Sport – Blood and Porridge

May 8, 2025May 22, 2025

Nostalgic wallows 4: the snooker

For the first time in years, I’ve been reminded that the sport of snooker still exists. This is because of the headlines that have accompanied the final of the 2025 World Snooker Championship, which a few days ago was won for the first time by a Chinese player, Zhao Xintong. His victory has led to speculation that snooker, already popular in China, will rise to ‘another level’ there. Mind you, this new association with China will probably cause Donald Trump to slap tariffs of 145% on all snooker-related imports to the USA.

Anyway, snooker being in the news again has prompted me to dust down and repost this nostalgic piece about the long-ago days when snooker was exciting, all the time…

I learned many things from my maternal grandmother before she passed away in 1997 at the venerable age of 93. One of them was a fascination with the late 1970s / early 1980s phenomenon that was televised snooker.

During the 1970s most of my family, immediate and extended, had lived in Northern Ireland. In 1977, however, my parents bought a small farm in the south of Scotland and that became the new home for them, me and my siblings. My grandmother, then in her seventies, soon got into the habit of crossing the Irish Sea and visiting us in Scotland. However, because of the distance and effort involved in travelling, she would make the most of it and stay for a few weeks at a time.

Since my grandmother was an avid viewer of TV programmes, this meant that, while she resided in our house, we had to relinquish control of our television set to her. Unfortunately for me, she seemed addicted to every soap opera going, from the humble British ones like Coronation Street (1960-present), Crossroads (1964-88) and Emmerdale Farm (1972-present) to the opulent American ones like Dallas (1978-91) and Dynasty (1981-89), all of which I considered to be televisual brain-death.

However, one unexpected thing I noticed when she came to stay was that she was also a big fan of the sport of snooker, which had recently taken off in popularity and was attracting big TV audiences. At some point, I started watching it with her, with the result I became hooked on it too for a few years.

Here’s an example of how much my grandmother was into the snooker. One time she arrived with us while the World Snooker Championship – sponsored until 2005 by the tobacco company Embassy – was underway and was being broadcast live on BBC2. Some matches took place early in the morning, so she’d rise early to watch them. One morning my mother entered the living room, where my grandmother was immersed in a TV snooker game, and noticed she was wearing a cardigan that was inside out. A label protruded from the knitted collar behind her neck. My mother pointed this out, but she just sighed and nodded at the TV screen. “I can’t take it off and change it round just now,” she said. “If I did, I’d cause bad luck for Alex.”

From wikipedia.org / © Bigpad

The Alex she worried she might inflict bad luck on if she put her inside-out cardigan on the right way was Alexander Gordon Higgins, ‘Hurricane’ Higgins as he was known to snooker fans. He was famed for his mercurial abilities. On a good day he’d play brilliantly. On a shit day he’d play… well, shit. He was also famed for his mercurial temperament, which I’ll talk about in a minute. He was of working-class Protestant stock from Belfast in Northern Ireland, which was one of the reasons why my grandmother loved him. I remember a couple of times watching TV with her when Higgins fluffed an important shot. “Oh Alex!” she’d lament. “Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex…”

As snooker had risen to prominence, so had Higgins. He’d been playing from the age of seven, first in Belfast’s Jampot Club and YMCA; and by 1968, before he turned 20, he’d won the All-Ireland and Northern Ireland Amateur Snooker Championships. Physically slight, Higgins had for a time in the 1960s intended to become a jockey rather than a professional snooker player. I suspect this was part of the spell he cast later over my grandmother and ladies of a similar age, when he was still scrawny and undernourished-looking. Those ladies just wanted to feed him up and put some colour in his cheeks.

By 1972, Higgins had turned professional and he won that year’s World Snooker Championship, although this didn’t make much of a stir in the public consciousness because technology wasn’t ready for the sport yet. As the game required its players to sink all the red balls on the table, and then pocket in order the yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black ones, you needed to watch it on a colour television to know what was going on. And in British homes, colour TV sets didn’t outnumber black-and-white ones until 1976. I remember an uncle acquiring a colour TV before 1976, but the colours refused to be contained by the outlines on the screen and would swim across them, which made it migraine-inducing to watch.

However, once everyone could watch snooker in proper colour, the sport took off and its leading players became stars. What’s fascinating, and retrospectively rather sad, is that many of those guys weren’t cut out to be stars. They didn’t have the glitz of other big British sporting names of the 1970s, such as elegant playboy racing driver James Hunt or permed heartthrob footballer Kevin Keegan. Often, they’d grown up learning to play snooker in the booze-sodden, cigarette-fogged environments of pubs and club and hadn’t received much of a formal education. From the way Higgins behaved at the snooker table and away from it, you sometimes wondered if he’d had any opportunity to develop social skills at all. It must have been discombobulating for them to suddenly find themselves in the national limelight, suddenly become big media names and suddenly be chasing big sums of prize money.

Among this collection of misfits, oddballs and eccentrics there was, besides Higgins, Welshman Ray Reardon, already in his forties when snooker made him famous. Not one to modify his appearance and style to match the expectations of stardom, Reardon sported an imposing widow’s peak; and that and the way he stalked hungrily around the table earned him the nickname of ‘Dracula’. Then there was the ashen-faced Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White of Tooting, London, who wasn’t yet out of his teens by the end of the 1970s, who slightly resembled Johnny Depp in his Edward Scissorhands period and who came across as a younger, marginally less troubled version of Higgins. From the age of eight or nine, he’d played truant from school so he could practise in his local snooker hall.

