unforgiven

 

20 years on since the grizzly events surrounding Maurice Johnston’s signing for Rangers, JB Banal looks back in a spirit of reconciliation. After two decades of contemplation and reflection, he’d still like to string Johnston up to the ceiling by his nipples.

The announcement that Maurice Johnston had signed for Rangers was delivered from the Blue Room at Ibrox amidst an atmosphere of undisguised smugness from those assembled round the table.

Johnston (who sat throughout much of the press conference with his tongue literally embedded in his cheek), looked about as comfortable as a laboratory frog that’s been connected to the mains as he made his contribution to the afternoon’s proceedings: “I am absolutely thrilled”, he said, sounding absolutely petrified, adding, “My admiration for the club is huge,” which was something else he’d kept to himself up until that point.

It kept everything else off the front pages: war, famine, death, AIDs, recession, depression… all paled into insignificance in west central Scotland because Rangers Football Club had finally gone public on signing a player publicly recognised as a Catholic.

I put it that way because Maurice was a Catholic by the loosest possible definition. Transubstantiation, benediction, canon law… mention any of these to Maurice and his response would most probably be a slack-jawed vacant stare.

Tommy Burns’ autobiography had a whole chapter devoted to the importance of religion in his life. I’ve read every page of Johnston’s book more than once (that’s me paid for all my sins, incidentally). Throughout his booze-fuelled odyssey in pursuit of blondes not one mention is made of his faith or the sacraments. There isn’t a single reference to God in it. There’s a chapter called “Girls just want to have fun”, about his sexual conquests, and loads of space given over to his debauchery, but very little on the mystery of Faith.

His reputation as a “high-profile Roman Catholic” seems to have derived from the school he infrequently attended and an especially infamous League Cup final at Hampden. While playing for Celtic against Rangers Johnston was red-carded for head-butting an opponent and as he left the pitch he blessed himself.

Johnston wasn’t even the first Catholic to sign for Rangers. There were even three in the space of three years once, albeit the years in question were 1888-1891.

In the 20th Century two names spring less than readily to mind in Laurie Blyth and Don Kitchenbrand, although the latter pretty much renounced his religion and kept it all a big secret, ironically coming out of the Ibrox closet once again in the wake of Johnston’s press conference in the Blue Room.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of the Scottish public Johnston was a Catholic, and Pandora’s Box was now well and truly opened. It was safe at last to mention the ‘C’ word inside the Blue Room. It was alright now to acknowledge that Rangers had been practising sectarian discrimination as a signing policy but it was all going to be different from now on.

The year before Glasgow was set to assume the mantle of European City of Culture, it was going to be interesting to see how our cultured citizens would take the news.

The papers knew exactly where to get the most extreme reactions and posted their own Kate Adies to various sectors of the front.

Allan Laing for the Herald was on the spot at the nearest Rangers social club to Ibrox. “Everyone appeared to be speechless”, he wrote, “One official said, ‘Nobody wants to talk about it.’”

The Glasgow Evening Times had embedded Gordon Beattie in the Masonic Arms, a quaintly named hostelry in deepest Larkhall. His despatches captured the devastation as the locals reeled in shock and awe: “The signing of the ex-Celtic player has sent shock waves through the true blue fans in Larkhall… irate fans claim Rangers have turned their backs on their supporters … a member of the Larkhall Loyalists Supporters Club has burned his scarf in protest over the signing … ‘I felt sick when I heard about it, it’s terrible’… ‘This is a kick in the teeth to Larkhall.’”

The wife of a Rangers Supporters Club secretary from East Kilbride declared that she had been suffering from insomnia as a result of disturbing religious visions involving Johnston: “My blood is boiling. Is Mo Johnston going to run about Ibrox with his crucifix? I’ve though about nothing else all night.”

David Miller, General Secretary of the Rangers Supporters Association was peddling an equally hard line: “I never thought in my wildest dreams that they would sign him. Why him above all? It’s a sad day for Rangers. There will be a lot of people handing in their season tickets. I don’t want to see a Roman Catholic at Ibrox. Rangers have always stood for one thing and the biggest majority of the support have been brought up with the idea of a true blue Rangers team. I thought they would sign a Catholic eventually, perhaps in three or four years time, but someone from the continent.”

