David Murray�s first act as Rangers chairman was to sign Tom Cowan from Clyde for £100,000 in February 1989. From such humble beginnings, Murray subsidised more than a decade�s worth of success � and wanton indulgence.
David Murray's first act as Rangers chairman was to sign Tom Cowan from Clyde for £100,000 in February 1989. From such humble beginnings, Murray subsidised more than a decade's worth of success - and wanton indulgence - before he and his club reaped a bitter harvest.
Twenty years after a chance conversation with Graeme Souness, a basketball aficionado, courtside at an MIM home match at Meadowbank Arena, Murray has been confronted with his greatest challenge yet: getting out with his legacy intact.
The For Sale sign has been over Ibrox Stadium for more than two years. It is overly simplistic to suggest he should sell his 92% stake in the club to the first bidder and repair to an island idyll with his wife. For one, Murray is not immune to the banking and property crises that have triggered a global recession.
Secondly, after 20 years as custodian of a Scottish institution, albeit one with anachronistic baggage perpetuated by an element of its support, Murray sees himself as having a moral obligation to do the right thing.
Thirdly, whether he likes it or not, Murray's life is now inextricably linked, even bound and governed, by the daily grind of his attachment to Rangers.
The moment he passes the keys to a new occupier is the moment Murray will begin a slow and painful period of cold turkey. He will no longer be chairman and, while he will probably leave with an honorary position, modern Rangers will always be his club.
So what is the Murray legacy? Even amid a round of commemorative interviews, gala dinners and private toasts, not even he would attempt to sugarcoat his tenure as anything other than a series of high-stakes gambles, with mixed results.
He will rightly be hailed as the man who ended an embargo on Roman Catholic signings that restricted the club to roughly half the talent pool of this country and beyond. Not only was Maurice Johnston an astute piece of transfer business but he was the catalyst for a sequence of historic events sanctioned by an emboldened chairman. These culminated in the appointment of Dick Advocaat as Rangers' first foreign manager and Lorenzo Amoruso becoming the first Catholic captain of the club.
The signings of Brian Laudrup, Paul Gascoigne and Ronald de Boer were staging posts for Rangers' success but also Murray's ego. Laudrup was a fine footballer and supreme ambassador for the club; Gascoigne offered fleeting moments of genius before predictably combusting; de Boer was the epitome of Murray's increasingly reckless stargazing. Tore Andre Flo was the epitome of excess at a time when Murray ought to have stuck instead of twisting.
Murray will be remembered for modernising the stadium in preparation for the corporate era and for compounding the misery of a beleaguered and rudderless Celtic with his boasts of derring-do at the height of Rangers' sustained success under Souness and, largely, Walter Smith. On Thursday, Murray invited a select band of reporters who, either by accident or design, represented the broad spectrum of his critics: the subservients, the Siberians and the moderates who have neither been afforded the occasional sweetie nor craved a special place at the master's table.
It made for a robust and complex exchange on the fabric of the Murray legacy. He cannot escape culpability for plunging Rangers £80m into debt - even if the counter- argument is supporting his manager to a fault and subsequently cleaning up his own mess - and, while Celtic have exploited markets in America, Poland and the Far East to offset their indigenous handicap within the SPL, Murray has been unable to demonstrate such resourcefulness.
In retrospect, Murray may have wished to leave at the end of the Advocaat era. He has frequently referred to "changing the menu" at Rangers in terms of managerial appointments and signings. Underwriting a £2m signing for Maurice Edu is distinctly less palatable than his days holding high-end negotiations from his private plane. The menu has to change again. The problem is that nobody is willing to pick up the tab.
Above all, Murray can never be accused of not paying his way.
