Rugby star turned business giant Gammell evangelises about releasing Scotland's untapped potential

It was just the expression of confidence in his selection for an international debut that the newcomer needed to hear and he responded accordingly.

Forty years on from that Scotland v Ireland meeting Bill Gammell remembers the occasion both fondly and vividly.

“My first try was probably a yard out… it might have been two. Someone chucked the ball out and it bounced just short of the line, I grabbed it and went through Mike Gibson and Jimmy Bowen and I don’t know who the others were, but it was a striker’s try,” he recalls.

To be fair you wouldn’t need to know who the others were. For younger readers Mike Gibson was the Brian O’Driscoll of his era, widely considered to be Ireland’s finest ever back until his fellow centre arrived on the scene.

“Then in the second half I remember Jim Renwick hacked on the ball which I managed to get the bounce of and ran 25 metres or whatever, but the atmosphere was unbelievable in those days when the crowd was right up against the pitch and it was a Roy of the Rovers schoolboy dream,” Gammell continues.

A reserve for that summer’s British & Irish Lions tour of New Zealand, his sporting career would be curtailed by injury. However in those amateur rugby days he was, that same year, setting out on his business career, acquiring a two man insurance broking company which was, three years later, to become Cairn Energy. He attributes much of the subsequent success that has seen him become one of Scotland’s most successful businessmen, to lessons learned on the field of play.

“I do look back on rugby as being really formative in my career because you are playing with so different sizes, shapes, backgrounds, beliefs, but if you can coalesce that as a team… in business I always think the number one thing you have to have is a vision, the same as in rugby where you need to have a vision and a belief of what you can do together,” Gammell observes.

“When I started in business I imagined everyone was brighter than me, but one of the keys I believe in life is always to surround yourself with people who are more able than you. As the years have gone on I’ve figured out that I had to be quite smart to have done that, but rugby gave me that belief because you learned tremendous resilience. You win some, you lose some, but you realise that as long as you play your part and are the best you can possibly be in whatever you are doing the team is always more powerful than the individual.”

Nor were the sporting lessons confined to rugby because Gammell was not always the rangy runner who made such an impact as that 21-18 victory, Scotland’s only success in the 1977 Five Nations Championship campaign, was registered. Having played football at prep school in England from the age of seven until he arrived at Fettes College as, according to his own description, a rather under-sized 13-year-old, he did not turn to the sport most closely associated with Edinburgh’s private schools until after he left, a bid to expand his horizons having been accompanied by a growth spurt.

“I went to Australia for a year, came back and went to Stirling University where I went for a football trial and a rugby trial and just enjoyed the rugby,” he says.

While at school, however and still among the smaller boys in his year, he was pushed towards squash and was sufficiently good, as a 15-year-old, to reach the final of the East of Scotland under-18 championship where, as sixth seed, he met the favourite, a school-mate, in the final.

“I was two nil up but lost 3-2 and my father said to me ‘You didn’t believe you could win.’ He was totally right and I have never, ever forgotten that. It’s totally what happens in here,” Gammell says, tapping his temple.

Valuable as that realisation was in his approach to business life, however, it also informed his decision, after time served on the boards of Sportscotland, the Institute of Sport, Commonwealth Games Scotland and on an advisory board for the Olympics, to set up a new organisation around a decade ago. Originally geared specifically towards sport the Winning Scotland Foundation, of which he remained chairman after retiring from running Cairn Energy three years ago, has widened its remit and Gammell is evangelical about what lies behind that, his realisation that Scotland has for too long been blighted by limitations placed upon its citizens by their environment.

“The Winning Scotland Foundation is all about trying to encourage people to be their personal best and we are actually now dealing with education as well as sport because it is about helping people develop the mindset,” he explains.

“My vision is to try to change Scottish culture, as simple as that, to get us to realise it is about self-belief, it is about resilience, it is about courage, it is about effort and our whole education system should be about proving to people that they can help themselves to be whatever they want to be.”

Central to that is an approach to education that is about expanding the range of experiences to which youngsters are exposed, giving them the chance to find out just what it is they are good at, rather than finding themselves confined and defined by a narrow range of options that have, traditionally, seen over-emphasis placed upon academic learning.

In his case where squash, as an individual sport, taught him a vital lesson about his own outlook, it was rugby that pulled everything together as he realised that importance of surrounding himself with the right people and using his natural strengths to best advantage, while putting in the necessary effort.

“Rugby proved to me that while there were barriers put in my way, just through perseverance, some speed and some good inside centres that gave you the ball you could achieve a lot more than you believe, if you’re given the opportunity,” said Gammell.

“A lot of people have much more capability than they would ever realise because no-one’s actually given them that opportunity so what the Foundation’s trying to do is just turn the lightbulb on for lots of different people.

“The potential has to come from within and you’ve got to equip individuals to recognise what their own personal strengths are. That’s about developing a culture where there’s a can do spirit and there’s no real stigma in failure. Instead it’s about learning from those failures and what you move on to do.”

Which brings us back to the start of yesterday’s eve of Six Nations Championship conversation when, like every other rugby supporter in the land, Gammell was expressing his excitement for what lies ahead albeit, strangely reassuringly, with an optimism that was not unquenchable but instead was laced with the apprehension that afflicts all those of us who have been told so often in recent years that this time it will be different, only to be disappointed once more.

“I genuinely believe that you see people get to a standard where they either flourish or they can’t handle the responsibility or whatever,” he observed, having been taken aback when reminded that Scotland have won their opening match in the Six Nations just once.

“It’s the same with players. There are more players around having come through Glasgow and wherever else. I think Vern Cotter’s done a good job, but it’s a question of whether they’ve got the heart, they’ve got the bottle to make it happen.”

How many of them have the belief to take it, as Gammell did on that first appearance all those years ago, remains to be seen, but those set to take the field today are among the lucky ones who are getting the opportunity to find out.