Perhaps Mr. Miller thought Catholics from the continent were a less virulent strain than the home grown variety.

Tom Shields was able to fill his Herald Diary with anecdotes from the Mermaid Bar. They included a remark from one Rangers supporter who seemed to be prone to a touch of hyperbole: “Who does Souness think he is? God? He has ruined all our lives!”

A few days later the Daily Record claimed a world exclusive under the headline “Death Threat To A Dog Named Mo”. The story breathlessly revealed that a wee woman in Dumbarton owned a mongrel dog, the eponymous ‘Mo’ of the headline, which had been the innocent victim of death threats from local neds, who had also threatened to break the poor creature’s legs.

There was less of a tone of fatwah about the response of the Celtic fans but there was a backlash nonetheless. We had not just been jilted - we had been on to a promise only to be stood up at Boots corner.

To many, Johnston was not a professional footballer offering his services to the highest bidder, but a Judas Escariot who had committed the ultimate act of betrayal.

A Celtic die hard was even forced to name his newly born quads Eenie, Meenie, Minie and Pat.

Among the “questions everybody is asking” in the Sunday Mail’s Mo Johnston dossier was the one that quite a few people were curious to find out the answer to, “Where will he live?” Johnston had actually stated in his book that he would sign for Rangers, but only if they paid him a million pounds and bought him Stirling castle to live in. The dossier compiler, Archie McKay, helpfully pointed out that Stirling castle wasn’t for sale, but he knew of a castle near Balquhidder that was. They even showed a picture of it. It looked like part of the Maginot Line. The only thing missing was a howitzer.

Another option was Graeme Souness’ house near Edinburgh, “with its high walls topped with razor wire and security cameras.”

At least Salman Rushdie only had the Muslims after him.

Although his address was a closely guarded secret, there were subtle clues for anyone who could fly a helicopter

These soundbites from the borderlands of reason might have sold a few papers, but the reality was that there was no massed revolutionary uprising. A crowd of around 70 was reported as having gathered outside the Ibrox front door and, despite being renowned for not having a predeliction for surrender, they dispersed passively when invited to do so by the police.

Rangers reported 30 calls on the day of the signing demanding a refund of their season ticket books. The callers were told refunds were not to be allowed under the circumstances, reminiscent of insurance claims refused on the grounds that the accident was an act of God – or even Graeme Souness.

The fact was that most of the Rangers supporters realised that their club had signed a good player and there were plenty waiting to take up the season tickets of those determined to throw theirs away. Negligible numbers of hard-liners stayed away but they came back sooner or later. Where else was there for them to go?

Of the main characters involved in the drama, Billy McNeill is the one who emerged with most credit. The initial approaches to return to Scotland had been made by Johnston and the player was the one who had made the running. McNeill, like the rest of us, must have been convinced that somebody who was willing to appear on national television announcing his return to Celtic had every intention of actually doing it. The manager had been undeservedly embarrassed by Johnston’s unexpected volte face, a despicable thing to do in the eyes of most objective observers.

The Celtic board, as so often in those days, emerged looking incompetent. They had refused to speak to Bill McMurdo on a point of principal and it backfired on them in spectacular fashion. Their misplaced idealism in releasing Johnston from his “legally binding” obligations was perceived by many Celtic supporters, already beginning to reel from an assortment of blows, as a weak and anachronistic response to the situation at a time when the world of the football movers and shakers was increasingly being dominated by a new breed of rapacious and single-minded club owners in the mould of Murray and Souness.

The spurious notion that the club’s non-payment of Johnston’s tax liability was behind his defection was probably a red herring, but the board were never exactly highly regarded in matters financial. It was easy to perceive penny-pinching at the root of it all, even though the truth is they were prepared to break the Scottish transfer record to buy the player in the first place.

