MYSTERY, what mystery? Canadian business tycoon Ron Dixon, whose absentee chairmanship of Dundee FC has given rise to an industry of rumour, speculation, and innuendo as the club profile has risen in the build-up to Sunday's Coca-Cola Cup final against Aberdeen, broke silence from his Vancouver home this week to ask what all the fuss is about.

``It's very curious,'' he said in a relaxed tone. ``Most of the stuff I read is about these interfering, egotistical chairmen. Then you find a chairman like me who stays the hell out of the way and lets them get on, and the next thing you know is you get criticism for that. I guess the rule of the game is if you try to do anything in the modern world, someone's going to take a pot-shot at you.''

In a three-hour interview 56-year-old Dixon displays insight, optimism, wit and obvious affection for the club in which he has a #2m investment and whose progress he monitors closely from a distance of 6000 miles.

He talks highly of the sheer character and motivational abilities of manager Jim Duffy, with keen excitement of rising young stars Neil McCann and Jim Hamilton, and with appreciation for the loyalty of an unpaid board, led in his one-year absence from Dundee by vice-chairman Malcolm Reid and managing director Nigel Squire.

``I see the results and I see some of the write-ups,'' he confirms. ``I've known they made the Coca-Cola final since they beat Airdrie.'' The question everyone wants to ask is will he fly over to join the club for its sell-out date at Hampden? ``I've still got some time to try and work it out,'' he responds. ``If I'm not there my heart will still be with them, as it always is. If I go over it will have to be spontaneously because I have a very busy week for me to be hot-footing it off for pleasure, because I really have no business reason to come over.''

This same business instinct, developed over 35 years with interests that have spread to a dozen different countries in five continents, cautions him it might be best to stay away. ``It's taken me a long time to work out that if it ain't broke, don't fix it,'' he says.

It is a formula he may be tempted to apply to Dundee FC this weekend.

Neither would this appear to represent the only strategy over the portrayal of Dixon as a chairman whose telephone numbers have all been discontinued, who has not been in touch since the spring and who has displayed apparent indifference over his financial and personal involvement. He decides it is time to blow the myth.

With wry amusement, he explains: ``When I said to Nigel, `Why did you encourage this business of me not being around?' He says, `Well, Ron, I'm trying to get a buzz going here. We've got a winning team, a great coach, a great young team, but we're getting crowds of 2700 to 2800.' So, he says, `I went live with this story. The next game we got 10,000 fans.' He says it's all part of marketing. I said it seemed a strange marketing strategy to me, but strange or not, it works.''

He claims the reality is different, even if it ruins something of a Dixon mystique: ``I stay in touch in various ways. In the last two months I've probably spoken to eight or nine people. I've spoken to Nigel Squire in the last month since I got back from Asia.

I wasn't in touch for a long period of time because I bought a new business in January with 4000 employees that was in trouble. That occupied me for six months. Then, with my regular trips back to Asia, it's been a busy 1995.

``The club is now financially secure, so they don't need to phone me every two weeks asking me for money. So, there was a combination of reasons. It was no big deal from my point of view, but it was obviously a big deal to some people.

``Nigel Squire said I was this man who knows as much about soccer as he does about ice hockey, and he's got that right. The other directors evidently gave him hell for saying that. I disagree. I think that part of Nigel's charm is that he shoots from the hip and is a bit of a wise-cracker. I don't hold a grudge for that.''

As recently as last Friday Mr Squire was still perpetuating the line that he had received no word from Mr Dixon. Yesterday he admitted a private contact from his Canadian chairman two weeks ago, the first in a number of months. ``It wasn't a scam,'' Mr Squire denied. ``The board has had no official contact, and no-one on the board has said that they have heard from Mr Dixon. I was telling the truth as I saw it.

``I was asking the fans to come out and support the team because Mr Dixon was in Canada and we could not expect any more money or support from him. We were on our own. It would have taken a far more intelligent man than me to think that up as a marketing strategy.''

