Tale of the unexpected
McDermid still hasn’t lost love for game years after dad discovered star Baxter Chapters of joy and woe fascinate author at her beloved Rovers
A moment of pure magic makes you think: ‘That’s why I’m here’
ONE of those freezing afternoons at Stark’s Park, the bitingly cold rain blowing horizontally into the faces of the just and the unjust alike, and Val McDermid’s partner turns to ask: ‘How could your dad not have scouted for Barcelona?’ Ah, the two things you don’t choose in life — your family and your football team. They choose you, make you, grab a hold of your heart and squeeze it ’til it aches.
Jim McDermid, the Raith scout who never once boasted about spotting a skinny lad by the name of Jim Baxter playing in the Fife Juniors, must have known that his wee girl would have ended up firmly embedded in the life of the Rovers.
Val, who has sold over ten million copies of her dark, disturbing and deftly constructed crime novels all over the world, has her name on the front of the jerseys — and even sponsors her own stand at a stadium known, only slightly mockingly, by devotees as The San Starko.
Next month (April 17), she’ll be one of the guests of honour at Kirkcaldy’s Adam Smith Theatre for a 50th-anniversary celebration of Baxter’s finest day in a Scotland jersey, the famous 3-2 win over World Cup winners England at Wembley.
It’s not the kind of thing she needs to do. Life is busy. She’s writing, travelling, promoting, appearing on Question Time… it’s not as if the 61-year-old, the first state-school pupil ever admitted to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, has time to spare.
Yet football retains its fascination for a writer who, in print, often delves deeply into the subject of dangerous obsession. And, while her studies and previous working life may have taken her a long way from the Lang Toun, adopting Manchester United as her ‘wee team’ in the mid-1980s was never really a replacement for that first love.
Although we meet in a nice little café in the leafy Stockbridge area of Edinburgh, McDermid — charming, funny and as grounded as they come — immediately launches into stories about those first forays into the world of amateur and junior football where renowned talent spotter Jim did his digging.
Cinder pitches, muddy side lines and heavy industry workers trying to batter each other senseless… it’s a wonder young Val wasn’t put off for life. Her first adventures at the home of the Rovers, where she now enjoys the ‘luxury’ of sitting in the directors’ box with her fellow board members, were neither warm nor comfortable.
Get her talking about the wonder of a game that keeps her and millions of others hooked, however, and McDermid says simply: ‘I think football offers you those moments of magic.
‘You can sit there for 85 minutes in the rain. And, believe me, the directors’ box at Stark’s Park is the first place the rain hits. It’s misery. And all you see are long balls being punted up the pitch to nobody.
‘Then, suddenly, somebody does something that is just beautiful to watch. There is that moment of pure magic that makes you think: “That’s why I’m here”.
‘My partner, God bless her, has been sucked into the Rovers family. To the point where she actually goes when I’m not there.
‘But I remember going with her one day, it was lashing down, sheer misery. And she turned to me and asked: “How could your dad not have scouted for Barcelona?”.
‘Then you think about Jim Baxter at Wembley in ’67, you just smile. He could have played for anyone.
‘When I was wee, my dad was still scouting. So he would quite often take me with him to see games, just to get me out of my mother’s feet, I think.
‘So I do have memories of standing in the rain and the cold and the wind, watching shipyard workers and miners kicking seven bells out of each other.
‘Do you remember those terrible cinder pitches? You went for a skid on one of those and all the skin came off your legs.
‘I remember clearly that my dad used to keep a plank of wood in the car. He would take it out and we would stand on it, on the side lines of whatever awful game we were watching, so that we didn’t sink into the mud. Lovely memories…
‘My first memory of going to Stark’s Park is being sat up on one of the crush barriers, the cold metal. So most of my early memories of football seem to involve being cold.
‘Then there were the pies. You bit into it and the juice would run up your sleeve. But I enjoyed the excitement, the drama, the action. Clearly I didn’t develop an eye for a player — or we’d be doing a wee bit better than we are at the moment!’
Hockey took over Val’s life as she grew up, with games for Kirkcaldy High School on a Saturday morning followed by outings for Kirkcaldy Ladies in the afternoon. If there had been such a thing as organised football for girls at the time, she would have leapt at the chance to play.
When she moved to Oxford to study English, she’d go along with friends to the old Dell to watch Southampton, or Upton Park to see West Ham; it was a good day out, removed from the stresses of actually supporting one of the teams involved.
