Lion still

Oh what joy on a late summer’s day to be treated to a guided tour by Bertie Auld. Not of Glasgow, not really of his native Maryhill – just the bit we can see from the front step of his old tenement home at 95 Panmure Street, which turns out to be a whole world. “When folk ask me what my education was I tell them: ‘This, here. This place and its people, all of them right characters.’ I was born through that windae there, son, five of us to the one room. And when my old man died, God rest his soul, we couldn’t help noticing that his occupation on our birth certificates was different each time. Yes, the university of adversity... ”

The Lisbon Lion points to an old works entrance – his father had a stint there – which served as a goalmouth for street kickabouts, then across to Partick Thistle’s Firhill: “Ten minutes from the end we’d pick up our tennis ball and rush down for the opening of the gates.” He reels of his neighbours, the Butterleys and the Mucklewees: “Always, if our folks were out, we’d get jam pieces passed through to us.” And being Bertie, he doesn’t just point with his finger but also that famously jutting cartoon chin, one the great Dudley D Watkins himself couldn’t have improved upon.

Auld was at No 95 when I suggested meeting up for a natter, not about Lisbon this time but the Old Firm, who reconvene tomorrow. A charity has spruced up the block for the young homeless and its most famous former occupant was invited to the re-opening. He’s back again today because one trip down memory lane isn’t enough, not when you’re Bertie and you love reminiscing and Celtic fans in far-off Toronto will pay your fare to listen to your tales, as happened recently.

“Over there used to be the pawnbroker’s. I took along a suit once, and a bed-shirt a neighbour had given me. I was glad the place had these cubicles for a wee bit of privacy – like at confession, ha-ha – because I was a player by then. I still got recognised, and when the old boy behind the counter saw the shirt was soiled, I was dead embarrassed. ‘Ten shillings for the jaikit and the breeks,’ he said, ‘and two bob for the shirt and the shite.’

“And see that maroon-coloured shop?” Hand and chin are pointing to the bottom of Panmure Street. “When Celtic sold me to Birmingham City and I wasn’t going to be around to provide as much, I bought it for my maw for 550 quid.” He’d return to Parkhead, of course: older, wiser, less harem-scarem but still fundamentally a rapscallion, a midfielder brought in from the wing to form a silk-and-steel double-act with Bobby Murdoch – and to do his bit for immortality.

Now we’re at a garage, run by his son Robert. Auld wants the interview to happen here as a “wee boost” for the business. But it’s no panel-beating workshop, rather a Mercedes show room and Robert is the principal dealer. Bertie – nicknamed “Ten-thirty” by Jimmy Johnstone – checks the price of a gull-winged job. “£149,993 - I don’t think I’ve got that on me. Tell you what: the cheque you we were going to give me for this interview – just write it out to my laddie.” We’re not paying for the interview, but I’ve stumped up for alleged comedians who’ve entertained me less. What a card.

And what a snappily-dressed card. Auld is as dapper as you’d expect a celebrity Glaswegian of his vintage to be. He’s 73, with that fine head of hair still intact, and I’m particularly impressed by his patent black pointed loafers – what in Parliamo Glasgow you’d call a “rerr perr” – which twinkle on the tiled showroom floor as he re-tells the story about the pawnbroker, adding that the transaction was to raise the funds for a tank of petrol for his very first motor, a Vauxhall Velux. The salesmen love his patter, that big daft grin, and another yarn about hard times in Maryhill, such as the thrilling day when new neighbours arrived with a ball’s rubber inner. “At last we could blow up our leather outsider and play a proper game.”

So anyway, finally, about bloody time: the Old Firm. Does he remember his debut in the fixture? “Oh aye, I’d been out on loan at Dumbarton when Mr [Jimmy] McGrory called me back: ‘You’re playing at Ibrox on Saturday.’ Me, just 18, recently of Boghead, up against big Corky [George] Young, Scotland captain and icon – what a fantastic baptism. It was the Glasgow Cup but when you belong to this city there are no meaningless Old Firm games. Celtic and Rangers could be playing for a china cup, or it could be just toe-to-toe spitting – the people would come. I seem to remember Bobby Shearer kicking me up in the air and Harold Davis volleying me on the way back down and us losing 1-0.

In his second, glistening spell at Celtic his opponents in the light blue were John Greig, Dave Smith and Kai Johansen – scorer of a stupendous 1966 Scottish Cup-winning goal against Celtic that Auld can still scarcely comprehend – and they were no less uncompromising. “I remember Greigy in the tunnel at Ibrox wanting to know what our win bonus was. ‘Three quid.’ He laughed because they were on six quid. ‘Aye,’ I said, ‘but our three’s guaranteed.’ The bonuses weren’t much, so for 90 minutes my attitude was: ‘That lot are trying to take money from my kids and my maw.’ I’m sure the Rangers guys thought the same.” The bonus for lifting the European Cup in 1967, by the way, was £1500 per man – “but it was taxed so really 900”.

Auld still loves Celtic v Rangers but despaired at the mayhem the fixture generated last season and wonders how the multi-cultural millionaires who engage in it now can possibly enjoy the level of banter generated by Bertie and his home-grown contemporaries. “The humour’s missing from the Old Firm now, I think. When you enjoy something you must express it. One of the ways you can do that is with a grin, and with a chin like mine’s you can’t go wrong! One time, Bobby Shearer had booted me again and I said: ‘Do you know there’s a ball on the park.’ He said: ‘You mean we get one of them as well?’ Willie Henderson was awfie quick-witted. And ‘Tiny’ Wharton the ref always had a quip. ‘You dirty big bandit,’ I told him after we’d lost to Rangers, ‘you never gave us nothing today.’ ‘You’re wrong, Mr Auld. I awarded you a shy in your own half in the last minute.’

