The original SUPER AGENT
How Bill McMurdo went from the pit to the front pages alongside George Best and Rod Stewart
Rod kicked the toes out of his three grand Gucci shoes
THIS is a Double Mac. Warning: it may contain traces of Macca and Mojo to which some are allergic but it also has the spice of Rod playing fitba in his Gucci shoes on a runway at Glasgow Airport, a taste of the first and only replay of a World Cup final, a garnish of how selling a player to South Korea can yield an extraordinary dividend and a topping of why Airdrie, against all civilised thought, holds a special place for hospitality.
It is the Bill McMurdo story. Or some of them, at least. But these marvellous, gaudy and joyous anecdotes disguise the substance of the Double McMurdo. It is this: how did a wee boy from Niddrie become a major player in world football? How does a guy go from the pit to the suite of a five-star hotel with the biggest players and entertainers at his side?
McMurdo has dealt in millions over the years, weathered and indeed instigated the odd tabloid storm and leaned his slim frame into the prevailing winds of obstructive officialdom. At 72, he has survived the tale. He tells it with the poise and timing of a Peter Ustinov on Parkinson.
His name has reverberated behind the headlines relating the exploits of his most famous client, George Best, and the transfer of another, Mo Johnston, to Rangers when the world expected he was heading to Celtic.
‘I have always courted controversy,’ he says, without the slightest hint of regret.
But for McMurdo it is all about the deal and it is tempting to state the most important were made with his mother, Nina, and his wife, Helma. The latter was his companion for more than 50 years until her death three years ago.
‘I met her when we were both 16,’ he says. ‘She was the only person I ever listened to. Everything I did that was worthwhile in my life, I did through her.’
His mother was the first negotiator he faced. ‘We made a deal,’ he adds. ‘I’d get an apprenticeship, get something behind me and then I could do what I wanted with my life.’ This was to be a salesman.
‘I was 16 and the only Tory in the pit,’ he says of his apprenticeship as an electrical engineer in the Lothians mines. ‘I met an old work-mate the other day. He reminded me that they would all be sitting having a laugh and I would be studying books on salesmanship. I bought a sales correspondence course in 1968 for £100. That was about a year’s wages and I had to pay it up.’
His heroes were Dale Carnegie of How to Win Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale of The Power of Positive Thinking. He brought his own personality to the negotiating table.
‘At 16, I told the union boy I would not be paying the political levy. That caused a strike,’ he says.
‘I was strong-willed,’ he adds, unnecessarily.
He left the pit a week after completing his apprenticeship to become a salesman for a sweets firm and then joined Timex, where he quickly became their top salesman in the UK. Then his world changed.
‘Timex were paying Emerson Fittipaldi £1million a year to promote the brand worldwide. So I started doing bits with him in the UK. I learned how top sportsmen were handled,’ he says.
He had already become friends with Rangers directors Davie Hope and Hugh Adam, and realised that football was a business that was mired in the past commercially.
‘I did the first deal to put sponsors’ names on jerseys in Scotland,’ he says of the Bukta link-up with Hibernian in 1977. ‘The SFA fined us £100 but I told Tom Hart (former Hibs chairman) that the club was making 20 grand, so it was all right.’
His first three clients in football were Jock Wallace, Derek Johnstone and George Best. ‘George was hugely important for me,’ he says. ‘He opened doors all over the world.’
He left Timex in 1978 for a brave new world as an agent in a sport that was unprepared for the McMurdo maelstrom. He immediately instituted hospitality at Airdrie for a game against Rangers and went into battle for his clients.
‘It’s strange. Footballers did not have basic human rights, with clubs holding their contracts,’ he says. ‘I thought: “As a Tory, I should not be doing a union man’s job”. But I got on with it.’
This glimpse of a crucial time in the development of football as a business is laced with the intoxicating flavour of McMurdo anecdote.
‘I brought George (Best) up to do a Hibs lottery draw,’ he says. ‘Tom Hart was asked by the Press whether he would sign him and he said no. He was then asked if it was because he could not afford him.
‘Well, that got him angry. He said the Hart family would pay George’s wages. It did not cost them a penny. George was paid £2,500 a game but there were 16,000 at Love Street for one match and 23,000 at Easter Road for the next against Partick Thistle.’
McMurdo was now an agent. ‘At first, FIFA would not recognise agents and then they wanted a £100,000 bond from us. I fought them in the courts over this but I was also the first to register,’ he says, adding that his card declares him ‘Simply the First’, a nod to his football allegiance.
He acknowledges that the Bosman ruling of 1995 was the game-changer but his talent was to see it coming.
‘Jim Farry (secretary of the SFA) kept telling me that Bosman wouldn’t happen. I told him to get his head out of the sand,’ he says.
He then became a self-styled pariah. ‘The Press would have a go at you but would need you for transfer stories. Chairmen would criticise you publicly but deal with you in private. It’s business,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I walked out of a negotiation with Wallace Mercer (Hearts owner) and turned on the radio in the car to hear him telling the world I would never darken the doorstep of Tynecastle again.
‘I’d two tickets for the directors’ box that I could use in any match, both supplied by Wallace, and used regularly subsequently.’
This reminiscence prompts a tsunami of anecdote. ‘I was asked to arrange for Rod Stewart to open a stand at Celtic,’ he says. ‘Rod did it for a seat in the directors’ box
with his name on it and Celtic flew him up and down to London in a private jet.
‘Strangely, I had to hold his hand before he went out to perform the ceremony with Fergus McCann. Rod said he was ‘s ******* himself’. He said he was used to singing in front of thousands of fans but not doing this. Anyway, he got through it but the flight back was delayed because a co-pilot had taken ill.
‘We had a few hours to kill at a luxurious Portakabin next to the private runway at Glasgow.
‘These firemen were playing football on that runway and asked us if we fancied a game. Rod and his brothers and me played against the firemen. Rod had on three grands’ worth of Gucci shoes. And he kicked the toes out of them. That is him.’
Another game that sparks another story is how McMurdo and Bobby Moore staged a re-run of the 1966 World Cup final to raise money for the appeal after the Bradford City fire in 1985.
‘We just decided that something had to be done.’ he says. ‘I remember walking into a dressing room in Germany and there was the 1966 team, who regularly played charity matches. Within minutes I was having a natter with (Franz) Beckenbauer.’
This restlessness, this drive to organise, this love of a deal remains with him. ‘I still handle more than 30 players, mostly in Spain, Ecuador and Uruguay,’ says McMurdo. He took one client, Urko Vera Mateos, from Mirandes to the South Korean league. ‘He was earning 80,000 euros a year in Spain and $1m net in South Korea. The player could not settle but the deal brought a dividend.
‘I was invited to a meeting with four Athletic Bilbao players who told me that deal was the talk of the dressing room,’ he says. That led to McMurdo finally venturing into golf by signing up Ivan Cantero, the highly promising Spaniard who turned pro late last year.
The phone chirrups and it is Frank McAvennie on the line. There is but one message as I part from an extraordinary character. ‘Remember, I am not an agent, I am a salesman,’ he says. Yup, and I have purchased it all without hint of buyer’s remorse.