AS Scotland's football team prepares for the global limelight in Paris next week, privileged by the luck of the draw to open the World Cup in a match against the great Brazilians, I paid a rather special visit to the spiritual home of Scottish football which is, of course, Hampden Park.

Since I was a child, the very

name has spun a kind of magic because of tales I heard from older men. There were, of course, two earlier Hampdens in the Mount Florida district of Glasgow before that great institution of Queen's Park FC opened its third and

finest in 1903. It became the most famous football stadium in the world, scene of some classic encounters between Scotland

and England.

On two Saturdays in the spring of 1937, it established British crowd records which will almost certainly stand forever. Both the Scotland-England game and the Scottish Cup Final between Celtic and Aberdeen drew close on 150,000, with the kind of safety problems which will never again be allowed.

So, Hampden stirred my young imagination, even though I had never been there, and who knows what part it played in that early ambition to be a journalist? Because there was only one kind of journalist I wanted to be and that was in the sports department.

I followed every word of big names on the sports pages: Tommy Muirhead, Jack Harkness, Andy Cunningham, Willie Gallagher (Waverley), and of course, that Prince of the Pun, the inimitable R E Kingsley, better known as Rex of the Sunday Mail.These were heroes and when I was finally allowed to venture from Aberdeenshire to the great occasions in Glasgow I was

as anxious to see the writers as

the footballers.

That first visit to Hampden was for the Victory International

of 1946, when we annihilated England by a last-minute goal from Jimmy Delaney. At last the war had been won!

A year later it was Aberdeen's turn to win the Scottish Cup for the very first time and Hampden was absorbed into my psyche for ever.

I took my children to matches through the seventies and eighties. In 1976 they were within touching distance of the great Franz Beckenbauer when he mounted the steps to collect the European Cup for

Bayern Munich after beating St

Etienne of France.

Two years later we joined that jamboree of insanity when all Scotland, it seemed, turned out, not to see a football match but merely to wave ''cheerio'' to Ally MacLeod and his World Cup hopefuls as they drove round the track in their bus before heading for the airport. Oh, such pride before a fall!

What I did not realise was that

the fascination which had hooked me as a boy was playing similar tricks on my offspring. Not only would all three sons follow my career but two of them would become sports journalists.

In the mysterious workings of fate, I veered towards feature writing which, fortuitously, brought me into contact with sporting heroes from Muhammed Ali to Pele and Stanley Matthews. But I was never a sports journalist. That fantasy was played out through my children, Geoffrey landing at the BBC and Keith becoming editor of the football weekly First Down, based in London.

So what was I doing at Hampden last Sunday? Well, I was there for a splendid party in which 8000 people gathered in the adjoining enclosure of Lesser Hampden, drank beer, ate hamburgers, and swayed to a first-class jazz band. We were football supporters but, needless to say, not of the familiar variety. Can you imagine that kind of happy atmosphere within the rivalries of the Scottish game?

No, this was American football, which draws whole families to its pre-match parties, providing entertainment for the kids. The Scottish Claymores were playing Frankfurt in the European league. There was even a warm welcome for the German supporters, who came in their own brand of kilt.

So it was all good humour - and not a snarl in sight. And when three o'clock approached, we filtered towards Hampden, or what is available of it. The old stadium fell on hard times so they pulled it down. But now a magnificent new Hampden is rising from the ashes and, by this time next year, it will be ready to house the Scottish Cup Final, yielding to none in the top echelons of world football.

Since the American game is Keith's speciality, he was up from London and Geoffrey was there, too. We listened to the rebirth of the Hampden Roar and took pride in the fact that Sky Television was beaming all this into the United States. We stood recalling their boyhood visits here and the fact that they will both be in Paris next week, reporting on Scotland's big day.

The old man will just watch it

on television and feel glad that

the conveyor belt of life keeps grinding along.