An absorbing Racing Post interview with the incomparable Hugh McIlvanney

First published January 1, 2017

It is Breeders’ Cup night at Belmont Park in 2001. Races come and go at bewildering speed, each of them a minor classic. As runners load for the Sprint on dirt, British journalists are filing what is known in the trade as running copy.

Running copy arises when deadlines run parallel with the event itself. Time is precious, and in these circumstances most journalists pare the event down to a simple theme. Since there are no European runners in the Sprint, the race will have no bearing on the Ryder Cup-style storyline the occasion lends itself to. It is an apposite time to pause for breath.

One journalist forsakes the opportunity. Hugh McIlvanney is sifting through the debris of earlier races, anxious to build up a broader picture of an evening that can turn on its head as one race blurs into another. To his eye, the fate of Europe’s horses is but one angle, albeit an important one. The Breeders’ Cup is a gathering of equine excellence that transcends national boundaries. He will portray it in that vein.

Although it makes for a draining night, anyone who has worked a single day in McIlvanney’s orbit will attest to his state of exhaustion on completing the task. It is a legacy of his compulsion to make every second count.

Sad to relate, his thoughts are no longer appearing frequently in print. Horseracing has been able to expect only occasional contributions from one of its most astute observers since McIlvanney, 82, retired from his job as columnist with the Sunday Times in March last year. Racing’s presence within the columns of Britain’s principal sportswriters has all but gone with him. Few distinguished journalists working varied beats are so in thrall to the sport.

Although football and boxing were more regular staples of his craft, McIlvanney’s eagerness to write about racing was already manifest when Arkle rose from obscurity in the mid-1960s. How could he be anything but enchanted?

“Some of the great figures I have met do stay with you,” McIlvanney reflects. “A man who made a huge impression on me very early on was [Arkle’s jockey] Pat Taaffe. When I interviewed him in 1966, I wrote that he was one of the few horsemen who could look Arkle in the eye without feeling inferior.”

The mid-1960s was something of a golden era for racing. In tandem with Arkle’s unfolding career came Sea-Bird’s glorious exhibition in the 1965 Derby on one of McIlvanney’s first visits to Epsom.

Sea-Bird: one of the greatest racehorses of a golden era for the sportCredit: Aprh

“I wouldn’t know enough to sit with the experts and go into analytical detail about how races develop, but I do think with horseracing you can tell when you are witnessing greatness,” he says.

“When I watched Sea-Bird winning the Derby I knew instantly that it wasn’t just remarkable, it was historic. To see him lobbing over the finishing line – it was almost as if he were cantering to the start.

“It’s not an original thought,” he continues, “but I feel very strongly that the thrill imparted by the running horse has a lot to do with folk memory. Throughout much of their history, humans knew that, short of jumping off a cliff, their best hope of travelling at speeds faster than their legs could generate was to be on horseback. That was the case for millennia until the advent of the train. I think that planted something very deep in the relationship between man and horse.”

McIlvanney’s relationship with racing spawned from his upbringing in Kilmarnock, in the west of Scotland. “Racing and betting tended to be part of the working-class experience in that era,” he says.

“My father, in spite of being staunchly left wing, had this strange dream of being an entrepreneur. He’d had a very rough upbringing; he was intelligent but barely literate, whereas my mother was extraordinarily literate for somebody whose formal schooling was over at 13. She was always left mopping up the pieces when my father’s ventures failed.”

One such venture was the bookmaking business ‘Young Con’ McIlvanney (his name was Willie but his father had been Con) tried to establish after he’d spent time collecting bets for other people. “He thought he’d have a go at it himself but his ambitions overstretched his sense of what was required,” McIlvanney recalls.

“He wasn’t sufficiently organised, but in contrast to a lot of small-time bookmakers who would just disappear when things went wrong, my father always paid out. He had a lot of pride.”

McIlvanney was 15 when he kept his father’s ledger at greyhound tracks, where the motto on the betting boards read: ‘Bet with Con and be sure you’re on.’ In reality, however, the bookmaking stint was only a minor episode. Of greater relevance to his future was that the McIlvanney household was never short of books and doubled as a combustible debating chamber.

“I was one of four children and as a family we were a disputatious bunch,” McIlvanney relates. “Betty and Neil, my older sister and brother, were extremely bright; they’d never let [younger brother and novelist] William or me off with anything. They could match us in any argument, but for all that went on I can’t remember a serious fallout between any of us.”

McIlvanney's entry into journalism came when, as a teenager, he finished runner-up in a debating contest which had the Kilmarnock Standard’s editor on the judges’ panel.

He then worked as a news reporter at the Scottish Daily Express and The Scotsman. While there, he honed the reporting techniques that would serve him so well when he moved south to The Observer in 1962.

He says getting himself employed as deputy sports editor amounted to arriving on a “fake passport” but his determination to write was soon accommodated.

