As the late Douglas Lowe and I settled, somewhat subdued, to our contributions following what had promised for much of the day to be the greatest sports story of our careers, the third member of The Herald’s team at the 2009 Open Championship offered to get us coffees. He returned some 15 minutes later wailing and gnashing teeth… literally.
Accustomed as we had become to such outbursts of mock angst and in spite of the fact that it was invariably well worth finding out what generated them, we both, with deadlines looming, studiously ignored him.
“What is the point?” he complained as he plonked himself between us. “What on earth is the point?”
As we continued to stare intently at our screens he redoubled his bid for attention.
“Why are we even bothering?” he demanded, head shaking vigorously before being plunged between his hands.
I broke first.
“OK Shug. Tell us. What’s happened?” I asked.
“Well,” he began.
“I walked up to the back of the tent towards the coffee machine and there, at the end of the aisle, was McIlvanney.
“I simply asked him ‘Well Hughie, what do you make of that?’ and he paused for a moment, then replied: ‘Stewart Cink…. the epitome of anticlimax.’
“So what is the point? We are going to sit here writing hundreds and thousands of words and none of them will measure up.”
He was, of course, quite right, that compliment magnified because it was delivered by Hugh MacDonald who, for all his thespian inclinations, is another of the finest writers this, or any other Scottish publication, has ever numbered among its sports specialists.
Rarely in this business do we have the opportunity to pay homage to employees of rival publications, not least while they are still alive, but McIlvanney’s decision to step down from writing his regular weekly column comes into that category, not least for the cynical reason that his departure from its pages so profoundly undermines the appeal of The Sunday Times.
He offered education to readers and inspiration to those keen to make their living from spectating, observing and commenting, albeit laced with intimidation due to the awareness that entering this particular profession was to join an unwinnable contest.
My own first appreciation that a marriage of loves of both sport and writing was available came in the seventies with weekly exposure to McIlvanney’s work in The Observer, principally brought into the family home because of the contributions of another brilliant mind, that of Clive James.
Failing to manufacture an excuse to lever an audience in the intervening decades having so often been on the same premises is, then, a source of regret, albeit mitigated by the knowledge that a mystique that has too often disappeared upon getting to know great practitioners of sport, has not been endangered by over-exposure.
As a writer it is not that McIlvanney makes readers roar with laughter as James so frequently did, nor is there any memory of exclusive story-getting. What set him apart was an extraordinary turn of phrase that would, as in the case of his uncharacteristically brutal summation of the consequence of Tom Watson’s missed five foot putt on the final green which led to Cink’s play-off win at Turnberry seven years ago, leave even those as gifted as our Shug gasping with envy.
Apt, then, that the tributes to one who shares geographic roots with his nation’s most acclaimed bard, were led by one considered second to none among his own peers across the sporting world: ‘The Greatest’ acclaiming ‘The Greatest’.
Telling, too, that in reflecting upon how their careers became so closely linked McIlvanney offered, in last Sunday’s valedictory column, what amounts to a warning to both modern spin doctors and sportspeople who can only dream that their feats will one day be recorded as those of Muhammad Ali so stylishly were.
“Of all the changes that have transformed my trade since I arrived in Fleet Street half a century ago, obviously the most revolutionary has been the explosion of technology. But of no less interest to me is the shrinkage of meaningful access,” he observed, before adding in his conclusions: “I envy the present generation of sportswriters their youth but not their operating conditions.”
Admittedly his own status was such that when that had changed for all others the impression was that he need only hint at interest in a one-to-one conversation with the most precious of modern sporting prima donnas and it would be granted, which merely reinforces the point. Even McIlvanney could not have written as he did about sport and in so doing helped kindle a passion in it for so many, without those long chats with the likes of Ali, Jock Stein, George Best, Pele and Lester Piggott.
He meanwhile offered some consolation for loyal disciples in promising that he does not intend to absent himself entirely and will continue to write about sport occasionally, just as the other of the twa Shugs – as Burns might have been tempted to bracket them - still does so wonderfully in these pages since withdrawing from the daily fray a year or so ago.
Such sage figures deserve to be read and, even when the timing is less than ideal, listened to as long as they have the drive and energy to entertain and inform us.
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