© ITC Entertainment

Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White and Ray ‘Dracula’ Reardon, incidentally, inspired an odd little movie called Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1987) directed by the much-admired Alan Clarke. The title characters, obviously modelled on White and Reardon, were played by Phil Daniels and Alun Armstrong. The film has received the accolade of being ‘undoubtedly the only vampire snooker musical in cinema history.’

Another unconventional figure was Higgins’ fellow Northern Irishman Dennis Taylor, who suffered from bad eyesight. Ordinary glasses weren’t much use to Taylor at the snooker table because, when he bent over it to take a shot, his weak eyes would end up looking over the top of the glasses rather than through them. So he had to wear a pair of specially designed glasses with heightened lenses that made him resemble a non-spangly incarnation of Elton John.

From wikipedia.org / © John Dobson

Meanwhile, some glamour was injected into the snooker world by the Latin-looking, vaguely Antonio Banderas-esque Silvino Francisco, who was actually South African; and by the white-clad Kirk Stevens, a handsome lad with the all-important 1970s perm, who hailed from Toronto.

Stevens was one of a triumvirate of Canadian players who found fame as snooker players back then, which meant it was the first, possibly only, time that your average British person on the street could name three famous Canadians off the top of their heads. Also from Canada was Cliff Thorburn, who was known as ‘the Grinder’ for his remorselessly methodical style of play and who resembled a better-groomed Donald Sutherland; and Thorburn’s fellow British Columbian ‘Big’ Bill Werbeniuk, whose weight was in the region of 20 stones. The hefty Werbeniuk suffered from a tremor and to subdue this when playing he relied on beer: lots of beer. According to his Wikipedia entry, he’d typically have knocked back six pints before the start of a match and he could get through 40 to 50 pints in a day. One urban myth at the time was that Werbeniuk had all this beer medically prescribed to him by a doctor and got it for free. More feasible was a story in the British press about him claiming the price of half-a-dozen pints each match-day as a tax-deductible expense.

Thus, snooker back then offered an array of peculiar characters whom you’d find in few other sports, constantly having their ups and downs, which I imagine was another reason why it appealed to my soap-opera-mad grandmother.

Some of the downs they suffered were spectacular. In his autobiography, Jimmy White confessed to taking crack cocaine for a few mad months in the 1980s, while Kirk Stevens owned up to having a general cocaine problem during the same period. Stevens’ admission came after the final of the 1985 British Open, in which he’d played Silvino Francisco. The South African accused Stevens of being as ‘high as a kite’ during the match. Not that Francisco could complain too much, for in 1997 he was arrested and jailed for three years for smuggling cannabis with a street value of £155,000.

In the late 1980s Cliff Thorburn was heavily fined and banned from a couple of tournaments for failing a cocaine test; and to complete the Canadian drugs hat-trick, Bill Werbeniuk quit the sport after getting into trouble for taking the drug Inderal, which snooker’s governing body listed as a forbidden substance. To be fair to Werbeniuk, he was taking Inderal on the advice of his doctors, who thought it might help to curb his ruinous alcohol consumption.

Alex Higgins, meanwhile, was in a league of his own. An unabashed pisshead, he somewhat inevitably ended up in the orbit of the hellraising movie star Oliver Reed. However, if you’re to believe some of the stories, Reed found him hard to put up with – and vented his frustrations by, for instance, chasing Higgins around his mansion with an axe and feeding him a pretend hangover cure made out of perfume and washing-up liquid. Neither was Higgins afraid of drugs. According to fellow snooker-player John Virgo, he once asked clean-living popstar Sting at a concert if he had any ‘gear’. “Yes,” said Sting, “we’ve got some baseball caps and T-shirts left.” “No,” retorted a disgusted Higgins. “Not that kind of gear. I mean the kind of gear that goes up your nose!”

Higgins logged up a long and unflattering list of misdemeanours. He got into trouble for pissing into a potted plant during a tournament in 1982. (Virgo: “As he later argued, they were fake plants in the pot, so he ‘wasn’t being cruel to the flowers’”). He headbutted a tournament director in 1986 after refusing to provide a urine sample for a drugs test. He ended up playing in the 1989 European Open on crutches and with an ankle in plaster after falling 25 feet from a ledge outside the windows of his girlfriend’s apartment – he’d been trying to climb into the apartment after having a row with her. He punched a press officer in 1990. And the same year, he threatened to have the mild-mannered Dennis Taylor shot, which was no laughing matter since Higgins and Taylor belonged to either side of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide and Higgins came from Belfast’s Sandy Row area, notorious for its links with the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Defence Association.

The result was a slow, painful but inevitable erosion of Higgin’s playing ability, his emotional stability, his finances and his popularity. By the late 1990s, I couldn’t argue when an Irish friend dismissed him out of hand as ‘an unmannerly wee pup.’

From wikipedia.org / © Joni-Pekka Luomali

Even before those characters began to self-implode amid booze, drugs and violence, the future of snooker had materialised in the form of Englishman Steve Davis. He would dominate the sport during the 1980s, when he won six world titles and was ranked world number one for seven years in a row. Davis was scandal-free in his behaviour but also, unfortunately, relentlessly robotic in his playing style and deadly dull in his personality. It was no surprise when the satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image (1984-96) featured a sketch where Davis tries to jive up his image by giving himself a new nickname, to rival Alex Higgins’ ‘Hurricane’ and Jimmy White’s ‘Whirlwind’. Eventually, he chooses ‘Interesting’.

Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis, in effect, created the mould for the snooker players who would follow. A new generation of them were growing up, less conditioned by the boozy, seedy world of pubs and clubs from which many of their predecessors had emerged. They were better equipped to withstand the pressure of public and media attention and go sensibly about the business of winning tournaments and making money. For these pragmatic types, snooker was more of a job than an obsessive passion.

Still, some of my fondest snooker memories come from seeing the seemingly invulnerable Davis get beaten in a crucial game by a less organised, more human opponent. There was, for example, the final of the UK Championship in 1983 when Davis went up against Higgins and soon had a seven-frames-to-nil advantage. Miraculously, Higgins managed to pull himself together and eventually beat Davis 16-15 to win the competition.

Even better was the 1985 World Championship where Davis played Taylor and again built up a seemingly unassailable early lead, of eight frames to nil. But Taylor rallied and the lead seesawed between them, and eventually both players ended up on 17 frames each. Late on in the deciding frame, victory was decided by whoever could pocket the black first – which Taylor managed to do. My jubilation at Taylor’s win was marred by the fact that I and many others were watching the final that night in the Hillhead Bar at Aberdeen University’s Hillhead Halls of Residence. The final frame went on beyond midnight and beyond the bar’s closing time. Desperate to get us all out of the place, some absolute sadist in the bar-staff pulled the plug on the TV seconds before Taylor took that final, all-important shot at the black.

I’ve written humorously about them, but things didn’t end well for some of those snooker players. Kirk Stevens returned to Canada where, broke, he had to eke a living as a construction worker, landscape gardener, lumberjack and car salesman before he finally got back onto the local snooker circuit. Silvino Francisco, before the nadir of his cannabis arrest, was already in an ignominious situation, having to earn cash by working in a mate’s fish-and-chip shop. Bill Werbeniuk was unemployed and on disability benefits prior to his death in 2003.

From wikipedia.org / © The Royal Bar

Higgins’ end was pitiful. Diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, and subjected to radiotherapy treatment that destroyed his teeth and made it difficult for him to eat even the meagre amounts of food that he’d survived on previously, Higgins refused to curtail his heavy drinking and smoking. In 2010, having become dependent on disability payments just as Werbeniuk had, Higgins was found dead in his Belfast flat. His demise was attributed to a mixture of malnutrition, pneumonia and bronchitis. Photographs of him taken towards the end of his life show a shrivelled, shrunken figure that looked more like Dobby the House Elf from the Harry Potter movies than a human being. I’m relieved my Hurricane-loving grandmother didn’t live long enough to see him in such a state.

With nearly all its old characters retired or dead, I’ve paid little attention to the snooker world in the last quarter-century. Indeed, looking at recent lists of champions, the only names I recognise are those of Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins (who’s no relation to Alex). Still, for its modern players, it’s no doubt a saner and safer, though blander, sport nowadays.

But one nice thing I’ve noticed is that Steve Davis, once the embodiment of everything I found mind-numbingly boring about snooker, is actually quite cool nowadays. Since hanging up his snooker cue, he’s reinvented himself as a radio, club and festival DJ specialising in trancey, dancy electronic music. He collaborates with British-Iranian musician and composer Kavus Torabi and they’ve even formed an electronica band called the Utopia Strong, which released albums in 2019 and 2022.

So it turns out that Davis got it right with his tactics. He came across as a clean-living dullard in his youth but crucially he preserved his faculties, health and finances. And now, in his snooker retirement, he’s become Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis at last.

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Knight

August 26, 2024September 19, 2024

Who chairs wins

On Friday, August 16^th, two friends and I ventured into the Foochow Building on Singapore’s Tyrwhitt Road to experience Hardcore Island 2: A Fine City, the latest extravaganza staged by the Singapore Pro-Wrestling (SPW) association. We’d been laggardly in getting there, having supped a beer too many in a nearby pub, and arrived near the end of the evening’s first bout: one between local wrestlers CK Vin and Emman. As we entered the hall where the action was taking place, we were greeted by the sight of CK Vin throttling Emman with a folded chair. He’d put the back chair-frame over Emman’s head and had the rear edge of the seat deep in his throat. Unsurprisingly, soon afterwards, Emman submitted.

This, it transpired, was a ‘chairs match’ – which, Wikipedia informs me, is a contest where “only chairs can be used as legal weapons, but the only way to win is by pinfall or submission in the ring.” I liked the publicity blurb with which the SPW presaged CK Vin and Emman’s fight: “You’ll want to get to your seats now before the wrestlers take them all for weapons.”

© Singapore Pro-Wrestling

Before I moved to Singapore, it’d been a long time since I watched a professional wrestling match. In fact, I hadn’t been a fan of the sport since my boyhood in Northern Ireland. This was when World of Sport, Independent Television’s Saturday-afternoon sports show, would always have a four o’clock slot devoted to what people in those days simply called ‘the Wrestling’. Watching the Wrestling on TV, I quickly became obsessed with such larger-than-life figures as Les Kellett, Mark ‘Rollerball’ Rocco, Tally Ho Kaye, Jim Breaks, Mick McManus (catchphrase: “Not the ears! Not the ears!”), Big Daddy (catchphrase: “Easy! Easy! Easy!”), the gargantuan (six-foot-eleven, 685 pounds) Giant Haystacks and the mysterious, masked Kendo Nagasaki who claimed to be channelling “the spirit of a samurai warrior who, 300 years ago, lived in the place that is now called Nagasaki.” (He himself lived in Wolverhampton.) But I never got into the brasher, showier and slightly more glamorous pro-wrestling spectacles served up in subsequent decades by America’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF), later World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). And though for most of the 1990s I lived in Japan, I didn’t get into the super-popular New Japan Pro-Wrestling and All Japan Pro-Wrestling promotions either.

