PEOPLE: Gavin Hastings, ready for battle.

IT will be among the highlights of the Scottish rugby calendar. But when Scotland take on the All Blacks in the maelstrom of a packed Murrayfield stadium on Sunday, there will be more than points at stake.

Scottish pride, the thrill of the touchdown and a gritty mouthful of turf: no-one knows any of it better than the towering frame of the casually dressed figure relaxing in the boardroom of his New Town Office.

For when it comes to Scottish rugby legends, instantly recognisable faces and the kind of calm demeanour required to score a record-breaking 227 points in a Rugby World Cup career - plus 39 conversions or 36 penalty goals notched up during his three World Cup tournaments - Gavin Hastings is in a league of his own.

Now 45, these days the hair is little greyer yet the former Scotland full-back looks as fit, strong and able as he did back in 1995 when he finally hung up his prized international shirt after a sterling career that saw him appear for his country 61 times, captain Scotland and the British Lions, achieve a Grand Slam win and grasp the Calcutta Cup after a memorable roasting of an over-confident English side in 1990.

Surely being a spectator at the greatest rugby show on earth can't really compare with all of that?

Yet as he leans forward across the oval desk in his company's Melville Street boardroom, showing that familiar lop-sided grin, he insists he is more than happy to be a spectator these days.

"For a year or so when I finished I might still have harboured the belief that I could still have been out there competing, but when you've been finished for 12 years, those sorts of thoughts no longer enter my head," he smiles.

"The game has changed out of all recognition. The professional structure came in after I retired, the game has changed quicker than any other major sport. With it being full time, the boys' body shapes have changed. It has become much more physical."

Still, he believes that if he was 20 years younger, he would be out there, competing at that top level in a Scotland strip: "I'm a great believer that if you were good enough in one generation, you'd be good enough in the next one. You can only compare yourself with the guys that we played against. I have no doubts that I would be training differently today but I think that I would have enjoyed being a professional player."

These days "Big Gav" is still never far from the rugby pitch. Whether it's commentating on matches for the BBC, working with sports and event management company Platinum-One or watching his ten-year-old son Adam thundering by in his dad's footsteps, playing in a George Watson's rugger shirt.

He is also the face of next September's Golden Oldies rugby tournament, when more than 4000 rugby veterans from around the world will descend on Edinburgh for an eight-day festival.

And, of course, there's his recent appointment as chairman of Edinburgh - the city's professional rugby squad which is emerging and refocussing after a turbulent summer which saw a run-in between former owner Bob Carruthers and the Scottish Rugby Union.

It's a role at the coal face of the game that Gavin is clearly relishing - even though he is more ambassador than hands-on in the day-to-day running of the club.

"The game has been professional for 12 years but in terms of the crowds that Edinburgh play in front of, they are no bigger now than the average crowds that I and many others were playing in front of 15 years ago. We have to attract more supporters," he says.

The club's current Murrayfield base may not be the solution, but a new, smaller stadium might be.

"At the moment we're playing in a 67,500-seat stadium, so demand for a ticket isn't really there. We can't create a demand for tickets so that people want to buy their tickets early. If we know that in five years' time we are going to get a new stadium part-funded by Edinburgh City council, that's terrific, let's work towards that."

Edinburgh-born, Gavin still lives in the city, as do his parents and his brother, fellow rugby star Scott. Gavin is passionate about the idea that a Capital side can compete at the highest level in the sport.

"I'm a great fan of Edinburgh, we have got one of the great capital cities in Europe. I think it's very important for Edinburgh as a city to have a sporting team - male, female or mixed - that represents Edinburgh at the highest level of competition in Europe," he explains.

"We don't have a single Edinburgh team in soccer, but we do have an Edinburgh team in rugby. So we have to grow the brand so in five or ten years time we are going to be up there, challenging and competing with the best."

He certainly has plenty of clout and an arsenal of sporting contacts to draw on. Indeed, the company he chairs and his brother Scott works for is Platinum One - instigators of Spanish football giants Barcelona's hugely-successful pre-season trip to these shores.

"The senior directors of Barcelona were very keen to come over to Scotland and stay in St Andrews and play golf," he says. "They wanted to train away from the heat of the Spanish summer. It worked out for everyone."

So well, in fact, that he is optimistic that the exercise can be repeated. "I'm sure at some stage they will come back," he nods. "In fact, we are hoping to bring more high profile names to Scotland for pre-season training."

