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By HUGH MACDONALD Published: 16: 01 AEST, 11 May 2025 | Updated: 16: 01 AEST, 11 May 2025 View comments The sun was setting over the Clyde, the end credits were just about to roll, when Duncan Ferguson was asked a question. ‘Who would play you in the film of your life? ’ a fan chirped up from the third row. The big man could not give an answer. This was understandable. Who, after all, could give an authentic performance as the mad man of the forward line who later doles out pounds to waiting children? Who could carry off scenes of applying a match to a pot of paint and almost wiping out Tannadice? Who could make it reasonable to imagine a character who once imbibed Cristal champagne while racing his doos? Who can reconcile the polar opposites of a personality who can throw his team-mates around a physio room and then punt up £25, 000 for a wee trip for them after he feels he has let them down by being sent off? This is all Big Dunc: Dundee United, Rangers, Newcastle and, crucially, Everton player. This is Big Dunc: the lad who went to prison but the player who visited the sick and the lonely in their homes. Duncan Ferguson has been reflecting on his colourful career in a new autobiography The striker became an Everton legend during two spells at Goodison Park A firebrand on and off the pitch, Big Dunc was rarely far from any hint of trouble ‘Duncan became the legend before he became the player, ’ Joe Royle, his one-time manager, once said. The legend has now been printed. At a plush hotel in Erskine on Friday, Ferguson, now 53, came to tell all. He did not disappoint. ‘I wanted to tell my story, ’ he said. He later reflected: ‘I wish I could go back. You can’t. I have a ton of regrets. I abused myself. I thought football was easy, life was easy. You get older and you realise life is tough. I can’t go back to being that young boy again. I should have been the best. ’ This too is Big Dunc: serious, even melancholy, but one eager to play the life story for laughs. There is much to amuse. Ferguson is the exemplar of football at a certain stage in its history. The big money was just coming in, the retain contracts were disappearing but the lads were still lads. There was Merrydown cider and cans of lager, there were high jinks. There were the brushes with authority that were absurd and then calamitous for Ferguson. The intimations of disaster appeared early. ‘He was a tyrant, ’ said Ferguson of Jim Mc Lean. ‘He was justified in a lot of things he did, though. I was a bit nuts, I was crazy. ‘He wasn’t very nice to me. We didn’t really get on. I didn’t hate the man, I respected the man, but the things he was doing to me I didn’t like. He tried to bully me. I got bullied at school and it took me a long time to stand up to that bully. But once you stand up to that bully they melt away. ’ Ferguson looks back on his time with Dundee United chairman Jim Mc Lean with little fondness Mc Lean eventually slipped from Ferguson’s life but not after strain endured by both sides during the player’s spell at the club from 1990-93. There was the pyrotechnic with the paint pot that caused genuine alarm. There was the moment when Mc Lean baited a trap for people he thought were stealing money from the canteen. ‘He had taken all the serial numbers from the pound notes he put in the canteen, ’ explained Ferguson. ‘He then took us up to the boardroom and we were strip searched. It was not the last time I was strip searched, ’ he added wryly. Mc Lean, too, stripped to his underwear to show he was not the thief. The matter was somehow resolved but this was football in the early nineties. A regime that held the power of contract and players who had not yet embraced sports science or accessed the money that was swirling into the game. Ferguson would be swept away by this excess. It would take him into Barlinnie, into a pool of despair. The laughing stopped. Ferguson had moved on from the surreality of telling the audience that he had no pubic hair until he was late in teenage years. His next subject was the brutal reality of Bar-L. ‘The first night was horrendous. It was the worst night of my life, ’ he said. Ferguson was jailed in 1995 after breaching probation conditions. He had clashed with John Mc Stay at Ibrox in April 1994. He called it a ‘collision’, others insisted it was a butt. It was enough to ensure he spent 44 days in Barlinnie. He had been in a series of previous incidents, most notably a