Memory Man

by Jimmy Magee

  I don’t use any techniques, just an interest, so a whole heap of knowledge remains in my memory. I often test myself too. If I’m waiting for a meeting to start I have a habit of getting out a piece of paper and setting myself the task of writing down the names of those who played in a cup final—and not just their names but their positions too. Sometimes to pass the time I put together lists of teams. Nearly every piece of paper you would find in my pocket has a list on it of some description, from sports or music. On a long journey back from somewhere I would often wonder, ‘Can I name all the British Open golf champions since 1946?’ I’d be in the car on my own listing them off. I might miss one or two, but when I get home I look it up in one of my books.

  I think this comes from this childhood thing of walking around and doing pretend sports programmes. It’s a talent that must come from my fascination with commentary and the individual style and techniques of commentators.

  What makes a good commentator? If somebody wants to get into broadcasting I would have some advice for them. During my long career I have thought a lot about what sports commentary is and the differences between commentators on radio and television. I think television commentary is identification and explanation, with occasional anecdotes thrown in.

  I think statistics are overdone—I do them myself, but I hope I don’t overdo them. They are useful but often they can be useless—saying something like ‘That’s Robbie Keane’s fourth goal of the year.’ I mean, what difference does it make what goal it is—the third, fourth or fifth; who cares? Yet all this stuff is trotted out, stuff like ‘And that’s his third corner this week.’ It would be different if it was the first goal of the season, or his thirtieth goal of the season, or the hundredth goal of his career. In general I think commentary is being choked with statistics. I can give you as many stats as anyone off the top of my head, but I don’t think I should be saddling everyone else with them.

  Moving on to my thoughts on radio, I see commentary there simply as being a balanced mixture of description and geography. People should be told the geography of the pitch: where you are, the commentator, in relation to the pitch. You should set the scene. It’s useful if people know the line-up of the pitch and where the grandstand is and so on. They may not know, and it’s up to the commentator to say, ‘There is one main grandstand, in which I am sitting, and an open side on the far side,’ and off you go. For me the most annoying thing to hear from a commentator is ‘The play is on the far side of the field.’ What does that mean to the listener? Where is the far side of the field? All it means is that it is further from the commentator, but really the listener doesn’t care how far it is from the commentator. What they should be saying is, ‘It’s five yards from the English goal,’ or ‘It’s ten yards from the Irish goal.’

  You should ‘place the play’ by saying something like ‘Play is on the half-way line,’ or ‘at the sideline,’ because the listeners will then think to themselves, ‘I know where that is,’ and it will help them to see the ball. People have to know where the action is occurring, so you must always place the play.

  The commentator should not shout, or whisper. Think of someone asking you to sing a song at a party and you start off too high, and then you get to the second verse and you think, ‘Ah, Jaysus, I’m not going to be able to make the end of this.’ And then you have nothing left for the finish. Commentary should be the same: you shouldn’t be starting off on a ‘high doh’: it should be at a good, level, exciting pitch, so you can move to the other level. And then there’s the level of ‘the most fantastic thing ever seen.’ And if it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen you can go down to that level.

  There are games that are naturally fast—such as Gaelic football, hurling, greyhound racing, horse racing, track and field, athletics—and obviously they have to be commented on with pace. They reckon you can say three words in a second, but the 100 metres is run in ten seconds: you have time for only thirty words, so choose them well. Don’t say anything superfluous, and remember to get the winner’s name and the other medallists’ names right.

  One of the fastest games can be rugby, in my opinion, which for the most part is quite a slow, ponderous, forward game but not when it comes to the backs: then it’s a case of quick hand passes and it’s an up-tempo game. But at the end of this big passing movement if I am listening on the radio I want to know who scored the try, rather than the tornado of excitement from the commentator’s voice. Who scored the flipping thing? That’s what I want to know.

