Sifting through the history of organised competitive sport in our land, as we have been doing for our project ‘Scotland’s 100 Greatest Sporting Icons’ which launches on Monday, has been an evocative experience, stirring lifetimes of memories.

Among the most poignant were those of a sequence of events which are marking their ruby anniversary but speak to an era in rugby that might almost belong to a century earlier than that, such was the difference between then and now.

It is all the more relevant because a festive derby has just been played with an international championship looming as we look ahead to a Lions tour of New Zealand, just as was the case in 1977.

The 2017 Lions have one thing in common with the 1977 variety. They will be seeking to be the first since 1971, the only successful tour there so far, to beat the All Blacks in a Test series, but we can safely say that they will not find their own administrators undermining them as the puritanical Scottish Rugby Union did then.

Rugby players of the seventies were still amateurs, but were the sport’s first superstars, partly because of the popularisation of colour television, but largely because of the successes of those Lions in New Zealand in 1971, followed by Willie John McBride’s ‘Invincibles’ of 1974, who achieved a feat that will never be matched, in going through a 22 match tour of South Africa unbeaten.

Consequently they were attracting new levels of attention and Stewart Weir, The Herald’s head of sport, sets a scene he remembers well from his adolescence… for a variety of reasons.

"In kids TV, Saturday morning meant Swap Shop on the BBC - although I was more a TISWAS fan myself. Make that Sally James…” he recalled wistfully.

"However Swap Shop always started by guessing where Keith 'Cheggers' Chegwin would be on his travels and, more often than not, you could work out where he'd be depending on where the Beeb's outside broadcast units were covering sport that weekend. That particular day, with the clues Chegwin gave, it was easy enough to work out that he was in Edinburgh and at Murrayfield.

"The week previous, snow had caused both Inter-District matches to be cancelled, so the next series of games was switched to Murrayfield because of the 'electric blanket' (under soil heating in today's money) for what had become a double-header of Inter-District championship games, played a week ahead of the official International Trial.”

Among those whose profile had been transformed by the warbled eulogies of Welshman Max Boyce and the like, was Willie John McBride’s second row partner on those Lions tours Gordon Brown and it is fair to say that ‘Broon frae Troon’ generally revelled in the attention he received, but not that day.

Stewart takes up the tale once more: "So, the BBC took advantage by having their cameras in place and the action was shown on Rugby Special. However, it also became a news item - almost trial by television - for the fracas between Brown and Allan Hardie. There weren't a dozen cameras in place, just the one covering all the action - and the evidence from that looked damning when it came to any defence Brown might have had for taking out his retribution on Hardie, who was eventually found guilty of being the aggressor.

"The footage the BBC captured also found its way onto news bulletins and the likes. However, it was almost as if Scottish rugby closed ranks around the incident. Indeed, the Scottish Rugby magazine at the time made scant reference to it, or, its aftermath over the next few months."

It is fair to say that Brown’s version of the event in question differed hugely from that of Hardie. However their encounter, which resulted in Brown suffering a gaping wound across his forehead having been, according to his lucid account of being kneed then stamped upon - as outlined in gory detail in his autobiography which led to threats of a legal challenge that never came about - ended with him extricating himself from the ruck in which he had been trapped and chasing the North & Midlands hooker across the pitch.

While he claimed meditation had helped him come to terms with it before his sadly premature death in 2001, Brown was still traumatised by what had happened when we spoke about it in the mid-nineties.

“Around six years ago I was in Aberdeen (Hardie’s home city) and was walking down Union Street when I saw Allan Hardie walking towards me. He was much closer before I realised it was somebody who just looked like him. I went into a restaurant four hours later, put the spoon to my mouth and I was still shaking,” he recounted.

Little wonder, given the consequences, because in the musty halls of officialdom, unchallenged by public scrutiny in a time before independent disciplinary panels, it was typical of the SRU that, unlike their English counterparts who tended even then to look after their leading players, an opportunity was seen and seized upon to make an example.

Brown was issued with a ban that would end his Scotland career while he was still in his twenties and effectively, it seemed, rule him out of that summer’s Lions tour, since he was not allowed to play or train with his club for three months. That was where his celebrity began to work to his advantage as Rangers FC stepped in to save the day.

“I owe a great deal to Jock Wallace,” Brown recalled during our chat 17 years afterwards.

“Not just for the physical training either. I’d had such a blow mentally that I owe it to him and Linda (Brown’s wife) for getting me sorted out.

“Wallace just has such an aura. You just have to be around him. He’s the greatest man’s man I have ever met… although Willie John’s a close second.”

The training regime was unsophisticated, but effective, involving repeated runs up and down the towering Ibrox terracing.

“I did it once and thought that wasn’t too bad, then big Jock told me to do it again… and keep going until he called a halt. He did eventually, after I’d been violently ill a few times,” was Brown’s recollection.

“But it got me fit, fitter than I'd ever been and ready for the All Blacks.”

Ahead of Ibrox’s hosting of rugby during the 2014 Commonwealth Games our Stewart discovered that those sessions had involved one of Rangers’ leading players of the day Tam ‘Jaws’ Forsyth.

"When I first saw him I wasn't sure if he was an out of shape goalkeeper or a really out of shape centre-half," Forsyth told him, laughing.

“He was a big fella, imposing, but a lovely guy. I was coming back from a hamstring injury and did some sprints against Gordon.”

The comparison proved deceptive for a full-time professional footballer.

“(It seemed like) I was flying, quicker than I’d ever been before. I felt great. Who'd have thought after a lay off for that injury I'd come back in the best shape possible?

"Only once I started training again with the rest of the Rangers squad did I realise how slow big Broon actually was!"

Perhaps so, but as a rugby player in the seventies he was more than sufficiently prepared for what was to come.

The Lions’ winning run of the seventies would end in New Zealand that summer with a 3-1 defeat in a fiercely fought Test series, but the happy ending to the tale was that Brown ended his career having returned to the international scene, playing in the final three Tests.

And in the end there were compensations for coming through the darker aspects of the period.

“I was born and brought up with two brothers (one of them another Scotland rugby great Peter). Thanks to rugby I’ve got another 300,” Brown was to say of his career.

The 2017 Lions will be lucky men if, in this very different era, they end theirs able to make similar claims.

As to whether they can win this year’s Test series, it is sobering to remind ourselves that since the seventies there have been 10 matches between the two since, of which the Lions have won just one.

The days in which Broon frae Troon met the All Blacks in five Tests, winning two and drawing one, Keith Chegwin was roaming the land and Sally James was lighting up juvenile lives, are a long, long time ago.