By John Berry
Sporting press rooms around the world have lost a bit of both joie de vivre and gravitas with the passing of Hugh McIlvanney OBE at the age of 84.
McIlvanney, who retired in March 2016, was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in February 1934 and started his working life with the Kilmarnock Standard before moving to the Scottish Daily Express. He is, though, most synonymous with two of Britain's most respected Sunday newspapers, The Observer and The Sunday Times. He was the principal sports writer for the former for 30 years before occupying the same role with the latter for 23 years. The only sports journalist ever to have been voted Journalist of the Year in Great Britain, McIlvanney was an authority and a passionate devotee of all sports, and published critically acclaimed books on three: McIlvanney on Boxing (1982), McIlvanney on Football (1994) and McIlvanney on Horseracing (1995, co-written with Sir Peter O'Sullevan). Of all the sports, though, one got the impression that racing was his first love.
To sum up the magic of McIlvanney's writing, one could pick from any one of several hundred articles. One, though, springs particularly to mind. 'QIPCO British Champions' Day' is actually British racing's second attempt at holding a showpiece autumn fixture at Ascot, following the Ascot September Meeting becoming 'The Festival of British Racing' in 1989. At the time this was a very big deal, and a commemorative booklet, Sport Of Kings, was published to mark the occasion. The best racing writers contributed, including Peter Willett, Joe Hirsch, Ivor Herbert, Ian Wooldridge, Paul Haigh and Howard Wright, but McIlvanney's piece was the icing on the cake.
Under the headline 'In Pursuit of a Punter's Paradise', McIlvanney's golden prose walked the reader through the author's lifelong love affair with the turf. He recited a litany of great sporting occasions into which he had been able to insert an unscheduled day at the races, starting with the Moscow Olympics in 1989, during which he managed to sneak away from the business in hand to sample the delights of the Moscow Hippodrome.
“Emptying our pockets seemed to be official policy. The fact that the lady who took our wagers did her reckoning on an abacus was disconcerting enough but it was much more disturbing to discover that selecting winners was almost irrelevant as far as the prospects of profit were concerned. We hit three in a row and were still just marginally in front. We did not investigate the details of the tax applied to our bets in that far-off era before glasnost and perestroika but it had to be on a scale to make the Levy Board drool. Still, even that inconvenience was a tolerable penalty to pay for the pleasures of the afternoon. Next day Seb Coe, Steve Ovett or some of the other great athletes who enabled the Olympics of 1980 to rise above their problems (which, you will recall, included little aggravations like a U.S. boycott) might be enthralling us again. But for the moment we were glad to be away from de Coubertin's Games and back at the punting game.
“I have made similar defections in many corners of the globe, slipping away from a touring England football team in Australia to scuffle with the bookmakers at the Warwick Farm course in Sydney, interrupting coverage of Super Bowl preparations in San Diego to cross the Mexican border and engage the enemy at Agua Caliente in Tijuana, briefly deserting the World Cup in Argentina to sample the Buenos Aires equivalent of Sandown, using a heavyweight championship fight in Caracas, Venezuela, as an excuse to visit a track which offered breathtaking views but not a glimpse of a winner. And, of course, dozens of assignments in the States have encouraged me to play truant at Aqueduct and Belmont, Santa Anita, Hialeah, Gulfstream, Churchill Downs, Saratoga and those two smaller Maryland battlegrounds, Laurel Park and Bowie.”
The article ends with McIlvanney explaining the greatest sporting omission of his life: he was in New York on Saturday June 9, 1973, the day that Secretariat won the Belmont S., but he was in an office in Manhattan, rather than at Belmont Park, when the race was run. He thus enjoyed the glorious but agonising delight of seeing the greatest racing performance of all time live on television from a spot only a few miles away from the action.
“As a result, I had a direct, contemporaneous experience of watching what Secretariat did that afternoon. Yet, though that in itself was unforgettable, it wasn't at all the same as being one of the 68,000 who watched the big red horse in the flesh while he surged through what may well have been the greatest mile-and-a-half ever galloped by a Thoroughbred.
“In June of this year I was in the Press Box for the 121st running of the Belmont, and seeing Easy Goer win by eight lengths in the second-fastest time the race has produced was a tremendous thrill, especially as it came only four days after witnessing Nashwan's pulverising brilliance at Epsom. But to appreciate how miraculous Secretariat's run was we need only remember that in annihilating his nearest challenger by 31 lengths he covered the 12 furlongs in 2 minutes 24 sec. dead, two full seconds inside Easy Goer's time, and shattered the world record out of recognition. The official account from 1973 tells us that the wind was against Secretariat in the backstretch. The wind should have known better. For a couple of minutes at least, he was a greater force of nature than it was.
“None of us can ever expect to see the like of that again. But let's go on climbing up into the stands, just in case.”
Recent generations of readers have been very fortunate that Hugh McIlvanney did indeed go on climbing up into the stands and then sharing his wonder at what he saw. He was a titan of sports reporting, and racing was truly blessed that he loved the sport so dearly.
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