Tuesday was a profoundly sad day for the Smith family and for all those footballers and friends the great man influenced in an epic life in the game.
There was a vast scale to the eulogies. Big name after big name after big name. Those were the lucky ones, the ones who knew him, who played for him, who managed with or against him, who got to spend time with him and learn from him. If you were in that group then you were truly fortunate. Others only have snapshots.
It can be cringemaking when people on the periphery insert themselves into the narrative of a tragic loss like this by recounting their own tales from yesteryear that show what a tremendous person X or Y was (tales that are really a self aggrandisement dressed up as tribute). We run that risk here, but it’s a story we’ll tell none the less.
In early 1993, this writer was in his early months in Glasgow, an alien city in an alien country; early 20s and unfamiliar in the ways of Scottish football. Perhaps he saw the vaguely bewildered look, but Smith showed a kindness that was appreciated then and is still appreciated now.
He talked warmly for half an hour in his office at the top of the stairs at Ibrox. Even in my naive state it was obvious this was unusual and special. “If you want an interview with anybody then fax the club on a Tuesday and I’ll make sure it happens.”
I did – and it happened. Again and again. It was a very big deal. He had no need to help. Nothing that I wrote would have registered with him or mattered in any sense, but he did it anyway.
If that’s a self-indulgent story, then apologies, but I’ve always that felt it was a glimpse not of the football man, but of the man, the thoughtful character those closest to him would have known and loved.
That decency was one side of him, the personal side. Of course, there was another side, that of the operator. At a media conference weeks later, he walked into the room and confronted some poor misfortune whose newspaper columns had annoyed him. A senior writer. Actually, it was a friend of his. “You’ve been writing some amount of shite lately…”
On his way out of this verbal evisceration there was a definite trace of a smile on the manager’s face. I’d wondered why everybody – even the most gnarled pros in the writing game – seemed to sit up straight when Smith appeared. Now I knew.