Forget Springsteen, Alex Ferguson was The Boss back in the 80s.
And 40 years after bringing the Glory Days to Pittorie, he still is to every Aberdeen player he managed. John McMaster doesn’t call him anything else, although there were times he probably felt like it.
But throughout the course of an hour long conversation with the man who played left back under Sir Alex on the night Aberdeen stunned the world by consigning defeat to a Real Madrid side which never lost a European final before or after, there is nothing but genuine affection and gratitude for the role Ferguson played in making him a Gothenburg Great. There’s even a twinkle in his eye as he describes the occasional lambasting and maybe something else as McMaster recounts the kindness shown by his manager when a knee injury threatened his career three years before he scaled those heights in Sweden.
McMaster suffered two major injuries in the space of a few months in 1980 and Ferguson’s polar opposite reaction to each of them shines a light on the complexity of a character who went on to be regarded as Britain’s greatest ever manager. In a League Cup clash at Ibrox in September 1980, Rangers winger Willie Johnston was sent off for a vicious stamp on McMaster’s chest as he lay on the turf.
Reports that the Aberdeen man needed the kiss of life on the pitch has been dismissed by the man himself as an exaggeration but it hit him hard physically – and as he reveals on the latest Off The Record podcast – financially after Fergie FINED him for talking to the press about it.
“Willie must have thought I was a trampoline,” he said. “In his book, he says he thought it was Willie Miller. Willie had probably done him a couple of times. I’ve got strawberry blond hair – my mum told me it wasn’t ginger – while Willie is cutting about with his black curly hair and moustache.
“If big Dougie Rougvie had got a hold of him he wouldn’t have seen daylight. I got four big stud marks scraped right down from neck to my chest, I didn’t need a kiss of life or anything, although that was reported. I was lucky. If he had caught me on the throat it might have been different.
“Before going on to the bus, I had spoken to the press but then The Boss came on the bus and said he’d been talking to John Greig (Rangers manager at the time), who was his good pal, and he told us all to keep quiet about what happened. Anybody speaking about it would be fined.
“I was up the back of the bus holding my head. I told him it was too late – I had spoken to the press. He looked at me – ‘you’re fined’.
“I used to love Bud (Johnston). I loved watching him play. He was brilliant. But he went down in my estimation as a man. There was no apology, nothing. He just walked away and went up the tunnel. I don’t know what he was thinking to be honest.”
McMaster recovered quickly from that one but the knee injury he sustained against Liverpool at Pittodrie put him out of the game for 18 months. However, Ferguson’s man management skills and humanity came to the fore.
“It cost me a Scotland cap,” he winces. “I saw The Boss about five or six years ago and he told me I was unlucky.
“Big Jock Stein had told him on the Tuesday before the game that he was going to include me in the next Scotland squad. He asked The Boss if he could tell me but he asked him not to because I would get too excited about it before the Liverpool game. That was my opportunity.
“Liverpool came up and in the first 10 minutes wee Sammy Lee had whacked me on the nose. But I got up after treatment. A few minutes later I’d gone on a diagonal run past a few players when Ray Kennedy came over and as I overstretched to keep the ball, he hit me on the top of the knee. My studs stayed in the ground and my whole body went over.
“I had to come off and I was lying in the dressing room at half time asking if they thought I could play in the second leg. ‘Aye no problem John, a wee cortisone injection and you’ll be fine’...18 months later. It was a monstrous thing.
“When I went for the X-ray and got the surgery, The Boss was the first person to see me at the Hospital. I had a stookie from my toes to my thigh for 12 weeks, then another 12 weeks of non-weight bearing on it. The Boss asked the surgeon, a man called Tom Scotland, how the surgery had gone. ‘Not good,’ was the reply. ‘His leg was swinging like a pendulum – he’ll never kick a ball again’. The Boss said, ‘don’t tell him that’.
“However, the Boss must have told the whole of Aberdeen and the whole of the dressing room apart from me! But he really looked after me. I was worried about my mortgage, I had two kids and my wife Katie wasn’t working.
“The Boss said, ‘don’t worry about that. I’ll give you the full bonuses for the first three months, then for the next three months I’ll give you half the bonuses and the next three months I’ll give you a quarter of the bonus and by that time you’ll be ready to get in the first team’. In this day and age, that’s what you would do. Try to get people back to work quickly. He didn’t put me under any pressure.”
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