Ferguson was fourteen when the remarkable man who ran Drumchapel, Douglas Smith, knocked on his parents’ door. Smith was to die in 2004 at the age of seventy-six having helped to groom nearly thirty full internationals for Scotland, including Kenny Dalglish, Andy Gray, Archie Gemmill, Asa Hartford, John Robertson, John Wark and Paddy Crerand, plus an estimated three-hundred other footballers, among them Ferguson and David Moyes, who was to become a friend and rival as manager of Everton. Moyes’s father had been one of many parents enlisted by Smith to run his series of teams starting with the Under-14s. Ferguson was to describe Smith as ‘a fantastic man’ and ‘a massive influence’.
Smith came from a wealthy middle-class family and, after Cambridge, served in the army. An accident caused him to be invalided out in 1949 and he returned to Dunbartonshire to run the family shipbreakers’ business. He had a passion for football that initially he expressed through a Boys’ Brigade team in Drumchapel, a village that grew into a vast council estate for Glaswegians. And he had a strong moral sense, as Ferguson was to recall in the
Sunday Herald
interview: ‘Douglas didn’t just teach you about football. He also instilled in you a code of life.’
It fitted comfortably with his parents’ code: ‘Discipline, cleanliness, good time-keeping, no swearing, good sportsmanship but also how to be competitive as well.’ Ferguson was to find time-keeping and competitiveness easier to observe than some of the others, but his gratitude for Smith’s unselfish guidance – ‘it helped that he was very rich . . . but he devoted an incredible amount of time to us’ – is matched only by admiration for his vision in taking the boys to Europe for tournaments in which they played equivalents from the likes of Barcelona, Milan and Juventus. He even compared Smith with Matt Busby, Manchester United’s European pioneer, and implied that his ‘meticulous’ organisation and preparation lodged in the mind; those boys who had to play for their schools on a Saturday morning before representing Drumchapel in the afternoon, for instance, would be collected by car from the first match and taken for lunch. ‘The bother Douglas went to on our behalf was simply unbelievable.’
Now and again, he would entertain them on Sundays. ‘Eight or nine of us would pile into his big Rover,’ said Ferguson, ‘to be taken for lunch at Douglas’s huge mansion where we trooped through his orchard to play football on his private bowling green. He didn’t care about your background . . . or his beautiful grass – only if you could play football.’ Nor had he any time for the sectarian divide and so Ferguson, who followed the blue, happily wore the green and white hoops of Drumchapel.
Shortly before his fifteen birthday, Ferguson was chosen for Glasgow Schools’ annual match against Edinburgh and encountered John Greig. They were to become great friends after Ferguson realised his ambition to join Rangers. By then Greig was an established international, a more distinguished figure in Scottish football than Ferguson the player was ever to become. But as Greig first faced Ferguson he felt intimidated: ‘Not by him. I don’t even remember him. I just remember the sight of the team we faced – I thought we were playing a man’s team, not Glasgow boys! As we were being beaten 4-0, it just felt as if we were being overpowered by a much bigger and stronger side. They bullied us, almost – maybe that’s where he got that streak in him!’
A midfield player that day, Ferguson remembers being in direct opposition to Greig and thinking how small he was. He also remembers scoring from a penalty, and playing well.
Tools of the Trade
F
erguson left school, became apprenticed to the toolmaking trade at Wickman’s on the Hillington industrial estate – and took his first serious step towards a football career by leaving Drumchapel to join Queen’s Park shortly after his sixteenth birthday.
Queen’s Park, too, was an amateur club, but by far Scotland’s most distinguished, one which could proudly claim not only to have won the Scottish Cup ten times but twice to have reached the final of the FA Cup, albeit towards the end of the nineteenth century, when those conquered on the way to successive defeats by Blackburn Rovers at Kennington Oval included Aston Villa, Notts County, Blackburn Olympic and Old Wykehamists.
In 1903, Queen’s Park built the biggest stadium in the world, which Hampden Park was to remain until Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã was prepared for the 1950 World Cup. In 1958, as memories faded of a midsummer in which Brazil had at last taken their first world title, the teenage Pelé startling and delighting the sporting planet by scoring a hat-trick in the final against the Swedish hosts (Scotland had begun to set their own form of precedent by returning home after the group stage), Hampden echoed to the sound of Alex Ferguson demanding the ball.
