John Mason
Rugby correspondent for The Daily Telegraph who deplored the sport’s march into professionalism
JOHN MASON, who has died aged 89, was the rugby union correspondent of The Daily Telegraph for 18 years, from 1979 until 1997. He covered all the Lions tours of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the inaugural World Cup in 1987.
John Michael Linford Mason was born in London on September 29 1932, the eldest child and only son of Dudley and Ernestine Mason. He attended Colston’s School in Bristol where he first played rugby. But when he had to take time out with a broken collarbone one of the masters encouraged him to write, and he took his first steps into journalism via the school magazine, The Colstonian.
Even then he had an impressive grasp of imagery, describing rugby as “a fascinating battle of mind and muscle, rapier and claymore”.
Leaving school at 16, he became a cub reporter on the Bristol Evening Post.
Following National Service, he had stints with the Press Association and the London
Evening News as a general reporter then returned to the Post, alternating rugby and cricket according to the season.
He joined The Daily Telegraph in 1968, becoming Rugby Correspondent in 1979 – a year that was marred by his first heart attack, which persuaded him to give up smoking. There was a second in 1990, when he was on a flight from Cordoba to Buenos Aires towards the end of England’s first tour to Argentina since the Falklands War. His life was saved by Terry Crystal, the team doctor, and he subsequently had a pacemaker fitted.
In an era when sportswriters were keener to make the back pages of their pages than the front, Mason cleaved to the principle that “what happens on tour stays on tour”. He wrote from one Lions trip to South Africa that a player would be out for a week with conjunctivitis. What he did not mention was that the infection had come from being covered in fire-extinguisher foam during a night of revelries at a hotel bar in Cape Town.
In 1982 he was at the Sun Inn at Richmond, waiting for the public telephone to become free so he could file his report from the England v Australia game at Twickenham earlier in the day, when he recognised the woman on the phone. It was Erika Roe, who had famously streaked across the pitch at half-time.
With deadline looming, Mason was torn: should he file his report or try to secure an exclusive interview? Loyalty to the Telegraph sports desk won out, and he filed on time.
His doggedness served him well in 1991, when England had beaten Wales in Cardiff for the first time in 28 years but were boycotting the media in a dispute with the BBC over payments. Mason knew that the captain, Will Carling, had parked his car at Cheltenham railway station on his way to Wales, and figuring that he would return on the Sunday to pick it up, Mason was there to meet him; the ensuing in-depth interview was the front-page splash in the Telegraph’s Monday sports pull-out.
When a colleague on a rival paper asked him how it had come about, Mason told him: “Old-fashioned journalistic principles, nothing more, nothing less.”
The later years of Mason’s career were marked by rugby union’s march into professionalism, but it was not a development he favoured: opening up his beloved game to financial gain and commercialism, he believed, would bring wholly unwelcome changes: “Mammon has struck,” he wrote, “leaving the ideals of the game’s unpaid administrators in mortal danger.”
When he stepped down the following year he said he would not write another word, and he stuck to his vow despite lucrative offers from elsewhere.
In retirement he loved to revisit the Lions tours he had gone on, accompanied by his second wife Nan. At home they had a pair of West Highland terriers named Twickenham and Murrayfield (the former named by him, the latter by the Scots-born Nan).
John Mason married, first, Barbara in 1957; he had met her when he was working for the Evening Post in Bristol. They had a daughter, but divorced in the early 1980s, and in 1985 he married Agnes, known to all as Nan; she survives him with his daughter and his stepdaughter; his stepson predeceased him.