He joined The Sunday Times in 1993, three years before he was awarded an OBE. Among a treasure chest of awards he accumulated, the man described as the outstanding talent of his generation was the first of only two sportswriters to be honoured as Journalist of the Year.

He was on hand to report on momentous, and sometimes terrible, happenings in sport in the second half of the 20th century, among them the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 – and the less sinister drama of the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, when Muhammad Ali knocked out the seemingly indestructible George Foreman to reclaim the world heavyweight title in the depths of a Zairean night.

For all that, racing’s rich and varied landscape proved fertile pasture for McIlvanney. He has that priceless ability to extract striking verbal imagery by putting the most reticent of interviewees at ease, as he did with the likes of Vincent O’Brien and Lester Piggott.

McIlvanney probably treasures his encounters with O’Brien above all others in racing’s firmament. “Talking with Vincent captivated me,” he says.

“He built his phenomenal training career from practically nothing. At first, he had to lay horses out, to work a ploy, to have a bet to keep his operation going.

“I think he could see my jaw dropping as he told me the stories he loved to tell once he realised I was deeply fascinated, not just looking to fill my notebook. It was a weird feeling, because you sensed you were talking to someone who was arguably better at his job than anyone else who ever did it. One certainly had that with Ali, too, but I felt it very strongly with Vincent.”

Hugh McIlvanney presents Nick Luck with broadcaster of the year at the HWPA awards in 2016

Interviewing Piggott posed an entirely different conundrum. “I always say it was like mining gold with a plastic teaspoon,” he reflects.

“It was heavy going, and there was always the question of whether you’d had a satisfactory interview. Only when you looked through your notes afterwards did you realise there was plenty there.

“I was lucky enough to do a very big piece with Lester when he was relatively young,” he continues. “I remember I wrote a lot about the dramatic effect he had. When he walked into the paddock before the Derby it was like seeing Brando on the screen: you couldn’t look at anybody else. There was a kind of aloofness, almost an aura of superiority, certainly of a man apart.”

While McIlvanney’s relationships with interviewees were based on journalistic association, he formed a strong bond of friendship with the late Sir Peter O’Sullevan, at whose memorial service he spoke so evocatively in October 2015.

The two men’s convictions were so absolute that the smallest spark would ignite the bonfire of an argument, invariably settled on the best of terms – albeit some considerable time after it started. To see the two of them together was to recognise at once the level of respect and admiration each held for the other.

“I loved the worldliness, the mixture of warmth and hardness in Peter,” McIlvanney recalls. “He could be sentimental, especially about animals, but as far as life was concerned, he knew the story. We miss a lot of people but Peter is one of those who leave a really big hole. You keep wishing you could have another wee spell with him.”

Although McIlvanney retired last year, his devoted readers will yet have another wee spell with him. He has signed up with the Sunday Times to complete eight major pieces across a 12-month period. Even after six decades he still has plenty to impart, thanks largely, he maintains, to the series of special relationships he forged with colleagues and editors.

“I’ve been very lucky all my working life,” he says. “I’ve always landed among outstanding journalists, people who made earning a living alongside them a pleasure. That’s stayed true right the way through to the Sunday Times, where the treatment I’ve received from [sports editor] Alex Butler has gone far beyond professional decency.

“It’s a great feeling to work in those circumstances. Even now, at a much-reduced level, they are still giving me a place in the game.”

For as long as he is willing, there will always be a place in the game for the acute insight and singularly distinctive prose of Hugh McIlvanney.

‘The best Flat horse I’ve seen’

Arkle's extraordinary exploits in the mid-1960s represent a beacon on the mountain of equine prowess, although for unadulterated brilliance Hugh McIlvanney is unequivocal in placing Secretariat’s victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes on the highest pedestal. It was the day Secretariat completed the Triple Crown.

“Without doubt, Secretariat is the best Flat horse I have ever seen,” he says. “I don’t think any horse ever bred would have lived with him on the day he won the Belmont. I mean, you win by 31 lengths and break the [12-furlong] track record by more than two seconds . . . and he even broke the world record for 13 furlongs while [Ron] Turcotte was trying to pull him up.”

Secretariat’s winning time in the Belmont still stands as the fastest 12 furlongs any horse has ever run on dirt. He also lowered track records in winning the Kentucky Derby (Churchill Downs) and Preakness Stakes (Pimlico).

‘Big Red’ compiled his records even though his trainer, Lucien Laurin, took a number of false steps with the horse.

McIlvanney remembers: “I once talked to my American friend and fellow scribbler Ed Schuyler about the horse and he said to me: ‘People ask how Secretariat can be the greatest when he was beaten five times. And I say that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t got mixed up with human beings.’ ”

‘I wrote that Pat Taaffe was one of the few horsemen who could look Arkle in the eye without feeling inferior’

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