Hugh McIlvanney
Reporter, The Observer, Daily
Express, and Sunday Times
When it comes to writing, there are
several operators –
Liebling, Red Smith and Tom Wolf –
said to be journalism’s champion. But in my view, this Scotsman, born on
a council estate in Kilmarnock and who became the world’s premier sports
reporter, beats them all. Here he is on:
The late January weather on Ayr
racecourse: “It was the kind of wind that seemed to peel the flesh off
your bones and come back for the marrow.”
Boxer Joe Bugner: “the physique of a
Greek statue but fewer moves.”
An opponent of Mike Tyson’s: “Bruno
was no more competitive than a sheep in an abattoir.”
And George Best: “feet as sensitive
as a pick-pocket’s hands “.
I worked with McIlvanney and know that,
although his features were sometimes filed to a deadline that bore no
relation to the one we in the office were working on, he could, if it came
to it, ad-lib down the phone a 2,000-word report of a major event that
was, when you received it, as inventive, lucid and considered as if it had
been written with a goose-quill pen over three weeks. To this talent, he
added a capacity for reading and research that bordered on the compulsive.
His quest for precision and talent for getting to the essence of anything
was best shown in his report on the death of the young, painfully shy
boxer Johnny Owen following a bout in Las Vegas:
…Boxing gave Johnny Owen his one
positive means of self-expression. 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.”
McIlvanney is simply the best writer
ever to apply words to newsprint.