punch-up in Anstruther. ‘No easy, ’ he said of his jail term. ‘It’s no easy for anyone going to prison. And I played for the Rangers. Half of the nick are Rangers fans, half of the nick are Celtic fans. When I went through that door for the first time, they were all on the landings. Everybody. All looking down on me. You could have heard a pin drop. I had to walk through everyone. It tests you, it tests you. ’ Raith Rovers defender John Mc Stay lies on the Ibrox pitch after his clash with Ferguson The flashpoint saw Ferguson charged with assault and sentenced to three months in prison  The repetition emphasises that the pain has not quite gone. ‘When I went through the cell door I felt relief, ’ he said. There was a brief spell of peace and he sat on the edge of the bed. Then afternoon turned to night. ‘It became darker, and darker. Then there were the threats. ’ He heard the shouts. ‘What cell is he in. I am going to cut that big dirty Orange b******. He’s gonnae get cut tae f***. ’ Ferguson added: ‘Half a dozen to 10 people were telling me I was going to get slashed in the morning. I was only 23, on my own. It was frightening. You think: “How has it come to this? ”’ This would take more than a book to answer. There are some clues, however. Ferguson admitted he was told by his father ‘to get his retaliation in first’. He was taught by nature and nurture to meet threats forcibly. But his background was fairly typical for a boy from St Ninians, Stirling. ‘I was brought up in the tenements. I had a great upbringing. One side was the tenement, the other side was the country. I had everything. We had nae money but I had the country. I had the fishing, I loved taking my ferrets to catch the rabbits, I always had my dog with me. ’ Ferguson was left furious by the lack of SFA support he received over the Mc Stay incident  Football took him away from this. It led him to fame, then infamy. It introduced riches, then bankruptcy. The boy who walked the hills was fated to pace a cell. The honesty is unrestrained. There is humour in tales recounting how Craig Brown, then Scotland assistant coach, woke Ferguson in his room by hoovering a floor that was strewn with the detritus of excess. Ferguson admitted on the night before in 1992 he almost set fire to the Swiss hotel, too. It is an involved story with a wicker chair, a wardrobe of burning paper, and retribution against beer being poured on his bed. Again, this was the way of it in the early nineties. But another encounter with a manager was more painful. Ferguson had been sentenced to prison and was in the process of an appeal when he was summoned to Walter Smith’s office. The Rangers manager had a message. ‘He said to me: “Look Duncy, we are thinking of moving you on”. I was crying my eyes out. ’ Ferguson admitted: ‘The move to Rangers was too early for me. I was too young. I was immature. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. ’ Ally Mc Coist, sitting in the audience, and Mark Hateley were the first-choice strikers. Rangers wanted to wait a season before buying Ferguson but the striker said: ‘I was desperate to get out of Dundee. It turned out to be a very bad move. ’ Ferguson is unveiled as Rangers' record signing but he now insists he let Walter Smith down He added: ‘They paid over the odds. ’ The transfer fee was a then Scottish record of £4m. ‘I let Walter down. I went to Rangers and I failed. I didn’t give myself the best chance to succeed. That really hurt me. ’ He acknowledged the madness of his life. In 1993, before his move to Rangers, he played against Germany, then the world champions, at Ibrox. Scotland lost 1-0 but Ferguson was brutally belligerent and technically adroit. His overhead kick has become almost a signifier for his career. It was spectacular but it was saved. Indeed, Ferguson never scored for Scotland in any of his seven appearances. He walked away from international duty, bitter at the role he perceived the SFA to have played in his court travails. A phone call from Mc Coist when Smith had taken over as national coach failed to persuade him to return. He is frank about the genesis of his troubles. ‘I thought I had made it before I had made it. I thought I was invincible. I played against Celtic at Tannadice and I was drunk. I ripped it apart. Football was easy for me until I went to Ibrox. I don’t think there were many great moments there. ’ Indeed, his first goal came on the day he clashed with Mc Stay. So it was off to Everton, initially on a loan, and