Jock Stein – “Football man other icons revere”

Hugh McIlvaney 2006 tribute to Jock Stein

Those of us who knew Jock Stein don’t need anniversaries to trigger memories of him. He is capable of coming into our minds at any moment, vivid and warm, mischievous and profound, a presence larger and more vibrant than many of theliving around us. He could be ferociously stern, and sometimes susceptible to melancholy, but stories about him are almost always attended by laughter, often gales of it. No football anecdotes — not even the glorious archive bequeathed by Bill Shankly, a fellow miner from what used to be the southwest Scotland coalfield — can capture more of the joyful magic with which a ball game and its rough-hewn mythology once brightened working-class life, for both those who played and those who only watched. Relating the two groups came naturally to Stein, who worked underground until he was 27 and once told me he knew when he left the pits that “wherever I went, whatever work I did, I’d never be alongside better men”.

He was belatedly becoming a full-time sportsman and setting off on a career that would have its true fulfilment in management at Celtic, where myriad achievements that were little short of miraculous established him quite simply, undeniably in my book, as one of the greatest football men who ever lived. Shankly revered him, and so does Sir Alex Ferguson, who recognises the Big Man as key mentor in his own monumental career. Nobody ever read football or footballers more perceptively than Stein, or brought greater inspiration to devising ways of winning the most competitive matches. And nobody ever made the game and its associated activities more enjoyable. Limited education could not obscure the scope of his intelligence or the power of his intellect.

As I said, remembering Jock Stein doesn’t require anniversaries but there had to be special thoughts of him yesterday, when the calendar showed us it was precisely 20 years since the Tuesday night when he died in a room deep under the main stand at Ninian Park, Cardiff, after collapsing on the touchline at a Wales-Scotland World Cup qualifying match. Jock didn’t drink and as I reached for a glass to toast him last night, I was sure I could hear a familiar, growling voice. “Behave yersel’,” it was saying.

(Source: The Sunday Times)

---