Bertie is like a cabaret turn, especially in those shoes. His most famous story, of course, concerns Lisbon, in the tunnel, eyeing up swarthy Inter Milan with their luxurious strips and luminous teeth and shattering their serenity with a blast of “Hail, hail, the Celts are here”. Does he ever get fed up telling it? “No, coming from where I did, I was incredibly lucky to have the life of a footballer. No player should forget this is such a privilege, and what the game means to the ordinary guy.”

There are a couple of times today, though, when he’s almost lost for words. In the first Old Firm game after Lisbon, back at Ibrox, Davie Provan broke his leg in a clash with Auld. It was a bad one. The snapping of bone, so they say, could be heard on the terraces. “Ach, I don’t like talking about that,” he says. “A 50-50 ball, just one of those things, but not great, no.” Weren’t Rangers angry enough with him to threaten to sue? “Yes, but I had the famous Glasgow lawyer Joe Beltrami representing me. The verdict: not Provan.”

In Jock Stein’s legendary team, Auld and Murdoch didn’t split the silk and steel duties; these were one-stop-shop midfielders. YouTube footage reminds us of how Bertie could pick out a pass in the Old Firm pell mell. But he was never self-conscious about playing with “a bit of fire ... you needed it; everyone did back then”. It was certainly needed in the 1967 World Club Championship against Argentina’s Racing. “What a bunch of cowards, spitting and stuff behind your back rather than man-to-man. So eventually I decked one of them.” He was sent off but refused to leave the pitch.

Yes, Bertie could, as they say, look after himself. Is it true he featured in Jackie Charlton’s little black book of unfinished business? “So they tell me!” In the 1970 European Cup semi-final against Charlton’s Leeds at Hampden (attendance: 135,000 “and then some”) Mick Jones warned him at half-time: “The Hunter’s coming to get you.” Bertie: “He meant Norman, of course, but I just acted daft. ‘Who, White Hunter off the telly?’” (The Africa-set jungle adventures dated from 1957, the year of Auld’s Old Firm debut). And then there was Nobby Stiles.

“I don’t like talking about that either,” he says, “but here’s what happened: it was my first game for Hibs and Nobby had been given a free to Middlesboro. It was a friendly but in my book there’s no such thing: the punters have paid to get in and the ball’s there to be won. Nobby clattered me, broke my collar bone. Our trainer Tom McNiven said: ‘You’ll have to come off.’ ‘Give me five minutes,’ I said, and I gave Nobby a wee short ball and, well, he had to be carted off on a stretcher. But he’d have done the same to me.” You might imagine that Auld will always and forever be a Stein disciple and you’d be right, but while Big Jock is rated the best manager he reckons Eddie Turnbull was the best coach.

In many cases, he stresses, foes became friends. “When I was manager of Partick Thistle Davie Provan ran the youth team. We’ve had such rare laughs, the pair of us, and he still phones me once a month.” In his Birmingham days Auld was sent off for slugging two Fulham players, one of them England captain Johnny Haynes, and when the latter came to live in Edinburgh he became a buddy as well. And when he and George Young became hoteliers near each other they used to meet up every Tuesday afternoon for a natter. “Corky was lovely, no evil or badness about him, a gentleman, as were so many of the Rangers guys I played against”.

Perhaps we should close the chapter on Bertie’s dark side – he’s a devoted family man, a grandfather, who met his wife Liz at the dancing at Glasgow’s Locarno and married her at the church next to Birmingham’s St Andrews – and give some more space to his hair, his flair and his hats. You never missed Auld in the 1960s with his jet-black barnet and he scored five against Airdie in Stein’s first game as Celtic manager and a double in the 1965 Scottish Cup win over Dunfermline, which began the trophy haul under Big Jock, also starting Auld’s penchant for fat cigars.

He donned a trilby to celebrate Lisbon and a fedora for the victory over Leeds and while Hibs fans may not remember his time as Easter Road boss as a golden period, they haven’t forgotten the gigantic bunnets. “My favourite was made of cashmere, a present from Celtic fans in the US. And I needed it when we played Manchester United in a friendly when our undersoil heating ensured we were the only show in town. Big Ron Atkinson had a herringbone coat draped to the floor with a fur collar. I think I matched him with my camelhair, velvet collar – and when Willie Jamieson scored our equaliser I flung the bunnet in the air and it hovered there like Sputnik.”

Entertainment. Hibs chairman Tom Hart – “Another lovely man” – wanted it that day, going to the bother of hiring Man U a private plane. Jock Stein demanded it of his players every game – “The last thing he said as we filed out of the changing-room was: ‘Go and entertain these people.’” And Auld swears by it. “I loved to entertain, just loved it. When Jock said that your chest would swell up all the way down the tunnel and by the time you got on the pitch you thought you were going to burst out of your shirt. Mind you, sometimes I took him too literally.

“Once against Clyde I decided I’d sit on the ball. After the game Jock lifted me off my feet by grabbing me round the throat.” That sounds a bit extreme, I say, and Bertie “Ten-thirty” Auld, emeritus professor of the university of adversity (Maryhill campus), flashes another of those trademark widescreen grins. “Aye well, I actually sat on it three times.”