Craig Brown, Scot Symon and the Rangers values handed down

That fact is something which has been missing from the many peons of praise penned to him in the last week. Some of the tributes have even skipped the fact he kicked off his professional career with Rangers, and even the ones which have included it have treated his time at Ibrox as an irrelevance - it was far from that. 

It was the period he spent with Rangers under legendary manager Scot Symon that imbued him with many of the values which made him such an honourable, decent, honest and admirable man.

In fact, having scanned many of the newspaper tributes in the wake of his death, I saw only one reference to Brown talking about Rangers and Symon.

It was something I knew to be one hundred percent accurate because Broon, as he was known to me and everyone in football and the media, actually told me.

The truth is it came as he was chastising me for not contacting him to be interviewed for the Scot Symon biography I wrote and had published more than a decade ago. 

That was my mistake. It was also my misjudgement in thinking he wouldn’t have too many nice things to say about Symon, given the fact that during his three years at Rangers, Broon never played for the first team.

What Brown said, too late for inclusion in my Symon book, was that the Ibrox managerial icon taught him always to be courteous and that kindness should never be mistaken for weakness.

Broon was always courteous, unfailingly kind, but never weak. Witness his decision to leave Ally McCoist out of the Scotland squad which went to the 1998 World Cup Finals in France.

It was a decision which he reflected on many years later and which he conceded may have been a mistake. It wasn’t long after he had quit as Scotland boss that Brown made that admission.

He was working for BBC Five Live travelling Europe with the press pack and reporting on the Old Firm’s Euro exploits and no doubt cringing at the horror show Scotland had become under his hapless successor, Berti Vogts.

To be honest, I can’t quite recall which European City we were in at the time, but usually the night before the game Broom chose to shun broadcast colleagues and the Scottish daily newspaper reporters, preferring the company of what was known in the old inky trade, as the Sunday sisters.

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But I do recall the venue was Vienna one night when Brown, never a drinking man, got caught up with the ferocious tippler, Ronnie Scott of the Sunday Post and ended sliding off his stool and finishing on his backside with his legs in the air.

This was during a decade and a bit when I was on the wagon so, with the aid of Sky’s Davie Provan – another broadcaster who preferred the company of the Sunday sisters – I helped him back to his hotel. The incident was never mentioned again.

Though often, when he was sure of the company, usually the older hacks, Brown would open up on his time as a Rangers player. Scott, who figures in many an old hack’s tales, was involved the night Broon tried to explain why he had never played for the Ibrox first team.

Big Scotty was a Dundee fan, with a soft spot for Rangers and he always egged Broon on to tell tales of that great Dundee title-winning team of 1962, of which he had been a part.

There was an evening when I joked with him about having to go to Dundee to get a game as he wasn’t good enough for Rangers. Broon was indignant.

“It’s hardly a criticism of me that I couldn’t find a place in the Rangers team when slim Jim Baxter was the left half. He was the greatest Scotland player I have ever seen,” he said

He did look a little sheepish when I pointed out he had been at Ibrox for around three years before Baxter signed in 1960 and that the man barring his way was Billy Stevenson.

His reply to that was vintage Broon, reminding me that Stevenson was sold to Liverpool and was a key man in Bill Shankly’s first great sixties side, a team which won the title and the FA Cup.

He added that although he had never made it to the hallowed ground of the Rangers first team, it was enough to have been a Ranger and to have had the pride which comes with pulling on the blue jersey.

As they say, once a Ranger always a Ranger and Broon was all of that. Though he knew, given the anti-Rangers sentiment which swamped the Tartan Army, he had to be discreet about his allegiance.

Though I have never hidden a similar allegiance in more than half a century in newspapers, I forgive the wee man.

There was only really one occasion during his remarkable and successful tenure as Scotland manager, when we crossed swords. That was when he picked Londoner Matt Elliott, the man quickly tagged as a Jockney by the tabloids.

At the time I was writing my LeggoLand column in the Sunday People and thought it was only polite of me to phone wee Craig to tell him I was about to get the tackety boots on.

He was quite spikey in his defence of using the granny’s rule - something I detested then and still do. In the end, we were laughing when he asked me if I would have been against him picking Pele had the brilliant Brazilian had a Scottish granny and I replied by asking if that would have meant leaving out Denis Law.

The next time our paths crossed no mention of our chat was made and it was only years later that I was in his company at a function with Walter Smith, that he got me back.

Master tactician Broon pounced, asking Walter if he knew Leggo thought Denis Law was a better player than Pele. I got one of those chilling looks from the greatest Rangers manager of my lifetime, along with a shake of his head.

Brown’s time as Scotland’s manager started running out when David Taylor became the first outsider to become the Scottish Football Association chief executive. That marvellous character, former Rangers centre half, Doug Baillie, another Sunday sister, and I were standing together in the bowels of the newly re-developed Hampden after France had beaten the Scots in the new-look old stadium’s first game.

As he walked past us Taylor made a snide remark about the stadium being fine, but the team not so good. Big Dougie and wee Broon were good pals, so I expect Taylor’s inexcusable indiscretion soon reached the Scotland manager’s ears.

It was to Broon’s eternal credit that during those many trips and nights out, during those years of torture for Scottish football under Berti Vogts, he never once could be induced either publicly or privately to say what he really thought about Taylor or Vogts.

Perhaps that discretion was something else he learned from the gentlemanly James Scotland Symon.

But there is one more story which underlines that he was a real Ranger and it took place in the Easter Road car park in May 2005 just before the game against Hibs which has gone into history and legend as Helicopter Sunday.

As I was getting out of a colleague’s car, Broon was closing the door of his vehicle when he asked me what, as a Sunday newspaperman, whose working week was finished, I was doing there.

“I’m only here to see the Rangers,” I grinned.

Broon’s reply, delivered with his trademark smile, told it all.

“So am I.”