“The job was re-wiring a director’s house so for 50 quid a day I became Psycho’s labourer”
Brian Rice on life at Forest with Pearce and Clough
Iam always amused by that red double-decker parked at the far end of Hamilton Accies’ ground. It makes me think of the movie that could have been, if Cliff Richard had drunk something more adventurous than a bottle of pop. So does Brian Rice have any stories about buses? Oh yes he does.
The Accies manager’s father Benny drove them for a living, football specials and also the scheduled service which wound its way through North Lanarkshire, picking up Lisbon Lions along the way. John Clark got on at Holytown, Billy Mcneill at Bellshill and then it stopped at Viewpark – Jimmy Johnstone’s village. Says Rice: “Jinky was always late but Dad, a big Celtic fan, would tell the rest of the bus: ‘We’re not leaving until the wee man appears.’” I’d heard that Benny sometimes had to vacate his cabin, run up the stair and chap on the wing legend’s door. “Oh quite possibly.” And that the other passengers would mump and moan about being late for their work, with Benny eventually being moved on to another run. “Then that makes it an even better story!”
Young Brian from Whitburn, who would go on to learn from the self-styled greatestmanager-of-all-time-and-who’s-arguing? in Brian Clough and become a Nottingham Forest comedy-cult favourite, started out as a Celtic S-former. “Then I got released on the same day as Pat Nevin and Hibs picked me up. My bus through to Edinburgh left at half-past six in the morning, stopped at West Calder, East Calder and every tree, and took an hour and 20 minutes. Then I had to get a connecting bus to the top of Easter Road and run down to the ground. I had to report for 8.45 and was never late. It was the buses that got me there on time, not my pace!”
Another bus ferried the players to random training locations. Anywhere that was flat, basically, although sometimes Arthur’s Seat. “The goals would be on the roof and young guys like me had to hang out the windows to hold them down. We had loads of jobs. I had to clean Erich Schaedler’s boots and if they weren’t spotless he’d squash me up against the hot pipes. I never got home until almost eight o’clock at night. John Lambie [part of manager Willie Ormond’s coaching staff ] lived in Whitburn but he never gave me a lift. Some folk are surprised when I tell them that but, do you know, rattling through on that No 27 was the best thing that happened to me. I had to fend for myself. My apprenticeship was a tough school but it hardened me and that was good.”
This was the early 1980s so of course millennials didn’t exist and neither did snowflakes.
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In common with many of his generation – Rice is 55 – he encounters more sensitivity and softness among the young than was prevalent back then. “I tell youth players they have to be on time. They’ll go: ‘Oh, I’ll need to see if my mum can drop me off.’ I’ll say: ‘It’s not your mum that wants to be a footballer, it’s you.’” Rice’s protégés at Hamilton know nothing of Cloughie which is a shame, for what stories he has to tell about the man. Like Churchillisms and Marxisms (Groucho, not Karl), there are Cloughisms, and in still-compiled lists of them one about Rice figures as high as No 3. “I wouldn’t say he was pale and thin,” Ol’ Big Head remarked of his leftsided midfielder after an away-game stopover, “but the chambermaid in the hotel turned down his bed without realising he was already in it.”
Rice isn’t so thin now but then none of us are. The flash of red hair has gone although inside the baldy heid he hopes to have retained enough insight gained at the feet of the master which can be referenced in his own career as a boss. Continuing on the bus theme, the 55-year-old has gone from clippie to the guy at the wheel. From manager’s assistant to the main man. He spent 22 years as a No 2 at Falkirk, Hibs, Inverness Caley Thistle and latterly St Mirren – mostly alongside John “Yogi” Hughes who he actually rates as funnier than Cloughie – and for a lot of that time thought it was his place in life. He could work on the training ground. He didn’t have to do the grim stuff, like telling players their contracts wouldn’t be renewed. Or the tricky stuff such as media duties and talking to the likes of me.
He does well in his office after training today, only faltering twice, each time unsurprisingly. Rice was also an assistant in Qatar, at Al-khor, when he got into bother with gambling, racking up £65,000 debts from online roulette and facing jail before friends in football came to his aid. Reluctant to rake over this black period, he says: “We’re all made up of different experiences, good and bad. We all have things of which we’re not proud or we’d love to change and I’m no different. I lived through the hell of that time and have put it behind me.”
Rice also lived through Hillsborough, an unused player that fateful day which thrust him into full view of the tragedy. “I was in the main stand with my dad and my wife who was pregnant, just the length of the 18-yard box from the Leppings Lane end. Little kiddies were being crushed. I saw a boy, no more than eight, lying on a hoarding being used as a stretcher.” At this Rice stops, looks up to the light and lets the tears fall. “I went down to the changing-room. The boss asked me what was going on. I said: ‘There’s been fatalities.’ He ordered everyone into the showers: ‘We’re going home.’” For far
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