Face to Face: Denis Law
Teddy Jamieson
ASK Denis Law a question, almost any question, and he’ll start talking about football.
The beautiful game is his default setting. Raise his childhood and he talks about football. Discuss his parents and he talks about football.
Maybe it’s because he’s got a new book to promote. Maybe it’s because he thinks that’s what we want to hear (which we do, of course). Maybe, most likely, because the residual heat of his days in the sun warms him still.
And so it should. In his new book, Denis Law My Life In Football, there is image upon image of him wearing the glowing red of Manchester United or the dark blue of Scotland, black and white reminders of how much colour he gave to football. (The colour photographs are even better.) Sir Alex Ferguson, no less, has said Law was the greatest ever Scottish player. He’s certainly the only Scot to be named European Player of the Year (in 1964). No wonder then that football is central to him and his image of himself.
“It gives a lot of happiness and you meet great people. I was lucky. I played under two great managers and travelled the world,” he tells me as we sit in a bland office surrounded by copies of his book in Bishopbriggs. “I went to Italy and I thoroughly enjoyed everything bar the football and unfortunately that was what I went there for. I loved the food, I loved the wine. I was single in those days and the ladies were quite nice. But the football was rubbish.”
And so it goes, a constant circling back to the sport that made his name, even though it is now the best part of three decades since he finished his football career. He’s not sure the game has improved since his day. “I think money has taken over, you’ve got to say that. There’s an area where you get to a certain stage where you’re not hungry any more because you’ve got plenty.”
Law has now entered his eighth decade though he’s not showing his age especially. There’s the familiar Chuckle Brothers bogbrush of a haircut that gives him a cartoon outline. Underneath it, his face is pure animation. It’s a face you can recognise even in the book’s oldest images, of a teenage Law as an Aberdeen schoolboy, and in the back row a Scotland Under-15 team photo. “When you think of that time there was nothing else to do other than play football,” he recalls. “That’s what we did every day. There was no television as such. You were out playing football in the street and unknown to yourself then you were learning your trade. You didn’t realise that. You were just enjoying football.
“You were proud on a Friday when the teacher came round with your shirt because you were in the school team for the game tomorrow. You had to supply your own shorts, of course, and your own socks. There were all different colours of socks.”
The war was not long over at the time and Scotland, like the rest of Britain, was feeling the chill of austerity. “Nobody had anything. We weren’t any different from anybody else. I remember all that.”
Law’s dad was a trawlerman with little time for football. “He was out on Monday morning, didn’t come home to Saturday lunchtime so he was not into it. I used to think my old man was an alcoholic because he came home on a Saturday and that was him in the pub Saturday night and then he slept all day Sunday and then he was back to sea and it wasn’t until later in life I realised that was the only time to drink on a Saturday because they weren’t allowed to on the boat.”
Growing up, Law says he didn’t think of himself as a potential football professional (difficult as that might be to believe). “I was quite good at technical drawing so I fancied myself as a bit of an architect really but football came.” Even when he went to Huddersfield as a teenager he went thinking he was going to be a member of the ground staff first and foremost. “I wasn’t going to be there too long and then of course Bill Shankly, who was assistant manager, took over and then the whole world changed.”
He was in the first team at 16. “You couldn’t be a professional until you were 17, so out of the blue I became a professional footballer. I never intended that to happen.”
Those first years playing football were hard. He was homesick all the time. In the close season he would return to Aberdeen and not want to go back. But he was lucky that Shankly was his manager. He could see Law’s talent. More than that, though, Law says, he was a father figure, perhaps a replacement for the father who he rarely saw growing up. From Huddersfield he went to Manchester City, then Torino, before returning, for a record fee of £115,000, to Manchester – to the very same digs he was in while playing for City – to join Matt Busby’s reconstruction of Man United. He was 22.
“I was part of the team that was recovering from the Munich air disaster and when you think of what they achieved in that short time after that, it was really good. I knew Sir Matt from Scotland days. He selected me to play for Scotland when I was only 18 so I knew him then. It was just a lovely time.”
He won two league titles with United but missed his chance to play in the European Cup final in 1968 because of injury. His biggest regret?
“Absolutely yes, but even then though we’d get there again because we had a very good team and really in ’69 we should have got back. We were robbed. We played Milan at Old Trafford in the semi-final and I scored a goal which was about … I’m not exaggerating, it was a good two feet over the line. That would have been the equalising goal because we’d already been beaten 1-0 in Milan. The referee didn’t allow it and they went on to qualify.”
We can romanticise the era, seeing it in the glow of old photos and blurry TV footage. But football was a more brutal profession in some ways then. Denis, I say, I counted at least two punches thrown in the book. “Given to me?” No, thrown by you. Did you ever throw a punch off the pitch? “Nah, nah, nah. I was a coward off the field, didn’t want to get involved in anything like that.
“I think the philosophy was then if somebody kicked you on the field and you don’t do anything back then they’ll keep kicking you. It’s the same off the field, of course, too. Right, if you kick me I’m going to kick you back.” Or punch you back?
“Yeah whatever. That’s what you call bullies, isn’t it? If you don’t hit back at them they’ll keep hitting you, so no way. I don’t care how big you are or whatever … I didn’t always come off best but at least I showed that you’re not going to get away with it.”
The game was certainly more brutal in terms of medical treatment. Law’s problematic knee that kept him out of the 1968 European Cup final would finally go under the knife. “The treatment you got in those days was not like it is today. It was cut your leg open. It was not good surgery. If I had to look back on it now and I had any say I wouldn’t have had it done.”
He played on until 1974, returning to Man City where his most famous goal was the one he scored against United that helped condemn them to relegation. He didn’t celebrate. He even made it to the World Cup for the first time, though he says now he was taken as a token gesture. His time on the field had run out.
Of course life went on off the field as well as on through the good years and bad. He met his wife Di, had five children, became a family man. Was he a good parent? “I hope so. Well, I’ll just phone the children and see.” I ask, I say, because it doesn’t sound as if he had a role model. “No, no. I think you’ve got to put it down to your good lady.”
Did he ever change a nappy? “I changed one nappy one time and that was the only one I ever did. My wife and her sister went out shopping and left me with the babe and he’d done the business in the nappy. It was like Maltesers in the nappy and for some reason – I don’t know why – I put it under the hot tap thinking it would melt. That’s how naive I was at the time.”
Ask him what he’s proudest of in his life and he says playing for his country. But then he reconsiders. “My family. Yeah, family more than anything. I’ve got five great children. Well they’re not children any more.”
Law laments the fact there are not the Scottish players now that there were when he was in his pomp. If you offered him, he’d take another 50 caps playing for his country in return for those two league medals he won with United. He still hasn’t watched the 1966 World Cup final. He remains what he always was, a football man, and a Scottish one to boot. He talks about football because football has been his life. It still is.
Denis Law: My Life In Football is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £25.
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