R.I.P. Hugh McIlvanney, the British Equivalent of Liebling

Hugh McIlvanney, one of the most eloquent of wordsmiths in the pantheon of sports journalists, died on Thursday, Jan. 24, at age eighty-four after a battle with cancer. Voted Great Britain’s Sports Journalist of the Year seven times, McIlvanney was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2009. He was the third British boxing writer accorded this honor following Reg Gutteridge (2002) and Harry Mullan (2005).

McIlvanney (pictured in 1977) was born into humble circumstances in Kilmarnock, Scotland, the son of a former coal miner. He embarked on his career as a sportswriter with the Scottish Daily Express. According to Phil Shaw, writing in today’s Independent, McIlvanney was reluctant to take on the sports beat but reconsidered after his editor loaned him a copy of A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science “in the hope of convincing him that sports writing could be a vehicle for his obvious flair and did not simply equate to hyperbole, chronology and quotes.” McIlvanney’s introduction to Liebling, said his former colleague and rival Kevin Mitchell in The Guardian, was “the pivotal intervention in his long career.”

McIlvanney went on to spend thirty years at the Observer and then twenty-three years with the Sunday Times before retiring in 2016, having grown weary of traveling to far-flung places. Boxing, horseracing, and soccer were his primary fields of interest but he was especially partial to boxing, the subject of his most popular book, McIlvanney on Boxing, a compilation released in 1982 that would be updated with new material in subsequent editions. In trumpeting the book for his annual “Holiday Reading” column, Thomas Hauser called McIlvanney the British equivalent of Liebling.

McIlvanney, who cut a natty figure – a handkerchief and the tips of expensive Havana cigars protruded from the breast pocket of his sport jacket — insisted on calling himself a news reporter, never a writer as he felt the term was highfalutin, but he was a painstaking writer, a perfectionist who would labor over his copy for hours if afforded the opportunity. Here’s a few vignettes:

“Professional boxing is the most egalitarian of sports; a world in which great champions and obscure journeymen are equally exposed to barefaced robbery.”

In the same vein, McIlvanney was bemused, if that is the word, at the scores rendered in the 1987 fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler. One judge had it 10-2 for Sugar Ray, another had it 7-5 for Hagler. “Professional boxing’s system of scoring shows all the intellectual consistency of a rolling pair of dice,” he wrote in a post-fight report while noting that Las Vegas provided a “hospitable environment” for eccentric boxing officials.

On Don King (written as King was cleaving Mike Tyson from his manager Bill Cayton):

“He is boxing’s Lord of Chaos, a master exploiter of boxing’s permanent state of anarchy, its chronic lack of any uniform system of business or code of behavior.”

McIlvanney is survived by his third wife Caroline and a son and daughter from his first marriage. A younger brother, the noted crime fiction writer William McIlvanney, passed away in December of 2015.

We here at The Sweet Science send condolences to his loved ones.

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