James Penrice may have been an instant success at Hearts, but his route to becoming the toast of Tynecastle has been far from a straightforward one.
Along with all the routine things a young player must avoid, such as a loss of focus and discipline, and the temptation of vices like junk food – something he candidly admits he may not always have been able to resist – there were some unusual obstacles too. Like ticket inspectors.
“My childhood was just running about training three nights a week for maybe four or five years,” Penrice said.
“I was at Rangers and I was at Hibs, and after that I signed for Partick Thistle.
“We stayed in Livingston, so with the traffic and stuff, my mum couldn't take me. She had my wee brother to deal with as well.
“So, I had to leave school, take my dinner with me, have my dinner on the train, and then go to training in Lochinch in the back end of Glasgow.
“Sometimes I would have to try and dodge the train guy and run away from him. The family tried to help me as much as possible, but it's expensive being on a train three times a week.
“The Young Scot Card was getting rinsed, to be fair.”
It’s all a far cry from where the 26-year-old now finds himself, consistently excelling for Hearts since his summer move from Livingston, as he has taken the step up to one of the country’s biggest clubs with apparent ease.
There were many occasions though throughout his career that Penrice was almost lost to the professional game.
In a tumultuous season for Hearts, Tynecastle has reached boiling point at times, with fans voicing their displeasure at their team’s poor start to the season and their board over the running of their club.
Coming from the vastly different surroundings of the Tony Macaroni Arena, as it was then, there may have been concerns that Penrice would find it difficult to adjust to those demands, and be able to handle the pressure being applied from those steep Tynecastle banks.
As it has turned out, he has been a shining light amid the bleakness of a hugely disappointing season so far for the Gorgie men.
Ironically though, it was early pressure being placed on his shoulders that almost led him to quit football altogether. And in an even more ironic twist, it was Hibs who allowed Penrice to slip through their grasp as a result.
“Throughout primary school, it was all football-driven,” he said.
“There was no Plan B really. I was never brilliant in school.
“I went full-time when I turned 16 at Hibs, but I was only in the 17s for a year and they actually put me down a year into the 15s. Then I got released.
“My mum and my dad were disappointed, but it was more of a release for me when I got let go from Hibs. I knew I was never getting anywhere.
“To be fair to them, they came through to my house and told me because I'd been there for a while. Some of the other boys just got a phone call.
“My mum was obviously gutted. She'd done a lot of running around, so maybe for her it felt like the end. Hibs is hardly all that close to Livingston either, it's the back end of Tranent. I was getting buses and that to go there.
“They just probably felt it was a lot of hard work down the drain, but for me, it was a relief. It was a new start.”
Read more:
-
Dundee United 0 Hearts 1: Penrice's goal proves decisive for visitors
-
Kazakhstan club criticises Hearts after 'cheap' bid for star winger
-
Why the time has come for Ann Budge to begin her Hearts exit
With so much conjecture at the moment over Scotland’s struggles in producing young footballers, Penrice’s viewpoint on the subject is an informed one. And as someone who has been through that system and was almost chewed up and spat out of the game altogether by it, one that the Scottish FA may do well to heed.
“I think there's so much pressure put on kids,” he said.
“Everyone wants results. Everyone's basing it on stats and who can come through at such an early age.
“Even parents, they all want their kids to be the next Mbappe, but realistically, maybe one percent of all kids makes it to be in a professional football team. If that.
“You've then got a child who has had pressure put onto them, and I've heard it myself. I had to tell my dad to stop coming to the games at one point, just because of the pressure. He wanted me to do well, so it wasn't from a bad point of view. He just wanted his son to do well.
“But I think there's kids where it just consumes them. And sometimes that's what a kid needs, but for me, it didn't work.
“I needed to kind of let myself be free and get back to enjoying it, and I think that was the best thing that ever happened to me.
“Getting released from Hibs, that helped me so much.”
That may be tough to read for any Hibs fans currently watching Penrice star for their bitter Edinburgh rivals, but in fairness to the Easter Road outfit, he admits he was far from the player he is now back then, and he held himself to a far lower standard in terms of his professionalism.
After a short spell just getting back to enjoying playing the game again with his friends, chance would play its part in his next move, as the opportunity to sign for Thistle arrived.
“It was actually through my uncle,” he said.
“He's passed away now, but he was talking at work and someone said they knew a coach at Thistle and asked if I wanted to go. My other uncle knew Scotty Allison, who was the youth coach there at the time.
“I was just going into train for the summer. I wasn’t really bothered. I was wanting to go back and enjoy my football and play boys’ club with my pals, but I said, we'll try this. It was either that or it was Fife Elite.
“After maybe two weeks, they were leaving to go to the Milk Cup and they said, ‘By the way, do you want to come?’ I ended up playing against Man United and then they said they wanted to sign me.
“At that point, I wasn't really bothered about playing professionally. I just wanted to enjoy myself. That was more the thing.
“If I'm speaking to any young kid now, I just tell them to enjoy it, because that's probably something I didn't do when I was that age. Although that's all got me to here, I didn't enjoy it enough.
“I was going to training nervous and didn’t want to train, Honestly, I would love it when I was ill, because I didn't need to go to training. That's the way I was feeling.
