Pete Martin: Scots talent needs space to flourish

If we want Scotland to thrive, every child and adult needs the freedom to develop their skills that will allow them to stand out from the ordinary, writes Pete Martin

I met Jimmy Johnstone once. For our readers from Venus, let me say that “Jinky” was a tiny, tough, twinkle-toed Scottish footballer in the 60s and early 70s. He was just like Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, if the “World Player of the Year” had ginger hair and a taste for vodka and rowing boat escapades. In the photo taken by my Dad, I’m clutching an autograph book. Jimmy smiles for the camera, looking improbably young. Me, I’m wearing shorts, sandals and an anorak – and looking the other way.

Tragically, that’s not so different from how we treat talent today. We have a childish wish to get close to celebrity. But there’s a complete failure to appreciate real greatness: what it means and, more importantly, how it happens. We know what genius looks like, but we let our attention be drawn to a dog or a car, or maybe a dog chasing a car.

Consider Davie Cooper playing keepy-uppy against England at Wembley. Or imagine Johnstone just playing keepy-uppy during a Jock Stein team talk. You’ll understand that these were men not only of immense talent, but the were also men without fear.

The diminution of talent in modern society leaves us with a deeper, more general problem than cowardy-custardness. It’s a conundrum that affects our sporting arena, but also infects almost every walk of life from education to entrepreneurship, from creativity to commerce.

The simplest part of the issue is that we have developed the delusion that talent is ten-a-penny: easily acquired, cheap and instantly disposable.

Of course, modern gadgetry takes away many of the technical challenges that only hard-won knowledge and ability could overcome in the past. As photo-sharing sites demonstrate, automatic digital cameras allow even the most visually-illiterate to take a snap that’s in focus and correctly exposed. But technology also hides just how hard it is to take a great picture. In the past few years, we’ve taken as many pictures as were previously snapped in the whole of photography’s history. By sheer statistics, there are inevitably many good shots nowadays. The general bar has been raised, but it’s hard to avoid the overall impression of massive mediocrity: talent is drowned in a tsunami of tedium.

Today’s communications also makes it easy to scout for “talent” – so much so that 250,000 deluded souls queued to be ridiculed on X-Factor this year. Such unreality shows prove that it’s not hard to find the next Tommy Steel, aka cheeky chappie Ollie Murs. And, admittedly, it would be hard not to wander down your own street and stumble upon a woman who could sing better than Cilla Black. So the old system of guts and grit and industry connections was far from foolproof either.

Arguably and laughably, talent is all harmless fun, isn’t it? Indeed, across all our mainstream media, we’re usually more interested in the contents of someone’s wardrobe than in the contents of their mind. To use Professor Phil Hanlon’s phrase, the public obsession with superficiality and easy fame is merely part of the modern “dis-ease”.