Willie Lamont is a player, who has a known football career of just four seasons, one at Pollok, a second at Queen's Park and two at Pilgrims, all clubs within almost touching distance of Glasgow Southside, where he was born and raised, his mother from Paisley, his father from Glasgow and a Goods Merchant, a shopkeeper cum wholesaler. And it would be into that same line of business, specifically in the drinks' trade and as a Clerk, that young William was also to go. 

Meantime, he must have been playing football but where is unclear until at already twenty he was turning out for not for the current, junior Pollock club but the original, senior one that played at Cowglen, reached the third round of the Scottish Cup in the season, 1882-3, when he was there but in 1884 merged with nearby Sir John Maxwell and became Pollokshaws. However, by then he had joined The Spiders, albeit never to feature in the first team. As a left-sided forward he had first Eadie Fraser but also Bob Christie and Davie Allan in front of him in the pecking order. 

It is thus hardly surprising that he moved on. However, he must have impressed someone somewhere high up in the footballing establishment because, once at Broomloan the Pilgrim's ground in Govan, more of less where Ibrox is now, he was in March 1885 selected for the national team against Ireland, even said to have scored the opening goal in what was to be an 8-2 victory at the then Hampden Park. 

Yet that was to be his only representative honour. At the end of the following reason, aged only twenty-three, he more or less disappears, on-field at least apart from hints of occasional starts for Renton and Third Lanark, the latter likely, the former not. In part that may have been because for work he might have moved across the river to Dennistoun. Certainly in 1891 he was married out of there, his bride back in the Gorbals being Agnes Dinning. And they were to have five children. The first would be born in Dennistoun itself, the second in Plantation, both boys and both dying young. The first to survive, Alfred, would come into this world in the Gorbals, the fourth, another boy, John, in Cathcart and in 1901 by when the family had move in the Southern Suburbs, first to Govanhill and then to Crossmyloof, and finally in 1905 there was Elizabeth.