SIFTING between the fact and fiction which shroud the memory of Davie Cooper will never seem more difficult than at Hampden Park tomorrow. The CIS Cup final between Rangers and Motherwell, two of Cooper's former clubs, is being played in his memory, with Cooper's image embossed on each match ticket and his name embroidered on the teams' shirts.
It is a fitting memorial to a special footballer, who died 10 years ago this week. More remarkable, though, amid the media and marketing frenzy surrounding the game, is the way the memory of Cooper's career has become lodged halfway between legend and myth.
In recent days it hasn't done to recall Cooper as anything other than a genius or a magician. On one radio station this week a pundit even referred to Cooper as "one of the finest European players of his time".
Infamously, 15 years ago, when a Scottish Television crew bumped into Ruud Gullit, then in his prime, and Gullit proceeded to mention Cooper in a favourable light, the comment triggered a minor euphoria and has been repeatedly quoted since.
One problem with the Davie Cooper legend is that, as with many public personalities who die young and become subject to mythology, it doesn't wholly square with the facts of his career. For a so-called "genius", you would certainly have expected Cooper, who died at 39, to have won more than his 22 international caps.
Today it is also hard to believe that Cooper was booed at Ibrox during matches when his Rangers career was in a trough.
The Cooper legacy is a complicated treasure. "Davie was depressed for quite a few years about his career, " said Gordon Smith, the former Rangers player and now BBC broadcaster, yesterday. "In a way, the culture of Scottish football didn't just not suit him, but you could argue it actively went against him. Back then, and possibly still today, our culture celebrated 'destructive' football almost more than the creative game, and Davie suffered because of it. That may explain why he didn't achieve as much as he might have."
As well as Cooper's modest haul of caps, certainly for a genius, you also wouldn't know, hearing of that genius today, that he endured periods of being unable to hold down a firstteam place at Rangers, which only fuelled his depression. To take just one episode: at Ibrox in season 1980-81, when Cooper was 25 and supposedly in his prime, he started only six of Rangers' next 31 games from mid-October.
The fact that Cooper toiled for periods in his 12-year Rangers career has always convinced Tam Cowan, the Motherwell fan of exegetical renown, that Cooper showcased his very best before the Fir Park faithful, despite not signing for Motherwell until the age of 33. It is an observation with which Gordon Smith agrees, and there is further, intriguing evidence about Cooper's earlier, more fitful career.
Robert McElroy, the football historian, recalls the time when his magazine, The Rangers Historian, produced an edition in 1989 which, with a picture of Cooper on its front cover, bore the headline: Davie Cooper - The Player of the 1980s.
"I remember I got more than one response to that particular edition, " recalls McElroy. "One Rangers supporter came up to me and said, "Davie Cooper, our player of the 1980s! Are you kidding?' It just seemed to sum up Cooper as a player.
There were a lot of wasted years."
John Greig, the Rangers manager between 1978 and 1983, has subsequently been anointed by history as one of the seminal figures in the legend that is Cooper. Greig didn't always fancy the talented, brooding footballer, believing Cooper to be lazy and tactically ill-disciplined on the pitch. This resulted in Greig frequently omitting Cooper from his Rangers teams.
As the 10th anniversary of Cooper's death approaches next week, that issue between Cooper and Greig echoes. On Saturday a tribute dinner in Cooper's memory in Glasgow has been organised, and at least one member of Cooper's family has requested that Greig should not be invited.
Representing one of a series of dips in Cooper's career, some believe that his clashes with Greig were predictable from the start.
"I remember one match very clearly from Cooper's first season at Rangers in 1977-78, " says McElroy.
"At the time, John Greig was nearing the end of his Rangers career, while Cooper was just starting his, and they were playing together on the left. As I looked over, Greig was angrily shouting and shaking his fist at Cooper, and I've always remembered Davie's response. He just looked at Greig and shrugged.
"They had totally different attitudes. Greig, you could argue, was one of the hardest-working footballers ever, while, whatever great things we'd like to say of Cooper, 'hard worker'wouldn't be among them. When Greig stepped up to become Rangers manager the following season, you could predict that their relationship would be difficult.
"When Jock Wallace left Rangers to make way for Greig, Wallace said, 'there are some Rangers players here that Greig won't fancy, ' and you knew he was talking about Cooper."
The "genius" of Cooper, rightly or wrongly, seems elusive on the chart of his Rangers career, and Greig was not always in the wrong.
For instance, Greig had a memorable opening season as Rangers manager in 1978-79, during which the club appeared almost swashbuckling in the European Cup, famously evicting Juventus and PSV Eindhoven on their way to losing narrowly to Cologne in the quarter-finals. Greig was rightly praised for the astuteness of his team's play in that campaign.
Yet, over the six matches, he selected Cooper just once, for the home game against Cologne. Indeed, in an earlier round, having drawn 0-0 at home against PSV, Greig chose to omit Cooper once more from the second leg, a match Rangers famously won 3-2 in Eindhoven, and which the club's supporters still talk about today.
Gordon Smith insists that, great player though Cooper was, his potential for genius, in the traditional football sense, went sorely unfulfilled.
"Davie was down about it a lot of the time, " says Smith. "I remember when I left Rangers in 1980 to sign for Brighton, their manager, Alan Mullery, had actually wanted to sign both me and Davie, but was told he could only take one of us, and he chose me. I still remember Davie's reaction. He was sick about it. He said to me: 'You're really lucky. I wish I could go.'At the time his club career just wasn't working for him."
Tam Cowan remains euphoric to this day about Cooper's late renaissance at Motherwell in 1989, and Smith agrees that, maybe only at Motherwell, at the age of 33, did Cooper truly f lourish.
"Tommy McLean made him a playmaker at Motherwell, which is what Davie really was, " says Smith. "At Rangers they'd told him, 'you're a wide player, ' whereas at Motherwell he was given a free role. As I say, until that point, because of the culture of Scottish football, Davie had suffered. It would have been different had he played on the continent."
Cowan, like a few people, ruthlessly cuts through the mythical elements of the Cooper legacy.
"My God, he was fantastic for us, " he says. "Most Motherwell fans will tell you that 'Coop' was right up there beside legends like Willie Pettigrew and Joe Wark and, for me, he was probably the best.
"It's funny, though. Davie f lourished at Motherwell because there was no pressure on him. There were no expectations, no boo-boys around him. The weight on his shoulders just disappeared. He hardly missed a game for us.
I still say that it was Motherwell, not Rangers, which saw the best of Davie Cooper. The guy was a genius."
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