Indeed Jock would, a few years down the pit himself, start his football with Orbiston Celtic before at twenty-one, a left-back cum at times left-winger, signing for Bathgate then in the upper reaches of the Scottish Second Division before two seasons later stepping up to Dundee. At it would be there, bar the last couple of seasons, that he would spend the rest of what in total would be a seventeen year playing career, with well over three hundred League starts at Dens Park, the Cup Final in 1925 and in 1930 a single cap. It would be a stay only brought to an end at the age of thirty-five though a knee injury, from which he recovered but was forced down the leagues at Ross County and then locally at Montrose, Brechin and back in the city at Dundee Utd, finally hanging up his boots in his thirty-ninth year. 

In fact Dundee would remain his home for the rest of his days. In 1929 and again there he had married local-girl, Isabella Douglas, with whom he was to have two children, both Dundee-born. And it would be there in 1963, aged just sixty-two that he would die in the Mayfield Hospital, whilst working as a bus conductor and driver, be cremated at the Dundee Crematorium and survived by Isabella by just over twenty years. Her passing would be in 1986, aged seventy-eight.