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I knew that his Dad had played for Celtic, however this is still a great read.
Apologies if it's a little too Athleticy for some
This article is part of The Athletic’s series celebrating UK Black History Month. To view the whole collection, click here.
The musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron once observed that the “two things that Scottish folks love the most (are) music and football, and they got one representative for each of those from my family.”
Scott-Heron’s contributions to the former cannot be overstated. His fusion of spoken word, soul and jazz was enormously influential stylistically — he is credited as one of the figures paving the way for hip hop’s creation, as one example among many — and he was a charismatic and eloquent champion of human rights and left-wing politics in the 1970s and beyond.
Scott-Heron’s father, Gil Heron, was the first Black footballer to play for Celtic, the first Black footballer in the 20th century to play for the first team of any Scottish club (Guyana-born Andrew Watson had captained both Queen’s Park and the Scotland national team in the 1880s), and the first Black man to play professionally in Scotland.
His impact is still very much alive within his family, with Brandy, the only Heron grandchild to play football, remembering her grandpa as her self-appointed coach when she was young.
“At the time, I didn’t realise everything my grandpa had accomplished,” Brandy tells The Athletic from New York, where she lives. “He was just my grandpa.
“I think those memories have built greater meaning over time, now I understand a little bit more, I wasn’t just getting a soccer lesson. I knew he was a professional player, but I didn’t know the gravity of it.”
Gil Heron was born in Jamaica’s capital Kingston in 1922, then moved to Canada and was part of the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. Although he was gifted at virtually every sport he attempted, he excelled most of all at football, as a forward. After the war, he played for the Detroit Corinthians and Detroit Wolverines of the North American Soccer League and was top scorer in 1946. Around this time he married singer Bobbie Scott, Scott-Heron’s mother.
In 1951, Celtic toured the US and Heron caught the eye of one scout. Because he wished to pursue his career abroad, he and Scott divorced, with Scott caring for the young Scott-Heron back in Detroit. At a public trial game back in Scotland, he scored twice and was offered a contract. He only played five times for Celtic during the 1951-52 season, scoring twice, before moving on to Glasgow neighbours Third Lanark a year later. That was followed by a brief stint with England’s Kidderminster Harriers, before moving back to the US in 1954. He returned to Detroit with his second wife, Margaret Frize, after they had fallen in love in Scotland.
Despite his only fleeting time in the Celtic limelight, Heron established a lasting legacy. But he was infinitely more than just a talented footballer who broke ground for Celtic. He also boxed and played cricket to a high level, including in Scotland for Poloc and Ferguslie cricket clubs. He taught himself photography, building his own darkroom in his Detroit home after retiring from professional football. He wrote his own book of poetry, including a published poem about Scottish football in the 1950s, and apparently had a lovely singing voice.
Beyond his sporting and artistic achievements, Heron was intelligent and witty, passionate and curious. He was kind, politically conscientious, and generous, adds Brandy (Margaret Frize’s granddaughter), who describes him as a “renaissance man”.
“He taught himself how to develop film, without any education in it. I always thought that was really cool. As a result, I have a lot of really beautiful pictures of my dad and his siblings. He was good at a lot of things, and in a way that was above average. He wasn’t kind-of good at soccer or boxing, he was great! But he was my grandpa, you know? He was great at that too.”
Heron used to take granddaughter Brandy to pitches near the local high school to run through training drills. She was a right-back while at school, and her dad once rang up her grandpa with the news that she led the league in… yellow cards. “I think the proudest moment for my grandpa was then. He was like, ‘Yeeeessss!'” She became a central midfielder at university, and after she informed her grandpa of her positional change he quipped: “Do you have the lungs for that?”
“We talked about soccer a lot,” Brandy continues. “I felt really connected to him through it. We would always watch football together, a lot of Champions League. He would record games for decades. His whole bedroom was a wall of VHS cassettes, and I would sit on the bed with him and he would show me a game from the 1980s, he had videos recorded from so long ago! We talked about Pele a lot, and he really liked (Brazilian) Ronaldo a lot, we’d talk about him. Him and my dad had the joke, pre-Messi, that if Pele was God then Ronaldo was Jesus.”
Heron was also coach for his son Denis (Brandy’s father) and tended to get heavily invested in his games. “My dad hated when his father came to games,” Brandy says, “because he would be so involved as a spectator. My dad always told me about him always berating the referee and having to be sent away. I even remember him coming to a tournament I played in Michigan, and he would be screaming from the sidelines at the referee — even at his age!”
