TEN years ago to this very morning, Herald Sport bellowed down the phone with a most urgent request.
"Are you back in the country?" "Yes," I responded through the jet lag as my suitcase rolled by on the airport carousel. "Then get yourself to Glasgow straight away. They're closing the Claymores today."
The news that Scotland's American football team was being exterminated, a decade after its birth, was hardly a surprise. Trusted sources from within NFL's European operation had intimated for weeks that preparations should be made for its passing. Yet the press conference in an anonymous hotel to confirm the decision had the air of a eulogy before the wake could begin.
"It is a decision which is based purely on business and economics," said Jim Connolly, the league executive, delivering the lethal injection. Like Third Lanark and Clydebank, the end game had been played out.
"It seemed to be like a lot of relationship break-ups which go: 'it's not you, it's me'," recalls Alistair Kirkwood, the current NFL UK managing director. "And in this case, it really was like that. The league had started as World League, then had management consultancy tell the owners that if they focused on Europe, they would earn half a billion dollars every year inside seven years."
The numbers, at either Murrayfield or Hampden, did not add up. Millions were lost in Scotland alone. Its mission statement was continuously rewritten in a tussle of ideals: breeding fresh talent for the NFL versus generating a wave of fans intimately versed in the language of touchdowns and safeties.
"They were struggling to work out the end game," Kirkwood says. "Although the financials were tight, the business model was restrictive. You would have had to play a 20-week season to turn a profit. Structurally, there was a flaw."
Before long, NFL Europe was also consigned to history but the impact, close to home, still reverberates. Wembley will host the Atlanta Falcons and Detroit Lions this Sunday for the second of three regular-season games in the UK this year. It is a step, some believe, on the path towards giving London a franchise of its own.
Despite some small hope that Murrayfield might one day be a substitute venue, the focus in Scotland is now resolutely at the other end of the scale. "The legacy is the number of people who got involved," says Pete Laird, once part of the Claymores operational crew but now the head coach at Napier Knights in Edinburgh.
"We see it now: the younger players coming through our doors are largely guys who went to watch the Claymores when they were younger. Even among the senior coaches, a lot of us were on the staff in some capacity. There was already some interest in football before the team arrived but it exploded after it."
That residue is represented by seven Scottish senior teams from East Kilbride to Aberdeen taking part in the British league pyramid, plus five university sides. Many of the participants were intrigued initially by what they saw on television but were enthused by experiencing the sport at first hand.
"There were a lot of kids who either got the chance to play it in schools or played flag football when the Claymores ran their programmes," says Laird. "We still teach people from scratch sometimes but there's not as much of that any more; there's an understanding of the game."
The business insights left a legacy of their own. How many football clubs considered the C-word before their patch was encroached upon by an imported upstart? The customer, in the United States, is king. At the NFL's offices in London - and indeed sprinkled across the sporting landscape - are survivors of the battle lost.
"We learned a huge amount about how to engage fans," Kirkwood says, in a week when Wembley will be sold out once again. "Even now, we recycle ideas generated from within NFL Europe. Although the losses were substantial, budgets were shoestring and creativity was a maximum."
The journey continues. It is just the map which has undergone a radical revision. "Now it's top down," he adds. "We put on regular season games that matter and look for it to stimulate the rest of the sport like TV and grassroots. With the Claymores, it was much more personal and community driven throughout the year."
That might be seen again if London should ever get a team of its own but the Scot remains cautious. "It's probably two to three years away from us being able to say we've a big enough fan base," he says.
The Knights in Edinburgh or the Pirates of East Kilbride have no such extravagant ambitions. If the NFL is the apex, this is football in the raw. Yet without the Claymores, for all its imperfections and indecent departure, the sport might have disappeared whence it came, to the fringes as a forgotten fad.
"I was really saddened when it shut down," Laird says. "It almost felt it was the end of an opportunity to do so something with the sport. But actually it gave us the tools and it gave us the knowledge to build something domestically."
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