My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  But the fact was, it hadn’t happened. And for thirty-six years it hadn’t seemed to bother him, or at least he’d never mentioned it. So what brought the issue to the surface in 1994? Perhaps it was the sight of his two-year-old grandson starting to kick a small ball in the back garden; the simultaneous reminder that his line would go on and that he wouldn’t. The cap would be something to pass on to a boy who would naturally expect it to exist, as proof and illustration of the stories that his father would tell him of his own father.

  And for himself too. He was sixty-two; retirement was looming, the final acknowledgment that his achieving days were definitively over and that it was all reminiscence from here on in. Perhaps he didn’t trust his memory, or felt that memory wasn’t enough. But then he didn’t really reminisce. It wasn’t in his make-up to rattle on about the good old days. So maybe the pursuit of this piece of unanswerable evidence was about him being able to remind himself, quietly, without the fuss of having to remind anybody else.

  The immediate trigger, though, was a reunion with some of the surviving members of the 1958 World Cup squad. In March 1994, Scotland were due to play the Netherlands in a friendly at Hampden Park to mark the completion of the first phase of the stadium’s redevelopment. Not a gala occasion, but a good enough excuse to see some of the old boys. My father was one of a large number of former internationals invited to the game. For the veterans of ’58 the official letter from the Scottish FA must have had a nostalgic ring to it: ‘. . . with some regret the Association is unable to offset the various travel and hotel expenses which you may require to undertake.’

  Over Scottish salmon, haggis and roast rib of Angus they talked about the state of the game, the state of their knees and probably how things might have been if John Hewie hadn’t missed that penalty: ‘Do you remember, the bloody thing bounced all they way up the field and they went and scored . . .’ It was more than likely: Jimmy Murray was at my dad’s table, so was Alex Parker, and the Clyde full-back Harry Haddock – a great name in any sport – who had also been in the World Cup squad.

  They all signed my dad’s menu – perhaps he signed theirs – and underneath each name he printed in his own careful capitals the names of their respective clubs. Maybe he just wanted to be sure he could decipher the various scrawls and squiggles when he got home, but it’s hard for me not to read it now as a sort of cataloguing exercise. It was a part of his personality; directly traceable, I suppose, to his father, the meticulous chronicler of car ownership and petrol prices. In the garage at home his nails and hinges and wood screws were all sorted into tiny drawers with handwritten labels. The same immaculate diagrams and notes that he used to record training routines were later applied to home-brewing projects and his own exercise regime; but he’d never bothered with his past before.

  All the old internationals were presented with a commemorative medal by the Scottish FA to mark the occasion, a large embarrassed-looking disc in a blue plastic case that had the feel of a petrol station give-away. Perhaps it turned the conversation to real medals and to caps. Of his three teammates at the table, Jimmy Murray had played in the same two World Cup games as my father, Alex Parker had appeared in one and Harry Haddock not at all, but they all had caps – ‘That’s bad luck, eh, Stewart, to play in a World Cup and not play in a home international. Aye, there can’t be many like you . . .’

  When he got home he wrote a letter to the Chief Executive of the Scottish Football Association, Jim Farry. In a gentle back-and-forth he respectfully asked and the SFA politely declined to award him a cap retrospectively. He was happy to reimburse them for the cost of having it made. They couldn’t possibly make an exception. To do so would open the floodgates to further requests from other ex-internationals.

  In fact, there were really no floodgates to open. True, the restrictions on Scotland caps had persisted, remarkably, until the mid-1970s, but the British Championship had been the mainstay of the domestic international season into the ’80s. The number of players who had represented Scotland but somehow managed to avoid playing against England, Ireland or Wales was not going to constitute a torrent. In any case, the SFA didn’t know because they kept no record. Jim Farry, though, was clear on his obligation to the traditions of Scottish football administration. To award a cap retrospectively ‘would also demonstrate a lack of respect for the decisions of our predecessors at Park Gardens’.

  My father seemed to let go of the idea. He’d tried, the SFA had been sympathetic, but their hands were tied. Honour seemed to have been satisfied and the issue faded away. Five years later the missing cap was invested with new importance when he was diagnosed with cancer. In March 2000 he tried again. Jim Farry had left the previous year but the reply – from the Assistant Director of Administration this time – was the same, sympathetic yet categoric: ‘decisions not retrospective . . . place ourselves in a position . . . imagine the scenario . . .’

  He wrote back offering to buy a blazer badge; they were sorry to say blazer badges were no longer available. This time he couldn’t travel to the consolation game with France to mark the official inauguration of the new national stadium, he wasn’t well enough. They sent him a pennant.

  The idea of the cap became something of an obsession. He got it into his head that Ian St John was the man to help him. If my father could persuade Ian St John to highlight the injustice in his weekly column in Scotland’s Sunday Post, he was sure he’d prevail. I don’t know whether it was St John’s stature within the game that my father thought might swing it for him, or the fact that he wrote in the Sunday Post – the paper of Oor Wullie and The Broons and all the homespun certainties of his childhood.