But I’d always enjoyed wrestling movies, such as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008) or Stephen Merchant’s Fighting with my Family (2019). Okay, Mr. Nanny (1993) with Hulk Hogan not so much. And it often occurred to me that I’d like to see some live bouts. So, last year, when a mate told me of the existence of the SPW and invited me to one of their events, I thought, why not?

Anyway, back to tonight’s proceedings. The second bout on the bill involved two more local wrestlers, Destroyer Dharma and Kentona – the former defeating the latter with a pinfall, which in wrestling jargon is when you hold your opponent’s shoulders against the ring-floor long enough for the referee to count to three. Not for the last time that evening, the fighting spilled out of the confines of the ring and into the surrounding hall – much to the glee of the spectators, always happy to get a close-up view of the carnage. I should say that the crowd was a pleasing mix of young and old, male and female, and Singaporeans and foreigners. It was a far cry from the audiences I remember watching the 1970s British wrestling, which seemed to consist mainly of demented old grannies who’d hobble forward and club Mick McManus with their handbags whenever he was against the ropes.

The third battle tonight was a hotly anticipated one between Singapore’s Jack ‘N’ Cheese and the Gym Bros, who hail from Pattaya in Thailand. Jack ‘N’ Cheese are BGJ, aka Jack Chong, described on his Instagram page as the ‘Beast of Benevolence’; and the Cheeseburger Kid, whose yellow cowl-mask makes him resemble a jaundiced Deadpool. The latter has become a popular fixture of Singapore’s pro-wrestling world and tonight it looked like he had a mini-fan-club in tow – a small but voluble group in yellow T-shirts at the front of the crowd who cheered on his every move. It has to be said of their opponents, the Gym Bros, that they were at least a wee bit camp. One had a headful of Debbie-Harry-style blonde hair and wore white spats up to his knees. The other sported a weedy moustache and was clad in tight pink shorts whose contours left little to the proverbial imagination.

To the delight of everyone – bar the Gym Bros – Jack ‘N’ Cheese won the bout through another pinfall. And nobody was more delighted than the Cheeseburger Kid, who reacted to victory by leaping up into BGJ’s arms and posing there for the cameras.

Next came a tussle between two more wrestlers from the SPW roster: Bryson Blade, wearing bad-boy black-leather pants, and Referee Ryan, who, appropriately for a person sometimes working as a referee, was attired in a more sober costume of black and white. This was billed as a ‘Loser Gets Caned Match’. The blurb for it declared, “…the loser will be forced to take a lashing with a Singapore cane post-match! Gather round, people! You’re about to be taken back, school assembly style.” That references the fact that Singapore not only allows caning as a judicial punishment – a maximum of 24 strokes for a range of criminal offences – but also as a corporal punishment in schools, for male pupils who commit serious offences. (Actually, it took me back, since corporal punishment was still legal in Northern Irish schools in the 1970s and I got caned a few times, though not with a Singaporean rattan cane but a beechwood one.)

Eventually, Referee Ryan lost through a pinfall and ended up receiving ‘five of the best’. I wasn’t sitting near enough to the ring to be sure, but I suspect the cane-strokes may not have landed with the fullest possible force.

Following a 15-minute interval, bout number five saw another pair of Singaporean wrestlers in action, Zhang Wen and Riz. The former won, again by a pinfall. Then came a trio of female wrestlers slugging it out in a three-way battle. Representing Singapore in this scrap was the formidable Alexis Lee, who also goes under the moniker ‘Lion City Hit Girl’ and is the city-state’s very first lady pro-wrestler. The Straits Times newspaper recently described her as “…a rampaging figure of death, who will stomp and slam her opponents swiftly and ruthlessly.” I assume the Straits Times writer got the ‘figure of death’ idea from the white skull-make-up that covers half her face and her costume of tank-top, shorts and leggings patterned with bones and ribs. Her foes tonight were two Japanese wrestlers, Miyu ‘Pink Striker’ Yamashita and Koya Toribami. I know tori is the Japanese word for ‘bird’, which may explain why the latter fighter turned up in an elaborate, beaked bird-costume.

After a hard-fought contest – at one point the three of them were engaged in a sort of treble bearhug, with the bird-themed Koya Toribami caught in the middle like a piece of chicken in a chicken sandwich – Alexis Lee won with a pinfall. Afterwards, outside the ring, she posed defiantly with a glass of beer, which she’d definitely earned.

The seventh and final bout was an all-Singaporean affair pitching two teams of three wrestlers against each other – the Horrors, consisting of Aiden Rex, Dr Gore and Da Butcherman, and the Midnight Bastards (billed in some quarters as ‘State of Bastards’), consisting of RJ, Mason and Andruew Tang, aka the Statement. Despite being the co-founder of and head coach at SPW, Tang / the Statement has a villainous ring persona: “Embrace the Statement or I will make a statement out of you!” This was billed as an ‘Xtreme Rules’ match, which meant there were no rules. Not only chairs could be utilized as weapons, but also tables, a big wooden board that someone dragged out from under the ring, and even a stepladder. Yes, I’d noticed how that stepladder had been parked all evening at the far end of the hall and wondered when it was going to come in handy. It did when the spiky-mohawked Da Butcherman clambered up one side of it, and Andruew Tang, in gold-streaked trousers, clambered up its other side, and they faced off at the top.