Asked if contingency arrangements were being made to reserve a seat in the directors' box for Mr Dixon at the final, Mr Squire said: ``There won't be a seat because by tomorrow we'll have sold our 17,000 ticket allocation. Maybe he can see Jim Duffy about one of the players' wives' tickets. Or maybe he can sit with Jim Duffy in the dug-out. I'm not keeping him a ticket if he can't pick up the phone to tell us he's coming.''

As the mystery was promoted over ``Where is Ron Dixon?'', it fed inevitably into the next question of ``Who is Ron Dixon?''

Exhaustive inquiries in Scotland and Canada produce an intriguing range of answers, leads, evasions, red herrings, and caution.

``Who is Ron Dixon?'' asks Dr Patrick Pettman, a former business associate in Vancouver, and a friend of twenty years. ``That's a good question. There are two Ron Dixons. To be a successful businessman I think you have to have that kind of schizoid personality. In private life he has a great sense of humour. And the business side? I don't want to describe it. He's an achiever.''

Getting through to the man himself is like setting off down the Rosebud trail and walking into an interview with affable Citizen Kane. He is discovered in expansive mood after returning from a business trip to the United States and being called to the phone from raking leaves in the high security grounds of his large mansion in Delta, Vancouver.

``I'm not a big spotlight guy,'' says the man whose full range of business activities are low profile even in Canada. Yet in the course of a conversation, interrupted only by his taking a couple of personal calls, he volunteers enough details of his private domestic world - the minor leagues ice hockey coaching medal from the US Senate on his desk, the photograph on his wall of a kilted Dixon posing with Jim Duffy and Neil McCann, the racquetball court where he gets a daily work-out to keep his six foot three frame in condition - to almost allow you to cheat by putting a Vancouver dateline at its head.

It emerges he has been returning my calls, and he does impersonations of security declining to take a message.

Everyone who has ever encountered Dixon will testify to his engaging qualities. His soft-voiced style is pleasant. Urbane, well-informed, sharp, he talks easily and listens with an attention that is undeniably flattering.

Friends say he is a brilliant psychologist and that it is no coincidence that in his earliest days he excelled as a salesman. The remarkable thing, given the absentee image, is how open he is prepared to be.

``I didn't have a particularly happy childhood, but so didn't fifty million others,'' is his candid response to probing. ``My mother and father were divorced at an early age when I was nine. I left home at a fairly early age and went out into the world and got pummelled pretty good.''

Dixon is his mother's name. ``I'm terrible with names,'' he confesses at a couple of points, struggling to remember one. In fact, he is ingenious with his own. In North America he has used Ronald Barry Dixon. In Europe he has signed himself Ronald Noble Dixon. In his business dealings in Asia he is Ronald Noble Barry Dixon. Given that a whispering campaign suggests that Dixon has used a pseudonym, although nothing has ever been proved, this requires an explanation.

The one he provides is disarmingly simple. With unfazed amusement, he responds: ``It's one of the things I do to keep my life somewhat organised. I use one middle initial in one part of the world, and the other middle initial in another part of the world, so I know if anyone's contacting me or leaving me a message, at least I know what part of the world it's coming from. When you do business in twelve of thirteen countries you use any little trick you can to keep track of things.''

For years opponents have tried to investigate a suggestion that his real name could be Barry Nowakowski, and that this Nowakowski identity might reveal a ``past''. The creation of a mystery over his absence has led to a resurfacing of these lurid stories, and Dixon is aware of them.

``The Nowakowski thing is pure bullshit,'' he replies evenly. ``I don't mind people taking a shot at me that I'm too competitive, or I'm too ruthless, or I'm any of the other negative things. But I would sue immediately if anyone ever said I was Nowakowski. You promise to buy me six Glenfiddichs and a nice steak, and I'll show you my birth certificate.'' It shows Ronald Barry Noble Dixon.

His mother was born to Scots-immigrant parents in Canada, a heritage of which he is intensely proud. His grandmother, Elizabeth Duncan, went to Canada as a teenage serving girl and met Horace ``Happy'' Dixon, a miner in southern Alberta who had gone over independently from the Gorbals.

