HE waits, that’s what he does… and I tell you what: tick followed tock, followed tick, followed tock, followed tick.
And 77 years after Fred Perry had done so his grandson finally ended the long British wait for a Wimbledon winner.
But still tick followed tock, followed tick, followed tock, followed tick.
And 114 years after they had last done so his favourite football team, for whom he played in the fifties, finally ended their long wait for a Scottish Cup win.
If Guinness ever decide to remake their iconic advert then Roy Erskine would seem an obvious choice to build the imagery around.
By way of example this week’s initial plan to meet was postponed by a telephone call from the 84-year-old whose genes helped transform Scottish sport.
“Andy is just going on court,” he explained apologetically.
As we rearranged I said I hoped he would enjoy watching the first round tie at a French Open many were tipping Murray to win.
“I really just enjoy the results,” he replied, in the manner of a true sporting competitor.
A little more than two hours later, another agonising wait was underway. Bad light had stopped play with the world No.2 battling back from the shock loss of the opening two sets to a 37-year-old who is ranked 125 places below him.
As we met the following morning Erskine was consequently waiting again for the match to resume on television and wife Shirley was anticipating a tense day.
“My husband is very mild-mannered, he’s very easy going, but when he’s watching his grandsons…” her voice tails off with a chuckle.
“He’s not allowed to show his emotions when he goes to the matches. Our daughter won’t allow him to make any remarks or show any face change.”
Shirley has a slightly more philosophical outlook.
“I enjoy watching,” she said.
“I sat there and watched it all. I just think there’s nothing we can do. We’ve got to sit here and support him. We’ve got to help him through this bad patch. Roy gets terribly wound up about it when he watches it here. He won’t have anybody in here when he’s watching Andy playing.”
However, as Roy explained, the principle problem there is seeing it through the television lens.
“I’m quite a good watcher as long as it’s live,” he said.
“I hate watching here. I really do not like that because you don’t really know what’s going on. It’s great having it on the television but you don’t have the same sense of what is happening.”
Which is why the complimentary tickets that daughter Judy acquired for Saturday’s Scottish Cup final made for a magnificent experience for a man who had played at Hibs during its greatest era, when the Famous Five were in their pomp in the fifties as that other long wait ended.
“We are very lucky,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of things we would not be able to do. Physically I couldn’t have gone to the cup final unless I had had hospitality, but I got a car to the door. It was a fantastic day.
“Judith’s responsible for an awful lot of this. She looked after me and it’s almost an embarrassment, even going to a football match, the people that stop her and speak to her and ask for photographs. I was surprised by how much that happened on Saturday.”
Being entertained as they provided court meant making some lovely connections.
Before the match Keith Wright, one of Hibs' greatest strikers, was sitting at the next table, allowing Roy and Judy to share with him the memory – they still have the photo – of his meeting with Andy and Jamie when they were pre-school age and attending Saturday morning junior football sessions at Hibs.
Afterwards, when the mother of David Gray, the cup-winning captain and scorer of their winning goal, came over to talk to Judy about tennis, Roy could tell her that an hour earlier his daughter had asked him to nominate his man-of-the-match, while Hibs were still behind, and he had identified the defender, saying, "That is a player who has shown what football’s all about, just his whole attitude and what it was all about".
"You could see that she was very proud," he added. “I actually got on my feet at the moment he scored. It was the only time I moved during the whole game because my legs are knackered nowadays and I have an awful job getting up – but I actually got up.”
As to what it all means, he reckons players tend not to pay much attention to that until history is made.
“I don’t think that the 100-plus years came into it until they had the realisation that they had done this,” he said.
“It was more the winning of that game you were thinking about. With Wimbledon it was also about winning the thing.”
With that it was time to leave him to another anxious spell in front of the television set and, thankfully, the younger of his famous tennis-playing grandsons duly finished off his recovery against Stepanek.
Good things come to those who wait.
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