What Dumbarton owner Mario ‘Vintage’ Lapointe enjoys most in life is writing and playing music. The Canadian’s compositions have already been streamed over one million times on Spotify and YouTube and, by February, he expects that number to double.
For three decades he dabbled in song-writing. When his marriage came to an end, he began to take the pursuit a little more seriously and last weekend the father of three delivered an intimate set of acoustic tracks and stories on the opening night of the three-day Dumbarton Rocks festival.
Joined on stage by local musician Richie Gallacher, the audience were drawn to the Marbill Coaches Stadium by curiosity. Most had never watched the major shareholder in a Scottish football club pour out his heart via self-penned songs such as ‘Country Man’ and ‘The Devil Won’t Let Me Go’ before.
A fan engagement strategy unlikely to be adopted any time soon by Dermot Desmond, Andrew Cavenagh or Dave Cormack, Lapointe tells The Fixture: “People think I am doing music for a career and I’m not. I am doing it for fun, but I do take care of what I do.
“There is no money to be made this way. You have to be a real performer to make money and I am not that guy.”
More comfortable in the sanctuary of the recording studio than he ever is in the spotlight of the live gig, he finds concerts like last weekend’s event in the club’s Bar 72 ‘intimidating’.
“I get too anxious and too nervous and the only reason I do it here is because it’s cabaret style with little tables, little candles and alcohol service only between songs and not during. We do it like they did it in nightclubs in the 1950s.
“Richie Gallacher is a performer whereas I just do studio stuff with my son. But it went well, it went well.”
So well, indeed, that the man who describes himself as a musician, a poet, a storyteller, an engineer, a sports coach, a businessman, and entrepreneur, was dragged back on to the stage for an encore the following night. An 80th birthday party drew guests from as far afield as Virginia and Florida and, keen to engage the Dumbarton community in any way he can, an arm was duly twisted behind his back.
“Someone said to the lady celebrating ‘Mario writes nice, soft songs.’ So they asked me to play and I did another two songs there as well. I did my own compositions because I never do covers. That’s too hard.”
Between standing ovations, he still harbours the occasional moment of doubt. Days when he wonders why he spent all that money bailing out a struggling lower league football club on the west coast of Scotland with an average crowd of 800, a history of financial instability and a series of past owners who saw more value in the stadium land than the football team. So far this season Dumbarton have won three of their nine league games and sit third bottom of Scottish football’s lowest senior league.
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“When we are going through a bad patch my kids say, ‘are you sure about this?'
“We talk about all sorts of things and they see when I am in a bad mood or sad and say, ‘are you sure you want to do this?’
“But we are building something. It’s building blocks, it’s not like snapping your fingers.”
A wealthy self-made man from Montreal, the Canadian saved the club name with a seven-figure investment last year.
Growing up playing baseball and hockey, he worked part-time at a local grocery store and McDonald’s during his high school and university years. Earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Université de Sherbrooke he founded SMT-ASSY Electronics in 1996 and, when Dumbarton plunged into administration, he turned his attention away from buying potential clubs in England and Portugal to focus on Scotland.
Between August and May, Lapointe’s Saturday mornings are now spent in an office of his Quebec electronics store watching the Sons of the Rock struggle to escape the lower reaches of League Two. From time to time the frustration spills over.
“Last year under the previous coach something happened in a game and it cost me a monitor. I punched it and that was not good. The screen never came back.”
He offers no apologies for putting the club’s future before the team’s present. Money was spent in the summer on a new artificial surface and Frank McKeown’s inexperienced squad features 11 players aged 23 or under.
Languishing dangerously close to the trap door which dumps distressed clubs into the murky depths of the Lowland League, a mere three points separates third from ninth in League Two after nine rounds of fixtures and three wins on the bounce offer hope of a revival for the club named joint winners of the first Scottish league title in 1891.
