Unintentional man of mystery
(S Herald 10/12/06)
THE WIND is in a raucous, wrecking mood outside the small, immaculate terraced house. Inside, draught free and cosy, the only sound of importance is George Connelly's voice.
You lose your concentration at your peril; he is travelling back in time to unravel 30 years of mystery; he is explaining why he walked away from Paradise and turned his back on his genius.
"I was going home with £59 a week. There were no bonuses because I had lost my contract," he says. "That was the basic wage and, at the end of the day, it was costing me money to play fitba. I had a house to buy, a mortgage to pay, I had two kids, two cars, the gas and the electric bills, and a marriage that wasn't working so what was the point?
continued…
"I just wanted out. I had it in my head for a wee while that it would have been a great thing to get out of it. Everything was all right as long as I was getting the bonuses. I can remember getting 750 quid for beating Rangers and £1500 for beating Leeds. But, because of my walk-outs, I never got them anymore.
"No, I never fought my corner in the manager's office, never asked him for a penny. Oh, I suppose I could have got it eventually, anyway. The thing was I wasn't street-wise. I had gone into fitba straight from school at 15. I did it all back to front. I would have been better going down the pits first, finding out a bit about life, and then going into fitba. You get my meaning?"
George Connelly had several specialities; these included assisting leaden leather footballs to defy gravity for unconscionable periods of time, and also being able to find colleagues from afar with passes that might have been guided by radar. But perhaps his most accomplished trick was his ability to disappear. So adept did he become in this art that he could have handed out tutorials to Lord Lucan.
"Lucky" Lucan, of course, commanded the attention of much of the British constabulary in 1974. The unlucky man pursuing Connelly in the preceding and subsequent years was far more minatory than the polis and not governed by the apparatus of convention. Jock Stein was on the case. But even the redoubtable Celtic manager could not solve the mystery of a man in psychological freefall.
In just over 10 years at Celtic Park, Connelly put together 254 first-team appearances and recorded at least five walk-outs. There were other defections which did not make the official log, but factor in a few Scotland call-offs and even Clousseau would detect a marked recalcitrance on the part of the young man to be identified with the beautiful game.
You could imagine a Hollywood mogul being intrigued by his final farewell, although perhaps not enough to commit it to celluloid, but it was fairly decisive for all that. The players were participating in the morning's training when Connelly reached an irrevocable moment in time. One of those present gives an approximation of a last hurrah you would not have imagined forming on Charlton Heston's lips.
"Ah, f*** it! I'm away!"
With this, Connelly ran off into the distance, out of Parkhead lives forever and into that unique space where very private people go. There was to be no return. He has not been back to the ground since.
Now, anyone attempting to trace a casebook which runs on similar patterns will doubtless arrive at that belonging to the indefatigable George Best, but then the historian is liable to run out of viable alternatives. Who else was like Connelly, indeed? But more to the point: where did it all go wrong, George?
With this in mind I head for Clackmannanshire, where the man in question lives as unobtrusively as a legend is permitted to live. In the game, estimates of his talent were laden with such generosity it was impossible to confine them to one sheet of paper. Connelly, they said, could drop a ball on a six pence from 60 yards. He should have been a contender. He could have been another Franz Beckenbauer. But the thing was he didn't care to be a contender or, for that matter, another Kaiser. He could have had it all and yet he chose not to have it at all.
Today, we are closeted in a neatly-furnished room – it is dominated by a state-of-the-art plasma screen – and I have forgotten the storms outside; I am feeling like I have just been given the Saturday night jackpot acknowledgement from Dale Winton. Connelly had appeared out of the storm to escort me from my parking place to his home. I have not laid eyes on him since 1975. It is good to see him looking so fit and obviously well.
Really, it doesn't get any better than this for a sports journalist. Who receives an invitation to talk to Connelly, for God's sake? Many have been turned away. He can be safely categorised as the recluse's recluse, shunning journalists as if they are contaminated by radioactive substances. He gave one interview around 10 years ago, but he dismisses that one as "stupid" because he was under the influence of drink at the time.
Back to the intrigue. Let's consider his initial explanation as to why he walked away. It makes a lot of sense, perhaps a whole lot more than the one about how he yearned to become a long-distance lorry driver. "Och, that was a lot of rubbish," he says. "Maybe I did say things like that at the time, but they were in jest. There's nae way I would have driven lorries. Things like that point to me being stupid and I'm not. Far from it."
No, the integral part of his reluctance to commit to football was a marriage that failed to function properly. There is no denying it made him a deeply unhappy man. But, when pressed on the subject, the portcullis to the Connelly castle goes down and the drawbridge rises. I have trespassed on forbidden territory and reproof is a dark look from the owner of the freehold.
No, he won't talk about that. If Connelly experienced a lot of pain and suffering in those days, then it's confidential pain and suffering. It's just like when he is asked if he believes in God. He smiles briefly but there is no sunshine in the smile. "I knew you were going to ask me that. I was thinking about it before you came and I knew you'd ask me thae kind of things. That's a pass. It's private."
Connelly, until recently a self-employed taxi driver, is comfortable, however, talking about his life with his second lady, Helen, with whom he has shared the last 29 years. "That can't be bad, eh? She's strong for me and good to me. I could tell you so much, but I can't. She's my friend, my best friend. I tell everybody that. It's all right playing the field, but you get the right one, you keep a hold of it. What is for sure is that she's kept me alive, certainly for the last 15 or 20 years, kept me on the straight and narrow 'cos you dinnae ken what's going to happen with the drink."
