The sports writer
Remembering Hugh McIlvanney
In Richard Ford’s novel, The Sportswriter, there is a moment when the titular journalist, Frank Bascombe, is dispatched to interview a once-great athlete. What he finds is less than the legend he imagined so he faces a dilemma, does he write what he finds or gild the lily?
Hugh McIlvanney, who died last week at age 84, was one of the most brilliant sports writers of the past half century. For over 60 years the man from Kilmarnock wrote for a number of publications, most notably The Observer and latterly The Sunday Times. He reported on England’s World Cup victory in 1966, was at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by a terror group and chronicled first-hand Hillsborough disaster in 1989. He hung with Muhammad Ali at his villa just hours after the great heavyweight’s dismantling of George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire in 1974 and was again at ringside in’75 for the Thrilla in Manila when Ali beat Joe Frazier.
At its finest, sports writing is an art form and McIlvanney nailed it. Football and boxing were his sporting arenas but it was his innate ability to find the history and humanity of a moment that made him special. In 1980 he was in Los Angeles for the tragic last fight of Welsh pugilist Johnny Owen who was challenging for the world bantamweight title. Boxing, wrote the sports writer, “gave Johnny Owen his one positive means of selfexpression. Outside the ring he was an inaudible and almost invisible personality. Inside, he became astonishingly positive and self-assured. He seemed to be more at home there than anywhere else. It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.” Hugh McIlvanney wrote what he saw and what he felt and therein legends are made.