Locker Room:Bah! Christmas! I was born too soon. I think if I were a kid now I would succeed in virtual sports almost as sweepingly as I failed at the real thing. I would like tomorrow morning to be unwrapping a WII/Playstation/Xbox selection of sporting diversions which I could safely excel at without the risk of burning calories or getting rained on.

I suffer from gift envy. Not to come over like the poorest one of Python's Four Yorkshiremen, but kids these days don't know they are born. Certainly we had indoor virtual sports which ranged from blow football to a board-based football game played with cards called Strike (way before there was a Cork GAA version) and later Subbuteo teams with large clots of bostik holding their lower limbs together.

In our day mainly, though, you got stuff they made you go outdoors in. Back then outdoors was considered the natural habitat for kids.

(I am tempted here to steal the old Emo Phillips joke about running excitedly to the locked back door when the first heavy snowfall of winter blanketed the ground and roaring at the parents, "Come on, come on, you know the deal, let me in".)

I was a gullible child, which made the business of presents all the more regrettable. One Christmas I was bought a second-hand bike with old-fashioned, upright handlebars. I believed for years my father's reassurance that this staid contraption was in fact a "converted" racing bike. Even as I earnestly repeated this claim to many people who walked away shaking their heads and smiling to themselves I imagined the conversion had been necessitated by a series of accidents caused when the racer generated sonic booms while being ridden on the Howth Road.

This was the era when the chopper was the bicycle of choice. It was felt in my house that the chopper was in itself a highly dangerous form of transportation. If a young man were forced to break suddenly, inadvertently employing the front-wheel brake instead of the back-wheel brake, the design of the whole thing could send the young man hurtling toward the raised handlebars.

As I was obviously destined for a career in male modelling, it was decided that my smouldering good looks would be best served by mounting a converted racer.

That all came later of course. My first sports-related Christmas present was a replica Leeds United kit, given to me in 1970. I have a photograph of myself somewhere poncing about in it in the back garden carrying a football under my arm. I am holding the football against my side in that rather sedate way footballers used to employ when carrying balls on to the field.

There may have been a period back then when I genuinely believed the jersey I owned was actually Allan Clarke's (it had Sniffer's number eight on the back) but I do remember being brought to the local park one day and becoming involved in a kickaround with a fully grown man who was also wearing a Leeds United kit. (If this sounds impossibly seedy they were rather more innocent times. Yes, he gave me sweets. So what?)

I remember asking him if he played for Leeds. This was an era before replica jerseys were widely available, and anyway, smartasses, when you are seven it is possible to believe Leeds players might frequent the local park; he could have been looking for the sort of talent that might carry the ball on to the Wembley turf without dropping it. Okay?

He said no, he didn't play for Leeds; he was an "amateur" footballer. I took penalties on him, none of which he had the good grace to let go past him. I was quite pleased about that. I didn't want to play with the sort of amateur against whom I could score pennos.

I wrote in my diary that night, "Met an amateur footballer today. Don't know his name".

I didn't know his name but we were brothers in white. How I longed for his support the following year. That Christmas I was given a pair of white football boots.

I can't remember what brand the boots were but I knew one thing as soon as I saw them: I had been spared the dreaded Blackthorn boots. Does anybody remember those beauties? Designed by club-footed coalminers for GAA players, they were the last word in unfashionability, the sporting footwear for people who found the hobnail too flimsy. I think had a pair of Blackthorns been produced I would have rebelled against wearing them unless told they were converted Gola boots.

Anyway in the mid-70s it required quite a lot of flamboyance to get away with wearing white football boots. I hadn't got that flamboyance, unless you count luminous acne as the sign of an outgoing nature. White boots were mortifying.

I am reminded of Niall Quinn's story about the former bright young thing Seán Thornton turning up for training at Sunderland a few years ago with his bleached hair, his earring and his white boots and the veteran coach Bobby Saxton glancing balefully at the young lad, shaking his head and saying, "You had better be good, very good".

I wasn't good or very good. I wasn't very flamboyant. After all I rode to training on what I believed to be a converted racing bike. The first evening I wore the white boots I tried to cover them in mud as quickly as possible so nothing other than my lack of talent would make me conspicuous.

Unfortunately, when I got home my mother unveiled her supplementary present: a tin of clear dubbin.

I'm not sure that kids today are bothered with football-boot maintenance, but back in the 70s, when it rained all year long, it was necessary to keep your boots shined and polished and waterproofed. You stuffed them with old newspapers when not wearing them. If you spent three hours a week wearing the boots you spent as a rule six hours a week applying dubbin and other waxy products to spare yourself the wrath of your parents, who were, of course, gently playful in their reminders that there were no more boots being bought if those bloody boots weren't looked after.

Maintaining a pair of white boots (I was also given a device which erratically expelled some white paint through a round spongy disc at the top so I could effectively TippEx out blemishes) was a major commitment which may have cost me my shot at the big time.

(If we can digress here, when did established practice in lacing change? In that era - and Pillar Caffrey should be looking into this - it was felt you would be a far better player if you wrapped your laces around the underside of your boot before tying a knot on the top. To this end all boots back then actually came with enough lace with which to mummify oneself if one so wanted. An unfortunate side-effect of this vogue for effectively binding one's foot in shoelace was the discoloration of the perfectly white boot by the sodden, black lace.

By the way not only did it rain all through the 70s but it was also frosty most of the time. Skies were almost grey and for nine months of the year the earth looked like the inside of a freezer. It was common to clump off a pitch with a large acreage of frozen mud clamped to the underside of each frozen boot. This made the foot-binding approach to laces especially inconvenient as the fingers of the boots' owners were inevitably frozen senseless, and unpicking the great wodge of frozen lace at the top was impossible but just kicking the boots off while they were laced around your sole was equally difficult. Really, you'd have to have been there. The laughs we had on the 13Bs.)

We were young and easily pleased back then though. We'd come out on Christmas afternoon each carrying the dull-brown plastic football we had been given hours earlier and each wearing new shoes because our parents loved us to scuff them the minute we got them. Some had the brown plastic Wembley ball. Others had the blowaway ball, which because of its lightweight nature and the hurricane which prevailed through the 70s was the least-desirable ball available to young boys.

I had the best of both worlds though: a converted Wembley ball and a Leeds jersey in a world filled, then as now, by Chelsea fans. Bah.