Sports Biblio Digest, 1.27.19: Remembering Hugh McIlvanney, 'The Poet in Print'
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Russell Baker on Sports; Baseball Hall of Fame; The Cleveland Rams; Warren Beatty, Quarterback; Sacrificing a Neighborhood for Super Bowl Dreams; The Curmudgeonly Sportswriter’s Curmudgeonly Sportswriter; Boxing’s Heart of Darkness; Irish Rugby; Sports Book News
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Tributes have been pouring in much of the week for Scottish-born sports journalist, Hugh McIlvanney, who has died at the age of 84, leaving behind a memorable body of work in daily newspapers as well as books, and in particular about boxing, soccer and horse racing.
He wrote for The Observer for 30 years and 23 more at The Sunday Times of London, and was the U.K. Sports Writer of the year seven times.
From Kevin Mitchell’s obituary in The Guardian:
“Allied to his great style was McIlvanney’s huge admiration for the characters of sport, and he never lost faith in his heroes, however flawed. Nobody gave George Best more rope. And Ali stood tallest for him, even when palsied after a boxing career that lingered too long. There was no doubt in McIlvanney’s mind that Muhammad (as he insisted on calling him) was The Greatest, as a human being and an athlete.”
McIlvanney got his start at local papers, then the Scotsman in 1960, and after heading south, chronicled the exploits of Muhammad Ali, Pele, Jock Stein, Alex Ferguson and many other British and global sports stars. He was awarded the OBE in 1996 for his service to journalism.
Other memorable work involved lesser-known figures, including his story on British boxer Johnny Owen’s calamitous 1980 fight for the world bantamweight crown.
McIlvanney operated at the peak of the daily newspaper industry, influenced by the literary touch of American writers (especially A.J. Liebling) but crafting his own voice with a tough lyricism and piercing observation.
As Paul Hayward noted in The Telegraph of London:
“Fleet Street giants, from a time before the internet ‘democratised’ reporting, and published any and every opinion, McIlvanney and his generation thrived on the accessibility of the best performers, who were yet to be cocooned by armies of agents and minders demanding copy and headline approval. In today’s media world, McIlvanney would have been permanently at war with people blocking his path to sportsmen and women.
And only a brave or deluded soul would have stood in the way of his urge to go beyond soundbites and superficial portraits.”
The soccer publication FourFourTwo rated “McIlvanney on Football” highly among its top 50 books of all time, and “The Hardest Game” has long been lauded as an anthology of boxing reportage noted for the very different tone it struck from comparable collections:
“It is not hard-boiled, it is not knowing, it is not flippant. Nor are there any self-aggrandizing attempts to equate boxing with writing or puffing it up with overblown metaphors first popularized for sports by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and then morphing into the lingua franca of Sokal Hoax post-modernists for the last thirty years.”
Also in The Guardian, McIlvanney’s nephew writes of a larger-than-life figure in a family filled with them:
“A straitened upbringing in a Kilmarnock housing scheme had not made him materialistic – he was famously careless and open with money – but it did give him an appreciation for good things. He dressed impeccably, smoked the best cigars, savoured fine wine. When I got my first lecturing job he bought me a Montblanc pen and a beautiful leather briefcase that I carry to work every day, 20 years down the line.”
Later in his career, he recorded a series of interviews called the “The McIlvanney Conversations” on the BBC.
Cooperstown Paper Cut
After Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens hovered just under the 60 percent mark in Baseball Hall of Fame voting revealed this week (inductees need to be included on at least 75 percent of all ballots), ESPN.com’s Jeff Passan unearthed some interesting data about the participating writers.
Of the 232 Baseball Writers Association of America members who made their votes public, 71.1 percent voted for Clemens and 70.6 percent for Bonds. Of the 193 votes that are private, 45.6 percent voted for Clemens and 45.1 percent for Bonds.
With only three years remaining on the ballot, their stagnating candidacies are “the personification of death by paper cut,” wrote Passan, who gave up his voting privileges to protest what he regards a lack of transparency in the BBWAA process.
He followed up with some of the ‘“no” voters, who are resolute in their decision not to honor Bonds and Clemens because of allegations of steroids use.
The 2019 class includes a first-time unanimous selection, former Yankees’ closer Mariano Rivera, as well as the late Roy Halladay, Mike Mussina and, in his final year on the ballot, Edgar Martinez.
As deserving as they are to go into Cooperstown, their inclusion has been overshadowed by a deeply flawed process for which there is no apparent desire to change, or address in any significant way.
Harold Baines is going in the Hall of Fame, but the best hitter and pitcher of my lifetime are not? Regardless of your views on steroid use, that verges on absurdity.
Sports Book News
21 years after its initial publication, a new release of Donald McRae’s “Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing,” is being released in the United States in March. The South African-born writer’s ruminations about the modern sport were reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates when the book first came out;
Due out in February, another sports short from Slattery Media in Melbourne: “Bradman & Packer : The Deal that Changed Cricket,” by journalist Daniel Brettig, assistant editor of ESPN Cricinfo;
The finalists for the ESPN/PEN Literary Sports Writing Award have been announced:
The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, Howard Bryant;
The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, Jane Leavy;
The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, Rowan Ricardo Phillips;
Limits of the Known, David Roberts;
Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City, Albert Samaha.
The judges are Chris Bachelder, Rafi Kohan and Carvell Wallace and the winner will be announced in February.
A Few Good Reads
The Ringer: The World According to Ray Ratto, the king of the press box curmudgeons and my new spirit animal: “When I start to get stale, I try to figure out a different way to write the same old crap;”
The Wall Street Journal: My Talk With Legendary Rams Quarterback Warren Beatty, aka Joe Pendleton, 41 years after the release of “Heaven Can Wait” and the season before the Rams reached the Super Bowl for the first time;
Los Angeles Times: Don’t Watch the Super Bowl. David Ulin pens a familiar, self-righteous cri de couer that always pops up this time of year;
New Orleans Times-Picayune: Wanna skip the Super Bowl? Russell Baker showed us how it’s done. A boycott for different reasons;
Sports Illustrated: Atlanta Last Hosted a Super Bowl . . . Ray Lewis was arrested in a murder case and we had an ice storm. Snow could be in the forecast early this week too;
Bitter Southerner: Lightning Streak. An Atlanta neighborhood was sacrificed to satisfy local dreams of being a Super Bowl host;
Cleveland Plain-Dealer: L.A.’s Super-Bowl franchise began here. A season after winning the NFL title in 1945, the Rams moved West, threatened by fan loyalty by the upstart Browns;
The Six Nations Championship starts Friday and Ireland not only is the favorite for this event, but is expected to contend at the Rugby World Cup later this year. Donald McRae again, in The Guardian, traces the rise of the current squad, and how they've overcome cultural and political divisions in the country.
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This is Digest issue No. 153, published Jan. 27, 2019.
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