From the Sun October 2004
By Robert McAulay
Lisbon Lion Tommy Gemmell has told how some of his team-mates called him an "Orange b*****d".
Hero Gemmell, a Protestant, also claims there were players who wanted to turn Celtic into a Catholics-only club.
He said he suffered the abuse at the start of his Parkhead career in the early 1960s.
The star - who scored in Celtic's European Cup win in 1967 - told how he and fellow defender Ian Young were the only Protestants in the team when he first arrived at the club.
Gemmell said: "If either of us had a bad game we would get bigoted abuse.
"Certain other players would say, 'What do you expect of an Orange b*****d?
"They would say it directly to you, and they were not having a joke or a laugh.
"I don't know why they called an Orange b', as I had never been in an Orange lodge in my life.
"A handful of players at the club could have been described as real bigots and they would have liked to see a Celtic side that was 100 per cent Catholic."
Gemmell, 61, tells in his new book Lion Heart how he was backed by chairman Sir Robert Kelly and players like Billy McNeill and Steve Chalmers.
The former full-back - who played more than 400 games for Celtic - said: "I just wanted to go out and play and as I got more experienced more senior players saw I was good for the team and everything became ***ky-dory.
"But there had been some resentment of me when I first became established.
"To his credit, the Celtic chairman Sir Bob Kelly was always keen to stress my merits as a player.
"And guys like Billy McNeill and Steve Chalmers were never bigoted.
"The bigoted guys had been at the club for a long time, but why they thought the way they did, I don't know."
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