A Boxing Memory: Hugh McIlvanney

A Boxing Memory: Hugh McIlvanney

By Garry White

“It’s only words, and words are all I have,” sung the Bee Gees back in the flare trousered, and open-shirted 70s. Yes, the Bee Gees, and not Westlife or Boyzone or whichever one, it was of Louis Walsh’s pre-packed vocal combos that had the temerity to bastardise the Gibb brothers’ heartfelt lyrics. Still, when asked to write about [ubiquitously prefixed: Late and Great] Hugh McIlvanney, these were perhaps incongruously, the first words that crept into my head. Of course, there are other better lines penned in voluminous, artful bundles over more than half a century by the great man, but we will come to these later.

Anyway, McIlvanney was undoubtedly greater than the sum of his matchless words. Yes, he quietly typed them onto pages in his study before knocking back a stiff drink or three or hurriedly unfurling them like a matador’s cape through creaking phone lines at a thousand different sporting venues. But when it comes down to it: words are just words. In the hands of the ordinary, they are ritually constrained and wasted. In today’s ever more unfeeling and aggressive clickbait world, they are typically little more than blunt expletive-laden instruments; mere cudgels for the unthinking to take anonymous aim at anyone they see fit. Even in the journalistic world, when hopefully used for more positive means, they are now typically apt to be short and trite; used as little more than an accompaniment to a more eye-catching visual. Where they exist alone, the peanut gallery view is that the modern audience is so distracted with scrolling options on their iPhones that they are compelled to hit the mark immediately. A story isn’t worth telling if it can’t be framed in 500 words or less… preferably with a hyperbolic headline that relates little to the accompanying text.

Thankfully, McIlvanney was of a manifestly different breed and time. As part of a proud sports writing lineage, he crafted stories with all the eye-catching colour and imagery of a novelist; successfully capturing the reader’s imagination and raising them beyond the critical yet often prosaic details of results into the minds of athletes and the inner world they inhabit. Yet, at the same time, still able to relate it all back to readers over their morning cornflakes. Beyond all things, he understood the humanity that lurked at the heart of all the sporting action. This was, of course, a pre-internet world. A world of paper boys forcing newspapers through often vicious letter boxes, pensioners providing a polite nod as they undertook the ritualistic morning walk to the ‘paper shop’, and commuters hidden safely behind a stiff broadsheet. If I labour this, it is because the unrequited nostalgist in me still mourns for these near-distant days when newsprint was king. An age that resided so close to our present but is now irretrievably swept away by time. 

I must have been only 11 or 12 when I first read McIlvanney. It wouldn’t have been in the papers as my grandad always bought the Daily Mirror, whose sports pages I would flick through after school, often finding out for the first time the results of the previous evening’s football fixtures. If it sounds like a primitive world, then it probably was. Perhaps a simple country cousin to today’s souped-up world with its endless screaming for competing attentions. Anyway, that first unexpected meeting with McIlvanney was in a sports anthology whose title I have long since forgotten.

Unsurprisingly, it was his famous piece written in the hours after Johnny Owen’s knockout defeat to Lupe Pintor at the Los Angeles Auditorium in September of 1980. Titled: ‘Johnny Owen’s Last Fight’ it recounts the Welshman’s unsuccessful challenge for Pintor’s WBC Bantamweight title and his subsequent unconsciousness. As McIlvanney pens the words, Owen is in hospital deep in a coma that he will never awaken from. 

“It can be no consolation to those in South Wales and in Los Angeles who are red-eyed with anxiety about Johnny Owen to know that the extreme depth of his own courage did as much as anything else to take him to the edge of death.”

This haunting opening sentence stayed with me from this first reading, but only later did it fully resonate. This time, it was through a different book: Come Out Writing: A Boxing Anthology. I was older now, maybe 16 or 17. The book that featured some of the greatest writers to cover boxing quickly became an obsession for me. I possessed a deep love for sport but had by this stage figured out that I would never open the batting for England, be the next Roy of the Rovers, or go 12 rounds at Ceasar’s Palace. But maybe I could at least write about it instead. And so it came to pass that some of these writers became as large in my thoughts and estimations as the sports stars they brought to life on the page. Rather than reading Pride and Prejudice or Hamlet or whatever A-level text I was meant to be studying, I was more likely to be found punching out Paul Gallico’s 1930s essay on Primo Carnera, straight from the book onto one of the school typewriters. At that time, I didn’t have any words of my own, so I instead revelled in Gallico’s and his depression-era prose that bounced off the page like a lead volley fired from Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn. Only later did I learn that Gallico – who subsequently gave up sports writing for fiction – had played a mean trick on poor old Primo. Sure, there were no “shades of Ali” about the lumbering Italian, but he wasn’t nearly as pathetic as the picture that the artful Gallico painted. 

Elsewhere, the book contained a short story by Jerry Izenberg about an anonymous fighter named Greatest Crawford, who walked out of the ring in disgust when his six-rounder was demoted to four at Shea Stadium in the 60s.

Another titled ‘The Night the Fix was In’ about poor Billy Graham being swindled out of the world welterweight title and an alleged deathbed confession provided by a compromised ringside judge. And finally, there was McIlvanney and Johnny Owen – No doubt the undisputed champion in this cavalcade of greats. And by this time, its words hit me in a way they hadn’t just a couple of years earlier. Suddenly, they possessed the power to move me to tears; to cut through my senses and lacerate my emotions. And in an early 90s world where I couldn’t just type ‘Johnny Owen’ into Google Images, all I had was the writer’s description.