Later, as a career in journalism culminated in a posting as Northern Bureau Chief for a national Sunday newspaper, she would ply the sports writers with requests for tickets to Old Trafford, where a certain Alex Ferguson had just taken over.
Having a working life away from home meant McDermid wasn’t actually at Ibrox on that November day in 1994, watching Raith beat Celtic in a penalty shootout to lift the League Cup, the club’s first — and, to date, only — major trophy.
Yet she told Sportsmail: ‘I remember driving on that day, on the M62, having been at some event in Hull. I was driving along, listening to it on the radio, and just the emotional impact of the penalty shootout…
‘I had to pull over because I had tears running down my face. It was just a wow moment. And it is amazing how it affects you.’
It says something about Val that, as much fun as it might have been to associate with Rovers during the good times, her involvement with the club came in response to calamity.
With a nod to a former board not remembered with much fondness, she talks about ‘the disasters of the Weegie years’, with Sportsmail’s mention of the infamous Claude Anelka — look him up — prompting a wince and a plea: ‘Don’t speak of my grief.’
In short, as fans rallied to keep the club afloat, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown phoned anyone he knew with both a connection to the Rovers or the area — and a bit of ready cash in need of a good cause. Gradually, McDermid upped her involvement and her investment, explaining: ‘It seemed to me to be a natural thing to do, to do something that was a way of putting something back.
‘I knew my dad would have been passionate about it. So there was that sense of getting involved. Initially, I took one of these executive memberships — which was essentially just a way of getting money out of folk.
‘But it snowballed, I went to more games, then I went in with the stand sponsorship — and the shirt sponsorship, too. To some degree, it seemed like good business.
‘But it also meant I could put money into the club. Football is something that takes up a residence in your heart, it becomes a part of your emotional identity.
‘However far away I was, however uninvolved in football I was, I still checked the Rovers every Saturday — and had those moments of great elation in the mid-1990s.
‘It’s family history. My dad, his brothers, my granddad, my auntie Mary, they were all great supporters of the club. It is emotional, seeing my name on the shirts. It’s not always necessarily a good emotion!
‘But, yes, my dad would have loved that. He would have been very proud. He would also have taken the p*** out of me, of course.
‘In a practical sense, I was quite taken aback by the publicity generated by the shirt sponsorship. I had media from all over the UK, I did breakfast TV and it was even in the New York
Times — who, I have to say, didn’t really understand football.
‘Towards the end of that interview, the guy said to me: “So, if another team was to come along with a better offer, would you take it?”.
‘I’m just thinking: “No… no… I don’t think you’re quite getting it
here… it’s not a franchise, this is football”.’
Val’s late father, who was still doing his bit for Raith as matchday turnstile manager at the time of his sudden death aged just 64, ten days before her first book was published, clearly had the club in his soul.
As for the great gift he bestowed upon the team after an afternoon watching Crossgates Primrose, well, as his daughter puts it: ‘He wasn’t a man much given to boasting. So I only discovered his link to Jim Baxter by accident.
‘A newspaper was doing one of those perennial serialisations of “My Life in Football” sort of thing, this one about Baxter. I suddenly read “Jim McDermid” and turned round to my dad, saying: “That’s you!”. He just said: “Aye...”.
‘That was honestly the first I learned of the Baxter connection. My dad would never blaw about it. Of course my dad was proud of Jim. He was gratified by the fact that Jim had become such a great player — he always wanted to see folk doing well.
‘He didn’t talk about it much. Partly because my mother had no interest in football at all. He once took her to a game at Alloa, when they were still courting. It rained and she said she would never go back again. He must have been a smooth talker.’
The celebration of Baxter in Kirkcaldy is being held to raise funds for Raith’s youth development programme, McDermid explaining: ‘It’s what the club has always been about.
‘It was guys like my dad ploughtering about in the rain every weekend, looking for that magic moment. That’s what brought us Baxter.
‘That’s what guys are still doing now, working with young players, bringing them through to, hopefully, be the next Baxter for the Rovers — and all of Scottish football.’ In Kirkcaldy, Val is still known to many as Jim McDermid’s lassie. It’s a source of amusement rather than chagrin to the bestselling author. ‘It’s not the worst thing to be known as,’ she says, smiling. ‘You can argue that, in terms of impact on the town, what he did was far more important than anything I’ve ever written.’