He had swiftly advanced through the club’s youth ranks and was a month short of his seventeenth birthday when he made his first senior appearance, at Stranraer.
Ferguson had joined the rest of the players at Glasgow’s Central Station for the journey of several hours to a town that still felt that the absence of an invitation to join the Scottish League until 1955 might not have been entirely unconnected to its remote location at Scotland’s south-western tip, where the ferries left for Ireland.
Another reason, of course, might have been the presence in Stranraer’s team of a left-back, identified by Ferguson only as ‘McKnight’, who bit him during a tussle in the match. Bemoaning it in the dressing room at half-time, the youngster was told by Queen’s Park’s equivalent of a manager to ‘bite him back’. Whether or not the advice was taken, the senior players had heard it and, in a combative second half, a member of each side was sent off. It was all experience. As was defeat: 2-1.
A newspaper cutting records, however, that Ferguson scored Queen’s Park’s goal, ‘ending a great solo run with a flashing drive’. Oddly, this is omitted from his book. An instance of self-effacement? Or a lapse of memory? Either would be a collector’s item, for Ferguson’s memory has often been described as ‘photographic’ and this picture he would certainly consider worth a thousand words.
In the late 1950s and early in the supposedly swinging 1960s, as Scots went about their business unaware of the impending arrival of Labour government, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and, less happily on the cultural front, the World Cup triumph in store for their big brothers to the south, Scottish football presented a relatively interesting face.
It was Hearts, rather than Celtic, who vied with Rangers for supremacy, taking the championship to Edinburgh in 1958 and 1960. Dundee acceded to the title in 1962 and Kilmarnock were to do so in 1965, before Celtic under Jock Stein emerged from semi-hibernation to begin a sequence of nine consecutive championships during which the club also brought the European Cup to Scotland.
By now Queen’s Park were struggling to keep in touch with it all. They had genuflected to their past with two seasons in the top division and, despite relegation a few months before Ferguson’s debut, the side contained players who were to surpass Ferguson’s own career in the sense that they played for Scotland.
One was Willie Bell, who figured in Leeds United’s rise under Don Revie. The other, Davie Holt, went to Hearts after representing Great Britain in the Olympic Games of 1960 in Rome. At Queen’s Park, he and Ferguson used to travel to training together by bus from work at the Hillington estate. They were happy and, Holt later insisted, purely amateur days. ‘People sometimes ask me if I had money slipped in my boot,’ he said, ‘but, believe me, you never got a brown penny out of Queen’s Park. You were playing for the history of the club, and it was a fabulous history.’
At Stranraer, chastened, the Queen’s Park players slipped out of the little Stair Park ground and across a railway track to await the train back to Glasgow.
They beat Alloa Athletic 4-2, Ferguson scoring at Hampden, and he went on to make sporadic first-team appearances. Bill Pinkerton, the Queen’s Park goalkeeper, recalled Ferguson as being ‘difficult to knock off the ball because he was all elbows and hands’.
In training, Pinkerton surprisingly added: ‘A few of us felt he could have worked a lot harder. I remember thinking sometimes that his heart wasn’t in it. He had a few run-ins with the trainers, Willie Gibson and Frank Lyon. It was always about the type of training we did. We would start with two laps of the cinder track at Hampden. Next it was up and down the terracing, every stairway, right to the top and back again. Then ten sprints. That was your training. Alex kept complaining, saying this was not the sort of stuff we should be doing. But we had no option because, being amateurs with jobs, we trained in the evenings and Hampden in those days had no floodlights. There were only the lights along the front of the main stand – it was like training in the dark. We couldn’t do any work with a ball until the light evenings came along.’
The gloom did bring Ferguson one benefit. ‘Two or three of us were good quarter-milers,’ Pinkerton recalled, ‘and some of the other players didn’t like it. After we’d set off on our laps, we’d look round for the next group and there’d be no one there. They’d be hiding in the tunnel or somewhere, waiting to join us on the track when we came round. Alex was always one of them. So he wasn’t the most enthusiastic. Nor did he stand out as a player. But he was a good lad.’
