It is amazing how news of the death of an ageing footballer stirs memories which seem so fresh and vivid.
In fact, they turn out to be decades old.
Johnny Hamilton, once of Hibs and Rangers, died five days ago. The news triggered a mental reel-to-reel in my mind of 1970s football in Scotland, when crowds gathered on concrete slopes, and players played at half the pace they do today, exhibiting that distinct 1970s currency called “flair”.
Hamilton was an old footballer, but certainly not an old man. His death at 66 seems painfully premature and sends a shoot of anxiety over how quickly time passes.
His picture occasionally appeared on the front cover of the Rangers matchday programme, which used to cost 5p, was published in black and white with a smudge of blue through it, and became quickly dog-eared. To those who have such programmes today, they seem flimsy productions, but are priceless.
I first saw Hamilton when I was 9-years-old. He was wearing a Hibs shirt in a pulsating Drybrough Cup final against Celtic. Peering down from the Olympian heights of the old North Stand at Hampden, I can’t claim to have taken in much detail of the match, except to say that some captivating chaos was breaking out before my child’s eyes.
Hibs went 3-0 up that day. I remember skilful players, with long tresses of hair billowing in the wind behind them, darting here and there. A Celtic team of Billy McNeill, George Connelly, Jimmy Johnstone and Kenny Dalglish hauled the game back to 3-3 before Hibs swept to victory in extra time.
At least, this is how the newspapers of the day reported it.
It was a period when Hibs and Celtic traded in some memorable cup final tussles, and when Eddie Turnbull had sufficient brilliance about him to trouble and even goad the seemingly peerless Jock Stein.
“Stein knew I had the measure of him,” Turnbull, now old and mellowed, told me when I chatted with him a few years before his death in 2011. There had been no love lost between the two.
And amid it all was this mysterious Hibs player, of long hair and dark, handsome looks, by the name of Johnny Hamilton.
Doubtless there was some behind the scenes explanation to it all – Turnbull was a fire-breathing tyrant to match the best of them – but it was a total mystery to the football-watching public when Hibs released the talented Hamilton in the spring of 1973.
The mystery of that was only deepened when Hamilton, by no means a grafter, went on to secure an influential berth in Jock Wallace’s first treble-winning Rangers team of the 1975-76 season.
Wallace detested shirkers and slackers, and Hamilton’s worldview most certainly was not industrious.
But in that 1975-76 season he persuaded Wallace by other means – with his poise over the ball, his articulate passing and his understanding of the value of possession – to be retained in the Rangers team.
I don’t have a clue how tall Hamilton was. But from up there on the concrete slopes he appeared hunched, centred, cultivated, and with a gracefulness about him whenever the ball arrived at his feet.
Maybe Rangers changed Hamilton as a player. At Hibs he had seemed more tearaway and attack-minded. That said, he was a younger stripling in his early days at Easter Road. At Ibrox, Hamilton, for two or three seasons at least, was a thoughtful and creative Rangers midfielder.
Talk of him ever playing for Scotland seemed far-fetched – but that was then. Scotland teemed with Asa Hartfords and Don Massons and Alfie Conns, and they all came and went in the dark blue. Back in Glasgow, Hamilton was satisfied with his lot, playing for Rangers and for one of the greatest managers in the club’s history.
It’s all gone now, that age of macaroon bars and spearmint chewing gum being sold from cinema-style usherette trays outside our football grounds.
In Hamilton’s day at Rangers the three-wheeled invalid cars would purr round the oval perimeter track of the pitch, and a quaint half-time results service was offered which you could only divine via a mysterious lettering system in your match programme.
The grass was a verdant green in August and the smell around the stadium was tremendous, it intoxicated you.
It is a long lost world now, some of it, not all of it, for the better. What we did have back then were fleeting craftsmen in our game – by no means world superstars – of whom Johnny Hamilton was one.
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