PEOPLE: Mickey battles through the pain.

THERE'S a definite limp and a slight grimace as Hibs legend Mickey Weir rises from his seat and attempts to make his way down a steep set of stairs.

"It's not that bad, really," he says with a shrug. It's certainly a lot better than it was. To be honest, I'm over the worst of it. Now I want to get back to doing what I want to do - football."

Having endured more than two years trapped at home in the west of the city, a gnawing back injury has achieved something that many opposition players failed to do - floor the nippy wee winger and knock him out of the game he loves.

The pain has been crippling, almost certainly the result of years spent pushing his slight frame to the absolute limit, playing top-flight matches when he should have been sitting them out.

He endured the aches and pains in his legs, his groin - all over - until nearly three years ago when doctors finally told him his back was a complete mess and it needed to be fixed. The result is he now has a metal plate in his back, inserted to help keep it straight.

"It's holding it together," he explains. "The bones were all over the place. I was at Cowdenbeath coaching at the time, but it got worse and worse. I couldn't run, I couldn't do anything."

Injuries were part and parcel of his career as a player, but this - affecting him at the age of 40 as he tried to carve out a career in a new area of the game - was a bitter blow. He had to quit coaching and there followed terrible, painful days when he could hardly walk.

It was physically draining, but worse than that, it tested his mental fortitude to the limit.

Pilton lad Mickey, green and white through and through, with a League Cup medal to his name and 20 years of football coursing through his veins, suddenly found himself barely able to lift himself out of his chair.

"My youngest, Harrison, had just been born," he remembers. "On the plus side, it meant I got to spend a lot of time with him, but on the other hand I could hardly walk. It was a horrendous time for me, the most difficult time of my life.

"I wouldn't say I was depressed, but I got very low and it got very hard to get out of bed in the morning. My wife, Michelle, was an absolute rock, she kept my head up."

He waited a year for the operation and since then has followed doctors' orders and spent 18 months resting. The pain might still be niggling, but not enough to stop the father of two returning to the beautiful game - even if it is, for the time being at least, behind a microphone.

These days, the pocket dynamo who steered Hibs to a 1992 League Cup and who many Hibbees regard as one of Easter Road's legends is carving a career as an online pundit, working the chat show format with fellow ex-Hibbee Joe Tortalano, former Hearts legend Gary MacKay and ex-Talk 107 sports show host Gordon Dallas.

"I'm loving it," he grins, referring to Kickabout, a weekly podcast football show that started just a few weeks ago but has already attracted listeners from around the globe.

"It's been fantastic for me to get involved in. What I really like is that it's not people sitting about complaining about the game and being negative about it. It's about having some fun - the kind of terracing and changing room banter that football used to be all about before it all got so serious."

Yet serious is what he has been about his sport since the days when he and his younger brother would play footy in the garden of their parents' Mary and Matthew's Pilton home and end up scrapping over who kicked what when.

"I've always had a competitive edge," he nods. "I think when you come from a not-so-great background, you end up with a bit of a chip on your shoulder. I was told by so many people that I was too wee to make it in the game, I suppose it pushed me on. There's a bit of the 'small guy' syndrome about me, I always want to win."

Still, he could easily have grown up hooked on something more destructive than winning. The Pilton of his youth offered few opportunities other than gangs, thieving, booze and drugs - more than a few of his friends opted for one or the other, and some didn't survive.

"I ran around with people who did all that stuff, but I knew when to walk away," he says before adding that he's never drunk alcohol - not even when he helped Hibs to that League Cup victory.

"For a start, my dad made it clear he didn't want the police at his door for anything and I had too much respect for my family to go down that road. I remember running with a gang once. A lot of us turned up to meet another gang and two or three of my mates took a severe beating. I saw that and knew it wasn't for me.

"I lost friends to drugs," he adds. "Bad enough for them to die, but awful too for the ones left behind. One friend was a real straight talker, the kind of bloke who, when everyone else was saying the referee had been harsh with me, he'd be saying, 'well it was your own fault, you did this or that and you shouldn't have'. I lost him through drugs.

"He told me once, 'you've got a chance to be something, don't end up like me on drugs, this isn't a life for anyone', but some people can't discipline themselves out of it. Some of the best footballers around are sitting about in pubs or at the bookies because they didn't use their talent."

It's a message he now takes to young people who might be on the brink of making disastrous choices, pushed towards a life of missed opportunities through peer pressure or just because no-one's ever told them there's an alternative.

"Kids listen to people who have been through it," he points out, "they want to hear from people like myself, ex-sportsmen and women. There's an opportunity there to get to these kids before they lose their chance."

At the other end of the scale, he despairs at the rise of the over-enthusiastic pushy parents who yell at kids from the football sidelines and youth team coaches who live out their own football fantasies through a team of nine-year-olds.

He also yearns for the days when it didn't cost a week's household budget to watch games.

Worse though, he can hardly believe that after more than 25 years in the game, he's now having to jump through hoops to gain the SFA badges he needs to pursue the next stage of his career - coaching.

"I was angry at the start. In my opinion no bits of paper can replace sheer experience, but you've just got to bite the bullet and get on with it."

That never-say-die attitude has got him where he is today. Weir's back provides a shot of pain as he stands up and he winces slightly.

"My approach in the game was to never leave anything on the pitch, to give it everything I could," he shrugs. "That's why I'm in the state I am.

"It was madness, my body couldn't sustain what was needed to play at the level I wanted. The heart was there but the body couldn't take it - but I wouldn't have changed it for the world."

Four Kickabout podcasts are available every Tuesday on www.kickaboutscotland.com

FROM MILLWALL TO MOTHERWELL

MICKEY WEIR joined Hibs, the club he had supported as a youth, from Portobello Thistle as a teenager.

His apprentice role involved football training but also maintaining the Easter Road ground, including sweeping the terracing and painting the woodwork.

"I'd never really wanted to be a professional footballer," he admits. "But Portobello Thistle was run by a great man, George Johnson, who, along with some others, encouraged me to forget about my height and concentrate of my game," says Weir.

"I was 16 years old and playing with Pat Stanton, one of my childhood heroes. My first game with the Hibs first team was among the greatest achievements of my life."

He came from a long line of Hibs fans, which meant his apprenticeship duties were a labour of love.

He remained at Hibs until 1987 when he signed for Luton Town only to return to Easter Road after a few months and just eight appearances.

He ended up instrumental in the side's 1992 League Cup win against Dunfermline.

He left in 1996 for a brief spell on loan to Millwall before ending his playing career at Motherwell. There followed a stint coaching at Cowdenbeath before being forced to take time out through injury.

Edinburgh Evening News: April 7 2009