Eloquent, lively writing rang with Scotsman’s inimitable voice
THE many tributes to Hugh McIlvanney, who died on January 24 aged 84, are the measure of a true Fleet Street legend.
McIlvanney defined the sports pages of The Observer for three decades from the beginning of the 1960s and set the standard for the match report and the ringside dispatch as a storytelling art form. It is no surprise that so many of the reminiscences have dwelt on the Scot’s inimitable voice.
McIlvanney’s words on the page were rooted in the cadences of his spoken language. It seems no coincidence in this regard that he was of the generation who mostly dictated their reports from Wembley or Old Trafford down a phone line at 10 minutes to five.
Sentences and unspooling paragraphs were rolled around mouths before they reached the page. No doubt the formidable women on the other end of those phones in the copy room of the Observer offices looked forward to McIlvanney’s Kilmarnock consonants with a special interest.
Sunday journalism has always aspired to being that most spirited conversation with the friend you never tire of. McIlvanney exemplified that tone. He pulled his readers close with crafted observation and anecdote, bringing the drama just now before his eyes to vivid life in theirs.
Forty or 50 years on, it is remarkable how, as with the oral history of the ancient poets passed down from one generation to the next, some readers claim recall of passages of McIlvanney’s observation.
In his accounts of the fights of Muhammad Ali or his delight in the magic of the young George Best, he could both marshal an effortless range of reference and find the punchline that brought a smile to Sundaymorning lips.
His younger brother, William, was a garlanded novelist. McIlvanney, by some accounts, always felt a little in awe of that literary rigour. He insisted on calling himself a reporter, not a writer, but at his best he elevated the back page to something magisterial.
The great advantage that McIlvanney had in his early career over today’s sports writers was that the subjects of his features were as often as not friends or confidants as well as heroes.
A miner’s son, with a brilliant autodidact’s determination, he spoke the language of Matt Busby or Bill Shankly or Brian Clough or Alex Ferguson.
In the days when professional sportsmen were earning not much more than the rest of us, their lives and ambitions and motivations were both more accessible and more understandable to those who mythologised or criticised them.
There were no battalions of public relations operatives to keep their millionaire clients to the corporate line. The special magic of McIlvanney’s writing was that, as a reader, you felt he was saving some intimate insight of dressing room or boxing gym just for you.
The other blessing of his vocation when he started out was sport was confined, like church services, to set times of the week. It was not the stuff of rolling news and endless phoneins. Outside of the carnival of World Cups, football was a Saturday afternoon or floodlit Wednesdayevening event. Little of it was televised and only the FA Cup final was live. Sports reporters were the eyes and ears of fans not at the fight or the game, with licence to elaborate tales of miracle and wonder.
In an earlier era, the richness of McIlvanney’s prose, his ability to relay outrageous courage or brutal defeat, might have been saved for accounts of the battlefield.
A few times, he employed his gifts on real frontlines, winning a journalist of the year award for his reports from Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles.
But, in an era of relative peace, it was sport, ‘‘war without the shooting’’, that held his attention.
He liked to call it a ‘‘magnificent triviality’’, but he understood that the challenge and the joy — for him and for us — was always to make believe it mattered.