Heron would take up refereeing himself, presumably because he wanted to show them how it was done as well as to exorcise his post-retirement appetite for still being involved in the game.
He did not talk much about his time playing for Celtic but he regularly mentioned the Scottish weather and how cold it was. “He would tell me about eating a lot of fruit, as one of the healthy things he could find,” Brandy says. “He would talk about how he met my grandma, and I would always joke, ‘Your romantic story had you coming back to Detroit, Michigan? Really?!'”
Heron relished the challenge of playing for Celtic and trying himself out abroad, as signalled by the difficult divorce from Scott.
Gil Scott-Heron did not meet his father until he was 26 years old — an encounter described in his song Hello Sunday, Hello Road.
Yet Scott-Heron took pride in his father’s ambitions.
“My father decided to do what he always wanted to do: play football full-time, at the highest level, against the best players,” he writes in his memoir The Last Holiday.
“It was, for him, the chance of a lifetime, the chance to play for one of the most famous teams in the British Isles. It was an opportunity to see who he was and what he was, to avoid sliding through fits of old age and animosity and spasms of, ‘I coulda been a contender’ that no one believed.”
It did not pan out in the end, with Celtic’s star centre-forward at the time, John McPhail, difficult to displace and it being a reputedly cliquey dressing room at the time. It was not necessarily a reflection of his ability, and Brandy says he was mostly excited about his time as a Celtic player. Off the pitch, he met his new love, and Brandy’s grandma, Margaret, and enjoyed a variety of new cultures and experiences in Scotland and England that he treasured for the rest of his life, but it was not easy for him during those three post-war years.
“He spoke a lot about racism in sport,” Brandy remembers. “Our family is a very outspoken family, as my uncle (Scott-Heron) shows, and that was part of it. I experienced racism in one of the teams I played on, and I remember the two of us talking about that. In that sense, I heard about his time in Scotland because he didn’t have the best time there, even as a light-skinned Black man.
“It’s very hard for me to put myself in his shoes, but it was the 1950s. As far as allies go, there weren’t many. I think there were a much smaller population of people standing up for you, because it was such the norm, and I do think that was a bad part of it. I think within the (Celtic) team that wasn’t a problem, but I think from the crowd there were some racist feelings.”
Upon his arrival, Heron was nicknamed The Black Arrow because of his skill and speed. It was intended as a term of affection, and the Dundee singer-songwriter and playwright Michael Marra recorded a song about Heron’s legacy using the nickname as imagery. When Scott-Heron first heard it in Harlem, New York he reportedly wanted to cover it, although there is no evidence that he did in the end.
Although written and recorded by a White Scotsman, the song attempts to respectfully immortalise the Heron family legacy of football interwoven with music.
Heron himself liked having the nickname but simultaneously felt some discomfort over it.
“I think he was proud to have a nickname from the fans,” Brandy explains, “but he also felt uncomfortable about the nickname itself. I think it was quite normal at the time, but if that happened today most people would think, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not right’. It’s not that he didn’t like it, but he also had some feelings about it as an identifier.”
Politics was a major interest, and influence, in Heron’s life, as it was in his first son’s.
“I think all Herons have a pretty strong political consciousness,” Brandy says. “My dad used to read three newspapers every day, my uncle Gil was a very outspoken Black poet, and my grandfather was very similar. He also worked at Ford after his football career, so then he was involved in the unions, and him and his buddies became focused on what politics meant in Ford factories of Detroit, Michigan in the 1960s and ’70s.
“Him and my dad, it would be 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock in the morning, and they’d still be at the table discussing politics. We’re a very long-conversation family! I feel like I’m that kind of person because of how much time I spent with the men in the family.”
Heron was immensely proud of his Jamaican heritage, and reminisced fondly with his grandchildren of his adolescence in the Caribbean before moving to Canada: “I remember when he was in the hospital when Usain Bolt was killing it at one of the Olympics, and my dad would bring newspapers to the hospital and read it to him. One of the pictures, the spread, was of Usain Bolt, and my dad told him, ‘The fastest man in the world is a Jamaican’, and my grandpa raised both of his hands and was pumping them in the air in celebration.”