  This kind of thing was my area of expertise. I could quite easily have made a couple of calls and interested someone in the story. At the same time I was a little uneasy about helping him to get publicity, because I knew he was torn: on the one hand he’d worked himself up into one of his lathers of conviction about his entitlement to the cap; on the other he didn’t want to rock the boat and impugn the SFA in public. I told him I would make the calls if he wanted me to, but I could picture his annoyance when the story didn’t appear exactly as he imagined it would – WORLD CUP VETERAN SLAMS SCOTLAND SCROOGES – and it began to dawn on him that he’d started a process he couldn’t control. He said he’d stick with Ian St John. St John didn’t call back.

  In the meantime he confided in Dennis Marshall, his old friend from Nottingham. Conversations with Den tend to have the status of press releases, and a short time afterwards he was talking to Brian Tansley, the host of a show on BBC Radio Nottingham. He mentioned the story on air and again my father’s agitation seemed to subside. He’d been given a public hearing and his claim had in some way been recognised.

  In fact it had – not by the SFA, but by a family firm in Nottingham. Brian Turner of Majestic Trophies had been a fourteen-year-old Forest fan in 1958. He and his wife Janet did some research and set about producing the most faithful replica they could of a Scotland cap: a tassel on the crown, gold braid around the peak, J.J.S. Imlach, Scotland 1958 embroidered on the front panel above it. And instead of the initials of the old home international fixtures, the full names of his four opponents: v Hungary, Poland on one side; v Yugoslavia, France on the other. He was overwhelmed. The Turners were invited into the studio in Nottingham, my father, on the phone from Formby, could barely speak to thank them.

  The story was picked up by the Nottingham Evening Post. In the pictures his pride and pleasure are almost unbearable to look at. I wanted to say, ‘Dad, it’s a fake.’ A beautifully crafted, gold-tasselled, well-intentioned facsimile of the real thing, with all the same high-quality needlework and absolutely none of the significance. But his delight was deep and genuine, and who was I to puncture it by passing judgment.

  The cap went into a glass-fronted cupboard in the hall where the wine glasses were kept, draped over a decanter. He wasn’t allowed to drink by then, so there wasn’t much chance of it being disturbed. Fo
llowing in the first car behind the hearse, I could see it all the way to the crematorium, propped up against the coffin next to a Nottingham Forest team photo.

  Later, I called around and discovered that two other members of Scotland’s 1958 World Cup Squad had been in the same situation as my father. Archie Roberston of Clyde was dead; Hibs’ Eddie Turnbull had never bothered pursuing the SFA for a cap. I was inclined to agree with Eddie’s stoic acceptance of the rules as the rules, and the players simply victims of the period in which they’d played. Then I spoke to Tommy Docherty, who had gone on to manage the national team in the early ’70s, and heard the story of how he’d intervened to help get a cap for Bob Wilson. Bob, he told me, had played for Scotland but never against the home countries.

  What? The Scottish Football Association, with its fear of floodgates and its respect for tradition, had been dishing out retrospective caps on a selective basis? It was only Tommy Docherty’s famous assertion that the best football managers are liars that kept me from calling Hampden Park there and then. Instead, I contacted Bob Wilson. He cautiously declared himself unaware of any intervention by Tommy Docherty on his behalf, but otherwise confirmed the story, which apart from the outcome sounded exactly like my father’s. He’d written periodically to the SFA over the course of two decades with no success. It was only after Craig Brown took over as national manager that he’d got his cap. Jim Farry had also been helpful.

  I mentioned this discovery to Eddie Turnbull. ‘The English keeper? He got a cap? You’re kidding.’ He was scarcely less incredulous by the time I’d outlined the sequence of events to him. ‘That’s ridiculous. That takes some believing, that Wilson got a cap.’

  To many people, Bob Wilson – born in Chesterfield and a key member of Arsenal’s double-winning side of 1970–71 – was an English keeper and a very good one. In fact, he was perfectly well qualified to play for Scotland through his parents and turned out twice for the national team: in a European Championship qualifier against Portugal and a friendly against Holland, both in late 1971. His cap, inscribed with the initials P and H, finally arrived in 1996. That made it two years after Jim Farry had first written to my father, all sympathy and tied-hands, to say that it simply wasn’t possible, and four years before the SFA – following ‘some research into the circumstances’ – had turned him down for a second time.

  The implication was clear: a well-known, well-connected television presenter who could call on the Scotland manager to lobby on his behalf was worth an international cap in the eyes of the SFA; an older name from a less spotlit era, sitting at his dining-room table with a ballpoint pen and some Basildon Bond, could be safely fobbed off with the official line. I wondered how many others had received the same treatment as my father. And how many exceptions had been made. According to Craig Brown, Bob Wilson’s wasn’t the only one. But I only shared half of Eddie Turnbull’s indignation, the half directed at the Scottish Football Association. I couldn’t begrudge a cap to Bob Wilson, one of the game’s few real gentlemen. If he qualified as a Scotland player – and there’s absolutely no doubt that he did – then he was just as entitled to the recognition for it as anyone else. My father, for example.

