CELTIC hero Stevie Chalmers was given three weeks to live years before scoring the winning goal in the European Cup final, a BBC documentary has revealed.
Chalmers was 20 when he contracted tuberculosis meningitis and was given no chance of survival.
But 12 years later the forward, now 81, scored Celtic’s second goal in their 2-1 win over Inter Milan in Lisbon as Jock Stein’s team became the first British side to win Europe’s elite trophy.
Chalmers’ story is told alongside those of his team-mates in ‘Glasgow 1967: The Lisbon Lions’, which will be screened to mark the 50th anniversary of Celtic’s greatest triumph next week.
The Glaswegian was diagnosed in 1955 when he was a budding footballer with Kirkintilloch Rob Roy.
Dr Dermot Kennedy told the programme: “Tuberculosis meningitis was the deadliest disease in Glasgow ever, 100 per cent fatality at that time. It was a terrible disease.”
As fellow patients died around him in hospital, Chalmers was given pioneering treatment by Dr Peter McKenzie.
“It was a miracle cure,” Dr Kennedy said. “It was not believed that people could survive tuberculosis meningitis and Stevie Chalmers was one of the very first in Scotland.”
Chalmers joined Celtic in 1959 and his late goal in Lisbon on May 25, 1967, remains the most famous in the club’s history.
The BBC documentary features interviews with the likes of Jim Craig, Bertie Auld, John Clark, Bobby Lennox and Willie Wallace as well as family members of other Lions, and supporters who made the 2,000-mile trip to Portugal.
The hour-long programme, will be shown on BBC One Scotland at 9pm next Wednesday, and at 11.15pm on BBC One elsewhere.
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