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Not
many have ticked the box marked "lifetime ambition" by the age of 16.
Fewer still have gone on to use it as a platform for a lifetime of
success. They broke the mould when they made Ronnie Hamilton,
protagonist of one of Scottish football's great untold stories.
On
September 18, 1961, aged 16 years and 52 days, Hamilton made his debut
for his beloved Kilmarnock against St Mirren at Rugby Park.
If
ever a story embodied the values of a provincial club it is Hamilton's.
Born and bred in the Ayrshire town, he starred in the great Rugby Park
side who won the league title in 1965 before going on to coach, scout
and later become club chairman when they lifted the Scottish Cup in
1997.
Now
61 and retired from football, as well as his career as a successful
chartered accountant, he has time to reflect on "the rollercoaster ride"
which made him into the ultimate local hero.
Hamilton's forensic memory makes his own tentative steps into senior
football seem like yesterday. Back then, he was still a pupil at
Kilmarnock Academy but that did not stop him making an early impact. "I
was still going to school in my short trousers when I made my debut in
front of 12,000 at Rugby Park," he recalls.
"I
went on to score two goals that day in a 4-3 win. But playing in the
first team could be a disadvantage, though, because if I had a bad game
then I heard all about it on a Monday morning. You were mince on
Saturday, Ronnie,' they'd shout."
Hamilton's talents were complemented by an impeccable sense of timing.
Scottish football's achievements in the 1960s may have become synonymous
with Celtic, but Jock Stein's side were at the peak of a pyramid of
talent including Willie Waddell's Kilmarnock. During that decade, the
Ayrshire club won the league championship for the first and last time in
their history, reached three Cup finals and finished runners-up on two
other occasions.
"
Waddell
probably took that Kilmarnock team to a level of fitness which was
unknown in football in that era," explains Hamilton. "Plus we had guys
like Frank Beattie who was a wonderful team player, Brian McIlroy, who
played on the left wing and Davie Sneddon inside him. Jackie McInally
was a wonderful footballer too.
"I
reckon he was a better player than his son Alan, formerly Celtic and
Bayern Munich. I was the leading goalscorer in the year we won the
league and I probably only scored about 15 or 16 goals.
We
didn't score a lot of goals but we were a very good team."
But
the sparks which illuminate his career and still fire the 59-year-old's
imagination are the European nights at Rugby Park.
The
visit of Eintracht Frankfurt in a Fairs Cup preliminary tie in 1964 is a
particular highlight, not least because the 18-year-old Hamilton had
missed the first away leg with the prosaic distraction of an accountancy
exam. 3-0 down from the first leg in Germany, the home return was to
prove one of the greatest comebacks in the history of Scottish football.
"They Eintracht still carried an aura because they had been the
opposition to Real Madrid in that great European Cup final of 1960,"
says Hamilton, who also played against the legendary Spanish side,
including Puskas, Gento and Santa Maria, in 1965.
"After two minutes one of their players nearly burst the net to make it
4-0 on aggregate. There's a lovely story about a great Kilmarnock
supporter who was coming through the turnstiles when he heard this roar.
"He
shouted up, What's that?' and word got back to him that Eintracht had
scored. So he said, Oh, for god's sake, I'm not hanging about for that'.
In doing so he missed one of the best ever comebacks in the history of
Scottish football because we ended up beating them
5-1."
Modesty does not permit him to mention that a double from a certain R
Hamilton, including an 88th-minute winner, proved decisive. Despite
receiving full-time offers from "most clubs apart from Manchester
United", including Arsenal and Scot Symon's Rangers, he decided to
remain part-time in football and pursue a career in chartered
accountancy.
He
soon climbed the ranks at a local company, where he eventually became
senior partner, while his football career took him to St Mirren, Queen
of the South and then back to Kilmarnock.
His
involvement with the club he loves continued when he became Sneddon's
assistant manager, and later fulfilled scouting and coaching roles
throughout the lean years during which they slipped into the second
division. Fittingly, the return of the good times under then chairman
Bobby Fleeting in the 90s saw Hamilton's ascent to boardroom level,
where he played the cautious accountant to Fleeting's heady ambitions.
"I'd be saying no, I don't think you should be spending this much,
Bobby'. But he pushed forward and in the end we were one of the first
clubs to develop our stadium. If football directors were all like me
then we would be in a better state financially, but there wouldn't be
the same buzz. There needs to be a balance."
By
the time he became chairman in December 1996, that balance had
irretrievably swung towards agents and players, and Hamilton began to
detect the seeds of future financial decay in the game.
