R.I.P MCILVANNEY
Alan Hubbard looks back on the life and career of the world heavyweight champion of sportswriting
Six pages of tributes dedicated to the legendary scribe who has sadly passed
WHAT is it about boxing that brings out the best in literary giants? Actually, literature and boxing shouldn’t really go together. It has been said that the former is concerned with refining our consciousness; the latter with trying to clobber someone into unconsciousness as artfully and as swiftly as possible.
Yet opposites attract. No sport has drawn better scribbling from esteemed wordsmiths than the noblest art of them all.
Through the ages from Jack London via Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Gallico, A. J. Liebling, Budd Schulberg and Norman Mailer, boxing has been the inspiration for the maestros of the written word, allowing them to launch themselves into the blood and thunder of the sport, and become fascinated by it.
Something as basically primal as boxing naturally provides a rich abundance of enduring metaphors concerning power, fear, life and death that have struck a chord with many brilliant writers. Not least Hugh Mcilvanney. Britain’s greatest sports journalist of his – or arguably any – generation, who passed away last week, wrote beautifully, elegantly and with much envied insight on a plethora of sports, but none more so than boxing.
The late, great Red Smith, doyen of American sports scribes, once opined: “Sportswriting is easy. All you do is sit at a typewriter and sweat blood.” If such is the case, then Mcilvanney’s typewriter and latterly his laptop are indelibly stained with gallons of the old claret.
He has been described as the “Muhammad Ali of sportswriting” and symbolically there was a mutual respect and admiration between the fighter and the writer that is so rare in the modern game. But his opinions have always been honestly expressed. Ali, he maintains, was the greatest figure in the history of the sport, but Sugar Ray Leonard was the greatest fighter he’s ever seen.
Hugh’s heyday was largely before our profession was invaded by what he
described as the revolutionary explosion of technology, the advent of mobile phones, laptops and Twitter.
No university graduate with a doubtful degree in ‘Media Studies’, like most of us venerable scribes Hugh was a product of old-school, fact-checking, foot-in-the-door journalism. Far happier picking up a phone and yelling down the line above the roar of the crowd to a usually disinterested copytaker who demanded: “Is there much more of this?”
His love of boxing was weaned on A. J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science, given to him by his first editor as a junior reporter on the Kilmarnock Standard.
With distinguished colleagues such as Colin Hart, Ken Jones and Jim Lawton, I was privileged to travel the world with Hughie, who was seven times Sports Journalist of the Year, covering big fights from Atlanta to Zaire, and numerous Olympic Games and World Cups. It was a joy, and always an education to be in his company, despite the perpetual fog of Cuban cigar smoke and combative argument.
He was also the only sportswriter to be honoured with the trade’s ultimate accolade as Journalist of the Year. He accepted an OBE, which, as a staunch Republican, must have been some dilemma.
I also worked closely with him for some years in the seventies as editor of Sportsworld Magazine, to which he was the star if grossly underpaid contributor, and subsequently in the early nineties as his sports editor on The Observer, where he was chief sportswriter. So I can testify not only to his professional excellence but to his often terrifying obsession with detail and accuracy. The ultimate perfectionist, he had only one deficiency: Deadlines.
I swear I lost most of my hair thanks to Hugh’s frequent tardiness. I was once on the receiving end of a tirade in the early hours of a Sunday morning after he had picked up a copy of The Observer bearing one of his big fight reports, which as usual we had just squeezed into the delayed last edition as he relentlessly beavered away, labouring over every syllable.
When my bedside phone rang at 7am he bellowed: “What a f**king disaster that was last night!”
“Well, it was a bit late, Hugh,” I replied. “Och, I don’t mean that,” he snorted, and began to berate me for not spotting a mistake in the piece he had dictated to a copytaker who had mis-spelled the surname of the referee, Mickey Vann. It had appeared with only one N. “Jesus Christ,” roared Hugh. “Everyone will think I’m an idiot.”
Not that anyone ever did. Especially when he produced literary pearls like this on the Rumble in the Jungle:
“We should have known that Muhammad Ali would not settle for any old resurrection. He had to have an additional flourish. So, having rolled away the rock, he hit George Foreman on the head with it.”
He also appreciated big punchers as well as the more subtle moves of the ring artists. He once observed of Sonny Liston: “There seems only one way to beat him. Shell him for three days – then send in the infantry.”
He was wrong about that, of course, as Ali, then Cassius Clay, knew exactly how to beat him, and that was the beginning of a beautiful bond of mutual admiration between fighter and writer.
Much of Mcilvanney’s most compelling prose came courtesy of Ali and his fights, most memorably the third of the trilogy with Joe Frazier: “It takes a rare purity of spirit to irrigate the moral and aesthetic desert that is forever threatening to engulf the world of heavyweight boxing. What we saw in Quezon City, capital of the Philippines, in midweek represented a shining flood of that purity. To say so is not to claim that the third and last meeting of Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali would leave all who witnessed it ready to embrace the values of the prize-ring. Those 40-odd minutes of unremitting violence must have had the opposite effect on many. They would recoil from the thought that two men who were formidable in so many ways should seek to express themselves through an exchange of suffering, and especially they would wince at the sight of Frazier, his marvellous body reduced to a dilapidated, lurching vehicle for his unyielding will, reeling blindly in the murderous crossfire of the world champion’s final assaults.”
Hugh could also be as wickedly entertaining with his verbal ripostes as he was with the printed word. Having written that the British heavyweight Joe Bugner “had the physique of a Greek statue but with fewer moves”, he was in conversation with him as Bugner climbed out of a swimming pool, after waltzing around for 15 rounds with Ali in Kuala Lumpur, barely breaking sweat. “Get me Jesus Christ and I’ll fight him tomorrow,” Bugner boasted to us.
Hugh quickly countered, growling in his Ayrshire brogue: “Joe, you’re only saying that because you know he’s got bad hands.”
Hugh led the front pages with his graphic reports on tragedies at Munich and Hillsborough, but some of the most poignant paragraphs he ever penned came when he covered a world bantamweight title fight which he admitted left him questioning the morality of boxing. In September 1980, he was in Los Angeles when the Mexican Lupe Pintor knocked out Johnny Owen, the shy, brave challenger from the Welsh valleys, who died from the injuries he sustained.
Mcilvanney wrote memorably: “Outside the ring Owen 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.”
A man of truculent mien, Hugh was not shy of settling arguments with an impromptu but invariably brief bout of fisticuffs. His most illustrious opponent was esteemed fellow author Norman Mailer, with whom he was involved in a scuffle during a postfight party disagreement in Manhattan.
However, he lost his final battle, that with prostate and bladder cancer from which he had been suffering for several years, and died at his home in Richmond, Surrey, just a few days short of his 85th birthday.
When Hugh announced his retirement from writing three years ago, an ailing Ali took time to send this affectionate tribute:
“Hugh Mcilvanney has dedicated his life to boxing… his words were a window to the lives, the courage, the struggles and the triumphs of great champions of his time. He has contributed richly and uniquely to the fabric of our sport around the world.”
Signing off from The Sunday Times, Hugh made it clear that he had decided to retire because: “I had an abhorrence of the idea that I might become some old codger in the chimney corner muttering away about how it used to be.”
But he insisted his exit was not an obituary. “It is just about living, not quietly waiting for when the towel will eventually flutter into the ring.”
Sentiments which, no doubt, Ali would have echoed as one “Greatest” to another.
IT WAS A JOY TO BE IN HIS COMPANY, DESPITE THE FOG OF CUBAN CIGAR SMOKE