Bertie was so irrepressibly in love with life he seemed indestructible
THE 91-year-old man stares at me like I could be something of a threat. He has dementia. I bend towards him and ask him a question. ‘Do you remember Bertie Auld’?
Suddenly from that sullen, apprehensive countenance comes a spreading of uninhibited joy, like a footballer from the past has dribbled his way through the dense fog that obviously curtails his life. For a moment, he looks younger. Bertie has come to his aid.
I was attending Glasgow Life’s first Dementia Football Festival that brought together 60 dementia sufferers which, with almost indecent irony, was being held on the day Scottish football was lamenting the passing of one of the great characters of our game from that same dreaded condition.
With Craig Brown, Gordon Smith and John Rowbotham, I was there to supply memories of the past. Assuredly, you felt Bertie was out there on Toryglen’s indoor pitch, his name piercing the mist wrapped round so many minds, and helping to indicate that football from the past could be a powerful tool in combatting the very condition which took him away.
The sadness everybody felt there stemmed from the fact that he was so irrepressibly in love with life that he almost seemed indestructible.
We know that much has been made of heading the ball as a very likely cause of brain damage. You could scarcely place Bertie in that category, although he did score a historic headed goal on April 24, 1965, which was the first to be scored under Jock Stein’s management in a Scottish Cup final, in their 3-2 victory over Dunfermline. That was like confirming a special deal between the two men.
For Bertie always believed he had a special relationship with his manager and based his belief on the story he told me about how he had returned to Celtic from exile in the south in 1965. It was on a Friday evening before he played for Birmingham against West Ham in the FA cup.
‘I got a phone call from a man called Dougie Hepburn,’ he told me. ‘He just asked me if I would like to go back to Celtic Park. I said I would, of course, but I asked him who had told him to make the call. He hesitated a bit and then said Jock Stein. Now since I knew he was a pal of the big man, I believed him.’
It took Bertie aback, as Stein was manager of Hibs at the time. Celtic Park was still some way off during sticky negotiations. The wordly-wise Bertie worked out, eventually, that not only did Stein value his skill and tenacity but that his re-signing was representing a new order.
‘The big man was setting out his stall,’ he said. ‘He was going to be the boss.’
Bertie knew that better than anyone, since he was painfully aware that Bob Kelly, the Celtic chairman, was no admirer of his free-spirited approach to life, and had been glad to see the back of him. Bertie repaid his restoration immediately with his two goals in that final. Thereafter, he was indispensable to the side.
The conversation I had with him that summed up his personality, and his emotional tie with the club, was in the banqueting hall after the Lisbon triumph.
It was there at the long table he revealed his spontaneous ploy which must have touched the very souls of his colleagues.
‘We were in the dark tunnel waiting to go on to the pitch. The Italians beside us looked all bronzed and like gods. So I just started to sing the Celtic song: ‘Oh, it’s a grand old team…’ And everybody joined in. What a lift it was,’ he recalled.
So, beneath the warrior-like attitude he could sometimes bring to the game — when, for example, he was sent off in the prestigious testimonial match for Alfredo Di Stefano with Real Madrid in the Bernabeu only two weeks after Lisbon in a clash with Amancio — there beat a hugely sentimental heart. At countless dinners around the world, some of which I witnessed myself, when he took the microphone, his repartee and storytelling could not have been bettered by Billy Connolly himself.
And we must never forget his years as a manager, particularly at Firhill, where his press conferences were like family gatherings, with his ‘Maw’ in attendance sometimes, and booze liberally flowing to a grateful media, like myself, and other courtiers, in unabashed adulation of the man and his hospitality. They could last for hours. But his time there also produced one big regret, which Stein, himself, recounted to me.
One day, Dick Donald, the Aberdeen chairman, phoned Stein to ask his advice, as many did in those days. He asked him if he thought Bertie would be an appropriate choice as their next manager.
Stein dissuaded him and instead recommended Billy McNeill. He then phoned Bertie and was painfully honest with him and thereafter told me that Bertie was deeply hurt and sensed he would never be forgiven by the man who had almost been a talisman for him in his efforts to reconstruct Celtic.
Not that anything would have sunk him. My last real connection with Bertie was during the Independence referendum in 2014. I was in his five-a-side Better Together team in a knockabout game, that gave me the satisfaction of putting on record that I assisted in one of his goals. It is a memory I will cherish. And I now feel, after this week, that I am blessed that I can still do so.
“Bertie became indispensable to Stein’s Celtic”