He was the first black player to play for Scottish club Celtic and was the father of poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron.

[6] He played for St Georges College, a prominent Jamaican high school, and won the Manning Cup and Oliver Shield in 1937 – a statement of island-wide, schoolboy football supremacy.

In 1957, he played for Windsor Corinthians and was again selected to Ontario's Essex All-Stars to face a touring English team, Tottenham Hotspur, on 22 May.

While in Chicago, Heron met Bobbie Scott, a singer, with whom he had a son in 1949, Gil Scott-Heron, who became a famed poet and musician.

[13] Heron had three more children with his wife Margaret Frize (deceased), whom he met while in Glasgow, Scotland: Gayle, Denis[5] and his youngest child Kenneth, who was killed in Detroit.