Tired of scorning his bosses at the BBC, the old smoothie has signed for the opposition

Des moves to ITV!" At first glance, it seemed a newspaper billboard screamer on a par with Titanic Sinks, Brit Wins Wimbledon or Bradman Duck.

Yet after a "Wow!" and a gulp for yet another "end of the olde tyme order", the news that Desmond Lynam was leaving the BBC cannot have come as too much of a surprise to the lolling world of armchair sport.

For 20 of the 30 years the corporation has employed Lynam, it set all the standards and held all the contracts in a near-monopoly that was the envy of every other broadcaster in the world. The UK's Independent Television did a bit of horse-racing and a lot of all-in wrestling and that, just about, was that. For any worthwhile sporting event that brought the British nation together as one, the BBC was a catalyst.

For the past 10 years or so, however, this superiority and presumption of pre-eminence has been eroded by the harsh bombardment of broadcasting's free-for-all. The BBC's licence fee could not cope and, some say, nor could Auntie's lackadaisical hauteur. The others cleaned up, and as the appealing presence of Lynam moved smoothly through the gears - from boxing reporter to all-round bits-and-pieces radio presenter, to comfy television front man, to station talisman, to sitting-room icon, to national deity - there were, increasingly, no contracts or events or pictures over which the great man could actually preside. The emperor had no clothes; the field marshal was left with no men and no fields to conquer.

As BBC's Match of the Day presenter, Lynam should already have been peremptorily fired for running, as an angry fifth-columnist, a campaign against his scheduling bosses for putting out his Saturday evening programme at any and various times of the night on a whim week by week - often towards midnight, when children would be in bed. But the mandarins of Shepherd's Bush dared not sack him - and both sides knew it. When the FA Cup final was lost, Lynam went public again, and ballistic.

He told me: "For just £15 million, we have given up our BBC heritage. It has been ours for more than 60 years. What Hitler couldn't stop, they let Mr Murdoch do the honours, easy peasy. They just handed it over. As presenter for years, they didn't even have the decency or guts to tell me. Not even a phone call. "It was as though `somebody's very sick in the family, but it'll all go away if we don't tell anybody about it'. BBC Sport needs someone with muscle and clout who won't allow the suits and accountants to push it around anymore."

But he stayed. Well, the 1998 World Cup was coming up in France, and once again Lynam and his BBC team in their studio high above the ChampsElysees took all the critical plaudits - and ensured the BBC the highest ratings, with Lynam winning Sun polls of "top totty" even over such blatant pin-ups as David Ginola.

Oscar Wilde once wrote of a lady who "knew nothing at all about music, but was very fond of musicians". Lynam updated it - and apparently a nation of women who historically knew nothing about football remained glued to their seats because they had become very fond of a certain TV football presenter. With his just-washed but totally unsheened thatch of grey hair, matched with his raggedy top lip and, we must presume, slow-burn bedroom eyes, he played MC to all the passing dramas as seemingly lazy, laid-back and unfazed as an ageing seal basking in a warm hollow of sand.

Someone even wrote a play for BBC1 called My Summer with Des, and the actress who starred in it drooled: "He has more charisma than any other actor I've ever been opposite."

It had been two World Cups before that Lynam had moved from talisman to fully fledged British national icon - the Italian summer when England made the semis; Paul Gascoigne wept and, at a stroke, became Gazza; and Desmond became Des as he nightly signed off: "Take it away, Luciano", and Pavarotti would let rip with Nessun Dorma.

Before that, Lynam's talent and career had been simmering pleasantly enough. He had a couple of lucky breaks and was considered in the BBC sportsrooms as a jolly good egg and all-rounder, but not one necessarily touched by the broadcaster's fairy dust. Now, at the century's end, any history of broadcasting - the BBC's started with the 1927 live "narration" of the Cup final between Cardiff City and Arsenal - might well include Lynam as an all-time great in a pantheon peopled by British grandees such as the 1940s war correspondents, or Ed Murrow, Richard Dimbleby, Gilbert Harding, John Arlott . . .

His reputation nationally has long left behind even his mentors at the lip mike - such ground-breaking stalwarts of the BBC outside broadcast department as Peter Dimmock and David Coleman. It was the cruel tabloid-induced "disgrace" of Coleman's successor on Grandstand, Frank Bough, that allowed room for Lynam's smooth advancement from radio to television.

There was no jealousy about Lynam's rise and rise. The broadcasting pros knew he was ready for it. We sporting hacks on the back pages knew he was no smoothie-chops, but a good old pro who had served his time in the small halls - being first in and last out and, deadline met, the one to turn off the lights. He was a terrific boxing reporter in the days when the wireless was just becoming the radio.

He would laugh at his own faux pas - "born in Italy, all his fights have been in his native New York", or, in front of Grand- stand's Saturday teatime teleprinter, "Chesterfield 1, Chester 1 - another scoreless draw there in that local derby". He still blushes when remembering how, national fame just about assured, he dried up during a World Cup game in Naples in 1990. He stared, a rabbit in headlights, at the camera and was unable to tell the 14 million viewers a thing. Not one word. He couldn't remember where he was, what he was doing there, even his name. But he still wisecracks: "See Naples and dry."

He put it all in perspective when he first took the Grandstand job. No high-falutin keen-as-mustard Coleman stuff about the glories of sport and endeavour. Des told the Radio Times: "There's a simple recipe about this sports business of mine. Viewers must remember it when I'm rabbitting on. If you're a sporting star, you're a sporting star. If you don't quite make it as a player, you become a coach. If you can't coach, you become a journalist. And if you can't spell, you become a presenter of Grand- stand on Saturday afternoons."

He has remained appealingly self-deprecating. I last had a drink with Des in, of all places, a taverna alongside a canal in Venice last year. My wife and I, on holiday, were sitting there minding our own business when, with a screech of gears and brakes, the whole area was suddenly overtaken by a film crew. Lights! Action! Camera! The real stuff, ready to roll, and everybody shouting as if they were each Zefirelli himself.

Out of the last van, scruffily immaculate in his singular way, stepped a man in a crumpled white suit - obviously the superstar. It was Des. We demanded simultaneously: "What the hell are you doing here? Why aren't you at Wimbledon, Villa Park, Twickenham, Old Trafford, wherever . . ?'

Des was moonlighting, doing a lucrative in-flight advertising film for British Airways European tours. Bernard Braden, years ago, might have been banned by the Beeb for extolling Campbell's soups, but now the BBC obviously knew Des could do what he wanted as long as he stayed with them. The deal ended last Monday.

He may have taken over BBC boxing commentaries from good broth-of-a-boy Eamon Andrews - but Lynam's Irishness has never been evident, nor traded upon. When the family first came to Sussex from deepest Ireland in 1952, when Des was 10, his classmates could not understand a word. On leaving school, he had straightened out the lingo well enough to become a trainee salesman for Cornhill Insurance. He began writing snippets on boxing and ice hockey for the Brighton Argus and was in pole position when BBC Radio began expanding to the regions. BBC Brighton's tapes were heard by Angus Mackay, legendary producer of national radio's Saturday Sports Report.

Eamon Andrews had left for more famous things, and Lynam was given a trial. After his audition, the management rejected him out of hand: "We have nothing against him, but think he lacks background, experience and, totally, personality."

But Mackay had noted something; he gave Lynam a whirl. He did the show for two years, presuming taskmaster Mackay was hating every moment of the partnership and missing his beloved Eamon. Until one night, after the show and as the two of them were taking the lift in Broadcasting House down from studio B9 to the pub, Mackay put his hand on the tyro Lynam's shoulder and pronounced: "Not at all bad, old son, not bad at all."