  I have fantastic regard for horse racing commentators. Our own Des Scahill and Tony O’Hehir (son of the great Mícheál) are wonders, because they don’t forget that the colours change in racing. Every half hour the colours change, and there are so many owners in horse racing now and so many syndicates that there are numerous colour changes. So you have to go down and check them and see what horses are in the race; and no matter how well you know them they are all over in three or four minutes and you have to go and do the next race.

  People are carrying dockets in their hands and they want to know, ‘Did my horse win, or where did it come in?’ So make sure to get the winner right. These boys never seem to miss the winners. The boys in England, like Peter O’Sullevan, Evan Williams and the late Peter Bromley, would be high up in my estimation too but not as good as O’Hehir and Scahill, who are just unbelievable.

  With regard to interviewing sport stars, in my opinion the purpose of an interview is to get information from them and not to be standing there repeating stuff you know. It sounds obvious, but there are lots of guys who do radio and television interviews who start with something twee like ‘Tell me about the day you went off the road in the car. Were you in trouble with the police over that?’ knowing very well they had been in jail for a month. I don’t like that type of technique.

  If I was giving advice to anyone about doing commentaries one of the first things I would say is to avoid clichés—not altogether but as much as possible. I heard a report recently and every cliché in the book was used, and it really takes from it. What is a cliché? A cliché is a ‘time-worn phrase’—now that’s a cliché too!

  ——

  People often ask me, ‘What was the biggest moment of your career, Jimmy?’ I don’t think there is a ‘biggest’ but rather a lot of big ones, like the Olympic Games every four years, which are just fantastic experiences. Every sport has its world championship, but the Olympics transcend everything, and everyone in the world has an interest in them. Doing the big world championship boxing matches is also big for me. I really enjoyed doing the ‘Superstars’ programmes, such as the Tour de France and World Cup and European Champions League matches.

  I’ve done twelve Summer Olympics and twelve World Cups. I’m told by those who know these things that there are only two (both non-English speaking) people who have been at more World Cups as a broadcaster. Another big moment was doing the 1987 Tour de France when Stephen Roche won it, and doing the boxing commentary when Barry McGuigan won the featherweight world title in 1985.

  I have brilliant memories. There would be a lot of favourite sporting moments, so I simply wouldn’t narrow them down to just one. But one that does stick out has a connection with my father. Growing up, I used to hear them speaking about the great Jessie Owens. My father used to say, ‘Ah, there’ll never be another one like him.’ Nobody believed that Jessie Owens, who won four gold medals in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, would ever be matched. But, true enough, it ended up that I was doing commentary for the Olympics in Los Angeles in ’84 when Carl Lewis exactly replicated the four gold medals of Jessie Owens. That has to be a special moment for me, as I had a flashback to sitting beside my father and listening to him talk excitedly about the great Jessie Owens.

  I also have fond memories of commenting on soccer games that my son Paul, who tragically died in 2008 from motor neurone disease, played in during his career with Shamrock Rovers, Finn Harps and St Patrick’s Athletic. I did three or perhaps four
commentaries for television when Paul was playing, and I like to think that unless you already knew he was my son you wouldn’t know this from the broadcast. But it was a bit of pressure on me, because you want him to do well and if he missed an opener you’d have to say, ‘He should have hit the target.’ It’s not easy being critical of your own son live on air, but you can’t not say it because you know him and you don’t want to hurt his feelings.

  I think Paul, who won a League cup title, might have had a little extra pressure in his football career from having a father who was a well-known sports commentator, but he never mentioned it to me.

  ——

  If I’m going to be completely honest I’ll also have to admit to some howlers. After all—as Joe E. Brown famously said to Jack Lemmon when he reveals he is a man masquerading as a woman at the end of Some Like It Hot—‘Nobody’s perfect.’ I once famously said on air that the Argentine footballer Ardiles ‘strokes the ball like it was a part of his anatomy.’ And I got the boxer Jim Rock’s moniker wrong by calling him the Blue Panther (instead of Pink).

