of what was so great about it – games packed with genuine and committed fans watching players they could identify with – has disappeared.
If anything positive came of the experience of following Hearts through that rollercoaster season, then it was in the form of an important lesson, and a good one to learn when you’re young. It could be summed up thus: don’t get your hopes up; don’t take anything for granted; expect nothing. These, as I would find out, would be useful mottos for any Hearts fan, or, for that matter, Scotland fan – when it came to either football or rugby.
There’s a postscript to my interest in, or obsession with, that legendary Hearts team – and they remain club legends, in part because we’re still waiting for a first league title since 1960.
Ten years later, John Robertson came into the Texaco garage where I, by now an 18-year-old about to head off to university, was working. ‘Robbo’ had been my ultimate hero, as he was to most Hearts fans – he is the most prolific goal-scorer in the club’s history. And here he was walking across the forecourt and into my shop! I was completely star-struck, and as he walked towards me I realized something else: he was tiny. He could barely see over the counter.
Still, it was quite a thrill to meet my boyhood hero, even if I was a little over-awed. In my flustered state I think all I managed to say was, ‘Pump four, mate? That’ll be sixteen quid.’
After our brief and largely unsuccessful foray into football, rugby took over. Rugby was a big part of the culture of the school, though there was no particular pressure to play, and it wasn’t cliquey, as I know it can be at some schools. Watson’s was a nice school, with a good atmosphere. There was a real cross-section of people among the teachers and pupils, and I felt fortunate to go there.
My parents weren’t wealthy – Dad working in the building industry, eventually as a chartered surveyor, Mum as a nurse – and I know they had to make sacrifices to send my sister, Carrie, and me there. Not that they were explicit about that to us, but we were made aware that we were lucky to go to a good school, and we both knew, I think, that we shouldn’t waste the opportunities available to us there. I tried to do the best I could, because I was also aware, from a young age, that although sport seemed the most important thing in my life, ultimately education would be more important. After all, as I was later told by my school’s careers adviser, ‘You’re not going to make a living out of sport.’ (OK, so this turned out to be bad advice … but I wasn’t to know it at the time – and neither, to be fair, was he.)
As far as the rugby went, there was no pressure to play, either from the teaching staff or from my peers. I suppose some implicit ‘pressure’ was applied by the roll call of illustrious rugby players among the school’s former pupils, headed by the Hastings brothers. But there are other notable alumni, too, including Martin Bell, the Olympic skier, Martha Kearney, the broadcaster, the MPs Malcolm Rifkind, David Steel and Chris Smith, the mountaineer Robin Smith, the architect Sir Basil Spence, and Mylo, the singer-songwriter. A pretty eclectic bunch – and even the three politicians all represent different parties.
When I was at school, there were future Scottish rugby internationals Jamie Mayer, Marcus Di Rollo and Jason White, who would go on to captain the national side.
When I started playing rugby we were coached by Mr French, a Rangers fan, but still a good guy. In those days it was straight into the full game, no mini rugby to break us in. And initially it was similar to the football in many regards, with 15 of us all chasing after the ball. Loosely speaking there were backs and forwards, but we didn’t stick too rigidly to that.
That said, I quickly settled on the position of stand-off, and I became the kicker. There was a lot of pressure involved in being the kicker. As with the football, there was no concession made to the fact we were small, with puny legs: we played on full-size pitches, with full-size goals. So kicking was a challenge, and my record wasn’t quite as impressive as Chris Paterson’s.
Like Paterson, I often managed 100 per cent, but that would be either 100 per cent over, or 100 per cent missed, with the ball invariably skidding along the ground. If I got the first conversion over, then I was fine; it would relax me, and I’d have a good game. But the kicking tended to mirror the game: if I kicked well, I played well; if I kicked badly, I found that it played on my mind and destroyed my game. I had some horrendous games.
It’s funny, though, that kicking seems to be something that attracts the individualist. Think of Jonny Wilkinson and Paterson, and you tend to think of them obsessively practising the art of kicking, long after their team-mates have left the training pitch. Paterson has even spoken in the past about being given a hard time at school for spending so long on his own, practising his kicking. As an aspiring young rugby player I was similar, I suppose. If I’d kicked badly in a match, the following day would see me in one of our two local parks, with my dad, practising until it got dark – or until my dad got bored.
But the problem – and this would be something of a recurring theme for me in my sporting life – was that all that practice didn’t really make much difference. Nobody ever really showed me how to kick. My dad knew the basics, but I had no one to help me with my technique. It’s a bit like having a bad golf swing: you can practise as much as you like, but without expert help you’re not going to get any better. It was also like golf in another sense, though. If I stuck one through the posts every once in a while it gave me a real buzz – and kept me practising just a little bit longer.
My kick-offs were just as erratic as my conversion attempts. I had this knack of picking out the biggest guy in the opposing team, and I’d be confronted with the sight of this – relatively speaking – huge second row catching it and running straight back towards me. Thus, within the first minute of most games, I’d suffer a big bang to the head. But I only suffered concussion on one occasion, in training. I’d broken through and was running towards the try line; and I thought I was clear, so I throttled back as I neared the posts, and was cruising towards the line, oblivious to the fact that an opposing winger had chased me all the way. He dived and clipped my ankles, and I, clutching the ball to my chest, hit the ground like a sack of spuds. The ball ‘broke’ my fall, but it caused a whiplash effect, my head bouncing off the ground. I had no idea where I was, what day it was or what I was doing.
Remarkably, the only other serious injury I suffered on the rugby pitch was a broken thumb. It was the first and only time my dad missed a game – an omen, perhaps. I was in fourth year at secondary school, it was on the eve of my first important exams, the Standard Grade (the Scottish equivalent to ‘O’ levels) prelims, when, in the early minutes of a game against Heriot’s, I went to hand off a big prop and felt my thumb bend right back. It was excruciating, but I gave it a shake and carried on playing. Until the next scrum, when I received a pass. Suffice to say that the resulting scream could probably be heard by my parents, who were out of town for the weekend. The result was an arm in plaster from hand to elbow, which meant I was assigned a ‘scribe’ – some poor sixth year – for the exams. This wasn’t as inconvenient as it sounds, because I remember my ‘scribe’ being pretty helpful with the multiple-choice questions on my Chemistry paper. If I said ‘C’ he’d say: ‘Do you want to think about that r-e-a-l-l-y c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y?’
The high point of my rugby career came when I was selected to captain the Edinburgh Schools under-15 team against the North of Scotland. It felt amazing to pull on the navy blue kit – which bore an uncanny resemblance to the Scotland jersey – for a match played up in Inverness, and which we won, with me kicking three out of three conversions. Eat your heart out, Chris Paterson. It was quite an eye-opener playing with kids from other schools, and there was a seriousness of purpose about us; it came, I suppose, from the sense of pride, and responsibility, we all felt representing not only our schools, but our city. I remember a prop from Musselburgh displaying a particularly impressive attitude for a 14-year-old. After he scored the
