A MERE one game played and one goal scored and Inverurie Locos midfielder Thanh-Tan Tran has garnered more publicity than most Highland League players do across their whole careers. That is what happens when you are a 20-year-old of Vietnamese extraction with a life story unlike that of any player to have taken part in the Scottish Cup across the competition's 135-year history.
"I have been overwhelmed by the press I've got," he says. "Sky are coming to see me and my friend tells me you can see my goal at the BBC website. It has all been such a surprise."
Tran, pictured right, added untold mileage to the telling of his
tale when last month, only 110 seconds into a third-round encounter against Vale of Leven, he netted to send Inverurie on their way to a 4-0 victory that has earned them a fourth-round tie at home to Motherwell on Saturday.
It also earned the youngster another round of interviews wherein it can be recounted how in 1983 his dad Van-Brien and mum Thuy crammed into a leaky vessel with his one-year-old sister Tram. They did so to escape their country's communist rule in a mass exodus by those who became known as the 'Boat People'. The Tran family settled Germany, where Thanh-Tan played for fourth-tier amateur side Hammer SPVG before coming to Scotland in October. He did so to visit his Aberdeen-based sister Tram, whose Irish husband persuaded Inverurie manager Dave Cormie to give him a trial, during which he impressed enough to be given a crack at the Highland League. The visit of Mark McGhee's side to Harlaw Park this week will represent the biggest game in the life of Tran who is driven by the support of his dad to give everything in his bid to become a professional footballer.
Currently working in a clothes shop in Aberdeen city centre and waiting to hear whether he has been accepted to study sport science at Robert Gordon University, he eats and trains in pursuit of his quest to be paid to play football.
"I don't drink alcohol and I am one of those who thinks you should put good things into your body so your body can do good things, so I don't like to stuff myself with burgers, pizza and chips. It is funny when I walk up to Union Street at lunchtime and see people queuing to get into McDonald's. I find that strange. When I leave work at night I go straight to the gym for an hour-and-a-half of cardiovascular, and building my strength and power is important."
He derives that strength not simply from the physical but the spiritual – in the form of a Buddha icon he wears round his neck. "I touch it or kiss it when I go out to play and for me Buddha is what Jesus will be to Catholics and Protestants. That is my Vietnamese heart.
"I don't give it out to everybody about being from boat people, but I think that's what makes me, and gives me the determination to succeed because my parents did something that was so difficult, so I would have a better life. I have never asked my dad that much about the actual experience of leaving Vietnam but I know that it was just a case of people jumping on any available boat without knowing where it would take them or if they would make it somewhere else alive and that keeps me humble."
Tran has never been able to afford to visit Vietnam, where he has a grandmother he hasn't see since he was five. He is relieved how quickly he has settled into Scottish life and puts that down to boarding with his sister and her husband. And a five-day visit from his girlfriend Katha over Christmas allowed him to experience a sense of being at one with his temporary residence, in an unexpected way.
"I had to drive from Aberdeen to Edinburgh airport in the morning to pick her up," he says. "As I passed through Stonehaven, on one side of me was the North Sea and on the other side the sun was rising over the hills. It just made me feel so comfortable, it was quite something."
It would be quite some-thing again if he could be the source of the ultimate discomfort for Motherwell in the Highlands this weekend. That would be another story worth re-telling.