His paternal grandfather was an Anglican minister, but the subject of his father evidently exposes old scars. This and the tragic death of his son in a motor accident in the late 1980s are the only two subjects he refuses to discuss.

On leaving home in East-end Vancouver at the age of 16, Ron Dixon went to work on construction of the Trans-Canada oil pipeline. He had a variety of early jobs, posting For Sale signs for a real estate company and working as a security guard, to pay his way through college.

He left midway through his degree to enter business with a friend. He was offered a half share in the Vancouver firm City Janitorial if he could save it.

``Yes, I've swung a mop in my time, but basically I had to sell some institutional accounts,'' he recalls. ``The Bank of British Columbia was my first big one. We ended up with eight trucks on the road and a reasonably successful business.'' He was 22 and on his way.

Through the sixties and seventies he went through the ``nursing home business'', construction, hotels, and manufacturing. His base spread to Seattle and Australia, after marrying his Tasmanian wife Joan. He started developing interests in Hong Kong and the Philippines. Since 1978 his main field of operations was in computers and hi-tech information supply.

He developed Telecheque, a credit card and cheque verification service. Nevertheless, he managed to keep his growing private and business wealth on the lowest key.

``When you're wealthy you're automatically perceived as a bastard, and taking advantage of your money,'' he reflects. ``In actual fact money can be a huge anvil. And that's why I've always kept a low profile. For many many years I was one of the wealthiest men in Vancouver, and no-one knew me except the guys I did business with. I kept it that way on purpose.

``I can remember my kids saying to me one time when they were twelve or so, `Are you rich, daddy?', and I'd say `No. Not particularly.' For many years they had know idea we were any different from anyone else.

``The only commonality I've seen among wealthy men, and I know a lot of them, is that they all worked hard, sacrificed in some ways their relationship with their families, they were all ego-driven, they are all perfectionists, and they are all good with numbers.'' He believes these attributes apply to himself.

In 1990 a rare profile of Dixon appeared in the Vancouver business magazine Equity. The story was subsequently discredited, and the publisher fielded five separate law suits. The journalist, Don Ramsay, remarked to contacts that putting together a piece on Dixon was like doing ``reconstructive surgery''.

He guessed the business fortune of ``our city's most mysterious multi-millionaire'' at $150m, but the figure was almost certainly meaningless.

Yet even as recently as January this year the same article was circulating among employees seeking information on Dixon when he was negotiating takeover of the ailing National Real Estate Service (NRS). The ruthlessness of Dixon's business character has been revealed in drastic pruning to revive his new company. NRS employees and agents on commission have been leaving in large numbers since the takeover. The former company president, Joe Pearson, with 25 years' service with the firm, claimed constructive dismissal when he was informed he was on paid holiday.

When he tried to resume work, two days after the takeover, he was escorted personally to the lift by Dixon. The law suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed figure.

``I'm a fairly honest guy,'' says Dixon. ``I do have a steely side, there's no doubt about that. I hate when people try to cheat me, or one-up me. I don't spend a lot of time explaining. I just do my thing. Don't complain, and don't explain. I don't do all the things that are supposed to get you a nice polished image in the market place.''

Had it not been for his lifetime passion for sport, his name might never have reached public awareness. In the early days he coached kids at baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. He is proud of his certificates and of his level five coaching jacket.

Inevitably, he moved into ownership, first with the New Brunswick Bruins and then the Tri-City Americans, based south of the border in Washington State at Kennewick. It was ice hockey that took him to Dundee. Fraser McCall, a former player with the Perth Panthers in Scotland who emigrated and got rich enough to be called the ``Bank of Victoria'' and finance Stagecoach in the early days, was going to go into the then Dundee Tigers with Dixon as a joint venture.

Dixon eventually had to go alone and emerged from a complicated takeover and shares battle for Dundee Angus Ice Rink with no team and no rink. A previously negotiated deal for the site went through in a #1.9m deal with William Low, and Dixon's plans for a new facility were dropped after failing to attract local government support.