“There is something about his pale face, with its large nose, jutting ears and uneven teeth, all set above that long, skeletal frame, that takes hold of the heart and makes unbearable the thought of him being badly hurt,” wrote McIlvanney.

It was a long time before I actually saw a picture of the real-life Owen in a book at the local library. But when I finally did, I saw that this description fitted perfectly. Outwardly, Owen could not have looked less like a prize-fighter. His innocent face, with its exaggeratedly boyish features that radiated his desperate, almost pained shyness, was at stark odds with the inner fire that would feverishly rise when the bell called for it.

McIlvanney’s prose is otherworldly. He takes us from a father’s grief at ringside to a distraught mother at the end of a telephone line in Merthyr Tydfil and dramatically covers all of the fight action that preceded it. At one point, he provides some insight into the notes he penned in his diary the morning before the fight. “Feel physical sickness at the thought of what might happen, the fear that this story might take us to a hospital room,” recounts McIlvanney in sad prophecy. 

Immediately before that he opens up the readers to the identity of Owen, “In the street, in a hotel lounge or even in his family’s home on a Merthyr Tydfil housing estate, he is so reticent as to be almost unreachable, so desperately shy that he has turned 24 without ever having had a genuine date with a girl,” he notes. The man by this time is a British, Commonwealth, and European champion; yet McIlvanney navigates his way through all the belts and titles to the to the very essence of Owen. Through it all, even the 25 convincing victories in the ring, he is just a good-natured, quiet innocent who at 24 lives contentedly at home with his mum and dad. In an earlier piece on Owen prior to his 1979 European title challenge versus Juan Francisco Rodriguez, Owen’s father remarks to McIlvanney, “He’s [Owen] mine and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he is a lovely boy. He still washes the dishes and clears out the ashes to light the fire in the morning. Nothing changes with Johnny.”

And it was these word pictures, these paradoxes between the uncompromising warrior and the outwardly shy, timid boy from the valleys, that made me fall in love with Owen more than a decade after he had died in a Los Angeles hospital. In a sport that is by necessity predicated on toughness and often exaggerated posturing, there was something about the Welshman that forever pulls on my heartstrings. Later, McIlvanney would end his dispatch with his famous closing paragraph not only on the paradoxes of Owen but the sport of boxing itself.

“She [Owen’s mother] can scarcely avoid being bitter against boxing now and many who have not suffered such personal agony because of the hardest of sports will be asking once again if the game is worth the candle. Quite a few of us who have been involved with it most of our lives share the doubts. But our reactions are bound to be complicated by the knowledge that it was boxing that gave Johnny Owen his one positive means of self-expression,” wrote McIllvanney. “Outside the ring, he was an inaudible and almost invisible personality. Inside, he became astonishingly positive and self-assured. He seemed to be more at home there than anywhere else. It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.”

More than thirty years after first properly understanding that paragraph, I can still recall it word for word. In a world full of white noise, bluster, and bullshit, the words still reside in my head, uninterrupted and in perfect alignment. Their power remains undiminished, and there will always be more to them than grammar and syntax. Sports writing, and to an extent all writing, can observe unblemished mechanics, but be entirely empty at its centre. The literary equivalent of a thousand York Hall mismatches or cricket’s endless T20 franchise money grabs. The events happened; the facts are recorded, but scarcely, anyone can remember them. Nothing more than the old cliché of tomorrow’s ‘chip paper’.  Johnny Owen died chasing a dream against a granite-tough Mexican thousands of miles from home. His fighting heart, guts, and honour should alone make his sacrifice to that dream a thing of permanency, but additionally, it is McIlvanney’s matchless words that make it so. 

And the heart-pouring grief that was penned in what has become an epitaph for Owen, cannot be manufactured. These are not canned words. Instead, they have to be pulled patiently and painfully from the soul. The words written lightly on the page from the heaviest of hearts. Jonathan Rendall used to muse in his frequent passages of public introspection on his own sensitivity. The pain that he often felt that others didn’t understand or share. The undiluted glibness of everything around him. Despite his quick wit, you could feel his words often bleeding onto the page from his many open wounds. Despite their very different writing styles, there is something of that here in McIlvanney’s writing as well: the understanding of the human condition and its inevitable bedfellow, pain. 

“By the tenth, there was unmistakable evidence that the strength had drained out of every part of Owen’s body except his heart. He was too tired and weak now to stay really close to Pintor, skin against skin, denying the puncher leverage. As that weariness gradually created a space between them, Pintor filled it with cruel, stiff-armed hooks. Every time Owen was hit solidly in the 11th, the thin body shuddered. We knew the end had to be near but could not foresee how awful it would be.

“There were just 40 seconds of the 12th round left when the horror story started to take shape. Owen was trying to press in on Pintor near the ropes, failed to prevent that deadly space from developing again, and was dropped on his knees by a short right. After rising at three and taking another mandatory count, he was moved by the action to the other side of the ring, and it was there that a ferocious right hook threw him onto his back. He was unconscious before he hit the canvas, and his relaxed neck muscles allowed his head to thud against the boards.”

Hugh McIlvanney sadly passed away in 2019.