Hugh McIlvanney’s sports writing will never go out of fashion

Hugh McIlvanney has been rightly been recognized by his obituarists as one of the outstanding sports journalists of our time, perhaps the pre-eminent one, just as his younger brother William was the finest Scottish novelist of his generation. However, Robert Low, in an interesting and warm appreciation, published in the March number of “Standpoint”, asks whether there is a future for McIlvanney’s style of sports-writing, whether indeed he should be seen as one of the last of a distinguished line. Low, himself a former sports editor on The Observer, evidently hopes the answer is “no”, just as evidently as he fears it is “maybe, yes”.

There are three reasons for his fear.

First, the old style of match reports is out-of-date. Once we went to the newspapers to find out what happened to follow the course of a game. Even if we had actually been at the ground, there is much we would have missed. So, we relied on the reporter to tell us, for instance, who made the pass that led to a goal or try.

How well I remember eagerly snatching the sports edition of the Edinburgh Evening News before boarding a northbound train in order to learn what I had missed when watching the match from the schoolboys’ enclosure, terracing or stand at Murrayfield.  Now we are likely either to have watched the game on TV or to have recorded it if we were actually at the game, and there will have been lots of action replays. The reporter’s old informative role is to some extent redundant; he’s certainly not bringing news. An exception may be made for match reports in local newspapers, though again only to some extent, people not at the game often having been kept up-to-date on their phones – often with shots of the action.

Likewise, we no longer rely on the journalist to tell us how someone plays. Neville Cardus was one of the first great writers on cricket – or the first one we may have read – and he had the ability to let us picture how a player one had never seen in action batted or bowled. If I have a clear idea of Wally Hammond’s style, it’s partly because of still photographs but more because of the picture Cardus painted in words.

So the reporter’s role isn’t what it was. Nevertheless, it is still valuable, still important. What we look for now is not narrative but interpretation or analysis. We already know what happened, what went right or wrong, but we don’t know why or how; or at least we are not sure. We want to get the view of someone whom we recognize knows more about the game than we do – even if we will often find ourselves in disagreement with him.

The second reason for Robert Low’s fear that there may be no place, or only a very small one, for journalists like McIlvanney is that the sort of relationships he enjoyed with managers, coaches and players are harder to establish now. When he started out, there were few PR men in sport, and far fewer agents seeking to control what their clients said. Informal and friendly relations between Press and players were common.

I would be surprised if any journalist – and especially one who had never himself played at a high level – could now write as warm, uninhibited and delightful an account of a Test series as Frank Keating’s record of the 1980-81 tour of the West Indies, “Another Bloody Day in Paradise”. Now what players say to the Press is usually programmed and monitored, consequently rarely interesting, almost never revealing. Nevertheless, simply because Press Conferences are called, and managers, coaches and selected players say – usually – what they are supposed to say, journalists are required by their editors to report their words and the sports pages become duller.

Professional sportsmen are sometimes forbidden to let journalists have their telephone numbers, and, as Low remarks, reporters are often reduced to recycling what players have tweeted. Such tweets are very seldom as newsworthy (or indeed as funny as the tweets which come almost daily from the White House or Trump Tower.)

Then Low wonders whether there is still a demand for McIlvanney’s sort of journalism. Fewer and fewer young people buy newspapers, or even read them online. Much of their information comes in brief, in immediate snippets received on a hand-held device and read, or consumed, as they go.  The market for the well-considered, carefully written 1500 or 2000 word piece, or essay, is limited, and may be shrinking.

No doubt this is true – up to a point anyway. Yet predicting the closing of this market and the end of long-form and elegant journalism is to indulge in unnecessary gloom.

It’s like predicting the death of the novel, an art-form which may have surrendered the primacy it enjoyed for, perhaps, a century and a half from the publication of “Waverley” in 1814, but still survives, and, one way or another, flourishes despite the competition.

Actually, though his roots were deep in the working-class football and boxing cultures of the industrial West of Scotland, McIlvanney always wrote for a minority of sports fans. He wrote for the Sunday broadsheets, not the popular Press; his one year on the Daily Express was neither happy nor successful.

Now, in spite of gloomy predictions, the broadsheets survive in Britain and are finding ways of adapting to the digital age. Their readers still expect considered pieces and good writing. Moreover, there is a proliferation of on-line publications – serious web-sites – like this one indeed. These may be niche markets and the niches may be smaller than they were half a century back. But they haven’t closed. The content of serious sports journalism is changing – inevitably changing for the reasons I’ve offered, and doubtless for other ones I haven’t thought of. But fears that there will soon be no place for journalists like McIlvanney are surely misplaced. You have to be a sad cynic to suppose that there is no longer a demand or market for intelligence and good writing.