince and tatties. She is brilliant at making one of my favourite meals. Money was tight so we were never out for meals at restaurants. But there wasn’t a dining-out culture thirty years ago like there is now. There must be at least 300 restaurants in the West of Scotland to choose from and thirty hotels, but that wasn’t the case all those years ago. Kids nowadays want to go out for lunch and dinner, or have a fast-food drive-thru, but that wasn’t in our mindset in the early and mid-’80s. It was all about what your mum was making for dinner. We were all happy with that. Our house used to have that whiff of homemade mince and tatties. As soon as I came in the door from school the smell would hit me. Beautiful. In saying that, I love all food. I love an Indian or a Chinese takeaway. My favourite dish is the South Indian garlic chilli chicken. Spaghetti arrabiata with extra chillis runs it a close second, but nothing will ever beat Mum’s mince and tatties.
She would do anything for anyone and her kindness has always overridden everything else. When I was a kid she would go to ridiculous lengths to spoil her boys at Christmas. We used to have bin bags full of toys and clothes. She was also a ‘chocoholic’. Her and Dad would rarely have much spare cash but she tried to give us a treat every day and I looked forward to her bringing me in a sweet from work. It was usually a King-size Mars Bar.
Yet, I must have driven her up the wall when I was younger. But according to my brothers, I’m her favourite son. They say I always have been and always will be. They reckon I got away with more than they ever did and most of the time they would get the blame for things and cop a sore one as a result. To this day, when we’re all together at family dinners, they will remind me of this. However, for all they slag me off, I know my brothers are proud of my achievements in football.
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£80 A WEEK BUT I FELT LIKE A MILLION DOLLARS
FOOTBALL CLUBS started to show an interest in me when I was around fourteen and playing for Jerviston BC. Jerviston had a good team and we were very successful. Our biggest rivals were Mill United. They were the established side in Lanarkshire but we managed to topple them. I was a central midfielder and sort of stood out because I was a bit taller and more physically developed than most of the other lads. Believe it or not, I had a decent turn of pace when I was a teenager and used that to good effect. I would take the free-kicks and the penalty kicks and I was often getting told I was going to make the grade as a professional footballer. My family came and watched me every week and were very supportive. We also used to get our games videoed and Dad would put my game on on a Sunday night when we got home. It became compulsive viewing in the McCulloch household. The sight of me and twenty-one other kids running around a red ash park, chasing a Mouldmaster ball was just too good to resist!
Motherwell, Rangers, St Johnstone and Hibs all showed an interest in me. By this stage I had moved on to play for Wishaw and then to Rangers SABC. It was then I decided to sign schoolboy forms with Motherwell. As I said earlier, they were my local team and had a good youth policy. It was also just two minutes from my front door so there wouldn’t be any inconvenience or expense when it came to travelling. Motherwell were delighted to get me on an S-form and also allowed me to continue to play for Rangers SABC, the only stipulation being that I did not train with Rangers during the week. I had a successful two-year period with Rangers and we won the Scottish Cup in consecutive seasons. I left to join Motherwell for the Under-16 team.
Motherwell were fine with me being with Rangers. It was straightforward most of the time, but it turned a little bit messy one day. The Rangers team I played for were fortunate enough to be chosen to take part in one of the Champions League pre-match ceremonies at Ibrox. One afternoon we were on a public park practising what we had to do for the event and a few of us were carrying on. The coach made us do a few laps of the park as a punishment. Willie McLean – brother of Jim and Tommy – was Head of Youths at Motherwell at that stage and happened to be taking in another game when he spotted me doing laps. He mistakenly thought I was ‘training’ with Rangers and let rip, swearing at me and making me feel extremely uncomfortable and embarrassed. My parents weren’t happy at Mr McLean’s conduct towards me and a few phone calls were made to him just to let him know that they found it unacceptable. Fortunately the matter was closed after that and we all moved on.
I enjoyed my spell at Motherwell and the club looked after me very well. The only negative I can remember was Motherwell asked me not to play for my school team. I was happy enough to abide by that but I was gutted when five of my Rangers SABC team-mates were selected for the Scotland team to go down and play England at Wembley. Scotland won 2–1. I’d have loved the opportunity to have been involved in that memorable occasion.
