- guardian.co.uk, Sunday October 12 2003 00.54 BST
He was on his way with his brother Bill to the Saturday night dancing, down at the Marine Gardens in Portobello, when he heard the Evening News seller shouting something about a new cap for Scotland. He paused, in the gloom of a Saturday night in the east end of Edinburgh - which even then, away back in January 1928, still wasn't I suspect quite as gloomy as the special modern glooms they do there today, thanks to the gloomy miracle of orange sodium light - and bought a paper, and found he'd come well out of that day's trial, and been picked to play rugby for Scotland.
The next week, my grandpa received a pre-printed card with a tear-off slip. 'You have been chosen to play for Scotland v Wales at Murrayfield on Saturday 4th February. Please let me know at once by the accompanying Card if you are able to play. Kick-off 2.45. Lunch at North British Station Hotel, Princes Street, Edinburgh, at 12.30 on Saturday. Brake leaves Hotel for field at 2 o'clock.'
He had to provide his own navy-blue stockings and white shorts, and send off his measurements for jersey and cap to outfitters Aitken & Niven, who sent these directly to the hotel on the day of the game. After lunch, the team had less than an hour before walking on to the pitch. They hadn't played together before. The captain, J.M. Bannerman, got the forwards to scrum down in the dressing room for a bit of practice, which was when grandpa learnt he wasn't playing wing-forward, as expected, but second-row. He weighed a bit over 11 stone. Scotland lost 13-0.
I suspect that all of them, like Jimmy Ferguson, have by now passed on, or at the very least lost some of the pace of their peak years, so they can't join us over the next seven weeks in witnessing a spectacle different in every conceivable way, other than the word 'rugby' and the possibility of Scotland again losing something 13-0.
Australia will doubtless do it well, this world cup. Sun, drink, physical violence, pointless fitness, cheering blondes, grilled well-muscled steaks, more drink - goodness but the country was made for the game (in the same way it sometimes worries me that Scotland can still advertise its addiction to niggling rules, prejudice, torpor, chilblains and cheating at niggling rules, by pretending to be proud to be the home of golf). And the teams will do well, the alarmingly superfit all-rounders who rinse out their toxins with nine litres of water a day and would no more countenance a hotel meal (I came terrifyingly close then to typing, for the first time ever, the phrase 'slap-up') before the game than a multiple amputation.
But here's a surprising thing, especially for those like me whose temperament tends towards the belief that most change is for the worse. Those who opposed all rugby's rule-changes and creeping professionalism - my grandpa loudly included, obstreperous and thrawn and principled to the last - foresaw a sanitised, soulless, whistle-heavy game, spoilt by money and lacking in any ethics: like rugby league or (God forbid) football. It hasn't happened. It's probably, now, the most watchable spectator sport I know: fast and thrilling and skilful beyond measure. And I like to think that, were he here today, his innate fairness would force him to agree, with of course a modicum of harrumphs; and I like to think too that, crucially, the game can't really have changed that monstrously when every man picked, for whatever country, can still feel the same thrill he felt beside a news-stand that winter's night.