“When you come to this place you are not just associating yourself with some team in Scottish League Two,” says Lapointe. “You are actually associating yourself with 154 years of history.”
While the relationship hits the odd bump in the road - “my Saturday depends on the result of the game” - he spent a trip to Las Vegas last year parading up and down the strip in a Dumbarton T-shirt and shorts.
Plucking his mobile phone from his desk, he flicks through the pictures to find a racy red Ford Explorer with a natty yellow Dumbarton crest emblazoned along the side.
“I had guys dropping their resumes in my mailbox after I got this on the side of my car in Montreal,” he laughs.
“A hockey agent who goes to Glasgow and Cardiff and loves football stopped me and asked, ‘are you guys actually going to start winning some games at some point?’
He spends as much time in Scotland as business interests allow. Next year he plans to return with two of his sons to give the rusting frames around the stadium shutters a lick of paint and recondition some of the chairs in the lounge.
“I could get a guy to do it, but that money would be better spent on football,” he explains.
The one extravagance he did permit himself was the purchase of a two-bedroom flat eight minutes’ walk from the club’s picturesque stadium. Plans to house relatives and musician pals were set to one side when a couple of Dumbarton players moved in instead.
“Ali Omar lives there and so does Robbie Cleary, a half Canadian boy. Because of that I now live in the living-room.
“I am not there often, but when I am I live on a futon between the TV and the couch. Some people might think that’s unusual, but I really don’t care.”
When Herald Sport offers the observation that the purchase of a toiling Scottish football club might strike some as a classic mid-life crisis, he concurs.
“Oh, yeah, that’s okay. As long as I’m having fun, I don’t care what they say.
“This place needed some leadership and positivity.
“It’s hard to lead when people are negative or drinking from a glass half full all of the time.
“Our board is all young guys apart from our chairman John Steele. Even he is young at heart.
“We have done a lot. We took over all the bars, all the concourse snack bars, we put in new artificial turf.
“We are giving season tickets to kids as soon as they turn seven. They get an automatic season ticket and a beanie and a scarf.”
One of his brainwaves was a ‘Pass It On’ campaign which permits supporters to buy a season ticket for £30 and donate it to a local youth under the age of 16. The numbers on that are up to 200 and, while some fans complain about the manager and the plight of a team propped up by a loan co-operation agreement with Celtic, Lapointe makes no apologies for putting the infrastructure and future of the club before the product on the pitch.
“Maybe a portion of fans wanted guys with a lot of money to say, ‘let’s go buy a team.’
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“But it’s all about sustainability now. My way of doing things is to figure out what revenues we can get, how do we get them and how do we increase the size of the community coming into the club?
“You have to plant seeds in the ground. If you don’t put seeds in the ground, you don’t grow anything.
“We want to grow the support naturally so that, if everything is (financially) back to par by year three and we are not losing as much, we can start to think, ‘okay, where are we going with the football?’
“It’s not that I am not looking at the football at all now, but it’s not my complete priority.
“I am building a club and not just a team.”
So long as their senior league status looks in any danger some will feel that’s a risky way to go and, from time to time they say so. The likes of Albion Rovers, Cowdenbeath and Brechin City have dropped into the Lowland League and, as yet, none of them have made it back up.
Aware of all this, Lapointe recalls one supporter making unflattering remarks during a sustained online campaign last year.
“I mean, when I came in we were about two weeks away from losing a club.
“They put the club on emergency life support and I put quite a lot of money in up till now.
“I’m here to help these guys, not to do the opposite.
“Why would people bring me down online when they barely know me?”
Fan hostility is a tough nut to crack so long as a young team sits uncomfortably close to position 42 in the pyramid. Still hopeful of securing a play-off place by the end of a long season, Lapointe remains one of life’s great optimists.
“I always say to folks, ‘try to be positive, try to stay positive.’
“When you are negative and seeing through a half-full glass you are drawing others in. You are draining the energy and right now Dumbarton need every bit of energy to succeed.”