At another point, the wrestlers hurriedly assembled, IKEA-style, a table in the ring. Then someone poured dozens of small, multicoloured, plasticky things across the tabletop. And soon after, an opponent got slammed down on the covered table, on his back. Ouch! One of my friends thought the plasticky things might be drawing pins. I had a horrible suspicion, though, that they were pieces of Lego. I remember how much my foot hurt after I stepped on a Lego-piece as a kid, so having your back thumped down against a whole table’s worth of those must be hellishly sore.

Anyway, thanks to yet another pinfall, the Horrors emerged victorious. And that was it for the night. Just to make the experience a little bit sweeter, on our way out, we encountered the Cheeseburger Kid standing at the Foochow Building’s entrance. We told him how much we’d enjoyed his fight and he seemed to genuinely appreciate our warm words.

Certain sports purists might quibble about the tongue-in-cheek, even corny nature of some of what was on show tonight. But the SPW’s get-togethers never fail to provide fun and excitement. The city / island state of Singapore has a reputation for being a calm, ordered and well-run place, but it’s nice to think that there’s a little part of it where, thanks to the SPW, for an occasional few hours, good-natured anarchy takes over. Where it becomes an anything-goes ‘lion city’ or a riotous ‘hardcore island’. Where – to borrow a quote from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) – “Chaos reigns!”

March 11, 2024March 11, 2024

Nostalgic wallows 1: Bill McLaren

© BBC

We’re nearing the end of the 2024 Six Nations rugby championship and my mental health feels more kicked around than the ball in the matches. Up until the Saturday just past, the two teams I support, Ireland and Scotland, had been doing well and I was entertaining hopes that the championship would conclude with them at the top of the table. But what a difference a Saturday afternoon makes. Ireland got beaten by England, the team nobody wants to get beaten by. Against all expectations, Scotland lost to Italy, the team regarded as the one in the championship ‘making up the numbers’ and who usually finish bottom.

Anyhow, aside from the anguish… The championship reminds me yet again of how much I miss being able to watch an international rugby match and at the same time listen to the knowledgeable and dulcet tones of Bill McLaren.

Although McLaren, who died in 2010 at the age of 86, worked as late as 2002, it was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that he was indisputably the voice of British rugby union. This was an era when sport, if you weren’t at the live event itself, was viewable only on a handful of terrestrial TV channels. It was common for one channel to have a monopoly on broadcasting one sport and, by extension, for one commentator to have a monopoly on talking about that sport. Hence, in my youth, it was almost impossible to see horse racing without hearing the posh but eerily robotic tones of Peter O’Sullivan, or boxing without hearing the excitable Harry Carpenter, or Formula One without hearing the gaffe-prone Murray Walker, or rugby league without hearing the indescribable-sounding Eddie Waring. McLaren fulfilled this role in the world of rugby union and for me was the best sports commentator of the lot, though I’m undoubtedly biased. Rugby has always been my favourite team sport. Plus McLaren came from Hawick in the Scottish Borders, the region where I spent many of my formative years.

There were three reasons for McLaren’s greatness. Firstly, he knew his stuff. I remember watching a McLaren-commentated game on a pub TV in Aberdeen sometime in the 1980s. I was in the company of my good friend, the late Finlay McLean, and at one point, Finlay turned around to me and marvelled, “He’s just steeped in the game, isn’t he?”

When a try was scored, McLaren didn’t just tell you the name of the player who’d crossed the line. No, he’d also observe how the player was the great-great-nephew of the man who’d kicked the winning points in the legendary Hawick-Galashiels derby of 1937, or a direct descendent of the tight-head prop with the great Western Province team that’d dominated South Africa’s Currie Cup in the 1890s. It wouldn’t have surprised you if he’d identified the player’s granny as the stylist responsible for grooming the mutton-chop sideburns of J.P.R. Williams, which were rugby’s main contribution to fashion in the 1970s. McLaren seemed to know everything about rugby.

His knowledge was encyclopaedic, but this was backed by a conscientious and professional attitude to research. I read somewhere that when preparing for a game, he’d cover a full sheet of foolscap with notes about each player. This meant that in the commentator’s box he was constantly shuffling around some 30 sheets of paper.

Secondly, although he was a Scotsman and often commentated on games involving the Scottish rugby team, he was never biased. On the contrary, he always applauded good rugby, no matter who was playing it and even if Scotland was on the receiving end of it. McLaren’s neutrality was especially admirable when you compared him with the international football commentators on the BBC at the time (and indeed still now), who seemed incapable of narrating an England World Cup match without speculating every second minute about whether ‘we’ could win the World Cup just like ‘we’ won it back in 1966.

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, his commentaries were laden with poetry. McLaren had an amusing, fanciful, frequently wonderful talent with language. Admittedly, he could be a tad unflattering in the turn of phrase he used to describe the over-sized players on the field. English prop Colin Smart – famous for getting stomach-pumped after drinking a bottle of aftershave as a post-match lark – consisted of ‘considerable acreage’; English captain and lock Bill Beaumont looked ‘like someone who enjoys his food’; Welsh forwards Scott and Craig Quinnell were ‘two well-nourished individuals’; Scottish flanker Finlay Calder had ‘hands like dinner plates’; and Calder’s gangly fellow-Scot Doddie Weir was ‘the lamppost of the line-out.’ As for the legendary and frankly massive New Zealand flanker Jonah Lomu, running into him was like ‘trying to tackle a snooker table’.