A Saint at Perth
I
mpatience nagged at Ferguson and, although his first-team opportunities became more frequent in his second season at Queen’s Park, he was vulnerable to the wooing of Willie Neil, the Glasgow scout of St Johnstone. This was ardent and not wholly scrupulous; although Neil was entitled to point out that the Perth club had been promoted to the First Division, he also promised Ferguson a regular place in the team. Naively, Ferguson believed it and signed for a year.
He remained an amateur – by now his toolmaking apprenticeship had been transferred to the Remington Rand factory, also on the Hillington estate – and the journey to and from Perth for training twice a week was costly. A combination of buses, trains and taxis enabled the eighteen-year-old Ferguson to leave Hillington at 4 p.m., reach St Johnstone’s ground with the other Glasgow-based players in time to train with their clubmates and arrive home after midnight for a few hours’ sleep before rising at 6.45 and setting off for work again.
On the rail journey, he enjoyed the players’ banter. So the travel might have seemed a lighter sacrifice if his expenses claims had been promptly met. But, again, promise and the reality of St Johnstone proved distant strangers.
The first-team place? Ferguson began to appreciate it had never been reserved for him when, clearly in order to fill it, the club signed Jimmy Gauld, an ageing pro picked up from Everton, one with a respectable career, all of which turned out to be behind him because he was beckoned back to England to help police and ended up in prison after being named the ringleader behind British football’s most infamous match-fixing scandal. Two England internationals, Peter Swan and Tony Kay, were also put behind bars along with their former Sheffield Wednesday colleague David ‘Bronco’ Layne.
There was, Ferguson wrote in his book four decades later, a suspicion among players in Scotland that corruption stalked dressing rooms closer to home. More than a suspicion, according to Ian Ure, the Dundee and Scotland centre-half who went on to play for Arsenal and Manchester United before succeeding Ferguson in his first managerial post at East Stirlingshire.
‘Without ever being certain,’ wrote Ferguson, ‘I had the uneasy feeling that there were games played in Scotland at the beginning of the Sixties which were at least in the doubtful category.’ Ure had no doubt that one would have taken place at St Johnstone’s Muirton Park on the final day of the 1961/2 season, when a draw would have guaranteed Dundee the championship and St Johnstone survival in the top division, but for the visiting players’ rejection of an offer of £30 (a little under a week’s wages) to share the two points at stake. The disdain of the Dundee dressing room was not unanimous, according to Ure. ‘One or two of ours,’ he said, ‘wanted to take the money.’
Ferguson played that day. He had spent his first Perth season in the reserves but then, after his father had undergone an operation for what later proved to be bowel cancer, one of the effects being that he was no longer fit for hard work in the shipyard, Ferguson decided to turn professional, signing a part-time contract that enabled him to keep his job in Glasgow. He played more often and began to score goals for a struggling side.
Not enough, though, to put fate in their own hands on that deciding day when Dundee made the twenty-two-mile journey along the River Tay followed by some 25,000 supporters, who, aided by 5,000 of the Muirton faithful, broke the ground’s attendance record.
‘Dundee at that time,’ wrote Ferguson, ‘were a team without a conspicuous weakness, an amalgam of all the attributes needed to win a championship.’ Forty years on, he rattled off the line-up: ‘Slater, Hamilton, Cox, Seith, Ure, Wishart, Smith, Penman, Gilzean, Cousins and Robertson.’
While conceding that it wasn’t a bad effort, I have to correct Ferguson here and there. The goalkeeper was not Bert Slater, who arrived from Liverpool in time for the following season’s European Cup campaign, but Pat Liney. Alan Gilzean wore the No. 10 shirt and Alan Cousin (singular, though many people made Ferguson’s mistake of using the plural) the No. 9.
I know because I was among the dark-blue throng that day in the blazing sun, fourteen years old and sweatily stumbling towards the packed terraces to await a celebration that was to remain unique nearly half a century later. It was my first time in the presence of Ferguson, though if I knew who he was, I soon forgot; our eyes, on this historic day, were for Dundee alone. At least until St Johnstone’s defenders started to kick our wonderfully elegant veteran of a winger, Gordon Smith. Then the notion of St Johnstone’s relegation seemed quite appealing.