WHILE idly chatting, with a chairman of a high-profile football club last week, I was shocked to discover that he does not travel on the team coach to away matches; apparently travelling with the players is no longer an option for directors in the modern game. For Wallace Mercer, who passed away last week, the thought of not travelling on the team coach with the boys would have been as abhorrent as ordering bottle of Liebfraumilch to go with his fine food.

Wallace Mercer was a man for whom I should have had no time whatsoever - our political views were incompatible, he was my boss and hogged many of the back pages that we players thought were our territory. The truth is, though, that I respected the man, in fact, more than that, I genuinely liked him. When I heard the news last week, I was deeply saddened. As always at these times I thought of his family, of Anne his wife, and his son Ian and daughter Helen. Of all the clubs I played for, and all the chairmen and owners I encountered, it struck me that Wallace's family was the only one in which I knew them all. It was a testament to what he fostered at Hearts.

Bizarrely, my first real exposure to the huge personality that was Wallace Mercer was in his car on the way to the Scottish Labour Party conference. This was as a result of my having filled in a questionnaire in a newspaper where I had said the person I would most like to meet was the then leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock. Another director, Pilmar Smith, duly arranged this and Wallace, sniffing the scent of a photographer's flashbulb, invited himself along. I think very few people would have preceded a meeting with the most important socialist politician of the time by being quite as enthusiastic, all the way from Edinburgh to Perth, about having bought car parking spaces in the centre of Edinburgh for £75,000, which would hugely increase the value of flats he had developed. The headline, the next day could quite easily have read Capitalism meets Socialism for Lunch.

When I arrived at Hearts from Celtic, the Mercer transformation was already well underway. The bad times, though, were recent enough that the players that had experienced the turmoil before Wallace arrived - Walter Kidd, Gary McKay and John Robertson - were still able to regale us with tales of horror about the lack of professionalism and ambition that culminated in one of Scotland's biggest clubs dropping out of the top division.

In the infamous 1985-86 season that started in disappointment (bottom of the league in September) and ended in even more disappointment (pipped for the league title and Scottish Cup), there were so many good times that everyone involved is still bound together by those memories. From Wallace as the owner down to Mary the tea lady, there was a lovely feeling about the club.

This must have been due to a large degree to the leadership of Wallace. It was the Eighties, Thatcherism was at it's height, greed was good and if you were doing well it was OK to let people know and boy did Wallace let people know. The Tynecastle press conferences were legendary. And they did not have to be about anything. A 16-year-old schoolboy signed for the club, press conference! Drawn Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup, press conference! New strip, press conference! I swear Wallace was having press conferences to announce press conferences at one point. The one consistency was they were all packed to the rafters. They started two hours before the official announcement and sometimes ended five hours after the main business was concluded. We saw many journalists and editors stagger out fortified by Wallace's hospitality. Funnily, Wallace never seemed to have much trouble dominating the back pages of the national press at the time, whether he had anything important to say or not.

One time he most certainly merited the column inches was when he launched his bid to create an Edinburgh super club, one that could match his ambition by generating the crowds and income that could make a team from the east genuine challengers to the Old Firm.

With Wallace, it was sometimes difficult to establish exactly what his motives were but I always felt that this move was more a desire to be remembered as a great visionary than of any wish to wipe out his greatest rivals. This was indicative of one of his failings: although he loved the game, he did not always understand it. He did not realise, until he was in too deep, what he was doing to all those people that loved Hibernian in the same way that he loved Hearts. Perhaps, in a strange way, he even did the Hibs fans a favour, as that seemed to be the catalyst for many changes at Easter Road.

There are many tales of Wallace that he neither confirmed nor denied with any great vigour. One of the more absurd regarded his negotiations to bring Ian Ferguson to Hearts. The story goes that he was trying to sort out the contract with Bill McMurdo, the player's agent, but had not concluded the deal the night before the press conference. So Wallace telephoned Bill at home and got Bill's answering machine, he left a message to let Bill know how much he would pay. As the evening went on and Wallace heard nothing, he left another message with an increased offer. This went on four times, with Wallace getting more desperate as he believed Bill was stonewalling him.

Eventually, Bill called him and they sorted it out. The legend goes that Bill was not ignoring Wallace's calls but was simply out for the evening. True or not, for those that know him it is enough to suspect that it could be true.

I had regular contact with Wallace until last month, as I am a member at Archerfield Golf Club in East Lothian as was Wallace. On my second visit there, I was assailed by a loud voice announcing to the whole clubhouse: "JOHN COLQUHOUN who, incidentally, was my best ever signing for Hearts when I was CHAIRMAN." I was ordered to take a seat and we talked about old times for a while. This was no hardship.

Wallace was generous to the players. I have never heard an ex-player talking of him with anything but fondness. Sadly, we could not give him what he ultimately wanted which was a trophy for his beloved Hearts. But just as surely as the man we met in Perth that day, Neil Kinnock, laid the foundations for the Labour victory in 1997, I believe that Wallace is due at least a part of the credit for the Hearts' Scottish Cup victory the following year and his legacy will live on for as long as Heart of Midlothian Football Club does.

Taken from the Scotsman