HE never auditioned for the role as Memory Man but the player of two names has made it his unlikely vocation.

At 75, Willie Hunter sits in an Edinburgh café with photographs of his past scattered across the table. “I am Billy really,” he says. “Always been called that.” Yet the name Willie Hunter has the effect of producing a hushed silence when uttered among men of a certain age. A forward of uncommon grace, he is a nominee for Greatest Motherwell Player Ever, an election that would be contested by some of his teammates, most notably Pat Quinn and Ian St John. Yet Hunter, steady in voice and strong in opinion, is restrained when describing both his attributes and those of others.

An Edinburgh laddie, he was forged as a footballer in Lanarkshire. Hunter admits to being impressed in moments throughout his life but that eventuality is more likely to be prompted by Jill St John rather than Ian St John. And of that more later. His career in football was brilliant but Hunter was never likely to be starry-eyed. He played in a tough school. His generous gifts exacted the traditionally meagre financial reward. Yet still he gives to the game and to his colleagues.

He enters the café, apologising for his appearance. “I will be with you in a minute,” he says. “I have to wipe this rain from my face.” The delay, of course, is worthwhile. Hunter was a football great. He is still a man of substance.

It is easy to be impressed by Hunter, the player, after even the most desultory trawl of the internet. He played for Motherwell for 10 years, earned three caps, and later plied his trade in the USA and South Africa with a spell in Leith with Hibernian wedged in between. This prosaic cv is garlanded with breathless praise by those who played with him or watched them. These men of the fifties and sixties were not easily impressed. Hunter softened their resistance to adulation. He won them over with performances that cannot be measured merely in goals and assists but that glistened with the flair of an artist who could deceive defenders with a touch or a shimmy. “I was a bit of a dribbler,” he says. Aye. And Michelangelo could coat a ceiling.

He has that assurance of the best when assessing his talents and those who played with him and against him. “In those days we never heard a tactics talk,” he says. He was one of the Ancell Babes, the Motherwell side of the late fifties and early sixties that illuminated Scottish football even though they could not quite win a title.

“We fell short in several positions but we had some good players in John Martis, Ian [St John], Pat [Quinn] and Charlie Aitken. But Bobby Ancell never coached us in any real sense. Then it was all about finding pieces for the jigsaw.”

Scouts would identify players and Ancell would try to fit them in the side. “It was all about people complementing each other. Ian [St John] was tough,” he says, rapping the table in emphasis. “He was quick, strong and good in the air. So you needed someone who could cross to him. I suppose Pat [Quinn] was our passer and I was the dribbler and could pass too.” He also supplied a goal every five games in a career that stretched at Motherwell from 1957 to 1967, encompassing 228 games.

His departure and subsequent career testifies to the brutal realities of football in the sixties. “I was due a benefit for 10 years’ service. It was £750 which was a lot of money then. Promises were made by Ancell but he left to go to Dundee and they were never honoured,” he says.

Instead, he left for Detroit Cougars and later played in South Africa. He was only 27 when he departed, so why did such a talent feel it necessary to take such a dramatic leap into a team that would fold within a year?

“I thought it would be a good experience and I was angry at the way I was treated,” he says softly. A brief, disappointing spell at Hibs was followed by a spell in South Africa. “When I came back from America, I was wanted by Hibs and Hearts. I made the wrong choice.” he says. He was also hurting. His knees were sore, his arm had been badly broken, requiring surgery that involved taking a bone from his hip. “I lost a bit of zip, I suppose,” he says of injuries that severely curtailed his possible haul of caps.

His passion for the game, though, could not be chilled by the cold reality of being treated as a chattel and being kicked routinely and regularly. When his playing career ended, he worked as an assistant to St John when the former Liverpool player was manager at Portsmouth. Hunter, subsequently, was briefly manager of Queen of the South and Inverness Caledonian. Of these episodes he says: “I learned that you had to bite your tongue in those jobs and I didn’t do that.” This is said without any hint of regret.

Hunter scouted for teams such as Tottenham Hotspur, had a successful career in insurance and even wrote a book about a trek undertaken with his wife. “I could do too much,” he says. He now devotes much of his time as an ambassador for Football Memories, the charity that seeks to help those with dementia find a link to the past through reminiscence of games, memorabilia and personalities. His own memories can veer far from the field. He is proud of his autograph collection. In Las Vegas, he loitered in the lobby to secure the signature of Jill St John, partner of the singer Jack Jones who was the headline act. Elton John signed at a Watford match and Rod Laver was cornered in Broadway though the main target, Frank Sinatra, was not in the famous watering hole of Jilly’s that night.

Hunter has a mixture of deadpan delivery and underplayed mischief when relating these takes. These traits extend to his football reminiscences. “I do not have any special memories as a player,” he says. “I suppose I remember that I played in very good under 23 teams at 17 with the likes of Dave Mackay. I remember sliding into a hoarding at Ibrox and hurting my arm when I was challenging wee Willie [Henderson],” he adds.

He also recalls heading to Girvan in 1960 to watch Real Madrid train ahead of their European Cup final against Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden. “The whole of Scottish professional football could have gone along. We were at Turnberry on end of season break and only six of us went to see them. The great players of the day were performing their tricks in front of an empty stand.”

Attempts to draw him out further produce a wonderful dividend. “I was on holiday with my wife – somewhere on the continent, I can’t remember where – and I met Lawrie McMenemy. It was before he was manager at Southampton but he told me to follow him and watch this 16-year-old boy playing on a pitch near the beach. It was Cruyff. You knew immediately he was going to be a great.”

There is a pause before he drags another memory from the vault. “Where I lived in Abbeyhill there was a big bit of spare land that was a dump but they tarred it over. It later became a school playground but we got sawdust and marked it out. It was 50-60 yards long and about 30 yards across and we played on it every Sunday. Ian [St John] sometimes came through to the dancing on a Saturday night and we would play on the Sunday afternoon against lads from another street.”

St John and Hunter were 17 and were the rising stars of Scottish football yet their passion could not be sated by professional football. “I loved the Sunday games,” says Hunter. “But it came to an end. The ball went over a fence one day and I went to retrieve it and Bobby Ancell was standing there. Someone had told on us. And that was that.”

The Memory Man smiles and sips his coffee. The past has suddenly warmed and softened a traditionally brutal Edinburgh winter’s day.