WHEN duty called, Dave King answered. When someone had to step up, he was there front and centre.

The boardroom battle raged at Ibrox and King and Co. emerged victorious. Two years on, was it all worth it?

Have the millions of pounds been well spent or the hours dedicated to the cause time well used?

As he sees the club he loves being rebuilt around him, King has mixed answers to those key questions. Life as Rangers chairman isn’t all fun and games.

He has been sued and threatened with prison, saw a management team leave in controversial circumstances and been one of the main protagonists in the latest chapters of Rangers’ fall and rise tale.

King won’t be found in the Director’s Box every other Saturday but his commitment to the cause has never diminished. The stresses and strains of being the figurehead of his boyhood heroes could have taken their toll but he is now looking forward to the next stage of the job with Pedro Caixinha at the helm.

The journey has not been easy and the road ahead is far from smooth. So, have there been times when King has wished he hadn’t done what he has done?

“No. No,” King said. “Let me answer that slightly differently.

“Have I had any fun or enjoyment about being involved with Rangers in the last two years? Not much.

“If you add it all together, maybe it would come to ten hours, and it was probably all after the semi-final (against Celtic).

“Is it fun? Of course it is not fun. There is nothing fun about what I am doing.

“Litigation, being sued, people trying to put me in jail, I am being sued by Sports Direct.

“What is fun about that? But I didn’t do it for fun.

“I did it because I felt, at a bad time, that I needed to step in, so I stepped in.

“I spend a huge amount of time on things like litigation. There is nothing fun about litigating with Mike Ashley.

“It is not enjoyable, there is nothing satisfying about it. But I have to do it.

“I travel to Scotland more often that I like to. People say I am absent, I am here far more often than I would like to be.

“Sometimes I fly into London for one day to meet on litigation and fly home that same evening.

“It is taking up more of my time and it is not fun. But I signed up to do it.”

King may be a reluctant saviour but his efforts in ousting the former Gers regime will be remembered for some time to come by the Light Blue legions.

The South Africa-based businessman wasn’t the only one in the fight, but his cash – alongside that of the likes of Douglas Park, George Letham and George Taylor – proved crucial as he, Paul Murray and John Gilligan secured the keys to Ibrox.

That war was won, but there are still battles being fought. King remains at loggerheads with Sports Direct and billionaire Mike Ashley, but he has no inclination to step aside while he remains the right man for the fight.

“No [I am not easily intimidated],” King said. “For me on a scale of one to ten it doesn’t get to one.

“The threat of going to jail, it’s quite amusing. My family say ‘we’ll see you at Christmas, which jail will we see you at?’ We genuinely laugh about it.

“I do this for a living. This is what I do. I wouldn’t have taken it on at Rangers if I didn’t have the temperament and the personality.

“Obviously money was required as well and I had to meet that but if I didn’t have the temperament and I wasn’t up for the fight then I wouldn’t have done it and I certainly wouldn’t be here two years later doing what I’m doing now.

“I am as determined now to see this through to the end as I was two years ago. I signed up to do it. And then I’ll make a decision.

“If Sports Direct is completely done and I think the club is back on a certain footing would it then make sense for me to say ‘I’m happy to step down and not be chairman, let’s have a local chairman’ that would be my preference frankly if I could find someone to do that, a good, independent non-executive chairman.

“You couldn’t invite an independent non-executive chairman on to the board: after about five minutes I would scare him away if I gave him top three fears.

“But if we could get to that point I would be very, very happy to step down because I would still have shareholder influence, I don’t need to be chairman of the board to exert shareholder influence because my shareholding would still be there.

“But right now in my view the club still needs someone like me, whether it’s me or it’s not, to continue with the fights we have and the negotiations.”

King returned to Glasgow this week to meet with his fellow directors and hold his first face-to-face talks with boss Caixinha following his appointment as Mark Warburton’s successor.

Some supporters questioned why he remained thousands of miles away during the managerial search or never spoke to Caixinha before he was confirmed in his new post.

He would relinquish the role of chairman if there was a better option. His club is in Glasgow, but his life will remain in Johannesburg.

King said: “It is not a case of wanting to do it (see the team more), but I live in South Africa. You can’t fly into Glasgow on a Saturday morning and watch a game.

“I have got Rangers TV, I watch every game. I don’t actually have to be at Ibrox.

“Put it this way, if it was a condition of being involved with Rangers that I had to relocate to Scotland, firstly I would be single because my wife would divorce me and she certainly wouldn’t come here, and it would never have happened. That was the choice.

“If there was someone else able to do it then someone else should have done it. But the fact was there was no one else able to do it and I am not willing to become single.”