Life With Brian... And Hugh

The death of Brian Glanville last month led me to reflect on working with the greats of football writing. He and Hugh McIlvanney were very different but both were wonderful characters

THE DEATH OF Brian Glanville last month got me thinking about some of the greats of British sportswriting that I’ve worked with. The best known are Brian and Hugh McIlvanney. As you might expect, they were brilliant operators. But you needed to stay on the right side of them.

I came across both at The Sunday Times, where I started as a casual downtable sub-editor. My first role for a national newspaper. We called ourselves “monkey subs” because that’s how we were viewed: bottom of the pecking order.

Monkeys are probably the wrong analogy. Subs are like the disposable characters in war films. You don’t get friendly with the new guy because they’ll be gone soon. Most sub-editors at The Sunday Times didn’t make it through the first month. An early mistake and you didn’t get asked back.

But if you got through those first, hairy months (I was once told to get rid of a casual because “he’s too tall”),* then you got to deal with some phenomenal writers.

Brian was very funny. He’d cycle to Wapping from his home in Holland Park on Fridays – he was in his late 60s then – and regale us with tales of footballers we could only dream about seeing. If Glanville liked and respected you, everything was fine. If he didn’t, he’d let you – and everyone else – know.

On FA Cup final day in 2000, the big story was that Chris Sutton, Chelsea’s hugely-expensive buy before the season, had departed the team’s camp after being left out of the matchday squad for the game against Aston Villa. A big media story at that time was that The Sunday Times had brought in Steve Curry to bolster their football reporting team. Glanville was not an admirer of Curry, who was much more suited to tabloid work.

In early afternoon, I took a call from another ST writer at Wembley. “Brian’s lost it,” he laughed. “He’s walking round the press room shouting, ‘Chris Sutton, where are you? Chris, are you here.’”

A few minutes later, Glanville rang for his word count. I got straight to the point. “Brian, you know Chris Sutton walked out?’

“Not that Chris Sutton,” Brian said, a gran voce. “That’s what I call Steve Curry.”

Brian was very theatrical at times and I was beginning to feel he didn’t need a telephone line to be heard from the Twin Towers. Everyone in the press room must have been earwigging.

“Why?” came my stupid, inevitable question.

“Like Sutton, Curry’s English, overpaid and…” the kicker was added with evident relish, “… shit!”

You had to love Brian. I admired many things about him, but his greatest quality was how generous he was to young writers. Football’s press boxes can be very clannish places that are full of ego. New faces can find themselves ignored in this intimidating environment.

Glanville was different. If he saw someone he didn’t recognise, he would go out of his way to introduce himself. For a young hopeful, having Brian approach them and introduce himself was like the Pope singling them out in a crowd.

The great man’s love and knowledge of Italy was legendary. When I was given my first significant project at The Times, the EuroGame, a pullout for Champions League week, Brian was my first call.

Glanville was never short of ideas. He’d phone in and, when I heard his voice at the other end of the line, I’d groan. No work for the next two hours. My day would be backed up. But what a couple of hours they’d be. You learnt so much about the game and the legendary figures within it by talking to him.

McIlvanney was all business on the phone. The pair differed in their approach to writing, too. If they were filing live and both were asked for 500 words, Hugh would file 495 on the final whistle. Just short so nothing would need to be removed.

His attention to detail was awe-inspiring. He tried never to use the same word twice in a piece and never started two paragraphs with the same word. For his rewrite, he would go through the piece line-by-line with the sub whose privilege it was to be assigned to the Scot. I always say I learnt to write by subbing Hugh.

Brian, by contrast, would file his allocated 500 by half time. You’d have to take a scalpel to his words. All the time keeping the narrative thread, the jokes and the literary allusions. I

Drinking with McIlvanney was when you got the stories. He’d take you to an after-hours club in Soho – the sort of place that’s full of thespians and has pictures of famous actors on the wall – and hold court. This man was mates with Stein, Busby and Shankly. But that was just the start of it.

Contrary to myth, Hugh was from Kilmarnock and not Glasgow but you didn’t doubt his toughness. I spent a year or two subbing his column. The standard office gag was don’t screw up or McIlvanney will set his gangsters on you. “Hugh, you get your gangsters and I’ll get mine,” I’d respond. He liked that.

On a Sunday Times Christmas night out, we were in McIlvanney’s Soho bolthole. There was tension afoot. Some sort of weird dynamic was going on between Hugh and a Scottish sub in his early 30s. This Caledonian beef simmered until about 1am and then Hugh kicked the sub, hard, just below the knee and lunged for him.

A good friend of mine, a young, burly Australian sub, stepped in between them. McIlvanney was having none of that. “You want some, Aussie boy?” he snarled.

Hugh was 72 years old.

I guided the legendary writer away but never got to the bottom of what it was all about. But Hugh did tell me a bunch of stories about Shankly.

When Brian was knocked off his bike coming home from Stamford Bridge one night, I started visiting him at home in his Georgian townhouse in Holland Park. His study was as you’d expect it. No, as you’d dream it: books piled high everywhere. One of my cherished possessions is a signed copy of his novel Dictators, a superb work about the relationship between Mussolini and the composer Toscanini. Glanville’s breadth of learning was awe-inspiring.

Hugh died six years ago. We didn’t speak much after I moved across Wapping to The Times but he’d congratulate me on promotions or when we won football-related awards.

I spoke to Brian much more often. The loss of his wife Pamela nine years ago was a blow but he was always enthusiastic to talk about football, his enemies and what it was like to be there when the Arno burst its banks. I used to tease him: “Come on, Brian, admit it, you made up everything we know about Italian football in the 1960s. There was no internet. No one could check. Admit it, you were blagging! And now it’s accepted fact!”

He'd laugh and move on to his next tale. Because he knew: you couldn’t make his life up. The thing that Glanville and McIlvanney had in common is they were both completely preposterous while being absolutely human. They enjoyed life. They made their own rules. In their different approaches, they had the highest of standards.

I miss them both. I can still read them, though. That way I can connect with their voices and their sense of fun. They will be with me for ever.

*I didn’t get rid of the sub and he went on to become football correspondent for a broadsheet