Memory Man

by Jimmy Magee

  Eventually she went to the toilet. I said to the child, ‘If you touch anything else on the plane I’ll have you! I’m warning you nicely now, young man!’

  I was sure he would complain about my threat to his mother when she came back, but he didn’t say a word! He even kept quiet for the rest of the journey—not a move out of him. When we got to Los Angeles she said to me, ‘Wasn’t he good today?’

  ‘He couldn’t have been better.’

  I’m sure the boy was relieved to see the back of me when I got off the plane.

  ——

  While waiting for the boxing match I had a bit of fun in Las Vegas about Johnny Peters, who is on the cabaret circuit. For fun I would ask someone working in any restaurant or hotel I was in, ‘Excuse me, has Johnny Peters been in today?’

  And the reply was always ‘No.’ Sure they wouldn’t know who Johnny Peters was! A few nights later I got a taxi and I asked the driver, ‘What’s the latest and biggest show on in Las Vegas at the moment?’

  ‘I don’t know, but all the guys are talking about Johnny Peters. He’s the talk of the Strip!’

  This whole thing emanated from me asking a whole lot of people if they had seen Johnny Peters. It just goes to prove that the Americans will buy into anything!

  I was looking forward to meeting Barry McGuigan. I had been very friendly with his father, Pat, in his singing days. He was a fantastic jazz singer and he will always be remembered for his Eurovision days. Pat was mad for boxing, and I will always remember the day he told me about his young son at home ‘who’s a great puncher.’ At the time I said to him, ‘Sure all fathers are like that about their sons!’ But he dismissed me and went on praising his son, who was about eight or nine at the time, and told me to ‘mark his words,’ his son would be a champion.

  I first met Barry when I went out to his family home in Clones to visit Pat. The house would be filled with music, boxing, and quizzes to beat the band. They would be throwing out questions like, ‘Who always jabbed with his left and crossed one-two to the body?’ I was thrilled to watch from the sidelines as Pat’s prediction about his boy began to come true.

  When Barry won the world title in London in the QPR stadium over Pedroza, which was only the second time he had been beaten in more than thirty fights, I was there for RTE radio. At the end of it I was wondering who had the rights to do interviews with the new champion. Then I decided that I didn’t care who had the rights: I wanted to speak to the man of the moment, regardless of red tape.

  I asked my producer, ‘Is there much lead on the microphone?’

  ‘What do you want a lead for?’

  ‘I want to get into the ring.’

  But the producer began protesting that we hadn’t got the rights to do that.

  ‘Sure what about all these American fights you see in the films, and they always get into the ring afterwards!’ I said.

  He insisted that he couldn’t do it, because we didn’t hold the rights.

  ‘I’m going to get into the ring anyway,’ I said.

  He was right, of course, because the BBC had the rights in Europe and ABC had them for America. But I got into the ring anyway and made my way over to Barry. All the cameras were there as I got into the ring. I made eye contact with Barry, and he immediately began coming towards me across the ring and we met half way. ‘Jaysus, Jimmy, we did it!’

  They were the first words he spoke after winning the world title. And, yes, I cheekily got the interview.

  Barry was always generous to me with his time, regardless of which television stations had the first rights to speak to him.

  He was a fantastic boxer, but unfortunately he lost the featherweight title in Las Vegas to the relatively unknown Texan boxer Steve Cruz. There was something odd about that night. Firstly, the heat was horrendous. Those who know these things say it was 125 degrees Fahrenheit, but other reports say it was 110 degrees. Fountain pens were melting on the press table. At the end of every round servants would come around and put wet towels on the back of reporters’ necks.

  Barry was in the ring fighting not just with the lights for the television but also with the sun beating down in the middle of a boiling afternoon. He told me he doesn’t remember anything from the tenth round on, but by the end of the fight he was out on his feet. He was knocked down twice in the last round, and only for that he would have won the title. I know this because I had befriended a woman who worked in the offices there and I went to her after the fight and asked if I could look at the score cards. One judge had McGuigan behind, another had him ahead, and another had him level with the relatively unknown Cruz. McGuigan, as the champion, would have got the advantage when it was that close, as was the norm; but getting knocked down twice in that round decided the one remaining judge, the one who mattered, to go for Cruz.

