Meet Hugh O'Neill, a Roman Catholic who signed for Rangers a decade before Johnston

Recent episodes of sectarian singing pale against O’Neill’s experience after arriving in Govan. The very fact he walked the corridors of Ibrox at all as a Rangers player more than a decade before the signing of Maurice Johnston is obscured by the former Celtic striker and his abortive Parkhead second coming, a singular moment in Scottish football history. “Rangers’ first Catholic,” went one of the morning papers on July 11, 1989.

Yet, in spirit – at least as far as openness is concerned – that dubious accolade would belong to O’Neill. Of course, in the end he never kicked a first-team ball, his stint just six months long. But first to his arrival: from the Hartford Bicentennials of the old North American Soccer League [NASL], it was a curious case of timing and connections.

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“There were swirling rumours and innuendo – the spelling of my name,” O’Neill, now 64, recalls of the events surrounding his arrival in Glasgow. “Right at that time there was a riot at Aston Villa [during a friendly against Rangers] and the Scottish FA were really trying to do something to crack down on sectarianism. They were hell-bent on clubs, particularly Rangers, to change their policy. With me being an American Scot, I was probably the easier way out for them to show good faith – not that I didn’t show merit in my football – but the combination of the two was probably timely for both of us because I was looking to improve myself and carry on my footballing career and they were looking to make some concessions.”

O’Neill came from a Paisley family who had emigrated to a little town in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City, called Kearny. This wasn’t just any old town. It was Scots-dominated, a mill town with Scottish roots going back to the late 1800s. It had an equally long football history. Unfortunately, it was also saddled with the excess baggage of Scottish life as it inherited the dividing lines of religion and football.

“The press had sniffed around to find out where my family was from,” O’Neill explains. “My father was Paisley-born of Irish Catholic extraction and my mother was first Church of Scotland Protestant and her brothers were Rangers supporters. All my father’s family were Celtic supporters.

“And with the Kearny connection, it wasn’t as if I was blind and naive to any of it because it existed over on our side. The Irish Americans and the Scots Americans were the local versions of Rangers and Celtic. So I was raised with that, the community was like a ghetto because they would all associate with one another. Those things die hard. It was not like it was even a watered down version in Kearny. It’s a bit different now but in those days it wasn’t.”

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Before Rangers even entered the equation, though, O’Neill simply wanted a place where he could play. As glamorous as the NASL of the 1970s was, the season was pitifully short. O’Neill, not long out of the college game and approaching 22, wanted to develop. He needed games. So he asked the Bicentennials to find him a club. Rangers colossus Willie Waddell entered the fray owing to his links to William Cox, a director at the Bicentennials. Waddell had been the manager of Kilmarnock in the 1960s when Cox was involved in bringing over top sides from Europe to help promote a then-unpopular game in the US.

In a less-connected era, it was Santiago Formoso, O’Neill’s Bicentennials team-mate and childhood friend who grew up with him on Highland Avenue in Kearny, who broke the unlikely news to an unsuspecting O’Neill and his father.

“He came across to the house and he was almost frightened because he was bringing the news to my father and I that the club had found a team for me and it was in Scotland,” O’Neill recalls. “And immediately I got excited because I thought it was Celtic,” he continues, laughing. “And when he said it was Rangers my father said, ‘Oh, this has got to be a mistake’. Knowing what my name was and possible background, he said there’s no chance that they would let me into the team, never mind the dressing room.”

But take O’Neill Rangers did. Ibrox was familiar – he’d been there before, he recalls mischievously, “but not in that capacity”. He felt welcome for the most part and made friends in Davie Armour, Kenny Watson and Alex O’Hara.

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At junctures, though, hostility from fans crossed over into violence.

“It was brutal,” O’Neill says. But he understood why: “The Celtic supporters despise you because you signed for them and the Rangers supporters didn’t want you there. There was no winning.

“I did the best I could to stay out of the line of fire. People would spot you on the bus and then you’re more at risk. Sometimes there was some trouble, which we managed to get out of, which wasn’t always easy.

“Myself and even a couple of teammates were attacked in the streets a few times and on the bus once. Glasgow was violent in the ’70s.”

Although he was confined to the reserves, he chipped in with some goals and played almost all of the games available during his stint.

“Jock Wallace, the manager, had mentioned I had a lot of potential and promise,” O’Neill says. “It was probably difficult for me because I don’t know what was happening with the board or anything else. I felt at times I probably should have been in the first team or at least have been given an opportunity, but the time wasn’t right like it was for those who ended up being Catholic and playing for Rangers. From Jock Wallace’s standpoint, you’ve also got to keep in mind that up front, or just behind where Derek Johnstone played, Derek Parlane was the centre forward and was playing for Scotland. At that time Rangers had been dominant and had just won the treble. The first team had six internationalists. Tom Forsyth, Sandy Jardine, Johnstone, Parlane, Peter McCloy . . . in my position, I’m playing up front and that’s the competition, but I did play in the reserves.”

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The reserves secured the treble that year, O’Neill recalls, but he never got the chance to collect any medals. His father had suffered a heart attack back in the US, so he cut short his time and returned to the NASL. He did, however, gather one piece of regalia.

“I ended up with one of Derek Johnstone’s Scotland caps,” O’Neill says. “He was going to give it to one of the other fellas and someone said, ‘Give it to Wyatt’. On TV, Wyatt Earp was played by the American actor Hugh O’Brian. John Greig, instead of Hugh O’Neill, called me Hugh O’Brian, and from there to Wyatt because Wyatt Earp. So that was my nickname at Rangers.”

O’Neill was notably absent from the reserves for one fixture in particular: “I never played against Celtic. I don’t know why. And I shied away from invitations I had from Celtic supporters clubs. I had a friend from Kearny who was a Rangers supporter and his father was heavily involved with the Petershill juniors so I would go there. That was neutral ground for me.”

Back home in Kearny, once his pro career fizzled out, O’Neill might have been expected to turn out for the Kearny Irish side belonging to the town’s Irish American club. Instead, he wore the blue of the Kearny Scots. Like his time in Glasgow, he wouldn’t even play against the other green and white side of his affection, only here it was due to the fact that by the time O’Neill had come of age, the Irish’s senior side for which his father played in the 1950s had disbanded.

Kearny has changed. Many of the Scots and Irish have moved on. Today it’s predominantly Latin in hue. The Irish American club recently closed and its former members only keep its spirit alive at a local bar. The Scots American club survives as a more ecumenical place these days, says current president Andrew Pollock – like O’Neill a Celtic supporter raised Catholic with family roots in Paisley.

 O’Neill remains a member of the Kearny Celtic Supporters Club, reputedly the oldest of its kind not located in either the UK or Ireland. It’ll be in that guise he watches next weekend’s Old Firm clash, the original version, a game in any of its forms he probably never had a sniff of turning out in the first place