  But perhaps my most infamous gaffe was describing the pigeon as the symbol of peace. ‘And there it is,’ I memorably said during the opening ceremony of the Olympics, ‘the international symbol of peace: the pigeon.’ I just couldn’t think of the word ‘dove’.

  ‘No, Jimmy!’ the producer shouted.

  And perhaps the funniest was at the opening ceremony of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 when I said, ‘A beautiful piece of music specially commissioned for this opening ceremony.’ As the producer then pointed out to me, ‘that was nice of Beethoven to come back and write that!’

  Another embarrassing moment involves a sponsored programme for Glen Abbey, a company that made men’s socks and underwear. We would always have a VIP guest on the show, and essentially we would go out to the airport and get them coming in through the arrivals gate. We had the comedian Spike Milligan one time to say a few words for us.

  ‘Spike, you’re welcome to Ireland,’ I told him.

  ‘You’re welcome to it,’ he replied.

  A couple of weeks later I was back out at Dublin Airport to do an interview with the legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. I decided I didn’t want to get caught out again like that, so I began by saying to her, ‘Ella Fitzgerald, you’re welcome to the Glen Abbey Show.’

  ‘It’s sure good to meet you, Glen,’ she replied.

  I had a radio programme once called ‘Beat the Memory Man’, which went out live on either Monday or Thursday night. The formula was simple enough: there was a panel, and there would be one fellow doing horse racing, another doing music, and I was the presenter who also answered the questions. People won a guinea if they beat the panel.

  I suppose my most embarrassing moment has to be on this show when a caller came through speaking in Irish, and I don’t know enough Irish to conduct a conversation on the national airwaves. I knew I had to say something, as I couldn’t be totally rude or ignorant, so I said, ‘Agus ainm?’

  ‘Seán . . .’

  I didn’t know what ‘address’ was in Irish, so I said, ‘As Corcaigh?’

  And he replied, ‘Ní hea, as Luimneach.’

  Then he asked a question, and I hadn’t a clue what he was saying. I had to think on my feet, so I started saying, ‘Hello! Seán? Seán? . . . We seem to have lost him there . . .’

  And he’s saying, ‘No, you haven’t! I’m here.’

  ‘No, we’ve lost Seán. We’ll try him again.’ And I took him off the air, because I could think of no other way of getting out of it.

  ——

  People always pay me the compliment of saying, ‘There’ll only ever be one Memory Man.’ Well, I believe there’s an obvious successor when it comes time for me to hang up my microphone—which, by the way, I’m not planning to do any time soon. I was driving through town during the World Cup in 2010 when the Joe Duffy show ‘Liveline’ rang me, and he said, ‘We have a ten-year-old boy with us today who says he’s deadly on World Cup facts and figures. He says one of his favourite commentators is Jimmy Magee, and we were wondering if you would be able to come on the show today.’

  I explained that I couldn’t make it into the studio because I had prior engagements. ‘But I’d be more than happy to do a telephone call.’

  The show rang me when the young fellow, named Eoin Harrington, was on air. Joe was asking him all these World Cup questions that weren’t that simple for a ten-year-old, yet this young lad knew all the answers. I was really impressed. In the end Joe said, ‘Jimmy, can you ask a question?’

  I decided to ask him something that would give him a chance to show off his knowledge. ‘What country won the World Cup and didn’t lose another game for twenty-four years?’

  Straight away the young fellow replied, ‘That would be Uruguay. They won in 1930, and they didn’t lose until the semifinal in 1954.’

  I then realised that he really knew his stuff.

  The show had me on again another day with Eoin, who was beginning to make a name for himself. It was arranged that I would go into the studio and they would have me on air, and then during the piece I would be brought on as a surprise guest. He was really chuffed. It turned out that he was a grandson of Liam Campbell, who was a fantastic GAA commentator and was also, as it happens, the secretary for the Jimmy Magee All-Stars from the very beginning. Liam and I were very close before he sadly passed away. I was amazed to discover that here was his grandson answering questions about the World Cup.