then on a permanent transfer. He became a legend there. He produced a tableau of dramatic goals, sprinkled with red cards. It could have all played out at Bayern Munich. They were keen on signing him after his performance against Germany. But two days after the game he was fighting with four men in The Rock in Menzieshill, Dundee. He broke his toe. It was a harbinger of injuries to come. Ferguson gets to grips with Leicester City midfielder Steffen Freund in 2004 When he was fit he was unplayable, when he was unfit he did not play. The latter began to dominate the former. This is in the past. The present is a marquee at Mar Hall. The night is marked with two moments of genuine passion, perhaps joy. The first is the recollection of that lad striding out with his ferrets. The second is an anecdote about his life in Majorca where he lived for four years after his playing retirement. ‘I was a really good pigeons man and I took them with me, ’ he said. One day they were racing from Ibiza to Majorca. ‘I had a straw hat on, eating paella, drinking beer and smoking fags with guys who were about 90 years old. They didn’t know I was a good pigeons man. Suddenly I shouted: “Palomas a qui”. Five pigeons go boom into the loft. The lads nearly choked on their paella. ’ There is then that Ferguson laugh. It signifies much. He knows he did not make the most of the talent. He accepts much of that was dissipated in alcohol and he has not drunk since 2008. He remembers Bar L. He carries the wounds of bankruptcy when the taxman came looking for £4m. However, there is, perhaps, another realisation. He is fit, vibrant. He may not know who would play him in a movie but he knows he has survived. He has been through the storm and lived to tell the tales. Big Dunc is published by Century (£22) Ferguson found it surreal signing for Gullit at Newcastle, where he played alongside Shearer On a disappointing Scotland debut in a friendly: ‘I cannae get myself up for these f****** park games. ’ On playing Holland in 1992: ‘Ruud Gullit was the best player I have ever seen. I was made up in that game. When I came on as sub the Dutch manager shouted to Frank Rijkaard: “He’s coming on now so mark him. ” I was chuffed. I never touched the ball I was so busy looking at Rijkaard. ’ On his hero, Davie Cooper: ‘I just wanted to be like him. I watched him put in a free-kick at Hampden against Aberdeen. Top corner. I was a Rangers man and all my family were Rangers men. ’ The Stirling-born striker says Davie Cooper was the player he most wanted to emulate On Everton: ‘I played my best football there. I had time on the pitch. We weren’t very good at the time (when he first arrived in 1993) and I managed to be that talisman. I was aggressive, I took no prisoners. I loved it down there. ’ On being an idol: ‘Everton fans loved me because I cared for them, I would visit them. I built that relationship. When we came out of the training ground, there would be young kids and I would give them a pound. A young Wayne Rooney was there. I have pics of him at nine when he was outside the training ground. ’ On ever going back to Everton or Rangers: ‘My time has gone at Everton, unfortunately, I want to be a manager. I need to rebuild my career. I picked two incredibly tough jobs at Forest Green and Inverness Caledonian Thistle. But you get knocked down, you get back up. ’ Favourite memory: ‘Scoring goals against top teams. Against Liverpool, against Man United. I always did well against both of them. I remember scoring the goal that beat Celtic at Parkhead (December 26, 1992). Dundee United have not won there in the league since then. ’ Ferguson insists fans at Everton took him into their hearts because he 'took no prisoners' Life advice: ‘Don’t be swearing in interviews. Once I was asked to go for the Everton job, I lost my rag with the owners in the interview in London. I didn’t get the job. ’ Best centre-half: ‘Sami Hyypia at Liverpool. He was a good player, good in the air. He wasn’t physically strong but he read the game well. ' Biggest character he coached: ‘James Rodriguez. He was just walking around and then stopped in training and I shouted at him: “Vamos, venga, venga. Hey, you run, rapido”. He just looked at me and I knew he was thinking: “Who is this guy? ”’ On doing his audio book: ‘It wasn’t easy. The last time I read out something was in school when I was doing my lines. “I will not punch him in the face again. ”’

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