Britain’s “greatest ever sports writer”
Hugh Mcilvanney, who has
died aged 84, was widely
regarded as Britain’s greatest
ever sports writer, a man whose “mellifluous, muscular, multi-clause” prose far exceeded the usual standards of the genre, said The Daily Telegraph. Although he wrote about most sports, his passions were for racing, boxing and football. “Anyone immune to the delicious lunacy of horse racing,” he observed, “is suffering a deprivation for which mere solvency cannot compensate.” He was all too aware of the hopes and dreams invested in football – and cautioned against it. “Some of us have been acknowledging through most of our lives that the game is hopelessly ill-equipped to carry the burden of emotional expression the Scots seek to load upon it,” he wrote, after Scotland were knocked out of the 1978 World Cup. “What is hurting so many now is the realisation that something they believed to be a metaphor for their pride has all along been a metaphor for their desperation.”
When it came to boxing, he confessed that his “lifelong enthusiasm” was “increasingly assailed by misgivings”, but the sport inspired some of his finest writing – and one of his greatest coups as a reporter, said The Times. In 1974, he watched Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman in the “Rumble of the Jungle” in Zaire. Afterwards, he drove to the house where Ali was staying and – on a hunch that he would not be able to sleep after such a fight – waited outside in his car. Eventually, the world heavyweight champion came to the door, and invited him in; talking for several hours, Ali explained his new “rope-a-dope” strategy: drawing punches while leaning against the ropes, in an attempt to wear out his fearsome opponent. “Truth is, I could have killed myself dancin’ against him,” Ali revealed. Mcilvanney ended his piece presciently, wondering if now was the time for Ali, then 32, to retire. “Maybe both he and boxing should quit while they are ahead.” Born in Kilmarnock in 1934, Hugh Mcilvanney was the son of an ex-miner and a former mill worker. Neither of his parents had had much education, but his home was a cultured one: his mother loved poetry, and he and his siblings read voraciously. (One of his brothers was the celebrated crime writer William Mcilvanney.) Aged 16, Hugh came second in an adult debating contest that was judged by the editor of the Kilmarnock Standard, who later offered him a job. After national service, he worked as a reporter at The Scotsman until its editor, Alastair Dunnett, gave him a book of essays on boxing by A.J. Liebling and suggested he cover sport instead. Although worried about becoming a “fitba writer”, endlessly debating Rangers and Celtic, he agreed. In 1963 he moved to London to join The Observer, where he remained for the next 30 years. After that, he worked for The Sunday Times until his retirement in 2016. Working for Sunday papers meant he had time to agonise over his copy – and he did. Spending up to 40 hours on a piece, he acknowledged his “chipping and sculpting” was “over the top” at times, said The Scotsman, but it produced memorable observations on some sporting greats, including Lester Piggott (“a volcano trapped in an iceberg”), George Best (his feet were “as sensitive as a pickpocket’s hands”) and Joe Bugner (a man with “the physique of a Greek statue, but fewer moves”). He was sharp-witted in person, too. When, in response to a critical writeup, Alf Ramsey asked Mcilvanney what he had ever achieved, and suggested it was nothing but “words, words, words”, he replied: “Alf, they’re quite useful if you want to say something.” A selfdeclared “enemy of moderation”, Mcilvanney was a convivial, if occasionally confrontational man. He is survived by his third wife, Caroline North, and his two children from his first marriage. “People often ask me why I write about sport,” he once said. “I believe it is easier to find a kind of truth in sport than in politics or economics.”