Now I don't hide the fact that I'm a bit of a Gary Imlach fan, but I'd never heard of his father Stewart Imlach. It turns out Stewart Imlach was one of those people who manages to be just well known enough for you to wonder how you missed them previously. This is a man who played in Scotland's World Cup team back in '58, won the F.A. Cup back in '59 and seems to have made an impression on many people of the era. But his fame seems stuck in that era, something very few people manage to avoid.
In fact it seems almost as though his own father's celebrity passed Gary Imlach by too - a combination of being born too late to fully appreciate his father's impact and the simple truth that back then very few footballers received the recognition we associate with the game now. But when Stewart Imlach died in 2001 Gary Imlach found himself sorting the memorabilia that had accrued over the years, and soon he was sorting through his father's life to piece together all these fragments. The result is the sublime book My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes.
As I've noted before, Gary Imlach has a wonderful style and can bring many things to life. If truth be told I probably wouldn't have even given this book a second glance had it not been by him, and that would've been a shame. As I hoped this book goes far beyond a simple biography of his father's achievements; this is a history of football, the relationship a man has with his family, a passion, a tribute to a father, a recollection of a time gone by and so much more.
It's easy to see the history Imlach paints as rose-tinted but that couldn't be further form the truth. This is a past where football players were treated little better than slaves; the game was hard but the system which controlled it was harder still. The past isn't rose-tinted, simply the present has lost the intimacy from those days. There have been advantages to the changes as well though - for a start players can now enjoy the same employment rights as the rest of us.
Gary Imlach manages to weave the history of football elegantly into the story of his family. He talks of different sports as having different languages and proves that they're tongues many of us share. A series of major and minor events allow us to plot his father's life against this common knowledge in a fluid and natural way. From all accounts Gary Imlach writes like Stewart Imlach played - sharing something beautiful with the rest of us simply because they find the act so important to themselves.
This is a book for people who have even a remote interest in football, but this is also a book for anyone with a father. This is a book for those of us who dreamily remember a time when people smiled at you in the street simply because you were in their street. I simply can't recommend this book strongly enough, my copy will be treasured for years.