“But I would jump on three trains a week to go to Thistle. It was just a complete and utter turnaround and that was probably the most important thing for me.”
The toll of travelling to Glasgow for training in the evenings though, sometimes leaving the house for school at 8am and then not getting back home until half past nine at night, was making the prospect of enjoying himself at Thistle a challenging one.
Something had to give, and eventually, after signing on a full-time basis, Penrice made the jump and moved west, where he thoroughly enjoyed himself. Perhaps a little too much.
“I was probably the only boy from the east coast at Thistle, so they all thought I was a teuchter!” he said.
“They all made fun of the way I spoke.
“The boys were brilliant people though and I still speak to them now. We were going into games laughing and joking on the park, just keeping the ball with each other and there wasn't really any pressure.
“But when I was 16, I said to the club that I couldn't afford the train fares anymore. The scholar contract that they gave me, I would have spent my full wage on trains. So, then they said fine, we've got digs through here, come through and live.
“It was difficult being away from my family, but I lived with maybe four boys in an old woman's house. She's passed away now, but she was cooking us dinner and stuff.
“We would say to her we weren’t hungry, and we'd eaten at the football, and then we’d run down to Domino's and get a pizza. Then we’d go into the Tesco and get more crap.
“I was enjoying that freedom, but still thinking, ‘is this what a footballer really should be doing?’
“My first season I was really skinny, I could run all day, and then my second season I ballooned up. I was just blaming it on getting older or it just being puppy fat, but really it was just that I was eating a lot of rubbish.
“It probably killed me in my first couple of years in professional football.”
As he nudged his way into the first team picture, and had a little more disposable income as a result, that pattern of behaviour continued. Until, that is, he came onto the radar of manager Alan Archibald and assistant Scott Patterson, who soon set him straight.
“I had my first holiday, and I came back a wee bit heavier,” he said.
“They noticed, and let’s just say I was told that I needed to rein it in.
“Then I started to have my loan spells, and that was the thing that probably helped me the most, I got a wee reality check when I went out on loan.”
The first of those loans was to East Fife under Barry Smith.
“That was a definite eye-opener,” he said.
“I think I was maybe 18 or 19-years-old, and there was stuff that went on in that changing room I'll never forget.
“Kevin Smith was the captain. Johnny Page was there, Mark Lamont, Kyle Wilkie. I still speak to Kyle now, but they were all brilliant and had a kind of car school, they would pick me up at Deer Park because they trained at the Oriam.
“So that was good, that was kind of my first taste of football.”
The Firhill club had Dumbarton in mind as his next destination, but when hometown club Livingston came calling, Penrice was desperate to grasp the opportunity to get back to his roots for a while.
And, as it turned out, it proved a rather fateful decision in the long run in terms of the direction of his career.
At that point, the plan was simply to gain some experience until January, and return to Thistle as a better player - one ready to play in the Premiership.
“We went to Spain in the winter break,” he said.
“We played a couple of friendlies, and I thought that it was brilliant. Then I played maybe two games against Celtic and Rangers, and then I got put in the fridge.
“Looking back, I wasn't really physically ready to be playing in the Premiership. That's probably something I would change and that I regret, that I wasn't acting like a football player off the pitch, which never helped me on it.”
It would be some time though before that particular penny would drop for Penrice, who now concedes his Thistle career didn’t reach the heights it should have.
So low was his morale during those years, that he came perilously close to packing it all in completely once again.
“All that stuff probably didn’t stop until just into lockdown, I think,” he said.
“It was that far on.
“I had kind of become sick of playing football really, and when we went down to League One, I started to look at courses to do barbering and stuff. Online courses, night courses, that sort of thing.
“It wasn't really going that great. I just signed a new deal at Thistle, but because we had been relegated, I ended up losing half my money, so I couldn't even afford my car payment.
“I was struggling, and I tried to get out of the club, because it was costing me money, my family money, to try and get through to training.
“Everyone thinks that being a football player is a well-paid job and an easy job, but I was never making good money.
“It was difficult. It's not a nice place to be. You have to pay bills at the end of the day.”
Penrice’s regrets over his time at Firhill extend to the manner in which he left the club, and he hopes that his decision to move on as and when he did hasn’t left too bitter a taste in the mouths of the Jags faithful.
“I enjoyed mostly all of my time at Thistle,” he said.
“I don't know if it was a wee bit sour at the end the way I left. Maybe. It felt a wee bit weird leaving like that, with how long I'd played at the club.
“Livingston came back in for me in the January and by then I wasn't really playing at Thistle, so I asked them if I could leave. And they were like ‘no, we need X, Y and Z money wise’ and I'm like, ‘you're never going to get that in League One, just let me leave’.
“Luckily, we ended up taking Scott Tiffoney on loan and that's how I managed to get out. It was a swap deal, so he went to Thistle, and I went to Livingston in the Premiership. It was such a relief.”
The permanent move to Livingston though again placed Penrice at a career crossroads. And if he didn’t recognise it, his new manager, Davie Martindale, wasn’t long in spelling it out for him.
“Davie said to me, ‘this is your last chance,'” he said.