What Brandy remembers most fondly about her grandpa though is his sense of humour and how much fun he was. “He was a showman. He was the kind of guy who would just start reciting Shakespeare to you. What I would say about all of the Herons, we love sarcasm, wordplay, and so being a showman he would always have a quick thing to say, always ready with a joke. He’d love to lead a conversation or a meeting; he had the personality to dictate that, but always funny.”
“He used to like to scare us, he would have Freddy Krueger masks or something, and he would pop up out of nowhere at me and my cousins and frighten us. He also had a really good voice. I was having a hard day recently and found a home video of him singing, and it really cheered me up to watch that.”
Neither Heron nor Margaret Frize ever returned to Scotland, settled as they were in Detroit. Scott-Heron however did travel to his father’s former home. When he was in Glasgow to promote his book The Last Holiday, he was asked about his father’s connection to Celtic; just as he had been when touring Scotland in the 1970s when fans would turn up to his gigs in Celtic shirts. “There you go again — once again overshadowed by a parent,” he wryly replied. “My father still keeps up with what Celtic are doing, it’s a blessing from the spirits.” Scott-Heron passed away in 2011 aged just 62, less than three years after his father’s death.
Heron’s grandchildren have visited Scotland too. In 2019, Brandy, her brother Julian, and cousin Che (Scott-Heron’s daughter) travelled to Glasgow and were guests at Celtic’s ill-fated 4-3 defeat to CFR Cluj in the 2019-20 Champions League qualifiers. They were presented to the crowd before the game to the applause of a full stadium in commemoration of their grandfather’s memory.
“It was so good!” Brandy says. “Especially seeing all the fans before. I was incredibly honoured. The stadium was so cool and we were treated so kindly, there was a gentleman who walked my brother around the stadium, and he actually told me some information about my grandpa that I never knew. The day was so overwhelming.”
Heron passed away in 2008, at 86. His legacy in football is enshrined, but so is his strength and warmth of personality as an artist, an intellectual, a practical joker, and a family man.
“I miss him a lot,” Brandy concludes, “he was such a conversational person. I could get on the phone with him and stay on the phone for a very long time, talking about anything and always feeling better afterwards. When you have someone that special, it leaves a big impact.”
(Photo: Handout/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Apologies if it's a little too Athleticy for some
This article is part of The Athletic’s series celebrating UK Black History Month. To view the whole collection, click here.
The musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron once observed that the “two things that Scottish folks love the most (are) music and football, and they got one representative for each of those from my family.”
Scott-Heron’s contributions to the former cannot be overstated. His fusion of spoken word, soul and jazz was enormously influential stylistically — he is credited as one of the figures paving the way for hip hop’s creation, as one example among many — and he was a charismatic and eloquent champion of human rights and left-wing politics in the 1970s and beyond.
Scott-Heron’s father, Gil Heron, was the first Black footballer to play for Celtic, the first Black footballer in the 20th century to play for the first team of any Scottish club (Guyana-born Andrew Watson had captained both Queen’s Park and the Scotland national team in the 1880s), and the first Black man to play professionally in Scotland.
His impact is still very much alive within his family, with Brandy, the only Heron grandchild to play football, remembering her grandpa as her self-appointed coach when she was young.
“At the time, I didn’t realise everything my grandpa had accomplished,” Brandy tells The Athletic from New York, where she lives. “He was just my grandpa.
“I think those memories have built greater meaning over time, now I understand a little bit more, I wasn’t just getting a soccer lesson. I knew he was a professional player, but I didn’t know the gravity of it.”
Gil Heron was born in Jamaica’s capital Kingston in 1922, then moved to Canada and was part of the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. Although he was gifted at virtually every sport he attempted, he excelled most of all at football, as a forward. After the war, he played for the Detroit Corinthians and Detroit Wolverines of the North American Soccer League and was top scorer in 1946. Around this time he married singer Bobbie Scott, Scott-Heron’s mother.
In 1951, Celtic toured the US and Heron caught the eye of one scout. Because he wished to pursue his career abroad, he and Scott divorced, with Scott caring for the young Scott-Heron back in Detroit. At a public trial game back in Scotland, he scored twice and was offered a contract. He only played five times for Celtic during the 1951-52 season, scoring twice, before moving on to Glasgow neighbours Third Lanark a year later. That was followed by a brief stint with England’s Kidderminster Harriers, before moving back to the US in 1954. He returned to Detroit with his second wife, Margaret Frize, after they had fallen in love in Scotland.
