En ganske så bra obituary, fra '97:
FA Cup winners: Don Revie and Billy Bremner Why I will raise a glass of barasch to wee Billy Bremner
Jeff Powell
Last updated at 00:00 08 December 1997
THERE is a bar in the old airport at Budapest which has survived the plastic moderni-sation of the terminal building and still reeks of fiery liquor dispensed in a smoke-filled atmosphere of Iron Curtain nostalgia.
The lifestyle police have yet to reach this haven of incorrectness.
It is no more than a hole in the wall, really. Three's a crowd inside the tiny room where the walls are as plastered as the regulars - but with foreign bank notes, the hard currency which the Eastern Europeans once craved as desperately as Billy Bremner yearned for his first cigarette of the day.
It was shortly after 7am one such bleary morning more than a quarter of a century ago that we paused here for a hair of the Hungarian dog and, in Bremner's case, a few hand-rolled strands of tobacco.
Leeds United had been up all night celebrating another famous victory in Europe.
By nature the fetch-and-carry man in midfield, Wee Billy stationed himself between Big Jack Charlton at the counter and myself in the doorway.
I took the orders from the gaggle of players and sports reporters who travel to these occasions, and Bremner conveyed them to Charlton, whose bizarre knack of making himself understood around the world in broad Geordie resulted in the drinks being passed back out to the hun-gover assembly.
A dozen beers, a few glasses of wine, a couple of mineral waters for the fainthearted . . .
and a double barasch for the tall gentleman in the long overcoat propped against the wall.
As he handed over the stained glass with the brown liquid crawling up the inside, Bremner stopped to inhale the fumes and grimaced. When the instant disappearance of Hungary's national liqueur was followed by the polite request for another large one, Bremner whispered: 'Who the hell is that?'
GEOFFREY GREEN of the Times, he was informed. The doyen o f a l l f o o t b a l l e r writers.
Bremner - pugnacious, combative, feisty, irreverent and blunt - was more of a tabloid street man than a broadsheet intellectual. But his first act upon arriving home was to place an order for the Times with his local newsagent. And the newspaper was duly delivered to him - until the day after Green died.
Not that he ever read it, he confided years later. Not once.
Not even when it catalogued the latest League or Cup triumph by Leeds or eulogised his own election to the pantheon of England's Footballers Of The Year.
Each day's copy of the Times remained rolled up on the hall table, his daily memorial to one of the few men who ever out-drank Leeds, home or abroad.
The loyalty burned into this 5ft 5in of fighting-cock foot-baller was as vivid as his mop of curly red hair. So was winning.
The title of Bremner's autobiography was his declaration of football priorities: You Get Nowt For Coming Second.
The gritty burr of Yorkshire pragmatism had been grafted onto the natural-born Scottish warrior - his home town of Stirling borders the battlefield of Bannockburn - from the winter's day in 1959 when he signed professional forms with Leeds.
From that moment hence, Bremner carried the standard for his club and country with passion and a deep-seated sense of family.
For that latter reason alone, the passing of each of these real football men deepens the impression that we may not see their like again.
Bremner not only loved his wife Vicki, his son Billy Jr and his daughters Donna and Amanda but embraced a lifetime devotion to them which could never be threatened by his celebrity.
Even so, he felt just as married to Leeds and just as closely related to his blood brothers in the team.
Bonds as powerful as these are forged in the heart and the soul, not the ego and the pocket.
Loyalty and winning were inseparable to Bremner's instinct; they were not the two distinctly opposite entities which the money-driven world of sport has made them.
It is sadly ironic that a man of such old-fashioned values should die so young. Like England's Bobby Moore, Scotland's Bremner has gone early. At 54.
MOORE died from c a n c e r , f o r n o apparent reason.
B r e m n e r w e n t without warning in hospital yesterday, apparently from the strains imposed on that stout heart by the cigarettes and all the hypertension which furrowed that worn face whenever he stormed into combat.
National icons, both.
Who knows? Perhaps history prefers us to remember our heroes as they are before the ravages of time make too many inroads.
Like the memory of Bremner on another Cold War night in Eastern Europe.
One of those frequent occasions, on and off the pitch, when he made it more a truism than a cliche for his old teammates to chorus yesterday that he would have been the first man they would have wanted alongside them in the trenches.
It was Bremner who, all those years ago, led the charge against the bouncers as we all fought our way, shoulder-to-shoulder, out of a rip-off nightclub . . . fearing only the wrath of Don Revie who was waiting in the hotel lobby.
That was how he played his football.
It was Revie, the Godfather of Elland Road, who recog-nised Bremner's leadership qualities and appointed him not just his captain but his elder son in the football family that was Leeds. As a young man unprepared to rest on the laurels of his exceptional talent, he was the archetypal Revie footballer.
BR E M N E R w o r shipped The Don, never tolerating one word against the man who cajoled and encouraged Leeds to become not only the finest football team in the land but also for a time the most r e v i l e d b u n c h o f a r c h professionals in Europe.
'Yes,' he said once, 'we probably were the most hated players, but we were honest to a man.' What others saw as gamesmanship and intimidation, Bremner and Revie and Charl-ton and the rest regarded as the ultimate in competitiveness. Bremner and John Giles were as ball-skilled and perceptive as any midfield players in Europe at the time.
But although both stood under 5ft 6in in those blue and white socks, only the bravest dared defy them on the field of battle as they won two League Championships, one FA Cup, one League Cup and two European trophies.
It might have been more but for Revie's natural caution. But Bremner was of a different character. In 586 appearances spanning 17 years, he suffered the disgrace of being sent off at Wembley for scrapping with his English counterpart, Kevin Keegan, and wound up with a picture of his famous spat with Scots countryman Dave Mackay occupying a permanent place on the walls at Tottenham's White Hart Lane.
But Revie was his surrogate father, and Bremner never let him nor Leeds down. Nor Scotland, for whom Bremner's more than half a century of appearances were crowned by victory at Wembley in England's first match after their 1966 World Cup victory.
Bremner promptly claimed the championship of the world on behalf of his Wee Blue Devils.
Loyalty and victory. Bremner kept them in the family. That was why he could always smile.
That was why football never stopped loving him when the magic waned during his doomed attempt to follow Revie into the manager's chair and he drifted back to Doncas-ter, back to a life as an after-dinner speaker, local radio commentator and enthusiastic golfer.
He lived to see George Graham begin the revival at his beloved Leeds and was happy for that, too. But he never made it to his 55th birthday tomorrow.
If our own priorities could only have remained as clearly defined and focused as Billy Bremner's, no matter what the pressures and pitfalls of the daily routine, we would all be on the early morning plane to Budapest, there to toast our comrade in life . . . in barasch.
Above: The young Bremner
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