  At the end of it all McGuigan passed out from dehydration, as he had had no water from the tenth round on. But he was apparently shouting, ‘Don’t let them close my eyes!’ because he was afraid of death. This was because he had been in the ring with a lad who died after their match, Young Ali (the Nigerian Asymin Mustapha). That fight affected him for a long time. They found out afterwards that he had an aneurysm which would have erupted as soon as he hit something.

  I only spoke briefly to McGuigan before the fight. He told me he had a sore ankle that he had hurt in training, but he wasn’t making an issue out of it.

  He stopped fighting soon after that loss, which resulted in a very costly legal row with his manager, Barney Eastwood. I got on very well with both men, so I was sorry to see that happening between them. Boxing is full of these sorts of stories, but everybody always thought that McGuigan and Eastwood would last the distance. You could say that, up until they quarrelled, it had been a match made in Heaven.

  ——

  The following year at the 1987 Tour de France I had a pain in my leg, and someone said to me, half joking, ‘There’s a new laser wagon on the Tour.’ This was a laser treatment that was still new at the time. I marched over to the wagon and asked them to look at my leg, and they looked it over. When I came out there were four cyclists waiting impatiently outside, and one of them was Seán Kelly. ‘So you’re the man who’s holding us up! That’s gas; we’re riding in the Tour de France and Magee is in the tent!’

  Kelly had a groin problem and had gone on a 25-mile spin that morning to try to loosen himself up, but he couldn’t do it, and he rode the rest of the Tour de France with that injury. The man is made of iron.

  Now at after-dinner speeches he tells the story of how I held up the injured cyclists.

  I would guess that I have been to the Tour de France about eight times. My biggest memories are of Irish riders, such as Kelly and Roche, when they were at their peak. Both were great riders; it’s very difficult to say which one of them was better. Roche was a classic rider: he won the world championship, the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia. Kelly won a lot of one-day classics: he won Milan–San Remo, Tour of Flanders—all the big ones. But I think the climbing held him back in the Tour de France; he was too big to be a climber.

  I was very proud when the Tour de France came to Ireland. It was brilliant, but it has the anti-climax of being remembered as the year with all that trouble, when the Belgian team were caught with illegal substances. The man who won that year was the cheating Italian Marco Pantani. The pirate is dead now as a result of cocaine poisoning.

  It would be hard to argue against naming Lance Armstrong as the greatest cyclist in the modern era. I first got to meet Lance in 1993 in Oslo, where I was covering the World Cycling Championships. The amateur race was on the Saturday and the pro race on Sunday. It was a dirty day, with heavy rain. I think the weather was so bad that every rider fell, including Kelly and Roche.

  Armstrong was still in his teens at the time but he won the event, and the Americans went crazy. I met his mother and she was telling me, ‘He is hoping to ride in the Tour de France and even win it.’

  On that day you
could see the potential in him. He didn’t appear to be egotistical but he was a driven man. He would be right up there with Merckx. But nobody could have imagined the rollercoaster journey he went on after that. I don’t believe that his mother that day even dreamt he would go on to win the Tour de France an astonishing seven times—not only that but during it all to get cancer and then come back with a bang.

  There were a lot of people saying he wasn’t a fit man to represent the sport because they said he was on illegal substances. I think that any man who has suffered testicular cancer has to be on some form of medicine, so damn it, I would forgive him if he wanted to live.

  ——

  There was this fellow named Grimes from Dublin who became famous for a while because he always sneaked into big events. He was first rumbled when he was brazenly walking a horse in the Grand National and an editor from the BBC turned to a sports reporter and asked, ‘Who’s that guy who’s walking in the horse for the Grand National?’

