It’s been 40 years, but Ally McCoist can still recall the ironic, finer details of the time his manager at Rangers, Jock Wallace, punched him square on the chin.
“The 1984 Olympics were on – it’s scarred me that much, I can remember the boxing was on the telly!” McCoist laughs, chatting to FourFourTwo exactly 40 years later.
The striker had been at the club for just over a year and during his second pre-season with the Ibrox club inexperience got the better of him.
‘He’s absolutely livid’
“He was heavy on curfews”, explains McCoist, referring to then manager Jock Wallace who would go on to eventually win ten trophies at Rangers. “When I was about 21, he caught me coming back from the pub about five or 10 minutes late during a pre-season trip.”
“I went upstairs and was panicking like you have no idea. My room-mate Cammy Fraser was trying to calm me down – I said, ‘He’s absolutely livid’. There was a bang on the door.
“Cammy said, ‘I’ll sort this’, got up and walked towards the door… then turned right, walked into the toilet and locked that door. I thought, ‘Hey, you bastard’.
“I went to open the door to the room – as I did, it got booted off the hinges and I was confronted by this right jab to my jaw, which floored me. When I opened my eyes, Jock was breathing over me, saying, ‘I’ll see you in the morning’. I’m thinking, ‘F**k me, this is the warm-up!’”
“Thankfully he’d calmed down in the morning, but what a guy, I absolutely loved him. When I tell people that Big Jock put one on my chin, none of them ever say, ‘That’s terrible’ but, ‘You must have deserved it’, which to be fair, I did!”
Wallace managed the club across two spells that spanned 308 games and earned a 65.26 per cent win ratio. A classic Scottish manager of the time, he was a notorious disciplinarian.
In between his two spells as Rangers boss he managed a young Gary Lineker who recalls being pinned against the dressing room wall by Wallace at half-time once. “He called me a lazy English this and that. We were 2–0 up and I'd scored both goals. I didn't score in the second half – I was still shaking!”
Despite the hard-handed approach, many of Wallace’s former players, like McCoist and Lineker still hold him in high regard. He passed away in 1996 aged 60.
