Garry Brady does not tend to get stopped when he walks down the street, but the former Newcastle United winger was once rated as one of the 'brightest prospects in British football' by the BBC. He also happened to 'really p-- off' Alan Sugar.
Long before the days of the Apprentice, Sugar was the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur and Brady was one of the jewels of the club's academy. It did not take much to make Sugar angry, even back then, but the billionaire hit the roof when he learned that Newcastle United had reached a pre-contract agreement with Brady in 1998.
It was a simpler time. Brady did not have a mobile phone - let alone an agent - when compatriot Kenny Dalglish first rang the landline in his flat in London to test the waters. The Newcastle boss just so happened to be Brady's childhood hero so there was only ever going to be one answer.
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"I thought it was someone on the wind up to be honest, but I eventually realised it was Kenny," Brady told ChronicleLive. "He said he had kept an eye on me for a few years and was looking to sign me and bring me up there. I jumped at the chance. To have Kenny on the phone to you, you were a wee bit shell-shocked. I said, 'I'll sign for nothing!'
"At that time, Sugar was on the phone as well and Tottenham wanted me to stay, but I had made my mind up. I was ignoring him. I wasn't answering the phone. He just slaughtered me. He was really p----- off. It sounds crazy now but Sugar phoned the house in London and he was phoning my Ma up in Glasgow trying to find out where I was. My Ma was like, 'I don't know where he is!'
"You don't realise who you are dealing with at the time. I just felt Newcastle came in, it's closer to home, it's king Kenny and the fans are brilliant. I couldn't have knocked that back. Although I didn't have the best of times, and didn't do as well as I should have, I would have regretted it if I never went."
Brady had suffered a bad ankle injury while playing for Spurs, but Newcastle were still keen to sign the Scot as Dalglish looked to freshen up the squad with a pool of up and coming players. Newcastle were so interested, in fact, that the Magpies were even prepared to pay a compensation fee to secure the winger.
Brady may have been out of contract at the end of the season, but Newcastle had to stump up a six-figure fee because Spurs had helped develop the 21-year-old. A tribunal ultimately ordered Newcastle to pay £650,000, which was a sizable investment for a young player at the time.
Brady had only broken into Spurs' first team just a few months previously so, perhaps, it was not a surprise that the new arrival found those first weeks of pre-season training at Maiden Castle a huge step up as thousands of supporters watched his every move. At one point, Brady even wondered, 'What am I doing here?'
"It was a buzz going into the same dressing room as Rob Lee, [Alan] Shearer, [David] Batty, Stuart Pearce," he said. "They are all legends of the game, but you just feel you're a small fry going in there proving yourself.
"That's the nature of the beast. Maybe I folded a wee bit instead of grasping it. I was a bit star-struck.
"The first time you go in, Pearcey's gone in and rattled you! You're like, 'It's only training!' But you realise that's the level you're playing at. You train the way they play. It gave you a wake-up call.
"You needed to be owning the ball, especially playing against players like that. It can be intimidating. Sometimes, you don't fear it and just go and enjoy the game of football and blend in that way but, other times, if you think too much about it, the fear gets the better of you."
Dalglish, ultimately, helped Brady to settle in but, just a few months later, the Newcastle manager was sacked following a poor run of results, which left the summer signing facing an uncertain future at the club. However, it was Dalglish's successor, Ruud Gullit, who handed Brady his debut and the winger went on to make all of his 12 appearances for the club under the Dutchman in his first season on Tyneside.
Brady was the first to acknowledge that he 'had a few chances' under Gullit and 'didn't take them', even going on to admit that 'I can remember playing c---'. That disappointment did not overshadow his time at the club, though, and the match day experience at St James' was something that certainly stayed with him.
"Even the build-up," he said. "We went to the Copthorne, met up there, had our pre-match and went to the game.
"You always went through the city and you could see it was pure buzzing at one o'clock. When you're going down the tunnel for the warm-up and, then, when the game actually kicks off, the roar sends a shiver down my spine now even talking about it."
Brady, ultimately, only sampled that atmosphere at St James' on a handful of occasions as a player. Although Brady was on the club's books for three years, the Scot did not play in either of his final seasons at the club and was instead shipped out on loan to Norwich City before joining Portsmouth on a permanent basis in 2001.
Brady went on to return to Scotland and enjoy spells at Dundee, St Mirren and Brechin City before hanging up his boots in 2013. Although Brady 'wished' he did 'better' at Newcastle, tellingly, the 45-year-old never regretted his decision to move to Tyneside because of the people he met - on and off the field.
"You sit and watch football now and you see people on the telly and think, 'I played with him. I've been in the dressing room with him. I've played cards with him. I've lost money to him!'" he added.
"You see big Dunc on the telly and you think of a certain night out you had with him or Shearer and the Christmas nights out. You start having a laugh to yourself and you realise: F--- sake! You've had a good life so be grateful for what you've had.
"I didn't really realise what I could have been until now. I could have done better than what I did, but I'm still happy with what I've done. There's people who would give their right arm to play and I did it at Newcastle and Tottenham."
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