  ‘Same guy who walked it in last year.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  So they began investigating who he was, and it turned out that he had been gate-crashing all these events.

  One night I was MCing at the Albert Hall in London and this guy in a dinner suit approached me and asked me, ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘I do, actually. Sure I saw you on the BBC when you breached all security.’

  ‘With respect to you, Jimmy, I’m going to go out on the Albert Hall stage. I’ve never done it before, and I’m going to do it tonight. The hall is packed.’

  ‘It’s very nice of you to tell me, but I don’t think you should do that.’

  ‘I’m telling you because I don’t want you to think I’m being a smart arse here.’

  ‘Stay there. I have a better idea,’ I said to him, as I was informed it was time for me to kick off the show. I walked onto the stage to introduce Brendan Shine and his Band. ‘And just before we greet Brendan Shine,’ I told the audience, ‘I have a little bonus for you. Do you remember the man who walked the horse in at the Derby? Well, he’s here, appearing at the Albert Hall for the first time.’

  I brought him out so he didn’t have to break the security, and he got a massive reception. It just shows that the Irish are magical for fellows like this character who break the system.

  He was very grateful for it. ‘I never thought I would be introduced onto a stage.’

  He asked where we were going next. I told him the Lincoln Centre in New York.

  ‘I’d love to go there.’

  But I told him that I didn’t think the security there would let him on stage. If he did go over, alas, he wasn’t able to breach security that time, because we never met again.

  ——

  Also in 1987 I began doing a television show with George Hamilton called ‘Know Your Sport’—a title I had come up with. We were sitting around one day thinking what we might call this sports programme. The idea was already there, and George was already involved, and then I came in with the title. I also wrote all the questions.

  The show was a great success, and the first prize was a trip to the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988. The first winner was a man called Tom Hunt from Waterford. His two nephews Stephen and Noel Hunt have played soccer for Ireland, and both are playing at the moment.

  I didn’t need to win the main prize to get over to the Olympics in Seoul, which was a lovely experience. The Koreans are a lovely people. There was an unfortunate woman who ran a stall in the open market in Seoul where they sell everything from needles to suits and shirts. This woman had no arms or legs and she would shuffle around on this piece of leather. She was quite speedy and efficient and getting the jobs done and looking after things. She was the voice of the place. One of the lads was looking at her, saying how unbelievable she was. I told them they should have been there the day before when the bus pulled up and the driver opened the door of the bus and said to the woman, ‘How are you getting on?’ Every time I meet Frank Whelan since then I say, ‘How are you getting on?’ But it’s a private joke that only applies to those in the know about the woman in Seoul.

  ——

  Before heading to Asia I spent the summer in West Germany covering Euro ’88. I suppose the Irish soccer team had been the ‘nearly men’ up until they qualified the first time for a major tournament. Even though we had quality players and had enjoyed the occasional magnificent result over the years—such as laying claim to being the first international side outside the Home Countries to beat England on home soil, back in 1949—we were overshadowed for far too long by our Northern counterparts when it came to qualifying for tournaments.

  Before Jack Charlton took over as manager both John Giles and Eoin Hand had been desperately unlucky not to have succeeded in getting Ireland into the World Cup. There was certainly an abundance of the proverbial luck of the Irish with our qualification for the Euro ’88 tournament. We got there only by the skin of our teeth, thanks to a late goal by Gary Mackay in Sofia that put Ireland top of the group and unceremoniously dumped Bulgaria out of contention.

  Nobody had expected Scotland to beat the Bulgarian side, but it was a result that opened the doors to a desperately desired resurgence in the Irish soccer team, who were moments away from getting to the semi-final in Euro ’88 and reached the lofty heights of the quarter-finals in Italia ’90, as well as qualifying for two further World Cups, first in America and then in Japan and South Korea.