Platinum One also represents a number of football players, organises sports hospitality events and was key in helping Scotland successfully bid to host the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles in 2014. And it's clear that between his rugby commitments, work schedules and personal fitness regime, Gavin is clearly in as much demand these days as he may have been as an international star.

There is also, however, time for his wife Diane, 42, son Adam and eight-year-old Holly, who are both pupils at Watson's, his former school.

And could there be good news for Scotland fans, for Adam appears to have inherited his father's sports genes with a passion for rugby and football.

But which will the Hastings' lad opt to follow? "I'd never dream of steering him away from football to rugby," grins Gavin. "He loves both and he loves competitive sports. And I enjoy supporting him very much."

He'd love to see rugby emerge from the shadow of football and be adopted by more state schools - just as he laments the state of the nation's health and wishes more public cash could be steered into encouraging all sports at school level.

He firmly believes the day will come when more Scots develop an interest in the game beyond the Six Nations, emotionally-charged Scotland-England clashes and, of course, the Rugby World Cup.

"Rugby is a second cousin sport in Scotland," he says. "It's a challenge to change that, but that will come.

"There's an underlying support and depth of feeling for the game across a wide section of the community. It just needs our professional team to be successful."

Sunday will have a particular poignancy for Gavin: his final appearance was in June 1995, when Scotland lost 48-30 to the All Blacks in a World Cup quarter-final in Pretoria.

No doubt the memories will come flooding back, but, as he says: "I can't think that there will ever be a time when I'm not involved with rugby."

"I like the people, I like the sport. I have a lot of friends in it and it has been good to me over the years.

"I just hope I can be in a position to give something back."


Edinburgh Evening News September 21 2007

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

PEOPLE: Footballer Peter Marinello: I got a gun and went after him"

FAME and fortune shone on Peter Marinello. Gifted with a natural footballing talent, he had the added advantage of striking looks, a fun-loving personality and a sharp fashion sense that had the girls hooked.

No wonder he quickly became known as Scotland's George Best.

It was 1970 and the world was at his feet. The 19-year-old Hibs winger, so inventive and confident on the park, was on the cusp of greatness - Arsenal had just paid £100,000 for him, and he was in demand to appear on Top of the Pops and as a fashion model.

Life looked on course to pan out perfectly for a lad raised in a Broomhouse prefab, who honed his soccer skills on the nearest stretch of spare ground.

Sadly, though, the "George Best" tag was to prove uncannily accurate: soon Peter Marinello's name would go down in history among those players for whom football greatness became a curse.

Today, he lives in Bournemouth, his football revolves around encouraging his 20-month-old grandson Matthew to kick and not pick up the ball. "I think he's going to be a goalie," grins Peter.

He's 59 now, with a hip replacement and a lot of time on his hands to reflect on how that fresh-faced teenager who signed for Arsenal ended up broke and caught toting a handgun, intent on wreaking revenge on the business partner who shattered his dreams.

"I look back on it all and I see where I made mistakes," he nods. "I was naïve, I let people take advantage of me. I got involved with people I shouldn't have.

"I was skint, my wife was ill and I'd lost everything. And you go a little crazy when that happens."

He was just 15 when he signed for Hibs, having first shrewdly warned them that England legend Stanley Matthews wanted to sign him for Port Vale.

In fact, Hibs were the only team he wanted to play for. "I was a Hibs fan - my family were living in Logie Green at that time. I'd supported Hearts when we were in Broomhouse but you learn which team to follow when you move to Leith."

He loved the club and times were good, although at times - as was to become the regular case with Marinello - downright bizarre.

At the age of 18 and despite his best efforts still a "good" Catholic boy, he would join his Hibs teammates on a tour of Nigeria and Ghana, just as the Biafran War was breaking out.

Team-mate Jimmy O'Rourke decided to give him a late 18th birthday present he'd never forget - the loss of his virginity to a local "lady of the night", all the while egged on by a crowd of around 20 Hibs team-mates, seated, cheering, in a half circle around the bed.

It wasn't the only memorable moment of the tour - Marinello later recalled arriving at an island in Ghana where the lads spotted some locals' canoes and began messing around with them.

"Amused they were not," recalled Peter in his biography, Fallen Idle. "It was even less funny when I was snatched and frogmarched 200 yards.

"The local fishermen were convinced that we had damaged their boats and they indicated that, unless Hibernian Football Club were prepared to foot the bill for repairs, they could kiss goodbye to Peter Marinello."

He was restrained, hands tied behind his back while the team haggled for 40 anxious minutes before accepting the demands.

