Hugh McIlvanneyOBE (2 February 1934 – 24 January 2019) was a Scottish
sports journalist who had long stints with the British Sunday newspapers The Observer (30 years until 1993) and then 23 years with The Sunday Times (1993–2016). After nearly six decades in the profession, he retired in March 2016 at the age of 82.
Early life
McIlvanney was born on 2 February 1934 in
Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland, to William and Helen McIlvanney (née Montgomery).[2] He had one sister and two brothers, including the
novelist and
crime fiction writer
William McIlvanney.[3][2]
McIlvanney left school to work as a reporter at The Kilmarnock Standard.[3][5] He moved on to the Scottish Daily Express. In his mid-twenties, while he was working at The Scotsman, he was persuaded to write about sport. He joined The Observer in 1962 as an assistant sports editor and worked at the paper until 1993,[6] interrupted when he took a news and features role in 1972–73 with the Daily Express, before joining The Sunday Times in 1993.[7][8] His column on the back page of The Sunday Times sports section ran until 2016.[9][10]
His writing has been described as striving for perfection – with much attention paid to the detail.[2][4] Any expression of joy for the writing he submitted was deferred until he had seen what had actually been printed.[11] He was not shy in offering his analysis of sports stars.[12] In 1974, immediately after
The Rumble in the Jungle, he made an approach to
Muhammad Ali and was granted a two-hour interview.[13] In September 1980 he reported from Los Angeles on the professional fight where
Johnny Owen was defeated and knocked unconscious.[14]
In The Football Men, he examined the life and careers of three great modern Scottish football managers –
Matt Busby,
Jock Stein and
Bill Shankly for the
BBC television programme Arena. This used BBC archive footage, and aired in 1997 as a three-part series.[15][16][9]
He retired at the age of 82, having said that the physical demands of the job had become too taxing.[17]
He married three times and had one son, Conn, and a daughter, Elizabeth.[4] His first two marriages ended in divorce; his third marriage, to Caroline Joy North, lasted from 2014 until his death, on 24 January 2019, at his home in
Richmond, London.[1][2] Paying tribute to McIlvanney, The Press and Journal described him as "a giant with a genius for transforming sport into literature" and said his voice was "akin to Humphrey Bogart's in The Big Sleep; a gravelly drawl of dry-as-Nevada humour interspersed with a man's-gotta-do cynicism."[28] On 25 January 2019 McIlvanney was featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Last Word.[29]