  At long last Ireland was there on the major stage, which was very special. It was a hell of a good team too, with such wonderful players as Liam Brady, Ronnie Whelan, Mark Lawrenson, Frank Stapleton, Kevin Moran, Paul McGrath, Packie Bonner, Kevin Sheedy, John Aldridge—players who were performing with flair at the top level in English football. So it was a terrible shame that Jack Charlton went on with this mantra of ‘put ’em under pressure,’ which was even more prevalent in the Irish squads that played in the two subsequent World Cups under Charlton’s charge.

  I would have loved to see the Irish side go out and play positive football, as they did in parts of the game against the Soviet Union in Euro ’88 or, to take another example much later, when an Irish team—and one that was lacking the creativity of the players under Charlton—outperformed the French in Paris in 2010, which will also be remembered for Thierry Henry’s infamous handball.

  It was a shame that Jack had a notion in his head that they would play this ‘put ’em under pressure’ style of game. He told the players to go out there and ‘put their backs under pressure, and don’t let them have a free kick at the ball.’ As it turned out, it worked considerably well for him, up to a point. It was a system that Greece, who were truly a brutal team, used to greater success when they ground out result after result to win the Euros in 2004.

  If the Greeks could accomplish the unthinkable one can only imagine what that Irish team, with its abundance of talent, could have achieved with different tactics.

  Apart from all the star names it was a squad that also included a young Niall Quinn, who was with Arsenal then and had got his first cap in 1986.

  I was pronouncing his name with the Irish pronunciation, but one day the head of sport at RTE asked me, ‘Where did you get “Kneel” from? His name is Niall’ (pronouncing it ‘Nile’).

  ‘I know that’s what they call him over in England, but it’s wrong.’

  ‘I’m telling you, his name is Nile, not Kneel, and that’s what he’s to be called.’

  So from there on I reluctantly called him Nile. One day I got a letter from Niall’s mother, a short one-page letter saying, ‘Only his father, myself and yourself, Jimmy, call my son by his proper name.’ I didn’t have the courage to go back in with the letter to RTE’s head of sport and say, ‘I told you so!’

  Years later I was doing a Sunderland game and Quinn was playing that day, and he said in front of a lot of people, who were probably wondering what he was on about, ‘I think we’ve lost the battle, Jimmy!’ meaning his nam
e.

  I probably would have explained to the listeners about Quinn’s name if I had got a chance to do the commentary on any of the Irish games in Euro ’88, but sadly I didn’t. I was thrilled to be there, but I was equally disappointed that the game roster—either by design or accident—meant I was not selected for any of the Irish matches. I felt it was unfair on me after years of loyal service not to be given at least one of our games. I knew all the Irish squad by their first names. Many of them approached me in Germany and to a man would ask the same question: ‘Why weren’t you covering the game? Were you sick, Jimmy?’

  It saddened me, sitting alone in my hotel room watching them play against England when Ray Houghton headed in that famous goal, which he likes to sing about as his party piece. Houghton was a great player, and I still meet him regularly out in RTE. He was essentially a right-footed player, so it’s funny the way life works out, as I think it’s fair to say that he got two of Ireland’s greatest goals ever, one with his left foot and one with his head, and neither of them with his favourite weapon: his right foot! It was the same with that other famous Irish goal against the Russians in Euro ’88: Ronnie Whelan hit it in off his shin, as it turned out.

  After Ray Houghton’s score against England I kept telling myself, ‘I want to be there at the game instead of this bloody awful way of watching it,’ as I cheered on Ireland during the unbelievably tense game, when England missed chance after chance, thanks either to a fantastic Packie Bonner or to the posts and crossbar. Perhaps we were blessed by the Rosary beads that Packie kept in his gym bag.

  After the final whistle went and we won 1-0, I was still fuming, and I decided to get the lift down to the hotel’s restaurant for a bite to eat. As I sat there eating I told myself, ‘You have to exorcise all that out of your head. You have a game tomorrow. You can’t go around having nasty thoughts about anybody or anything. It’s past tense—get on with your job.’