“He told me, ‘You have coasted at Thistle for ages. You've not improved from the first time you were here. You need to really knuckle down’.
“It was somebody just injecting a wee rocket up my bum, and that's what I needed. I needed an arm around the shoulder and someone just to kind of say that you need to wake up now.”
An enjoyable and productive time at Livingston may ultimately have ended with relegation, but Penrice is full of gratitude for everything Martindale did for him, particularly as he was unable to help his manager during the final months of their desperate scrap for survival.
“I’ve seen Davie with the toolbelts on, the lot,” he said.
“He's done an unbelievable job, way over what anyone could expect compared to the finances at the club.
“I wanted to repay him, so I played through a hernia in that last season knowing that I needed to get surgery at some point.
“I was never training, I was just playing games, and then it got to the Hearts game in early January.”
That afternoon would be the breaking point for Penrice’s body, and ultimately, for his Livingston career. As he trooped off the pitch despondently after succumbing to the pain of his hernia issue, another twist in his career lay in store.
“I had told Davie I was going to leave in the summer, and he was absolutely brilliant with me,” he said.
“I played 16 minutes of the Hearts game and I had to come off, and as I walked around the pitch, Steven Naismith came up to me and was like, ‘I'm going to be speaking to you soon’, and I said ‘oh, alright’.
“I had other places phoning and asking if I'd speak to managers and I said ‘no, if I'm staying in Scotland, I'm signing with Hearts’.
“They had a PowerPoint with video of my game, where they think I can improve, what I'm good at.
“He basically said to me that he thought Alex Cochrane was in front of me. And I was like ‘no, I honestly don't think so. I think I've got enough to come in and I want to play and that's why I'm coming to Hearts, I'm not coming to make up the numbers.’
“He said they were going for a smaller squad but with more quality, and with the Europa League and then the Conference League guaranteed, I was going to be getting plenty of football.
“I just thought, well, that's half the battle. I phoned my family and said that I was going to sign for Hearts without really knowing how long it was going to be for or anything else.
“That was my only thought, I'm going to Hearts.”
If only it was so straightforward. While the media got wind of the move being in the works, the hernia problem Penrice was still struggling with threatened to kybosh the whole deal.
“I actually didn't know if I was going to be able to sign, because I hadn't played football since January, and clubs aren’t really known for taking people that haven't played in six months,” he said.
“I had to do a lot of work with the physios before I even signed, I had to get scans and all that stuff to make sure I was alright to pass a medical.
“But they were brilliant, Hearts. They took over my rehab. I got the operation, I woke up with a massive scar on my stomach, and it was a 12-week recovery instead of four. So, that kind of threw me back a wee bit.
“In the summer, it got released in the news that I'd signed a pre-contract, but I actually hadn't. It was on the TV and I'm not even getting excited, because in the back of my head I was thinking, ‘this could fall through here now’.
“I was still in so much pain. The surgeon had said it would be six to eight weeks, and I'm sitting 10 weeks in, still getting the same pain. I thought, ‘I'm done here’.”
In the end, the pain abated, and the dream move was indeed secured. But while Penrice had recovered and was now flourishing, collectively for Hearts, the new season was turning into a nightmare. And particularly, for manager Naismith.
“I was really disappointed for Steven,” he said.
“He always looked out for me. He always said how he wanted me to play, and I thought he was really good.
“Obviously the results weren't great, and it was difficult, because he showed a lot of faith to sign me from a team that had been relegated to the third biggest club in the country who have finished in the European spot. It's a massive jump.
“I can't really put my finger on what went wrong, but it's just something that happens. It was weird. Maybe it was the European football that caught up with us.
“But the first game of the season, I thought we were brilliant, and the chat was all that we could split the Old Firm. I thought we absolutely battered Rangers that day, and it was just a great buzz. I thought right, this is going to be absolutely excellent.
“Then it was just a massive drop off from there, and I honestly have no idea why.”
The turnaround in fortunes may have come too late to save Naismith, but under the guidance of new manager Neil Critchley – after some early struggles of his own – it finally appears as though Hearts may have turned a corner.
Penrice isn’t getting carried away on that front, and he is trying not to allow personal praise to go to his head either.
Perhaps that is why he looked so bashful when taking the acclaim of the travelling support after his recent winner against Dundee United at Tannadice, as they belted out their new song in honour of their left back.
“I had a joke with my friend recently,” he said.
“We were saying in the summer it would be good if I just went in and played a couple of games and got myself used to it, and then in the second season really make a go for it!
“Now I have a song, and that has been great. I’ve been sent it about a million times and my family sing it to me.
“I've never really had one before, so it's brilliant. It gives you a wee lift on the park when you hear it.
“I feel good when I step on the park, I feel like I can hurt teams, and that's the most important thing for me, that I feel I'm a threat.
“I just want to help the team. For me personally, it's about finishing the season in a better position than where we are now, and whatever personal stuff comes with that, I take it on board.
“But it's more about finishing a lot higher on the table than where we are now.”
Whether Penrice’s stock with the Hearts faithful can get any higher, remains to be seen. Hibs' loss has - eventually - been very much Hearts' gain.
