Aidan Smith: Heavenly moments with icons blighted by demon

As some of you have noticed and like to point out, I’m not a time-served football journalist (just a time-served paying fan). The number of bona fide legends I’ve met, therefore, can by counted on one and a half hands. But here’s an odd thing: almost all of them were blighted by the bevvy.

As a cub reporter on the Dalkeith Advertiser I once volunteered for a half-day shift on sister title the Leith Gazette so I could cover the official opening of a tyre-and-exhaust centre by George Best, then starring intermittently for Hibs. The ribbon-cutting was to be at 11am on a Saturday morning – I’ll never forget this because he was due to play against Celtic four hours later, a feat which seemed impossible. He was lovely and generous with his time but tired and exhausted himself – and still smashed from the night before (at least I assume it was the night before). He made it onto the park, albeit for only 17 minutes – more than enough time to score a great goal and make a fool of Roy Aitken.

Jim Baxter asked for payment for his interview. He’d just had his liver transplants and – the “hook” for my piece – a sober New Year was looming for the first time in his adult life. This was for a tabloid so the photographer needed an impactful shot. “Any booze in the house, Jim?” “Oh aye,” he said, producing a formidable stash and lining up at least a dozen bottles on the coffee-table – the booze which of course he wouldn’t be enjoying come Hogmanay.

Generous isn’t a word I’d use to describe Jim that day. It was as if each reminisce had a monetary value and suddenly – Ker-ching! – the agreed quotes-for-cash tally had been reached. Then he kept phoning me for his money. The accountants’ sluggishness was a problem because he’d already spent it on home improvements. I sympathised, but one particularly exasperated call went like this: “C***! Where’s my kitchen?!”

Brian Clough – with his wife and one of his grandsons present – was on best behaviour. He addressed me as “Young man” and I contemplated retiring, happy, there and then. But that would have meant missing out on meeting Socrates, who’s currently in and out of hospital in Brazil after admitting to a drink problem. I was glad to have encountered all those other legends – yes, there was even some warped pleasure to be had from the Baxter abuse – and now of course they’re no longer with us. But maybe my night with the captain of the greatest Brazil team never to win the World Cup just about edges it. Earlier, bogglingly, Socrates had been at Tower Bank Primary School in Portobello, supposedly to pass on some of his wondrous skills. Tragi-comically, his time was monopolised by journalists whose urgent, indeed only, inquiry concerned the poor form of countryman Juninho, then at Celtic. I got my one-to-one time with him at an uptown Edinburgh bar and we chatted about medicine, politics, theatre, you name it. Or rather he talked – of his just-performed debut stage play, of his newspaper musings on current affairs, of being a qualified doctor who smokes like a lum – and I hung on every word.

Of course we talked about football, the ’82 World Cup in Spain, which ended for him with one of the all-time great games – Brazil 2, Italy 3 – which had been “like achieving the conquest of the most beautiful woman in the world, but then being unable to do what matters with her”. Actually, it wasn’t me who extracted that quote from him, a classic of its kind. But I was very happy to come away, not with his sneering at David Narey’s toe-poke against Brazil earlier in the tournament, but his admiration. “To hit with the toe is bico – a classic play,” he told me.

Just about the only thing we didn’t talk about was booze. We consumed but didn’t discuss. Not as many bottles of San Miguel as Willie Miller remembers Socrates downing to provide a urine sample – an incredible 24 – but enough of them. Footballers could drink back then. Well, they probably couldn’t, but Socrates did. He had a philosophy that was all his own. Had and still has. I wish him well.