McKechnie grew up in Easterhouse, the suburb six miles east of Glasgow’s city centre that was completed after the First World War. The Easterhouse scheme was the prescribed answer to overcrowding and deprivation in other parts of the city, but while the houses were a clear upgrade, no thought had gone into installing shops or other infrastructure, and Glasgow’s existing gang problem only expanded. Easterhouse was a battleground for youths; knives, hammers and bats were wielded on street corners between rival groups including The Skinheads and The Provvy Rebels.

McKechnie grafted in spite of the danger. He delivered the Sunday newspapers to local residents, worked on the ice cream trucks after school and played football for the Boys Brigade. He soon realised that helping athletes was a more realistic route than being one, and has been performing that role for almost five decades.

During his early years, football was the one sport he really knew, but basketball found a way to introduce itself to McKechnie when the Harlem Globetrotters made their way to Lochend Secondary School in Easterhouse, a performance he graded as “a circus event.”

McKechie remained impartial to the sport, his curiosity levels hovering beneath his interest in physiotherapy. That began to change when his father, also named Alex - “I guess he named me” - was injured in a car accident when McKechnie was in his early teens, while one of his brothers once broke his femur. With prevention of injuries so dear to his heart today - ‘treat locally, rehab globally’ is one of his favourite philosophies - it was then that a connection with sports medicine first evolved. Witnessing first-hand his closest family members going through the motions around the house with no clear direction as to how they could return to full mobility and strength, it exposed him for the first time to the thought of changing that predicament for the many others who suffer.

That led him to Leeds School of Physiotherapy, and, ten days after being accepted, he was gone.

A community of Glaswegians was replaced by a dormitory full of people from all over the world. It was an environment in which he became closer and closer to the field of orthopedics, fascinated with fractures, surgeries and post-operative work undertaken at Leeds General Infirmary. This was still a time when ACL surgery did not exist, when baseball players did not talk of elbow replacement as if it were relatable to changing the bed sheets in the morning.

Having worked through those realities and graduated, McKechnie wanted to take advantage of being able to live anywhere in the Commonwealth. He applied for emigration with a view to a new life in Australia or Canada, perhaps making his way back to the UK afterward. He was not afraid to leave home; seeing the violence back home in Easterhouse, he had already witnessed what could happen if he stayed.

“I hit Vancouver and got stuck”, he says. McKechnie is yet to fulfil the latter part of the original travel plan.

McKechnie was hired as Head Physiotherapist at Simon Fraser University, a daunting situation for a 22-year-old who was one of only two in the training department. He was instantly impressed by the way North American athletes trained. Strength and power was such a big part of the process, and McKechnie was in awe of the high-quality equipment used to prepare players. He was grateful for his exposure to sports he had never dabbled in before, one job taking him to nearby Exhibition Park race course to help the jockeys. Familiarity came in the form of the local North American Soccer League team, the Vancouver Whitecaps, which placed McKechnie in the company of Willie Stevenson, who at one stage struggled mightily with his ACL rehab. The Scot has never forgotten how hard the former Liverpool player tried to return to action, and at the time it both angered him and hooked him into preventing sports injuries.

He would have plenty of opportunities to do just that, not least on his very first day on the job when McKechnie knew he would learn more in the place he had relocated to than anywhere else in the world.

That day, American football practice had started at three o’clock and within the space of ten minutes, through the small window in his office, McKechnie could see 15 behemoths walking towards him, all demanding that their ankles are taped or shoulders readjusted. The Scot had almost no idea what to do, inexperienced in dealing with sports injuries let alone athletes who measured up to sizes he had never encountered anywhere in life. Another challenge to overcome were the tape routines, completely different in Canada to the UK. The former used zinc tape, and in minutes, McKechnie was throwing out the basic strapping he had learned, inventing a new version on the fly.

His sports debut was a reminder that he had left the violence of Easterhouse behind and replaced it with the brutal world of American football, a reality that had pushed Clydebank Health Centre and the version of the game he thought he knew to the memory bank.

Not that McKechnie realised it at the time, this rapid study was all in preparation for bigger things.

-

There is an old video on the internet of McKechnie putting Steve Nash, then with the Dallas Mavericks and looking somewhat pre-teen, through his paces next to the watchful eye of Chad Lewis, then the Mavericks' strength coach. Having tested Nash with medicine balls, resistance bands and other inventory, the pair are seen kicking a small pink ball back and forth in mid-air right behind Lewis, who is being asked for his opinion on the gruelling and uber-specific workout he just witnessed.

To anyone who saw McKechnie’s techniques, they were revolutionary, at least before he and Nash turned playful.

“It is all I can do, and that’s alright”, McKechnie laughs of his skills.

McKechnie’s formula can be whittled down to one acronym: ‘B.U.I.L.D’.

First of all, his ‘basic principles’ never change. “Joints move, so you have got to move them. Muscles move joints, so you better work them.”

All that which he moves and works begins and ends with the core. Ask McKechnie to explain why it is so important to him and he will respond with a question: ‘If I were to ask you to define your core, what would you say?’ Cue a blabbering response about the abdominals, which as learned from McKechnie’s tutelage is not the core.

Core strength is instead an endurance base, the epicentre of bodily movement from stationary to active. It is an area which prevents somebody from overcompensating for any action large or small by a single part of the body. Like a sports team, the whole should be in unison, and it has become the focal point of McKechnie’s rehabilitation strategy.

After the ‘B’ of basic principles comes the U of ‘utilising’, specifically your skill set and those of the people around you. ‘I’ is for identity, “and with identity you have integrity.”

McKechnie’s identity - along with his accent - could be any one of knees, groins, the pelvic floor or the system that helps them all, the Core X programme, which among many has been used by Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol with whom McKechie worked while with the Los Angeles Lakers.

It has blossomed into a commercial project, a training system that incorporates the use of elastic and rubber bands to move the body in straight and diagonal lines, establishing correct movement patterns in order to prevent injury and increase performance. McKechnie also invented the torsion board, a device that Reebok later sold as the ‘core board’ and something that was masterminded while walking his dog.

“I passed a park and a kid was on a spring, just bouncing around on it”, he says of the light bulb moment. It is for this reason that the original core board is, from top to bottom, a huge engineering spring on plywood.

Such invention will lead you to ‘L’, which stands for ‘longevity’. The reason you build that is because it allows you to ‘D’; diversify.

“And you must always deliver.”

By hitting on these points, McKechnie opened his own clinic in Vancouver within three years of working at Simon Fraser. Who would have thought a future client would be one of the greatest basketball players ever to live?