Despite his only fleeting time in the Celtic limelight, Heron established a lasting legacy. But he was infinitely more than just a talented footballer who broke ground for Celtic. He also boxed and played cricket to a high level, including in Scotland for Poloc and Ferguslie cricket clubs. He taught himself photography, building his own darkroom in his Detroit home after retiring from professional football. He wrote his own book of poetry, including a published poem about Scottish football in the 1950s, and apparently had a lovely singing voice.
Beyond his sporting and artistic achievements, Heron was intelligent and witty, passionate and curious. He was kind, politically conscientious, and generous, adds Brandy (Margaret Frize’s granddaughter), who describes him as a “renaissance man”.
“He taught himself how to develop film, without any education in it. I always thought that was really cool. As a result, I have a lot of really beautiful pictures of my dad and his siblings. He was good at a lot of things, and in a way that was above average. He wasn’t kind-of good at soccer or boxing, he was great! But he was my grandpa, you know? He was great at that too.”
Heron used to take granddaughter Brandy to pitches near the local high school to run through training drills. She was a right-back while at school, and her dad once rang up her grandpa with the news that she led the league in… yellow cards. “I think the proudest moment for my grandpa was then. He was like, ‘Yeeeessss!'” She became a central midfielder at university, and after she informed her grandpa of her positional change he quipped: “Do you have the lungs for that?”
“We talked about soccer a lot,” Brandy continues. “I felt really connected to him through it. We would always watch football together, a lot of Champions League. He would record games for decades. His whole bedroom was a wall of VHS cassettes, and I would sit on the bed with him and he would show me a game from the 1980s, he had videos recorded from so long ago! We talked about Pele a lot, and he really liked (Brazilian) Ronaldo a lot, we’d talk about him. Him and my dad had the joke, pre-Messi, that if Pele was God then Ronaldo was Jesus.”
Heron was also coach for his son Denis (Brandy’s father) and tended to get heavily invested in his games. “My dad hated when his father came to games,” Brandy says, “because he would be so involved as a spectator. My dad always told me about him always berating the referee and having to be sent away. I even remember him coming to a tournament I played in Michigan, and he would be screaming from the sidelines at the referee — even at his age!”
Heron would take up refereeing himself, presumably because he wanted to show them how it was done as well as to exorcise his post-retirement appetite for still being involved in the game.
He did not talk much about his time playing for Celtic but he regularly mentioned the Scottish weather and how cold it was. “He would tell me about eating a lot of fruit, as one of the healthy things he could find,” Brandy says. “He would talk about how he met my grandma, and I would always joke, ‘Your romantic story had you coming back to Detroit, Michigan? Really?!'”
Heron relished the challenge of playing for Celtic and trying himself out abroad, as signalled by the difficult divorce from Scott.
Gil Scott-Heron did not meet his father until he was 26 years old — an encounter described in his song Hello Sunday, Hello Road.
Yet Scott-Heron took pride in his father’s ambitions.
“My father decided to do what he always wanted to do: play football full-time, at the highest level, against the best players,” he writes in his memoir The Last Holiday.
“It was, for him, the chance of a lifetime, the chance to play for one of the most famous teams in the British Isles. It was an opportunity to see who he was and what he was, to avoid sliding through fits of old age and animosity and spasms of, ‘I coulda been a contender’ that no one believed.”
It did not pan out in the end, with Celtic’s star centre-forward at the time, John McPhail, difficult to displace and it being a reputedly cliquey dressing room at the time. It was not necessarily a reflection of his ability, and Brandy says he was mostly excited about his time as a Celtic player. Off the pitch, he met his new love, and Brandy’s grandma, Margaret, and enjoyed a variety of new cultures and experiences in Scotland and England that he treasured for the rest of his life, but it was not easy for him during those three post-war years.
“He spoke a lot about racism in sport,” Brandy remembers. “Our family is a very outspoken family, as my uncle (Scott-Heron) shows, and that was part of it. I experienced racism in one of the teams I played on, and I remember the two of us talking about that. In that sense, I heard about his time in Scotland because he didn’t have the best time there, even as a light-skinned Black man.
