RECENTLY dipping back into a collection of Hugh McIlvanney’s boxing columns confirmed that when the then 82-year-old called time on his decades-long career as the sport’s finest chronicler in 2016, he left a yawning gap that will never be filled.

Hugh McIlvanney pictured in 1976 after winning the Sports Journalist award at the British Sports Journalism Awards

The man was so gifted, his writing so sublime, that rather than privileged to be ringside at all the classic fights of the late 20th century, involving some of the greatest fighters and biggest personalities the sport has produced, it was instead boxing’s privilege to have him there recording the drama, its highs and lows, with the artistry of a Van Gogh before he cut his ear off. 

Just absorb the majesty of the opening sentences of McIlvanney’s account of the “Thrilla In Manila” between Ali and Frazier in 1975: “It takes a rare purity of spirit to irrigate the moral and aesthetic desert that is forever threatening to engulf the world of heavyweight boxing. What we saw in Quezon City, capital of the Philippines, in midweek represented a shining flood of that purity.”

Or how about this from his profile of Scottish lightweight champion Ken Buchanan in 1971: “On the corner of any one of a thousand grey streets from Wick to Berwick-upon-Tweed you are in danger of finding people who will earnestly ponder the question of whether it would take one or two Scottish regiments to cope with the Red Army and who will argue persuasively that Benny Lynch, if caught on a sober night, would have floored Muhammad Ali in mid-shuffle.”

McIlvanney was the product of a postwar working-class background in the west of Scotland. His father had been a miner and both he and his younger brother (award-winning novelist and now deceased William McIlvanney) evinced a passion for the written word that was ingrained in the culture of working-class communities that once valued books and literature as an end in itself. It is a passion sadly lost along with the industries around which those communities cohered.

In my time reading and re-reading his work, the experience has always left leave me inspired and demoralised in equal part: inspired to try and emulate him but demoralised at the realisation I will never come close. I mean how could anyone possibly compete with: “As world heavyweight champion, Frank Bruno was regarded by many as a squatter in somebody else’s mansion.” 

Ultimately, in arriving at an appropriate tribute to Hugh McIlvanney I can do no better than German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Talent hits a target no-one else can hit. Genius hits a target no-one else can see.”