SUPER COOPER WAS MY HERO AND A REAL GENT
25 years on from the cruel loss of one of Scottish football’s most gifted talents, Gordon Smith reflects on the wizardry of Davie Cooper
IT is hard to think that it will be 25 years this evening since a number of us journalists were posted outside the front door of the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow to wait for news on the condition of Davie Cooper.
Those days are the hard, uncomfortable side of being a reporter.
Concerned visitors came and went. Jimmy Nicholl, a former Rangers team-mate, stopped to offer his thoughts. He could barely hold himself together, though, far less speak.
Cooper’s collapse from a brain haemorrhage while filming a coaching video at Broadwood Stadium had rendered everyone in Scottish football numb with shock.
Just looking back at old notes, it is clear the effect his passing, announced the following morning, had. Alex McLeish, then the head coach of Motherwell, shed tears while reading out a statement.
Tommy Burns, the Celtic manager, addressed a number of us in the Parkhead boardroom and spoke of the prayers he had held with his children for a man he declared ‘a national treasure’.
Cooper was the first footballer I ever interviewed face-to-face. I was 16 years old, three weeks into my first job. And I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
Tommy McLean, his manager at Motherwell at the time, had arranged for me to visit Fir Park at lunchtime. I was terrified. Cooper had a reputation from his Ibrox days of being occasionally difficult. However, in my eyes, he was a superstar.
He could have torn me to bits or stood up and walked out as I fumbled around in my notebook for my list of pre-prepared, almost certainly hopeless, questions.
But he didn’t. He was patient, kind, understanding, supportive. He saw I was out of my depth and tried to help.
Tuesday, August 22, 1989, that was. The kind of day that makes you think that being a reporter is the best job in the whole wide world.
It’s always special when you get the chance to meet a great footballer. Even better when he turns out to be a great guy, too.
IT became the lunch reservation that was never taken up. Gordon Smith had been eagerly anticipating meeting up with former Rangers team-mate Davie Cooper over a bowl of soup. The pair had been thrown together as part of manager Jock Wallace’s rebuilding job in the summer of 1977, Cooper arriving from Clydebank and Smith from Kilmarnock.
Only 14 months apart in age, they would go on to forge an instantly successful partnership on the field and a close friendship off it.
Their first season went far better than either man — both childhood Rangers supporters — could have dared imagine. In the
League Cup Final, Smith teed up Cooper for a goal and scored one himself as Celtic were beaten at Hampden. Two months later and they were celebrating a Treble.
They would go on to spend the next two years together at
Rangers before Smith departed for
Brighton and
Hove Albion.
Even then they might not have been separated.
‘Alan Mullery, the Brighton manager at that time, told me that he had actually tried to sign both of us,’ said Smith. ‘But Rangers would only let one of us leave. I told Alan he had got the wrong one.’
Even after parting ways in 1980, Smith and Cooper stayed close friends. A catch-up was long overdue and pencilled into their diaries for March 24, 1995. It would never take place. Tragically, Cooper would die of a brain haemorrhage the day before the proposed lunch date at the tender age of 39. Twenty-five years later and Smith can still recall the sense of numbness that washed over him as word came through that his friend had passed away.
‘I’ll never forget the moment that I heard,’ he said. ‘Someone from STV phoned me up to ask for my thoughts on Coop. ‘I thought they were maybe producing a documentary looking back on his career or something like that.
‘I hadn’t heard the news, so they were the ones to break it to me. And I just remember being in total shock and thinking this could not be true. That was a real heart-breaking moment for me.
‘Coop and I had stayed good friends long after we had both stopped playing.
‘We were actually meant to be having lunch the next day. It was so tragic what happened.’
Cooper’s name doesn’t always feature whenever there is a debate over Scotland’s greatest football talents. Smith (left) believes that to be a mistake.
Despite amassing more than 500 appearances throughout a playing career in four different countries, the one-time Scottish FA chief executive still rates Cooper as the greatest he ever played with.
‘If you’re picking an all-time Scottish team then you’d have to have Coop in there,’ insisted
Smith. ‘You couldn’t leave out someone with that talent. ‘Any manager would have loved to have been able to call upon Davie and what he could bring.
‘He was just so comfortable on the ball, a great striker of the ball and a brilliant passer.
‘He was a special talent with a great technique. People say he was one-footed but that was enough. It didn’t matter about his right foot as his left foot was so good.
‘Rangers fans know all about what he could do. Motherwell, Clydebank and Scotland fans, too. It’s just a shame that there weren’t as many live televised games back then as there are now, so more fans could get to see what kind of player he was. I just wish there was more footage of Coop that we could all look back on.’
There was a growing clamour around both men and fellow new signing Bobby Russell when Wallace added them to his Rangers squad in the summer of 1977. Few could have expected to see that potential fulfil itself so quickly, as Smith recalled.
‘I got on with Coop right away. The two of us and Bobby were the new faces in the dressing room that summer. Most of the other guys had been there for a while, so the three of us had a closeness as we had all arrived at Rangers around the same time.
‘We all got in the team around the same time under Jock. And it ended up being a really successful season. Those were really special moments.
‘In the first cup final we played in together, I made the first goal for Coop and then got the winner as we beat Celtic 2-1 at Hampden. So that was a brilliant day for both of us.
‘It meant a lot that we had both contributed to such a big occasion in our first season.
‘To go on from there to win the Treble was just incredible. We couldn’t have asked for a better start on the pitch. And most days we would also go out for lunch together so there was a real closeness away from football too.’
That people are still fondly recalling Cooper’s achievements a quarter of a century after his death is a sign of his enduring legacy Smith believes.
‘I think when Rangers fans — and hopefully Scottish fans in general — look back at that time they’ll realise what a talented player we had on our hands,’ he said. ‘He still sticks out in people’s memories for the games he played in and the things he was able to do with the ball. He was the most gifted player I ever saw.’
‘PEOPLE SAY HE WAS ONE-FOOTED BUT THAT WAS ENOUGH. IT DIDN’T MATTER ABOUT HIS RIGHT FOOT AS HIS LEFT FOOT WAS SO GOOD’