  On the strength of his famous appearances on Joe Duffy’s radio show Eoin got a couple of minor jobs with RTE, interviewing players and match reports. He reminded me a little bit of myself at that age: mind you, he’s more intelligent than I was at that age and deserved the moniker ‘the Memory Boy’.

  Chapter 18

  | SOME HARD MEN

  I began the 2000s working on a show I had come up with called ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, about Irish expatriates who had played Gaelic football but ended up plying their trade in the English Premiership or with Celtic. I wanted to do it to show there are so many Irish guys whose background is in Gaelic games but who professionally ended up playing the so-called garrison game.

  For example, Niall Quinn played for Dublin in the all- Ireland minor final; Kevin Moran won two all-Ireland medals; Martin O’Neill played an all-Ireland quarter-final for Derry and played in an all-Ireland colleges final; Packie Bonner played for Donegal; Kenny Cunningham played for the Dublin minors. I wanted to do pieces with them in which they were thinking of home and the Gaelic tradition. Happily, the show was a considerable success.

  Earlier I wrote that the Barcelona games were the best Olympics I ever experienced, but on reflection I might have to change my mind and put it joint first with Sydney in 2000 and Beijing in 2008. Sydney was absolutely brilliant. We stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of the city, and every morning we would come in by huge double-decker trains and cross Sydney Harbour Bridge, with the Opera House just below us. What other picture postcard would you want to pick for going across to work in the morning? Sure it wasn’t work at all for me.

  All the little streets and avenues around the venue had the names of famous Australian Olympians: there was Herb Elliott Parade and John Landy Avenue. Typical of me, I decided to give myself more work on my time off by coming up with the idea of doing a radio programme on those streets. It was a roving-style show where I walked around the streets with my mike and told a little anecdote about each of these Australian heroes. For example, when I was in Herb Elliott Parade I would say something like ‘It’s a mile long, so Herb would have run it in just under four minutes, as he had famously done during such-and- such an event . . .’ Then I would turn the corner into John Landy Avenue and recount something about him.

  I have an uncanny gift for bumping into my sports idols when I’m abroad. Australia was no exception. I met loads of people there whom I admired, including Herb Elliott himself, who remembered me from doing the programme with
him in Melbourne. ‘Ah, the man from Ireland!’ he said.

  I also met the legendary swimmer Dawn Fraser, who was the only woman to win three 100-metre freestyle races in a row. She was a character. In 1964, at the end of the Tokyo games, in which she had won three gold medals, she was arrested for helping to pull down two Olympic flags from flagstaffs as souvenirs; but she was released and was later given one of the flags. She was banned for ten years, but the episode didn’t stop her keeping her three gold medals.

  ——

  Simply from the viewpoint of a genuine Irish football supporter I was annoyed with both Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy for the stupid carry-on in Saipan that resulted in the team’s captain—and, let’s be honest, our most important player—packing his bags without even kicking a ball at the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea. As far as I’m concerned they were both at fault, and they should have been big enough to shake hands and move on. Instead our chances of making an impact were dramatically reduced by Keane’s decision to go home. He should never have insulted his manager with such bad language in front of the other players; but McCarthy should definitely have treated his captain a little bit better too.

  In my opinion they were both wrong and they were both right. Each has to take responsibility for it. Roy was probably wrong in the way he tackled the situation about the training conditions in Saipan. He probably did it for very good reasons, but his approach and his language were wrong. And maybe McCarthy was too thick with him; you would have to say he was probably right about that also: who would put up with that?

  I wasn’t in Saipan when their dispute spiralled out of control and turned into something that resembled a farce—except that the only ones laughing were the other teams in our group. I still wonder how different it would have been against Spain with Keane marshalling the troops. Something tells me that the game wouldn’t have ended up with us losing on penalties.