© BBC

He had a fondness to likening players to animals. They might behave like ‘a demented ferret’ or a ‘bag of weasels’ of a ‘raging bull with a bad head’ or ‘a whirling tsetse fly’ or ‘a runaway giraffe’ or ‘a slippery salmon’. The Scottish scrum-half Roy Laidlaw (whose nephew Greig captained Scotland for seven years up until 2019) was as elusive as ‘a baggy up a Borders burn’ – a baggy being, to quote the Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ‘a species of large minnow.’ Unsurprisingly for a Borders man, Scotticisms were common in his delivery. Rugby balls were likened to ‘three pounds of haggis’, the famously square-shouldered Scottish skipper Peter Brown was like ‘a coo kicking over a milk pail’ and an injured player sitting dejectedly at the side of the field whilst sucking on a mint was at least ‘enjoying his sweetie.’

When it came to describing the turbulent passions and physical violence often unleashed on the pitch, McLaren was amusingly euphemistic. Cheating was frequently described as ‘jiggery-pokery’ and punch-ups were dismissed as ‘a bit of argy-bargy’. I remember when fists started flying in the middle of one scrum, he commented: “It’s getting a bit unceremonious in that front row.” And when Scottish centre Jim Renwick – whom McLaren had coached as a schoolboy – missed a kick and was caught by the camera mouthing the F-word, McLaren diplomatically remarked that he was ‘muttering a few naughty Hawick words.’

Some of his sayings became catchphrases. When a player prepared to kick a conversion and half the stadium made disparaging noises in the hope of distracting him and making him fluff it, McLaren would invariably remark: “There’s some ill-mannered whistling.” And when a conversion-kick made it between the posts despite being taken from a torturous angle, he’d declare: “It’s high enough, it’s long enough and it’s straight enough!”

Aware that in the Borders towns local players who’d made it onto the national team were seen as heroes, he’d often serenade the scorer of a Scottish try with the lines, “And they’ll be dancing on the streets of…” or “And they’ll be drinking his health in…” – Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso, Melrose, Selkirk, wherever – “…tonight!” As an honorary Borderer, I’d say they were more likely to be drinking his health than dancing in the streets.

McLaren’s manner and delivery were immensely relaxed and comforting, but his early life had been no bed of roses. As a young World War II serviceman, he had to endure the Battle of Monte Cassino, of which one eyewitness said, “The men were so tired that it was a living death. They had come from such a depth of weariness that I wondered if they would quite be able to make the return to the lives and thoughts they had known.’ McLaren himself described Monte Cassino as a ‘vision of hell on earth.’

After the war, he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, which put a prompt end to any hopes he had of becoming a rugby internationalist. TB was then considered incurable and he wasn’t expected to survive, but he and four fellow sufferers agreed to be guinea pigs for the trials of a new drug, streptomycin. Thanks to this treatment he recovered, but three of the four other volunteers died. It was while he was convalescing that he produced his first sports commentaries – describing table-tennis matches over the hospital radio.

McLaren was passionately attached to his hometown and famously said, “A day out of Hawick is a day wasted.” Several years ago I visited Hawick for the first time since the 1980s, and saw to my dismay how much it’d deteriorated. Its high street was run-down and riddled with derelict properties – thanks to a faltering economy caused by the closure of local woolen mills, and also thanks no doubt to the opening of branches of Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s and Lidl, which’d sucked the retailing life out of the place. My first thought was: “What would Bill McLaren have said?”

© From rugbyrelics.com

McLaren’s commentaries were emblematic of an earlier, more innocent age, when rugby was still an amateur sport and because of that it was incredibly accessible. This was especially true if you lived in a rugby-daft place like the Borders, where the guys you saw performing heroic deeds for Scotland on TV on Saturday afternoons existed during weekdays as mortals like everyone else. As a kid living there, I was delighted when the man from the electricity board who came to our house to check on a power outage was none other than Jim Renwick. Meanwhile, Scottish fullback Peter Dods was a joiner down the road in Galashiels and my old man, a farmer, was on nodding terms with Scottish flanker John Jeffrey, who farmed in Kelso – Jeffrey’s teammates had nicknamed him ‘the Great White Shark’ but to Bill McLaren he was just ‘the big Kelso farmer’. And let’s not forget local electrician Roy Laidlaw, whom legend has it had to rewire the public toilets in Jedburgh the Monday morning after the Scotland team he was part of won the Grand Slam in Paris.

Yes, Bill McLaren’s voice evokes a simpler time in rugby, before professionalism, sponsorship, corporatism, razzmatazz and a profit-driven need to win at all costs took over. But homespun though his persona was, I don’t believe there’s been a sports commentator in the years since who’s come close to matching him.

December 10, 2022December 10, 2022

Remember the Ally-mo

© BBC

It’s come to my attention that a football World Cup is in progress. Time, then, to dust down and repost the following item, which surfaces on this blog every four years when the competition is underway to decide the global champions of the ‘beautiful game’.

One unsettling feature of growing older is that when an anniversary arrives and you think back to the original event, you feel shocked when you realise how much time separates now and then. The other week, the 2022 World Cup competition began in Qatar, and it’s just occurred to me that the 1978 World Cup in Argentina took place 44 whole years and eleven whole World Cups ago. It’s almost traumatic to realise how much time has elapsed.

However, if you’re old enough to remember the 1978 Argentinian World Cup and you were in Scotland at the time, you’ll testify that the event itself was traumatic.

