Profile on Alastair Johnston: Bluenose with the golden touch

In his Florida garage, the number plates of his two cars read RFC1 and 1BROX

ALASTAIR Johnston has three loves: golf, Rangers and making money. The 61-year-old Glaswegian has spent the past 37 years concentrating on the golf as a key player in Mark McCormack's all-pervasive behemoth agency International Management Group. Now, following his close friend Sir David Murray's decision to step down as chairman of Rangers, the famously bluenosed businessman has an opportunity to indulge his other sporting passion. Making money, though, remains a constant.

For many men, taking on the chairmanship of an institution such as Rangers Football Club would be a daunting proposition. Yet Johnston is not most men. At one stage, shortly after he had been named as the new head of the 1.4 billion IMG after McCormack's death in 2004, he was identified by Golf Digest magazine as the fourth most powerful man in golf. While the Ibrox role brings an intensity and profile that even golf's top jobs cannot rival, Johnston has been a sporting master of the universe for so long that he has little doubt he will rise to the challenge.

"If I get a knock, it's that I'm a little arrogant, but that is IMG in general and comes with the territory," he said when he first became a Rangers board member in 2004. "I'm very capable of being a jerk or an asshole, but I know that you don't have to be that way to make a lot of money, Arnold Palmer taught me that. I'd like to think that my reputation is one of honesty and candour, and I'd also like to think that my 30 years of sports experience would be acceptable to Rangers."

The champions could certainly do with some of his commercial acumen, not to mention the brass neck and youthful chutzpah with which the young Johnston engineered his own career breakthrough 41 years ago. Back in 1968, the year after Celtic won the European Cup and the year in which Rangers lost to Bayern Munich in the final of the Cup Winners Cup, the young accountancy student from Strathclyde University managed to get a job as a steward at the Open at Carnoustie and succeeded in blagging an interview with McCormack. Already a huge figure in golf, the Englishman was so impressed and amused by Johnston's sheer gall that he took the young Scot under his wing.

Despite the opposition of his father, who thought a career in sports promotion was no career at all, the rest, as they say, is history. After a career spent dealing with the agency's star clients such as Michael Schumacher, Bjorn Borg, Jackie Stewart, Tiger Woods and tennis's Williams sisters, the highly ambitious Johnston rose to head up IMG's hugely profitable golf division, establishing himself as McCormack's chosen successor before eventually being sidelined in a boardroom putsch shortly after his mentor's death.

These days, the immaculately dressed Johnston certainly has the look of the right man for these straitened times. Rangers, for so long under Murray sustained by pipe dreams of forming part of a European league or being admitted to the English Premier League, now have little choice but to cut their cloth to suit a league where television revenues are minimal. With the Ibrox club carrying a reported 30 million debt, manager Walter Smith is having to cut the size of his squad by a quarter, while the summer transfer window looks certain to close without a signing of any description for the first time in many years.

If the canny, hard-headed accountant in Johnston endorses "the end of the spend, spend, spend" era, then he at least can offer some pearls of commercial wisdom thanks to his decades of experience of negotiating TV rights for IMG, a company that got rich and bloated by maximising television revenue, primarily in golf, but which, by the time he left it, also represented 50 football players and 35 national teams. If he stays true to form and employs the same hard-nosed tactics that saw IMG prosper in golf, then look for ructions as Rangers combine commercially with Celtic to ram home their advantage as the dominant players in the Scottish football market.

Johnston knows all about extracting maximum value, and he attained near-legendary status when he negotiated the $60m Nike sponsorship of a little-known young golfer called Tiger Woods. Who knows, after managing to get reclusive Caribbean-based speculator Joe Lewis to invest 40m and South African-based Scot Dave King to invest 20m during the good years, Johnston may even be able to use his undoubted negotiating skills to finally find someone to buy Murray's 90 per cent stake in the club, for which the steel and property magnate is understood to want 50m.

If the love affair between Murray and some sections of the Rangers support is in danger of turning sour, despite Murray's unrivalled track record, at least the fans will see someone they can relate to in Johnston. After all, in the garage of his Orlando holiday home in the exclusive Isleworth gated community he shares with his wife, two step-daughters and son, not to mention A-listers such as Tiger Woods, Shaquille O'Neal and Wesley Snipes, the number plates of his two cars read RFC1 and 1BROX. He has also sunk 1m of his own money into the club and been at pains to establish his credentials by talking of the days when his uncle used to take him to see the Rangers team containing Jim Baxter and Willie Henderson; of his hero worship of John Greig; of his trauma of living in Partick as Celtic claimed nine-in-a-row.

"Rangers fans, and I'm one of them, don't have a high degree of patience because they've become used to success over the past 120 years or so," he said. "Rangers' first agenda is to be the champions of Scotland and win every domestic trophy."

Whether or not Johnston can deliver those trophies and be as successful with Rangers as he was with IMG remains to be seen, but what is not in doubt is that the arch-networker will enlist every one of his powerful friends and clients, as he showed when he bought Palmer some Rangers shares as a birthday present and turned the golfing icon into an honorary bluenose.

Not that there was ever any chance of Johnston forgetting his attachment to golf. Were St Andrews not hosting the 150th anniversary of the Open next year, or Gleneagles not hosting the 2014 Ryder Cup, the enthusiastic 18-handicapper would still have plenty of reminders, thanks to his collection of 13,000 golf books, which is growing at the rate of 600 to 700 a year and which includes the 1457 Act of Parliament in which the king banned golf and a first edition of Thomas Mathieson's 1743 The Goff, the first book written about the sport.

True to form, even that collection is yielding unexpected rewards. Not only was he offered 100,000 for the Mathieson first edition, but he has written a highly successful Chronicles Of Golf with his father and even sells the limited edition of his collection's bibliography for over $1,000 a pop. Rangers fans will hope that he brings that Midas touch to a club badly in need of a sprinkling of gold dust.

Alastair Johnston's first client at IMG was South African Gary Player, with whom the Scot built up a close relationship.

• Johnston says the low point of his career was when IMG bought French club Strasbourg, who then went on to knock Rangers out of the 1997 UEFA Cup.

• Johnston's Rangers hero is John Greig. "He was the guy who epitomised Rangers for many of the years I was following them from the early 1960s and onwards."

• During David Murray's 21-year reign, the Ibrox club have won 14 SPL titles, including nine-in-a-row. He bought the club for 6 million in 1988.

• Before he became an avid collector of golf books, Johnston was an obsessive stamp collector.

• Johnston doesn't believe Rangers can ever compete in Europe. "Because they are playing in Scottish football, Rangers and Celtic can't compete against the Real Madrids, Manchester Uniteds and AC Milans."

• Johnston also had film clients when at IMG, including Liz Hurley, above.