Like many famous soccer players, Jim Baxter was simultaneously a folk hero and fall guy. Plucked out of National Service into the professional game, and becoming a near-legendary figure at Glasgow Rangers in the mid-1960s, he was both a pin-up guy and a hero for millions of Scottish fans. His game reached its peak in 1967, when Scotland took on the then world champions England and beat them 3-2.
His private life was a different matter. Always fond of a drink or seven, he managed to sustain his professional career until his late twenties, and then he went downhill rapidly. He moved to England, first to Sunderland and then to Nottingham Forest, but never fulfilled the promise of his Scottish career. By his early thirties his career was over, and then began the long decline into alcoholism, failed businesses and obscurity.
In his fifties, it seemed as if the slide had been halted, as Baxter went on the wagon and carved out a new career for himself through personal appearances. But his life was cut short tragically through cancer.
Not much footage remains of Baxter in his prime, apart from some grainy black-and-white images from BBC soccer programs in the Sixties. Nonetheless his memory lives on as a gentleman, someone who took the vagaries of fortune with a smile and a cheery wave, and never lost his basic optimism, despite everything that happened to him.