How a Celtic fan helped Rangers' bid to become like Real Madrid

The story of how Rangers branched out into basketball in a bid to become a mult-sport behemoth like Real Madrid will be broadcast on BBC Scotland on Friday evening.

Celtic fan Tony McDaid was part of Rangers Basketball Club in the late 1980s.

The short film – part of the first episode of the new season of A View From The Terrace – details how Rangers were all set to lead Scotland's basketball revolution in the late eighties with Tony McDaid, a Celtic supporter, a key part of the team.

Former Rangers owner Lawrence Marlborough and chairman David Holmes set up Rangers Basketball Club in 1988, signing Butch Hayes, a former roommate of Michael Jordan at the Chicago Bulls, and Alan Cunningham, a Harlem Globetrotter, while Kevin Cadle, a legendary figure in British basketball, was appointed head coach.

The club enjoyed a glorious debut season, winning a treble including the British Basketball League and the Carlsberg Champions Trophy – thanks in part to captain Jim Morrison, a die-hard Rangers fan, and his Celtic-supporting team-mate McDaid.

During the film, McDaid reveals how he kept his new role secret from family and friends, while Morrison describes leading Rangers out in the Bernabeu to face Real Madrid in the second round of the 1988-89 FIBA European Cup Winners’ Cup, as a ‘dream come true’.

The film offers covers the demise of the team after multi-millionaire David Murray bought the football club. Despite being a huge basketball fan and a major investor in Scottish basketball for years, he decided to divert the £500,000 it would take to fund the basketball team towards signing Mark Walters from Aston Villa.

Jordan Laird, Executive Producer of A View From the Terrace and co-founder of Studio Something, said: “After just one glorious season, the club folded and was consigned to history, forever a quirk of Scottish footballing history.

“This is exactly the type of story we love to tell on the show, everyday Scottish football fans in stranger than fiction tales that make our game class.

“While it might be thought the show doesn’t focus on the ‘big two’, in reality we just follow where the story is, if the story needs to be told we’ll tell it regardless of the size of the club, it just so happens on this occasion we’ve gone right down the rabbit hole with two giants of our game.

“This short documentary is the result of going two footed into the incredible backstory of a truly fascinating tale that at the heart is about a fan getting to live his dream and asks would you pull on your most bitter rivals jersey for yours?”

A View From The Terrace will be shown on BBC Scotland on Friday, September 29 at 10.30pm. Episodes are also available on BBC iPlayer.