Book Review: Jinky

Cham­pi­ons League Talk was recently sent a copy of “Jinky: The Jimmy John­stone Story” writ­ten by Jim Black and I was given the hon­our of review­ing it.

Jinky, born James Con­nolly John­stone, was a dynamic winger that played for the Celtic side that won nine Scot­tish cham­pi­onships in a row between 1966 and 1974. He was also one of the famed Lis­bon Lions, the Celtic side that became the first British side to lift the Euro­pean Cup (now Cham­pi­ons League) in 1967.

Known as the ‘Wee Man’ (he stood just 5ft4in tall) to his man­ager and team­mates, John­stone was nick­named Jinky by the fans because of his jink­ing move­ments down the wing that left defend­ers so bam­boo­zled that he would often go back and beat them a sec­ond time purely for his own enjoy­ment. Many rate Jinky as one of the top play­ers ever and he is a tes­ta­ment to hard work. As a young lad, he was never with­out a ball at his feet and often invented litle games and drills to improve his skills. Assist sta­tis­tics were not accu­rately kept dur­ing that era but in his 515 appear­ances for Celtic, Jinky scored 130 goals. It’s not hard to imag­ine him hav­ing twice as many assists.

Despite all of his tal­ent, John­stone only appeared 23 times in a Scot­land shirt, scor­ing 4 goals. Largely it was due to his lack of dis­ci­pline off the field, which the book touches on briefly. After he was given a free trans­fer by Celtic at the end of the 1974–75 sea­son he bounced around from club to club, never stay­ing very long in any one place. He spent time with the San Jose Earth­quakes of the NASL, Sheffield United, Dundee, Sbel­bourne and Elgin City before call­ing it a day. His heart was always at Celtic Park and he was never quite the same player after leaving.

Life after foot­ball was dif­fi­cult for John­stone and this is where the book began to give us some insight into his life and friend­ships. How­ever, while the book’s back cover promises that this is the defin­i­tive account of Jimmy Johnstone’s life, it falls short of deliv­er­ing on that promise. This does not mean that the book is poor — it is still an enter­tain­ing, quick-paced read.

In review­ing the notes I made while read­ing the book, I often noted that there were large sec­tions that seemed to be no more than re-hashing of match sum­maries with lit­tle per­sonal detail. Fre­quently oppor­tu­ni­ties to delve into inter­est­ing and poten­tially telling per­sonal sit­u­a­tions are bypassed. We’re given a run through almost game by game of Jinky’s amaz­ing career but until the final chap­ters of the book and Jinky’s strug­gles after his play­ing career ends and his bat­tle with motor neu­rone dis­ease (com­monly referred to in North Amer­ica as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

Beyond these sur­face details, we get to know very lit­tle about the man, his fam­ily or his life out­side the arena. There are only a few quotes from team­mates and no quotes from fam­ily mem­bers. We don’t really learn why Jimmy drank so heav­ily, we’re not shown details of his dis­putes with leg­endary Celtic man­ager Jock Stein and there is no real indi­ca­tion of what his home life was like. His wife and chil­dren are dis­tant, periph­eral fig­urs. The really inter­est­ing bits are glossed over and I am going to assume that this is due to a lack of qual­ity infor­ma­tion avail­able and not a lack of research. This is the only book on Celtic that I’ve read so I am in no posi­tion to judge accurately.

The book does give an out­line of his life after foot­ball and it was a sad down­fall. Not hav­ing been paid princely sums like today’s stars and not hav­ing been wise with his money, John­stone found him­self broke. He attempted to sell off his winner’s medals to feed his alco­hol prob­lem and he spent years fail­ing at a vari­ety of blue-collar jobs. One par­tic­u­lar stint as a satellite-dish sales­man sticks out as bit­terly ironic. Here’s poor Jinky hop­ing to make a few bucks off of the same piece of equip­ment that hep­led today’s top-paid foot­ballers earn more in a week than Jimmy ever earned in a year.

Jinky was voted Celtic’s great­est ever player by the fans in 2002. Sadly, in 2006, John­stone suc­cumbed to rav­ages of motor neu­rone dis­ease. The club paid trib­ute to John­stone before the Scot­tish League Cup Final by wear­ing the num­ber 7 on both the front and back of their shirts in his hon­our. At the end of the match, Celtic’s team wore shirts with the squad name “Jinky” and the num­ber 7 as a fur­ther tribute

Despite the lack of per­sonal detail that I wanted, the book was enter­tain­ing and pro­vided some insight into a player and an era that I am not well-versed in. How­ever, as a biog­ra­phy of Jimmy John­ston, it left me want­ing to know a whole lot more.

Cham­pi­ons League Talk Rat­ing: 3 out of 5

Note: I found a great clip of Jinky doing a duet with Jim Kerr of Sim­ple Minds on a tune called Dirty Old Town. Jinky loved to sing a song or do karaoke and had a decent voice accord­ing to the book. This video backs that claim up. It also show some footage of Jinky in action.

Tagged as: celtic, jimmy johnstone, jinky johnstone, lisbon lions