Like most sports he turns his hand to, Callum Davidson perfected the art of topless belly sliding with effortless ease.
St Johnstone’s Scottish Cup triumph over Hibs ended with the winning manager sliding shirtless through a lake of lager on the dressing room floor of Hampden, egged on by players and staff.
His teenage daughter Eilidh was more impressed by the hits the video attracted on social media than she was by her old man leading a football team from Perth to two major trophies in a season of historic significance.
Callum Davidson’s celebration after his side won the Scottish Cup became a social media hit
‘I hadn’t even had a drink,’ Davidson laughs now. ‘Not even a can of lager.
‘A couple of boys were doing belly slides in the dressing room and they weren’t very good.
‘Steven MacLean said to me: ‘Go on gaffer, show them how it’s done’.
‘So I told them to soak the floor a little bit so I could slide properly. I didn’t want to stick on the floor and lose a layer of skin as I landed.
‘So I went flying across the floor and straight into a door, which caused a bit of hilarity for everybody else. Not so much me.’
Davidson with the Scottish Cup after St Johnstone’s 1-0 win over Hibernian last season
The floor was mopped up and players trudged up the steps of Hampden to pose for pictures with the trophy on the pitch. Trapped in a never-ending round of media interviews, the manager ran out of time to do the same. The moment was lost.
That’s why he’s now under pressure to cram the League and Scottish Cups into the car and grab some portraits before St Johnstone are finally forced to hand them back. The defence of the League Cup begins in Arbroath on Saturday.
‘I’ve had a bit of stick from my family for not bringing the two trophies down to the house to get pictures done. I will have to do it soon or I’ll never hear the end of it.’
The family struggle by for now with YouTube re-runs and grainy footage of the day dad went viral by sliding head first along the dressing room floor of the National Stadium like a Poundland Superman.
Davidson also won the Scottish League Cup after his side beat Livingston in the final
‘I’m not a social media user at all,’ he admits. ‘But my daughter said to me: ‘Dad you had 1.3million viewers’.
‘It’s the one and only time she has ever been impressed by me.
‘Because I don’t use social media, I didn’t really know what that meant.
‘So she had to explain to me: ‘Basically loads of people have watched it’.
‘And I’m thinking: ‘Aw, great…’.’
Had he climbed back to his feet and fished a couple of salmon from the pockets of his sodden club suit, it would have surprised no one. 2021 has been that kind of year.
Davidson met his wife whilst baby sitting former Wimbledon champion Andy Murray
He scoffs at the idea that he comes up smelling of roses, whatever he turns his mind to. Yet the evidence is compelling.
A teenage tennis protégé in Dunblane, he was coached by Judy Murray, and met his wife while baby-sitting Wimbledon champions Andy and Jamie.
He played squash in a local league while passing his exams with flying colours. A Scotland youth international at golf, he agonised over the pursuit of a tour card or a career in professional football.
‘I think out of eight players from my Scotland boys’ team, seven turned pro,’ he reveals. ‘I was the only one who turned pro at football. And it was close, very close.’
Callum Booth and David Wotherspoon celebrate after clinching the Scottish League Cup
Weeks after he led the Perth side to their second Scottish Cup win in an epic first season in management, his irritating excellence peaked when he strolled on to the first tee at the Dunblane New Golf Club in June and started tearing the place up.
He smashed six birdies and an eagle. Seven under par after 10 holes, he carded a 62 in the qualifying round for the club championship. A bogey at the 15th — ‘the easiest hole on the course’ — rankled for a bit, but couldn’t remove the sheen from a course record he’d finally pinched from his own uncle, Alec Wilson.
‘I’d been trying for 25 years to do that,’ he says. ‘It was my best achievement of the year.’
There’s laughter as he says it, but he might not be joking. In February, Saints won the Betfred (now Premier Sports) Cup for the first time in their history when they beat Livingston in the final.
Davidson celebrated St Johnstone’s unlikely cup double at Dunblane New Golf Club
In May, they became the first club from outside Glasgow to win both domestic trophies in the same season since Aberdeen in 1990.
Both finals were edgy affairs played out before Hampden stands emptied of fans by a Covid-19 pandemic. When he stepped on to the course in Dunblane after an opening round of 70 in June, everything felt precisely the way it should.
‘I probably enjoyed that more than either of the cup finals when it was going on because I knew I was playing well,’ he says.
‘Football is all about opinions and everyone trying to tell you how you played and how you should play.
St Johnstone became the first side outside of Glasgow to win a couple double since 1990
‘With golf, it’s basically just you against the course. And it was just one of those days when I was seven under par after 10 holes.
‘It was the club championship qualifiers, a stroke play championship. I managed to beat the course record and break my uncle Alec’s record. It was one of those things in the back of my mind that I always wanted to achieve.’
History shows that when the former Scotland left-back sets his sights on a sporting target he tends to reach it.
Despite a season of rampant over-achievement last time out, he still has ambitions he prefers to keep to himself for now. The relentless drive comes from his mother Maggie, the PE teacher who pushed him to win a place at Edinburgh University to study Civil Engineering in case his sporting ambitions came to nothing.
The Saints boss insists hard work is foundation of his success both on and off the pitch
She needn’t have worried. If he hadn’t won 19 caps as a Scotland left-back, you suspect he’d have found a way to lift the Claret Jug instead.
‘People always said to me: ‘You’re good at stuff’. But I did practise hard. It didn’t matter if it was table tennis, squash, tennis, golf or badminton. It wasn’t just a case of turning up and playing.
‘I practised the golf really hard. Football, I practised really hard.
‘I had to work at it. I worked hard at school as well to get my results because that didn’t really come naturally to me at all. I suppose I always thought to myself that I had a talent and I would be really disappointed with myself if I didn’t use that talent to the best of my ability.
Galatasaray knocked St Johnstone out of the Europa League after a 4-2 win at McDiarmid Park
‘My pals were going out for a drinking session and I would be practising golf until 9 o’clock at night, sometimes 10. I would go and meet them after. Most sports people who play at a good level have that, I think.’
The restless commitment to being the best he could be made it hard at times to switch off and watch TV. And the trophy-snaffling success of last season made it harder than ever over the summer.
Like everyone else he found himself asking a question in his head. Despite a decent show over two legs against Galatasaray, how on earth do St Johnstone maintain the standards of last season?
‘When I was an assistant manager, I remember times when I would finish for the summer and switch off,’ he says. ‘This year was different. Being a manager with Covid issues and all other kinds of issues I probably didn’t get any time to think.
St Johnstone started the new league season with a 0-0 draw against Ross County
‘It was always about the next thing. Signing players, holding on to players, looking at potential players, training facilities, personnel problems.
‘I was talking about this with my wife the other day. I probably haven’t had a moment yet to sit down and consider what we did.
‘When you go away on holiday you get away, you sit and do nothing. You read your book on your sun lounger and consider where you are.
‘But with the pandemic and so on that became difficult and I don’t know when I will get the chance to look back and reflect.
‘Maybe when I’m sacked or in between jobs I’ll take a bit of time and look back on what we did last season and decide it wasn’t too bad…’