Buying Dundee FC has been portrayed as a rich man's indulgence, but he claims that it was part of a personal commitment to his grandmother. ``She's the one who got me into Dundee,'' he reveals. ``She lived to be a ripe old age and by then I was a businessman of some repute and had some money. She asked me if I ever got the chance to do something for the old country. That's what got me started at Dundee.''

The football club and Dundee Leisure plc are not his only interests in Scotland. In 1991 he sent an agent to buy a 2000-acre hill sheep farm, Ballygroggan, south of Machrihanish and running down the coast to the Mull of Kintyre, sight unseen.

It was made over in the name of his wife, Joan, with the clearing of the sheep stock made a condition of purchase.

``He had no time for sheep,'' says his first manager, Duncan Brown. Locals had little time for an incomer multi-millionaire. A row over land access for hillwalkers was conducted in the columns of the Campbeltown Courier, with Dixon writing to protest that his only object was to protect wildlife from campers.

This was fuelled by claims of tradesmen that bills were unpaid for renovation work on properties at Ballygroggan. Dixon's infrequent visits to the farm created delays before accounts were settled. Then there was a classic rural altercation with Colonel Hector Macneal, his nearest neighbour, descended from three centuries of Macneals as local lairds on Losset Estate.

Dixon damaged two of the colonel's pillars when attempting to transport a caravan down a narrow track. The colonel remonstrated.

``He arrived at the front door of our house here,'' reports a still indignant Colonel Macneal. ``He said, `I'm Ron Dixon.' He was clutching a bottle of spumanti wine. I don't like spumanti wine. This was his peace offering. He came into the house and we sat in the garden. He looked at the trees and said, after five minutes, `Gee, Hector, I'll buy this place tomorrow if you're prepared to sell it.'''

It would have taken more than repaired pillars to set right the damaged reputation Dixon suffered. A recent planning application to establish a wind farm with wind-harnessing pylons was rejected by Argyll and Bute District Council after a petition of objection was received from locals.

``It has basically got to the point that if the guy wanted to put sheep back on the ground and return it to a sheep farm the locals would still object,'' admits Dixon's new manager, Dr Simon Lawrence. ``A lot of this bad feeling dates back to the initial days. If you're a North American and you contract someone to do a building job, and it's not done to your satisfaction, the guys don't get paid. They all got paid eventually.''

Three Scottish legal firms, Simpson Marwick and Fyfe Ireland in Edinburgh, and A. B. & A Matthews of Newton Stewart, have continuing actions against Dixon over disputed arrears of fees dating back to 1992.

DIXON claims bills should have been presented to his companies, not as personal accounts. ``I'm very demanding on lawyers,'' he confirms. ``I think they're hired guns. It's not the kind of profession I admire.''

Not least among the paradoxes that surround Dixon is the fact that he encouraged his daughter Lynn to attend law school at Edinburgh University before she completed her degree in Chicago.

Another is a tendency to spontaneous gestures of generosity. He once organised a truckload of goods for a Romanian orphanage after witnessing poverty and distress on a business trip there.

Steve Martin, a former Dundee FC director, testifies to witnessing numerous handouts - #100 notes given to people on the street, a #50 note to kids to buy a better football, and his presentation of a signed football to a Dundee fan in a wheelchair, after bidding #500 for it at a club centenary ball in the Angus Hotel.

Dixon does not believe he is likely to gain a reputation as a ``soft touch''. But he admits: ``Although I'm very serious about business, I've made some investments with the heart rather than my head in the last five years. I don't regret it.''

Dundee FC appears to come into the category of an ``investment of the heart'' in his own estimation. He denies that he will be anxious to sell when his five-year commitment to the club expires in January. ``Not necessarily,'' he counters. ``I've made certain commitments to certain people, not the least to Jim Duffy. I will keep all my commitments before I go. I just said it would be no earlier than five years.''

His parting shot over the phone concerns the final. ``I'll bet you a #1, and I know you're going to give me 4-1, that we win that game,'' he offers, without finding a taker. His thoughts turn to the former Dundee player whose goals got Aberdeen into the final to meet his old club. ``I just hope Billy Dodds gets my cheque, that's all. Just a joke. Just a joke.''