  In fact, I was grateful to Bob. He’d supplied me with the key to the floodgates. The men who ran the SFA, cornered by their own smug logic, couldn’t possibly deny my dad a cap now. I could picture it arriving, needing to be signed for, a registered parcel of delayed vindication.

  But I’d overestimated the bargaining power of the truth. In a tenth anniversary rematch of my father’s original correspondence with them, the SFA refused to budge. The high-handedness which had helped create the fiasco of the 1958 World Cup was alive and well; faced with the evidence that would oblige them to give my father a cap, the SFA simply denied that the evidence existed. They could find no record in their archives of a cap being issued to Bob Wilson, so as far as they were concerned none had been. The facts didn’t matter. I needn’t bother waiting in for the postman.

  For whose benefit had I been chasing it anyway? On whose behalf? I’d felt like it was something I could do for him, the least I could do for him, and I hadn’t been able to. That’s the story I had told myself. But he’d been happy with the copy. Maybe he was right to be, maybe it had more value: a cap crafted out of genuine feeling by people who saw him play and admired him, as opposed to an item squeezed out of an unwilling bureaucracy on a technicality – you broke the rules for someone else now break them for my dad – by a son who regretted not getting stuck in at the time.

  Either way, the copy is the only one he ever wore.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Final Score

  ‘NOWADAYS, WE’RE BASICALLY ROOTIN’ for jerseys.’

  The speaker’s own was fighting a battle on several fronts to contain him: a cheeseburger-built Buffalo Bills fan taking on the November wind-chill in his match-day uniform of team-replica shirt and construction worker’s hard hat.

  He leaned over the stand’s perimeter wall towards the microphone, a partial eclipse with a beard. ‘Seriously, what else is there? Players are just chasin’ the money, teams threaten to leave every time a city won’t come up with the dollars for a new stadium. So what’s left? The jerseys. If you like a team’s jersey colour, go root for ’em, y’know?’

  I thanked him and moved along the sideline, grateful as always for the American football fan’s facility in front of the camera. His performance sounded like it had been distilled from countless post-game rants in the local sports bar. He had a point, though, one I’d been pondering in various forms ever since I’d arrived in the country.

  One of the chief attractions of life as a foreigner in America is this: it’s not your fault. A Green Card, with its peculiar designation of ‘Resident Alien’, is essentially a guilt-free, access-all-areas pass to the best of both worlds. It allows you to indulge in all that’s great about the self-proclaimed world’s greatest country, while reserving your right to retreat to the sidelines at any moment and point – half shocked, half amused – at its worst excesses. And judgment delivered in a British accent carries its own implicit subtitles: ‘Not my problem, mate – I didn’t vote for any of this.’

  Of course, American sport had been awash with money for decades before the tidal wave ever hit the UK, and entirely unapologetic about the fact. The question bothering the Buffalo Bills fan and seemingly quite a few of his compatriots was this: at what stage does sport become such big business that the original point is lost? At what dilution of cash to content can you no longer taste the sport in sport?

  When millionaire players go on strike against millionaire team owners, depriving baseball fans of an entire season? When teams pack up and move, leaving their supporters behind, because they’ve had a better offer from another city in another state? When illiterate teenagers are given scholarships so that they can be put through the multimillion-dollar mincing machine of college football – then dumped out four years later still unable to read? When assaults, rapes and shootings are overlooked by college authorities because the perpetrators are valuable to the team? When high schools sack their coaches for having a losing season?

  In 1989, when I’d first left the UK for America, the cash-fuelled soap opera that comes packaged with US sport had struck me as an entirely indigenous phenomenon, something which had no parallel at home. By the time I arrived back for good nearly a decade later, a transatlantic drift seemed to be underway. Granted, there were no PE teachers losing their jobs over a run of poor results by the under-15s, but the landscape was undoubtedly altered.

  Many of the changes wrought by television and its money were clearly good for the game: fans better treated and better seated in front of a product of vastly improved, import-enhanced quality. The problem was, I couldn’t seem to care that much about it. I’d still get caught up in the excitement of a good game if I happened to catch one, but – outside internationals and the few key fixtures that give a season its shape – the urge to catch one rarely to
ok me. Worse than that, the stridency of the brash, relentless circus surrounding the game made it seem increasingly remote, like someone else’s sport.

  In America it really was someone else’s sport and I could enjoy it on its own terms. I was thrilled and fascinated by the NFL, but I had no childhood pact with it. I carried no emotional baggage into Giants Stadium or Candlestick Park. So when Candlestick Park became 3Com Park to suit the sponsors, I could sympathise with the fans who’d been going there for years without feeling affronted personally. Flying from city to city, flashing my resident alien credentials, I was free to enjoy the plenty that was good about American sport. The rest was all context and flavour, part of the auxiliary narrative. Fascinating stuff – and not my fault.

  In any case, the Americans – who after all had been richer longer – were much more at ease with their billions, and seemed to handle them more equitably. Football in the land of free enterprise was actually run as a cooperative – albeit a select and privileged one – with television and merchandising revenue split equally between all NFL teams.