You tumble out of one taboo, enjoy a few seconds of respite, and then tumble into another. Connelly says he cannot go into too much detail about the drinking, either. But the fact is he has not touched alcohol for three months and is thriving as a result. His head may have surrendered to the onslaught of grey but his body refuses to join the cult of submission. He is only a handful of kilograms above his playing weight of 89.
The svelte figure is attributed to power-walking. He does five miles, at least, every day. "I started about a month ago and have lost a good bit of weight. The first couple of days, I had to get Helen to come and get me in the car. The place I was heading for was about three miles away and I only got about halfway there when I was on the phone because I was absolutely shattered.
"I watch what I'm eating all the time. I never touch anything fried. And the worst thing for you is biscuits. I never have them in the hoose. Today, I'll have half a tin of plum tomatoes, a hard-boiled egg and three pieces of lean meat, no bacon."
The irony is clear; you are in receipt of an instant education in healthy eating from someone who was never, perhaps, so fastidious about good culinary management in the past. But the fact remains that when it comes to physical fitness, his abstinence from alcohol is surely proving more potent than anything else. Is there any harm in admitting that he is keeping the Devil at arm's length? He seems to agree. We return to the subject when I ask him if he keeps up his associations with former team-mates.
"I met Davie Hay when I went to Jimmy Quinn's funeral with wee Davie Cattenach. Catt's a great lad. He phoned me up and asked if I wanted to go through to Glasgow with him and see Davie, and have a bevvy with him. I never went. He hasn't phoned me back since. You see, I go on wee benders, so I try and stay off it as long as I can."
How long do you think the dry passage will last? "I don't know. As the guy says to me: You don't get any warnings.' But I certainly don't feel any need to go and do it now. I'm strong in my heid. I'm fit and feeling so good now that I'm not doing the taxiing and doing all this power-walking instead. I'm starting to say to myself that maybe it was the stress of taxis that was making me drink. So, yes, I'm putting it down to that. Taxiing can be heavy gear."
So heavy, in fact, that it is difficult to assess its weight. "I've seen life in the raw and it's an education. I nearly experienced violence a couple of times, but the fact is you get stressed out with it. No matter what you say, you're saying the wrong thing to them the passengers. You get a drug addict in the car and they're very irrational people. Instead of disagreeing with you, they want to bring a knife out on you. Here, they're no' too bad, but I couldn't hack it in Glasgow or Edinburgh. That must be a nightmare for drivers."
In his own way, Connelly presented Stein with his own personal nightmare. Stein, remember, was a man whose trenchant tongue could leave big, strong adults looking for bandages. Yet he stresses he did not experience Stein's potential for implosion.
"Believe it or not, he was sympathetic, even towards the end. He never even scolded me, or anything like it. He didn't scream at me but if he had I doubt if it would have done any good. No, he was good to me. Always was. I was 16 when that European match against Dynamo Kiev came about and I did the keepie-uppie at half time. Stein said he would give me a fiver if I would do it. That was a lot to me.
"Was I nervous? I wasn't, really. I was too stupid to be nervous. Nowadays, I'm one of those people who gets awfully easily embarrassed. If they said to me to go and do that now, I wouldn't go near it. But then, you just did it. There's David Marshall. He could do anything when he was younger, even play against Barcelona. Ask him to do it now and I'll bet he'd lose about five goals."
Connelly, for all his genius, is cocooned in humility. Talk to him about his greatest games and he says that some of them are on DVD; playing, and scoring, against Rangers in the 1969 Scottish Cup final, for instance. But they come with a warning: "I'm no' going to show it and blaw myself up. I'm no big headed." Neither, it seems, is he suffused with envy.
I ask him what he thinks when he sees today's players driving home with pantechnicons of cash to their spouses. He betrays no emotion. "I'm not a jealous person. Besides, you cannae turn the clock back. If a lot of them are getting 30 grand a week, then good luck to them. I was born at the wrang time, but I'm not the only person "
You don't brood, then?
"About thae times? No, I don't."
I dig deeper and put it to him that if he hadn't been blessed with such a placid personality, he might have been tempted to end it all. "I know what you're saying. I used to get like that sometimes while driving in the taxi. But dinnae put that bit doon."
Come on, George. Such an admission is not going to do you any harm.
"Oh, all right. Maybe, when I was driving, I would say to myself: Christ Almighty! I played for Celtic, appeared in five Scottish Cup finals, won four league medals and played in four League Cup finals, and won two Scotland caps. I'm still a very famous person, yet here I am driving a taxi.' "See if I thought about it seriously, I might have parked the car and ran away from it all, eh? I used to think about those things when I was driving, but I've no' done it for a long time now. Months."
George Connelly, in essence, was finished when he walked out of Celtic for the last time. He went to live with one of his brothers, played perfunctorily for Falkirk for three months, with Stein once coming to his door and making an abortive attempt to pave the way for another return. Then he disappeared into the quicksand of junior football, if only to keep his weight under control.
Contrary to popular belief, he did not nurse hatred for the game, nor for the people who played it professionally. Neither did he possess some deep-rooted psychological fear of its effect on him. He left because some components in his private life had broken down.
The storm outside, meanwhile, seems to have abated, if only temporarily, and the ever solicitous Connelly – he has even made the tea – prepares to escort me back to my car. There is one thing left to say.
"Sometimes I sit here and think: I'm 57. Where have the last 30 years of my life gone?' But am I happy with my life? Oh, yeah, I'm happy OK. Sure, I'm doing nothing the now but I'm loving it. Loving it. I'm not envious of anybody. I'm happier now than I've been for years. Content within myself."
One day, perhaps, the whole, unexpurgated version of the George Connelly story will come tumbling out into the public domain. We have, in all probability, only touched the extremities of the iceberg today. But, remember, this is some iceberg and, as Stein was fond of saying, some man.