For those of you who’re unacquainted with the topic… What happened in 1978 was that of the four national football teams in the UK, Scotland was the only one to qualify for Argentina. And the country had a team that, on paper, looked like it might achieve something. It boasted players from some of the mightiest football clubs in Britain: for example, from Manchester United (Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen, Lou Macari, Joe Jordan), Liverpool (Graham Souness, the legendary Kenny Dalgleish), Glasgow Rangers (Derek Johnstone, Tom Forsyth, Sandy Jardine), Nottingham Forest (Kenny Burns, John Robertson, Archie Gemmill) and, er, Partick Thistle (Alan Rough). And in charge of these remarkable players was a manager called Ally MacLeod, who was remarkable in his own way. Though not necessarily in the right way.

Ally had been emboldened by wins in 1977 over the European champions Czechoslovakia and over the Auld Enemy, England. The game against England concluded with the Scottish fans swarming onto the pitch at Wembley and digging up clods of the turf and breaking the goalposts into wee pieces to bring home as souvenirs, much to the horror of the English commentators and much to the hilarity of everyone in Scotland. He then began to talk up his team’s chances in Argentina. When early in 1978 Scotland failed to win the Home International championship involving England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ally shrugged it off with the tantalising comment that the championship’s title “could be dwarfed by the World Cup.” Such statements, and Ally’s general air of swagger and optimism – “My name is Ally MacLeod,” he announced when he became Scotland manager, “and I am a born winner!” – acted like catnip to both football fans and the hacks working on the sports pages of Scotland’s newspapers.

As the World Cup approached, a heady sense of expectation began to infect the Scottish population. Folk started to believe that the Argentinian World Cup would be a jamboree of Scottish footballing genius, culminating in Ally and the gang lifting the trophy. No wonder a carpet company cannily signed Ally to do a commercial where he sat on one of their rugs whilst dressed as a gaucho, which was 1970s Britain’s idea of what everybody in Argentina looked like. This led to a priceless incident where, just before he departed for Argentina, Ally was accosted by an exuberant fan who announced, “Ally, see the day after your commercial? My ma bought one o they carpets!”

Ally was indeed a great salesman. He could truly market the brand. Unfortunately, that was not quite the same as delivering the goods.

Even one of my favourite rock bands, the Australian (but mostly Scottish-born) AC/DC, got in on the act and played a gig in 1978 at Glasgow Apollo Theatre wearing Scotland football strips. Also getting in on the act was the Scottish comedian Andy Cameron, who recorded a song called Ally’s Tartan Army that soon rode high in the charts. It contained such catchy, if posthumously cringeworthy, lines as: “And we’re fairly shake them up / When we win the World Cup / Cos Scotland’s got the greatest football team!”

From pinterest.co.uk

Being in Scotland in the spring of 1978 and watching this happen was disconcerting for me. The year before, my family had moved from Northern Ireland and taken up residency in a farm near the Scottish town of Peebles. I’d assumed that the Scots were a stoical, down-to-earth lot, not given to flights of fancy. But then, all-of-a-sudden, they’d succumbed to this madness about Ally MacLeod, winning the World Cup and having the greatest football team in the universe. What was going on? I found it particularly noticeable the day before Scotland played Northern Ireland in the Home Internationals. When I walked into a meeting of the local Scouts that evening, all the other (Scottish) scouts had an insane glint in their eyes and were gleefully predicting how Scotland was going to slaughter, dismember and stomp on the grave of poor, lowly Northern Ireland the next day. As it turned out, all Scotland could manage with Northern Ireland was a 1-1 draw, much to my satisfaction.

Still, over time, the madness seemed to seep into even my non-ethnically Scottish soul. Hey, I thought, it would be cool to live in the country that’d won the World Cup, wouldn’t it?

After a delirious send-off at Hampden Stadium where 30,000 Scotland fans whooped and screamed as if their team had just come back from Argentina clutching the World Cup trophy, Ally’s Tartan Army flew out and got ready for their first game of the competition’s first round, which was against Peru. The evening that the game was on TV, I missed the beginning of it for my dad had sent me out to move some cows from one field to another. I was in the middle of moving those cows when I heard a huge rumbling roar. It was like how I’d imagine the approach of a tsunami to sound. I needed a few seconds to realise I was hearing cheering coming from the town, a half-mile away beyond the last of my parents’ fields. It was the sound of 5000-odd people in Peebles celebrating Joe Jordan knocking in a first goal for Scotland in the game’s 14^th minute. Gosh, I thought, it’s started. Scotland really are going to win the World Cup!

I completed my task, hurried back to the house and hunkered down in front of the television next to my younger brother, who’d really caught the Scotland World Cup bug and was watching the match with avid excitement. Scarcely had I arrived there when, just before half-time, Peru equalised. Then in the second half Peru scored two more, so that by the game’s end Scotland had been beaten 3-1. In a pathetic attempt to hide my disappointment, I pretended that, being Northern Irish, I hadn’t really been supporting Scotland and I thought their defeat was funny. So I turned around and started laughing at my brother. I stopped, though, when I realised he was in floods of tears. However, my mother had already seen me laughing at him and she gave me a deserved bollocking for making him even more upset.

Next up for Scotland was Iran, an unstable country in the early throes of a revolution. Scotland was surely going to win this one, right? Wrong. The team played so badly that they scraped a 1-1 draw and that was only because an Iranian player called Eskandarian scored an own-goal. This game was famous for its images of a totally-deflated Ally Macleod sitting hunched over in the Scotland dugout, his hands clamped over the top of his skull in an attempt to shut out the world – “Ally trying to dismantle his head,” as one wag described it later.

