Benny Hagen

Press reports are structured like a triangle, the weight of information balanced on the first line. Nobody much called Benny Hagen, Bernard, until he was murdered, aged 45, on 6^th November 2008. His killers Gary Gorman aged 25, and Gorman’s uncle Michael, aged 45, who stood with a knife in his hand and made sure Bernard got no medical help—nobody would be allowed to stench the bleeding—both received life sentences. Michael Gorman’s Queen’s Council said ‘it was out of character’.

 A knife was left in Bernard’s head. Bernard was knifed six times. A witness said Bernard was ‘rolling on the ground and said he was dying’. He was close to home, in sight of the shops on Fleming Avenue. Bernard’s widow Diane, mother of his three children, spoke of her ‘nightmare life’.

She was also referring to an incident six years earlier. Ann Gorman drove her teenage sons, Gary and Michael, both then aged 15, from a few streets away where they lived. They were armed with bottles of petrol and matches and she goaded them on as they set Sean Hagen, Bernard’s son alight. His Celtic top melted and he needed skin grafts for almost a quarter of his body.

Sean told his dad, Bernard, he didn’t want to be called ‘a grass’.

 Whitecrook, with almost 4000 residents, was tagged, ‘Murder Capital’ by sections of the media because of some earlier killings.

I never met Bernard Hagen.

‘You were some player,’ I said to Benny, the last time I saw him in Chandlers after a Celtic game.

He still had the Hagen curly hair, but was pudgy faced. He might have been father of three, but he was chuffed as a schoolboy.

We were from different tribes. I was in a St. Stephen’s Guild team playing in our home park in the lashing rain. The boys from Whitecrook, a Celtic and Catholic stronghold, always had great teams. Benny took a corner with his left foot and scored. Once might have been a fluke, but he did it again. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked our lads.

‘That’s Benny Hagen,’ I was told.

We played for the St Andrew’s school team, Father McDonald was our manager. When he picked the best players to play in a five-a-side tournament he drilled us to take one or two touches. Pass and move. He meant the rest of us. He didn’t mean Benny. Benny could take as many touches as he liked, glide past players and score.  

Benny followed the lead of his brother Jim. He spiked his hair and wore the half-knit woolly jumper with sleeves that came down over the wrist and covered most of his hand as he jumped highest and pogoed to the punk classics, Anarchy in the UK, and all the other commercial hits (that weren’t supposed to be commercial—and ripping us off).  Danny Payne (RIP) even wore plastic trousers and cut his clothes up. He might even have borrowed some of his sister Pauline’s makeup and gear.  I was content to remain unwashed for a tad longer, jump into the sweating crowd when the record was winding down. We had to queue up with our ten pences at the St Stephen Church Hall on a Thursday night, and sometimes even a Saturday, when we could get pissed on a couple of thirty pence cans of Kestrel as the big build up to the Guild dance.

Punk gave Benny an identity and made him bolshie. He came into the dressing room after a school-team training session and—out of earshot of Fr McDonald, who didn’t like swearing—accused us all of being fucking virgins. Sweating, raggedly breathing in wintergreen ointment, we freeze-framed and put our game faces on. Hurrying to the shower before the hot water ran out. That flash of anger. He didn’t mean me. I got off on the technicality that I’d have battered him. He meant others like John Callan, whose dad was a math teacher, and he was still an altar boy. He meant that every bird that was fat and plukey was now a punk and was gagging for it. Benny boasted that he’d gone up to Aberdeen for a Celtic game and shagged a few birds in a phone box.

We’d a history of going to Wembley, like oversized Bay City Roller’s supporters and beating England and ripping up the turf. Sending them home to think again. I’d never dreamt Pittodrie would be full of such rich pickings. I even moved up to Aberdeen and worked in Clipper Seafood factory—when that irritating song,  ‘abrah-abrah-cadabra, I’m going to reach out and grab you,’ was a top-ten hit—but it was all word play, I never got to the chance to shag a bird in, or out, of a phone box, and I checked them all from Bridge of Don to Brigadoon.  Benny was a king-sized spovver.

Benny was always part of any school-boy select teams. He was part of triumvirate that got picked up by Celtic Boy’s club. John (Bonnie) McKeever, Norrie McGlinchey, who lost his toes all those years ago, swinging on the school gate in St Stephen’s school, but still cut a groove as a left winger. His son, of course, was scouted by Tommy Burns, heralded as the next best thing.

I went up for trials too, with my plastic bag of training kit, Tuesday and Thursday nights on the gravel at Barrowfield. The club crest and the shirt and ties. The professionalism. Charlie Nicholas training as an under-16 on the pitch next to you. Davie Moyes, who captained the under-15s, and went on to play for the first team on the same pitch as the rest of us. One of the trainers later punched me lightly on the stomach after the first night, before I got into the shower.

I’ve told the story before of how I wasn’t even good enough to get sexually abused.  Getting the bus up to the training ground, straight after school. Meeting the Whitecrook boys.  Norrie’s da had a car, but he never seemed to notice me and I had to get the bus home. And when the selected a team for the next game they’d a list of sixteen or seventeen boys. The lump in the throat, the tapping foot, the hoping against hope, all the clichés of finding yourself invisible. The guy picking the team, consulting the assistant coach, and looking through you without even a half-wink of recognition.  Then the boring bits of standing around the touchline pretending the game mattered. I went back to normality and Boy’s Guild football after two weeks.

Benny didn’t need to put up with that because he was a real football player. Bonnie went on to play professional and even featured scoring a goal on Scotsport for Motherwell. Norrie played professional too. Benny slunk away from it all, despite being the best of all.

I still played with Benny, but in an unprofessional capacity, in the wee gym in Dean Street, the Whitecrook buroo club. Stan Henry seemed to have a set of key and run it. I’d head down and play three against three against the benches, as we had during our school days. But when Whitecrook buroo club played Dalmuir buroo club, I played for our club. No club crests. No club ties. A change of football top, or Hi-Viz vest, if you were lucky.  I could run all day every day, Benny was a smoker and flabby, but give him a ball and he’d grow younger. He’d laugh as he nicked the ball through my legs. I was there for the taking that much he felt sorry for me, went easy on me.

When football was finished, we were finished. We weren’t mates, we went our separate ways. Benny went back to his girlfriend Diane Elli, and in 1981, still in his teens he got married. Benny met her in a phone box. Benny boy, before he was a father, before he was a shagger, he was a contender and not a pretender like myself. Football was in his blood, he’d that gift of finding himself with a ball at his feet. That’s how I remember him. Not lying in a street with a blade stuck in his head. RIP.