A year later as he signed for Arsenal to become one of the highest-paid players in the game, Marinello must have believed that life in London surely couldn't be quite as bizarre . . .

"I was still upset at leaving Hibs," he recalls. "I was enjoying myself, I had a few bob, I liked buying nice suits and going out for a drink with the Hibs team.

"Willie MacFarlane, the Hibs manager, said I was getting out of control, he brought in another player and I was the last to know I was being sold."

His three years at Arsenal would often prove frustrating football-wise, but London offered bright lights and endless opportunities to relieve him of his earnings.

The birth of his first son, Paul, in 1972 - a year before he shunned Arsenal's pleas and moved to Portsmouth - was to have a resounding impact on his life. It plunged his wife, Joyce, into post-natal depression which would evolve into a lifelong struggle.

Her condition wasn't helped, perhaps, by her husband's off the pitch activities. Drinking - he once said he didn't have "a favourite drink, as long as it was wet" - gambling and unfortunate business investments were eating into his big money salary.

His journeyman career took him to Motherwell and America before he returned to Edinburgh, this time in a maroon jersey and the beginning of the end for a player who once held so much promise.

"I was fine about going to Hearts," he recalls. "I'd been raised in that part of town and it was part of my childhood. The fans were good to me, too."

Edinburgh, his hometown, seemed to offer a chance to finally settle and Marinello set about putting down business roots. He converted a house with a friend and, buoyed by that success, took on another property and dipped his toe into a trade he knew well.

"I bought a couple of pubs, one in Lauriston Place, the other in Leith Walk," he recalls.

Marinello played 36 times for Hearts - scoring on five occasions - between October 1981 and March 1983, when his old Hibs team-mate, Peter Cormack, signed him for Partick Thistle. Injury, however, put paid to his career just as the business behind his pubs started to collapse.

"I was too trusting," he recalls. "I started making big mistakes."

Haunted by the loss of hundreds of thousands of pounds, Marinello lost himself in booze and at the bookies. Money was running out. His final make-or-break deal was a £150,000 investment in a Spanish nightclub.

"My wife was in hospital and I was looking after two kids," he recalls. "We ended up with nowhere to stay, so we lived at Butlin's in Skegness while we waited and waited for the money.

"But I'd made a contract with a conman. He disappeared and I wasn't going to get my money."

Pushed to the edge, he finally snapped. It wasn't hard to find someone in London to supply him with a handgun and point him towards his ex-business partner.

"It was a replica," insists Marinello today. "It was just a scare tactic. All I wanted was to get my money back."

A few days later police came knocking and today Marinello knows he was lucky to escape it all with a stern warning.

Marinello's football career is overshadowed by bankruptcy, that handgun incident and a reputation for booze and business failures.

"I'm a devil may care person," he shrugs. "I was young and stupid and I had too much money and time on my hands. But there were some bloody great times too.

"Would I change it?" he grins, "not a bit of it."

Fallen Idle by Peter Marinello is published by Headline.

MODELS, nightclubs and footballers have proved a potent mix ever since George Best was in his heyday at Manchester United.

But rarely more so than in the case of Hearts' Chilean striker Mauricio Pinilla, who had to flee his home country to escape the pursuing press pack after finding himself at the centre of a sex scandal.

It was an alleged hotel-room liaison with Maria Jose Lopez, the glamorous model wife of his international captain Luis Jimenez, that sparked the furore three years ago.

Shortly afterwards, a fracas ensued when the 23-year-old and Jimenez turned up at the same Santiago nightclub. Pinilla left the club pursued by local reporters and swiftly booked flights to Mexico to escape their attention.

Across the city, the booze-fuelled party lifestyle of Hibs' Russell Latapy was as famous as his wizardry on the pitch.

As he was starting out on his career, he shared a house in Trinidad with fellow footballer Dwight Yorke and cricket star Brian Lara. The natural competition between the three sportsmen extended to their pursuit of women, Latapy once admitted.

His close friend Yorke was at his side when his Hibs career came to an inauspicious end in May 2001.

The pair were returning to Latapy's New Town flat from the Mercado club in the West End with two women when his Volkswagen Beetle was spotted weaving on to the wrong side of Kerr Street.

Latapy was charged with drink-driving, less than 48 hours before a derby match, and was duly sacked by the Easter Road club.

Rangers immediately stepped in to take advantage, by snapping up the wayward talent.

Edinburgh Evening News August 6, 2009