“It’s very hard for me to put myself in his shoes, but it was the 1950s. As far as allies go, there weren’t many. I think there were a much smaller population of people standing up for you, because it was such the norm, and I do think that was a bad part of it. I think within the (Celtic) team that wasn’t a problem, but I think from the crowd there were some racist feelings.”
Upon his arrival, Heron was nicknamed The Black Arrow because of his skill and speed. It was intended as a term of affection, and the Dundee singer-songwriter and playwright Michael Marra recorded a song about Heron’s legacy using the nickname as imagery. When Scott-Heron first heard it in Harlem, New York he reportedly wanted to cover it, although there is no evidence that he did in the end.
Although written and recorded by a White Scotsman, the song attempts to respectfully immortalise the Heron family legacy of football interwoven with music.
Heron himself liked having the nickname but simultaneously felt some discomfort over it.
“I think he was proud to have a nickname from the fans,” Brandy explains, “but he also felt uncomfortable about the nickname itself. I think it was quite normal at the time, but if that happened today most people would think, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not right’. It’s not that he didn’t like it, but he also had some feelings about it as an identifier.”
Politics was a major interest, and influence, in Heron’s life, as it was in his first son’s.
“I think all Herons have a pretty strong political consciousness,” Brandy says. “My dad used to read three newspapers every day, my uncle Gil was a very outspoken Black poet, and my grandfather was very similar. He also worked at Ford after his football career, so then he was involved in the unions, and him and his buddies became focused on what politics meant in Ford factories of Detroit, Michigan in the 1960s and ’70s.
“Him and my dad, it would be 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock in the morning, and they’d still be at the table discussing politics. We’re a very long-conversation family! I feel like I’m that kind of person because of how much time I spent with the men in the family.”
Heron was immensely proud of his Jamaican heritage, and reminisced fondly with his grandchildren of his adolescence in the Caribbean before moving to Canada: “I remember when he was in the hospital when Usain Bolt was killing it at one of the Olympics, and my dad would bring newspapers to the hospital and read it to him. One of the pictures, the spread, was of Usain Bolt, and my dad told him, ‘The fastest man in the world is a Jamaican’, and my grandpa raised both of his hands and was pumping them in the air in celebration.”
What Brandy remembers most fondly about her grandpa though is his sense of humour and how much fun he was. “He was a showman. He was the kind of guy who would just start reciting Shakespeare to you. What I would say about all of the Herons, we love sarcasm, wordplay, and so being a showman he would always have a quick thing to say, always ready with a joke. He’d love to lead a conversation or a meeting; he had the personality to dictate that, but always funny.”
“He used to like to scare us, he would have Freddy Krueger masks or something, and he would pop up out of nowhere at me and my cousins and frighten us. He also had a really good voice. I was having a hard day recently and found a home video of him singing, and it really cheered me up to watch that.”
Neither Heron nor Margaret Frize ever returned to Scotland, settled as they were in Detroit. Scott-Heron however did travel to his father’s former home. When he was in Glasgow to promote his book The Last Holiday, he was asked about his father’s connection to Celtic; just as he had been when touring Scotland in the 1970s when fans would turn up to his gigs in Celtic shirts. “There you go again — once again overshadowed by a parent,” he wryly replied. “My father still keeps up with what Celtic are doing, it’s a blessing from the spirits.” Scott-Heron passed away in 2011 aged just 62, less than three years after his father’s death.
Heron’s grandchildren have visited Scotland too. In 2019, Brandy, her brother Julian, and cousin Che (Scott-Heron’s daughter) travelled to Glasgow and were guests at Celtic’s ill-fated 4-3 defeat to CFR Cluj in the 2019-20 Champions League qualifiers. They were presented to the crowd before the game to the applause of a full stadium in commemoration of their grandfather’s memory.
“It was so good!” Brandy says. “Especially seeing all the fans before. I was incredibly honoured. The stadium was so cool and we were treated so kindly, there was a gentleman who walked my brother around the stadium, and he actually told me some information about my grandpa that I never knew. The day was so overwhelming.”
Heron passed away in 2008, at 86. His legacy in football is enshrined, but so is his strength and warmth of personality as an artist, an intellectual, a practical joker, and a family man.
“I miss him a lot,” Brandy concludes, “he was such a conversational person. I could get on the phone with him and stay on the phone for a very long time, talking about anything and always feeling better afterwards. When you have someone that special, it leaves a big impact.”
(Photo: Handout/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)