Voice of rugby heard loud and clear 'out there'

SIDELINE CUT:The late Bill McLaren helped through his commentary to shape the idea of what the game of rugby was in the minds of people

BILL McLAREN: was there ever a voice more suited to a sport than the Scotsman’s to the oval-ball game? After his death this week, all the newspapers have acknowledged that the PE teacher from Hawick owned the definitive “voice of rugby”.

But it was more than that. In countries where rugby flourished, McLaren’s voice was the sound of winter itself.

The evolution of rugby from its class-orientated century of amateurism, when it appealed to both the old-school-tie network of England, the mining towns of Wales and to farmers of rural France, through to its concerted push towards professionalism, has been a formidable success. The way that rugby sells itself and continues to invent itself, to broaden its popular appeal and entice more kids to play the game, has been a lesson in sports marketing.

The men responsible for the transformation of their sport have supervised a progression that few could have imagined when the governing body decided to stumble in to professionalism in 1995. The idea of a rugby World Cup was something of a conceit: only 16 countries entered the 1987 tournament and it was generally accepted the quarter-finals would consist of the Five Nations and Tri-Nations sides, the usual suspects. (With South Africa excluded because of apartheid, Fiji made it through to the last eight).

Rugby always held a strange, sporadic international audience – a source of reverence and national expression in New Zealand, a popular pursuit in the Pacific Islands, as important to the Welsh identity as the male-voice choir, it was the sport that made life miserable for thousands of boarding-school boys, central to life in some countries but virtually unknown in many others.

Rugby’s transformation has been slick and successful and highly commercial. But it turns out that for decades before the guardians of the sport were interested in spreading the rugby gospel and raising its international profile, they had a natural evangelist.

Anyone who grew up in this country in the 1970s or 1980s knew Bill McLaren’s voice, whether they realised it or not. It didn’t matter whether you followed rugby or not, there would have been some icy Saturday afternoon when, passing through your living-room, you would have heard that Scottish accent on the television.

It was as crisp and clear as a mountain stream and it evoked perfectly the darkness of the Five Nations days in Twickenham or Cardiff Arms Park when, more often than not, Irish teams were facing into bruising and thankless encounters.

McLaren was naturally more exuberant in his commentaries when his native Scotland were playing but his great gift was to be able to communicate a fondness for all the players, whichever country they were from, to share in their pain and to celebrate in their triumphs. As the years went on, he cultivated a reputation for the colourful and fanciful simile – Simon Geoghegan feinting an opponent “like a mad octopus”, so and so “like a mad giraffe”, a successful penalty kick “like a fluffed number four iron” – but he never really needed the embellishments to set himself apart.

It was all in the voice, in the way he said something as simple as, “And here’s John Jeffrey, the big Kelso farmer”; then you would see the blond man with the pale, pale skin emerging from the back of the ruck, sleeves up and eyes blazing.

In the days since McLaren died the extraordinary thing was not the outpouring of respect and affection from this part of the world, which was predictable enough. It was the extent of his reputation in the furthest rugby countries. One message posted to a newspaper tribute came from a New Zealander who recalled his mates trying to imitate McLaren’s accent as they went through their schoolyard rituals.

John Beattie, the former Scotland forward, wrote of watching a Romanian player greeting McLaren with tears in his eyes because the Scot, with the sensible, old-world glasses and military hair cut, owned the voice on the video tapes of rugby matches smuggled into the country during Ceausescu’s era.

For the Romanian, McLaren’s voice and description held everything that he associated with “out there”, with the game as it was played in the western world by the best players.

That McLaren’s voice could have such a profound effect on so many people meant his commentaries, for thousands of people, were not just an accompaniment to the match, they were inherently of the match, as important as the players or the great tries that may have been scored. The remarkable thing was that commentating was a pastime for McLaren for most of his life.

He taught in school, he played golf, he carried around a tin of mints which became something of a trademark.

Like many of the great microphone men from whom the commentaries seem to flow, he was fastidious in his preparation and his rehearsal, and although he was good enough to earn international trials for Scotland, he remained first and foremost a fan – you can hear the thrill in his voice in all the commentaries.

He lived the quintessential 20th century life. He fought in Africa and Italy and the second World War and his rugby career was abruptly stopped when he contracted polio. Both of those experiences would surely have made it easy for him to keep rugby within a proper perspective, to celebrate it as an escape and a privilege, a re-enactment on the sporting fields of the centuries of feuds between the home countries and France.

In the film Away for Her, there is a poignant and fiendishly funny scene in a retirement home where a former sportscaster has retreated so permanently into his working life that he commentates on his every moment. The sports announcer just has a bit part in the film but it is unforgettable.

As he walks past the central character, who is leaning against a wall trying to deal with some bad news, the sports commentator drones “and we’re walking down the hall, turning left and straight by the guy with the broken heart . . .”

In a few seconds, it illuminates the essential strangeness of commentating on games for a living.

It is a tough job and unforgiving too; it leaves you more open to ridicule than most and makes you not so much a household name or face as a household sound, as familiar as the theme tune to any of the soap operas.

Rugby, in the last decades of amateurism, was fortunate to have a number of distinguished commentators. It was always worth hearing Nigel Starmer-Smith when England played France. Clips of Ireland’s 1980s Five Nations wins don’t seem complete unless Fred Cogley is calling them.

And in McLaren, rugby had found its doyen. He made it seem effortless and did it in a style that was entirely natural and fitted perfectly. It was a gift, a happy union between the sport and the individual. But the crucial thing was you always knew the sport was not the be-all and end-all to the man.

In the incidental things McLaren said, it was clear that once those fresh and utterly distinctive commentaries were over and the microphone switched off, he was quite happy to retreat into Scotland and to live an anonymous life.

It seems unlikely Bill McLaren ever understood or even thought about his importance to rugby. But he helped to shape the idea of what the game was in the minds of people he never knew. He never got to play for Scotland but he was an international nonetheless.