To heighten the misery, the Scottish striker Willie Johnston was sent home after failing a drugs test. Other football players have suffered drugs scandals, most notably the cocaine-snorting Diego Maradona. But the hapless Johnston wasn’t even caught taking a glamorous, hedonistic drug. He tested positive for Reacitivan, a medication prescribed to him because he had hay fever. Poor old Willie might as well have been busted for taking Benylin Chesty Cough Mixture.

By now the Scotland situation was looking grim. Also grim was the atmosphere at Peebles High School. One guy in my class told me there was a record shop in Glasgow that was now selling copies of Ally’s Tartan Army by Andy Cameron for a penny each, so that disgruntled punters could make a public display of smashing them into vinyl slivers on the pavement outside. Meanwhile, a girl told me she couldn’t bear to drink Scotland’s national fizzy drink Irn Bru any more, because its name sounded it too much like ‘Iran Peru’. Lessons with our English teacher, Iain Jenkins, strayed off the topic of Shakespeare and became lengthy post-mortem discussions about what was going horribly wrong in Argentina.

In fact, I remember us doing some creative writing one day and then Iain Jenkins reading out a poem that a mischievous pupil from south of the border – England – had just penned about Scotland’s faltering World Cup campaign. It contained the memorable line, “Poor Ally will have to emigrate to the moon” and the even more memorable couplet, “Willie Johnston is over the hill / That’s why he’s on the pill.”

To get through to the World Cup’s next round, Scotland now had to beat the Netherlands… and beat them by three goals. There seemed zero chance of that happening. From the dire way the Scots were playing, it looked much more likely that the Dutch would murder them. Yet it was against the Dutch – who’d eventually make it to the competition’s final – that Scotland managed a victory. Indeed, they were 3-1 up at one point in the game and if they’d knocked in another goal they could have lived to fight another day. Alas, it wasn’t to be. The Dutch eventually pulled one back, making the final score 3-2. Scotland had won, but not by enough to stop them going home early.

Still, the game produced a brilliant Scottish goal by the diminutive Nottingham Forest player Archie Gemmill. It was the best goal of that World Cup and possibly the greatest World Cup goal ever. Incidentally, it’s also the goal whose footage is intercut with the hectic sex sequence in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1995). No wonder a dazed Ewan MacGregor murmurs at the end of it, “I haven’t felt that good since Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978!” Though I’m pretty sure that back in 1978 the Scottish football commentator Archie Macpherson didn’t really exclaim, as he does in Trainspotting, “A penetrating goal for Scotland!”

Thus, Scotland was out of the World Cup but with, technically, a wee bit of pride salvaged. Sadly, such was the hype that’d accompanied them to Argentina that their campaign didn’t feel like anything other than an absolute disaster. The day after the Holland game, I remember a classmate, the local postman’s son, coming into class. He pulled out a tartan scarf, waved it around for five seconds and said flatly and unenthusiastically, “See that? We beat Holland. Magic.” Then he put the scarf back in his bag and zipped it up again. And nobody at school seemed to talk about Scotland, Argentina and the World Cup ever again.

Mind you, later that summer, I returned to Northern Ireland for a holiday. People there seemed to view me as 100% Scottish now and they didn’t stop tearing the piss out of me about how crap Scotland had played in Argentina.

From twitter.com

But let’s be fair to Ally MacLeod, who died in 2004. In popular Scottish mythology he’s often depicted as a vainglorious balloon, bragging that his team would win the World Cup, and then win the next World Cup, and probably the Ryder Cup, the Stanley Cup, the America’s Cup, the Ashes and the Tour de France as well. But I’ve scoured the Internet and been unable to find most of the hyperbolic quotes that I’ve heard attributed to him. It’s fairer to say that he made a few tactless comments and exuded a lot of optimism, which the overheated imaginations of fans and journalists turned into mass hysteria. In the dispirited environment of post-World Cup Scotland, though, nobody wanted to admit their own culpability and poor Ally became the scapegoat.

Anyway, if you can ignore the hubris and focus only on the football, Ally’s 1978 squad didn’t do that badly. Yes, they had two duff games but they only lost one of those, and then they achieved a win against the eventual finalists. If the cards had fallen differently elsewhere in their first-round group, they might have got through to the competition’s next stage; and, having had their wake-up call, performed better. Other teams in other World Cups have done so with the same first-round record of one win, one draw and one defeat – including England.

Much has been blamed on that ill-fated World Cup campaign. People have found significance in how it came shortly before the 1979 referendum on creating a devolved Scottish parliament, which died a death because of apathy. The Scottish public voted for the parliament, but not in sufficiently high numbers. It’s tempting to join those two dots, but I’m inclined to blame this collapse in Scottish political willpower at the end of the decade on factors a lot more complex than Ally MacLeod bullshitting us a bit about football in 1978.

One thing that can be attributed to 1978 is the evolution of the Scotland football team’s travelling support, the Tartan Army. Thanks to the bitter lessons learnt then, modern Scotland fans have dumped any belligerent, nationalistic sense of expectation and have gone about the (often thankless) task of supporting Scotland with humour, irony, self-deprecation and a determination to have a good time no matter how bad the results. As a result, they’re now one of the most popular sets of fans in the world.

Actually, when Scotland played England several years ago at Wembley, I saw a picture of some Scottish fans posing in Trafalgar Square with a life-sized cut-out of Ally MacLeod they’d brought along. That made me smile. With his erratic management skills and over-exuberant PR skills, the daft bugger put us through the wringer in 1978. But it’s nice to know his spirit still gets invited to the party.