By the time I reached Fourth Year at Dalziel High I was going through the motions with my schoolwork. To be truthful, I became a waste of space in the classroom. Some of the teachers at school were cautious and warned that I might not make the grade. When I was on S-form they told my parents that I shouldn’t be taking football for granted and that I had to concentrate more on schoolwork. There was no chance I was going to do that. Football was all that mattered to me. But it did put doubts in my mind. It was just as well I stuck in and made the grade as a footballer because I left school with no qualifications. I didn’t even bother turning up to do my Chemistry exam and opted to go golfing instead. Chris Reid and I used to have a competition in Chemistry to see who could write the least amount so the winner was the smallest dot on our jotters. It got so bad that the teacher just let us do our own thing, usually pouring a beaker of water over one another. Looking back, we were trouble and the teachers must have dreaded it when we were in the same class. We kept each other amused. Entertainment came first and schoolwork came a very distant second. On reflection, by rights we should have been given a good slap by the teachers, told to get our heads down and to stop being so disruptive.
I yearned for the weeks when we were allowed to go off on work experience. With me being an S-form at Motherwell it was simple enough for me to go there and see the workings of the club from the inside and get a taste of what life might be like as a professional footballer. I had asked Motherwell assistant manager Tam Forsyth to get me in and he sorted it with the school. I was already going in there on a regular basis, whether it was for a mid-week training night or to help out during the school holidays. To go there to ‘work’ was perfect for me. I couldn’t ever imagine myself working in an office; I just wasn’t interested in a nine-to-five lifestyle. That said, I’m sure it would have been much less demanding being in an office than working under Forsyth. He just never let up. It made no difference to him that I was a kid. He made me work and left me in no doubt as to what would be required as a young footballer trying to make the grade at professional level.
Tommy McLean was the manager. As a person he had a reputation for being a hard taskmaster. I’m not sure if that was accurate or was actually more of a reflection on his big brother, Jim, and maybe that followed the family. I didn’t find out for myself either way as I had very few dealings with Tommy. He stuck to the first team and had little to do with the youths.
Most of my dealings were with Forsyth. I didn’t find it easy. Tam was a character and a strict disciplinarian. He took no shit from anyone, senior players or youngsters. Looking back, it gave me some extra mental strength at that time. Most important of all, though, he also knew the game. I learned so much from him in my early days and it stood me in good stead. He’d tell me where to run and when to run. But he did lack a wee bit of patience. If I
didn’t get it right first time he would lose the plot.
There is a great story about Tam after a training session at Smithycroft. When we were finished he asked all the YTS boys to collect the bibs, cones, discs and balls and put them on the trailer to take back to Fir Park. According to Tam, we were one ball short. He only counted nineteen balls and we had arrived with twenty. Nobody was allowed to leave until the missing ball was found. All the boys were hunting high and low, in the long grass and down by the trees. The rain was lashing down from the heavens. Ninety minutes later the search was still going on. The boys were tired, frustrated, wet and cold. Far from amused. A few were ready for chucking it and going back to the Park. One of the boys then demanded a recount. He asked Tam if he had counted the ball he had been holding under his arm for the past hour and a half. Needless to say he hadn’t.
I loved being involved at a professional club and it whetted my appetite. The banter between the senior players was brilliant, but unforgiving. Apart from the ability to succeed, I knew I was going to need two things to survive in football: a thick skin and a huge pair of balls. Footballers can be cruel and they pounce on any signs of weakness. I was determined to make sure I didn’t crumble.
During the holidays my job at the stadium was to brush the shower area, clean the urinals and the baths. Big Tam loved a bath, loved a long soak after putting the boys through a training session. I felt I had to try extra hard to get it clean for him. When I had hosed it and cleaned it with Jif and the cloths, he would run his finger up and down the tiles to check it was spotless. Most of the time I got pass marks. But a couple of times I was in a rush to get away early and tried to cut corners. He knew. So, he would call me back in and say, ‘Right you, ya wee slack-arsed bastard. Come here. Stand in front of me and tense your fucking arm so I can give you two or three punches.’ He’d leather me. It was extremely painful. His parting words when I didn’t clean the bath right were: ‘Remember, son, do your job right off the park and you will do it right on the park.’
Simp-Lee the Best Page 3