Graeme Souness and David Murray were given the journalistic equivalent of a standing ovation in the editorials and it would be churlish not to acknowledge that they had made a bold move. But as far as the cynics among us were concerned, they couldn’t lose.

They had already signed a black player and a Jewish player and even the captain of England, so it was clearly just a matter of time before they delivered a Catholic. Considering the circumstances, Maurice Johnston is unlikely to have been the strategic objective – it all seems too spur of the moment for that - but he became available and from their point of view it was a brilliant publicity coup as well as a chance to embarrass the hoops.

At a time when they were ambitiously pursuing high profile participation in European competitions, with one stroke they had fended off any potentially embarrassing interventions from the sport’s governing bodies, allayed any lingering suspicions that might have been held by potential sponsors and, crucially for us, delivered a kick to the nethers of Celtic which took the club years to recover from, a fact that perhaps mollified some of the hardest of the Ibrox hard core.

The signing of Maurice Johnston made it clear to Rangers supporters that there were going to be more players who practised an erstwhile proscribed religion and it was suggested at the time that the likes of Murray and Souness would no longer pander to a narrow-minded bigoted element among the Rangers support. Yet, among other incidences of plus ca change in more recent years, players, like Jorg Albertz and Marco Negri, who have subsequently signed for Rangers, have been told not to bless themselves on the pitch.

Perhaps had the Maurice Johnston affair been conducted differently, and for less questionable motives, it might well have broadened the appeal of Rangers the way the appointment of Jock Stein as Celtic manager did for the Parkhead club back in the 60s.

In true revisionist style, Johnston may try to portray himself as being a self-possessed breaker down of ancient barriers of intolerance at Ibrox, but even at the time it was easy to see him as someone at the mercy of forces beyond his comprehension who were manipulating him for reasons he couldn’t really understand.

It’s difficult to imagine what good he could possibly have foreseen coming of his actions other than a healthy pay cheque at the end of it, although he was to spend a little over two years at Rangers before finally admitting that he had bitten off more than he could chew.

He had been pretty quiet during Glasgow derbies, missing chances to such an extent that one sarcastic correspondent to Not The View urged us lo lay off him as he was on a difficult fifth column mission, but on November 4th 1989 he scored late winner against his formerly beloved hoops before wheeling away to celebrate in front of the Copland Road stand.

In a magnanimous gesture of reconciliation, one Celtic fan presented him with a half-eaten pie, although given the distance and necessary trajectory it was little surprise that Strathclyde’s finest were to construe the incident as a breach of the peace, a charge the accused was later to deny in court.

Far from keeping a low profile, Johnston found it virtually impossible to keep out of the tabloids, his misadventures including singing the Sash at a Rangers supporters function and being sent home from a pre-season training camp with his face covered in cuts and bruises, the official explanation for which was that he had fallen on some bed springs.

He finally left for Everton in November 1991 and thereafter his career is a classic study in a player gradually fading away.

He wound up in Kansas where - irony heaped on irony - he played his final game in the blue of Kansas City Wiz against the green and white hoops of Santos Laguna.

Was it a day that shook Celtic? It probably shook Rangers more, but it certainly did its bit to hasten the end of the old regime at Celtic Park.

The day after the Ibrox press conference an intrepid, not to mention observant, reporter spotted the Union Jack flying at half-mast over the main stand at Celtic Park. There could only be one of two reasons: since Larry Olivier had passed away during the night somebody was marking the death of the noted thespian or the place was in a state of grief at the events of the previous day. “If the flag is flying at half mast it must have slipped down the pole”, said Tom Grant.

It was, in fact, an ominous portent for Tom and his fellow board members.

At the end of January, following a 1:0 defeat at home to Motherwell, there was a demonstration in the car park outside Celtic Park. It wasn’t planned or organised, but it was the first of its kind for a generation. Yet even as early as July 1989 the fans could see the writing on the wall.

Sadly, the writing would have to be 10 feet high, written in blood and signed by the manager of the Bank of Scotland before anyone in the boardroom would take any notice.

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Above: Johnston gets a warm welcome on his return to Celtic Park