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They disagreed, and Harrington said, ‘I don’t know about that, Jimmy. I think I’d still give you a run for it.’

  ‘You’re on!’

  ‘Wait until we get a stretch of road, and pull in and we’ll do it,’ says O’Byrne.

  We pulled in on a stretch of road outside Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, and parked the car with the headlights left on to give us some light. We agreed that we would run from the car to the gates of Moore Abbey and back.

  ‘Whoever wins is the Sprint Champion of the All-Stars,’ I told them.

  Could you imagine if anyone had seen three grown men up to this type of codology at three in the morning? Anyway, I won that battle, and I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t, because I was the only sober one among us!

  Harrington told his son about it, and at the Masters in Augusta one year Pádraig said to me, ‘I never knew you were a sprinter!’

  ‘Don’t tell me your father told you that story!’

  Sadly, Paddy Harrington is no longer with us. He was a wonderful man.

  Chapter 7

  | MY WORLD TOUR

  I decided that if you’re going to call yourself a real sports broadcaster you have to see the major world events in order to know what you’re talking about. So I decided to go on my own world tour in 1977 to see up close many of the iconic stadiums around the globe.

  Looking back, I don’t know how Marie put up with me, because I didn’t really ask her if she minded me being away for so long. I probably didn’t ask just in case she did mind and objected to this dream trip of mine.

  I kicked off my sojourn by going over to watch the Tour de France. A friend of mine who worked for a Belgian television station, BRT, happened to be a good mate of the former cyclist Fred de Bruyne, got me accredited and agreed to take me in his car around the tour. Fred was a classic rider and a winner himself. We met through the Olympics, where at night some of the press corps would go singing and dancing. The tour was going a few days when I joined up. It was fascinating to be there watching some of the greatest cyclists; and they didn’t get any better than Eddy Merckx, who happened to be the first cyclist I met on the Tour de France.

  The cyclists register every morning. On my first morning there Merckx came up to sign in and casually handed his bike to his compatriot Freddy and asked him to hold it. So the first bike I got to hold in the Tour de France was Eddy Merckx’s, without planning it. He was then, and still is in my opinion, the greatest cyclist of all time. It was a great thrill to meet him, because I love cycling and have always loved Merckx, who in his career won the Tour de France five times, the Giro d’Italia five times and the world championship three times.

  Years later, when I was doing a television show called ‘Champions’ in which I interviewed fifteen sports legends in their homes or at the site of their famous victories, I made a point of including Eddy. We went to his house, where he makes his famous bikes. It was amazing being inside the house, half of which is a bike factory.

  After leaving the Tour de France I booked a flight for South Africa with Swissair. I stopped off for a golf tournament in Switzerland and then I went to Geneva to get the flight, and it happened that the world chess championship was going on there. So, I had two days at that event, which was an enjoyable couple of days but also a bit lonely, as I had no-one to talk to.

  People thought it was a bit odd when I told them my next port of call was Dakar, the capital city of Sénégal, a place I had always wanted to see. Besides, I had managed to get a connection flight from there to Brazil at an attractive price.

  It’s strange arriving at 4 a.m. in a place you’ve never been before. I got a taxi to the hotel, and when I arrived there were two armed guards on the steps. They were asleep, and the receptionist was also asleep. An unusual welcome.

  The next day I went to the offices of the Senegalese Football Association. When I walked up the steps to the landing at the very top there was a huge photograph. You might expect it to be the president of Sénégal, or the president of the football association—but no, it was a photo of Pelé! I thought, ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ It shows how Pelé had transcended the mere mortals and the workings of other places. I then got a flight to Rio de Janeiro. I would love to be there for the next World Cup, in 2014.

  I’m probably the only Irishman to have given a live commentary on Brazilian television. A friend of mine, named Walter, was a commentator for TV Global in Brazil, and I went to visit him when he was covering a game between Corinthians and Vasco da Gama at the famous Maracanã stadium. Half way through the game he turned to me and said nonchalantly, ‘I have to go to the bathroom, my friend. Why don’t you cover for me?’

  ‘Sure I didn’t know any Portuguese!’

  ‘My friend, you don’t need to know any Portuguese. You know all the players, and all you have to do is name the players.’

  And with that he got up and left me with the microphone. ‘Bloody hell,’ I thought. ‘What do I do?’ I was afraid, but at the same time I was also half hoping there would be a goal scored so I could shout ‘Gooooooaaaaal!’ and mimic the way the South American commentators scream when the ball is slotted into the onion sack. I did about five minutes of this, just saying the players’ names, with the occasional Spanish word thrown in, like bueno or muy bueno—even though I was in a Portuguese-speaking country. Later I was told that the fellows listening to it in the outside broadcasting truck thought it was great. Thankfully, nobody made a complaint to the station, but I’d imagine that my Irish accent, not to mention my Spanish, must have caused consternation to viewers, who were probably scratching their heads and wondering what the hell was going on.

  When I was in the studio with Walter the same day he said to me, ‘There is somebody I want you to meet. There is a very special man who wants to say hello to you, Jimmy.’ He pressed a button, and there was Pelé on the screen, saying in a recorded video message: ‘Jimmy, you are welcome to Brazil.’ Years later Pelé would tell me that he remembered recording that lovely welcome message for me.

  On this trip I also watched the great Brazilian player Garrincha playing football on the beach at Copacabana.

  After my visit to Rio as part of my own personal world tour I went on to São Paulo, which is the largest city not only in Brazil but in the entire southern hemisphere, to watch some more games. There I came across a street football game called futsal, which today is popular everywhere but at the time I hadn’t heard of it. At 12:30 the city centre would come to a standstill as they would mark the pitch and bring out the posts and sidebars right in the middle of the city. The excited crowds would gather for football played with a smaller ball and with fantastic skill.

  Interestingly, when I came home I would wax lyrical about witnessing this, but people I would tell about it would say, ‘It will never spread.’ But it has, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a game in future Olympics.

  I know everybody praises Irish fans for being among the best in the world, but we pale in comparison with the carnival atmosphere that the Brazilians put on. And one particular Irish fan clearly knew this too. I was in Guadalajara in Mexico for the 1986 World Cup on the day that Pat Jennings played his last game for Northern Ireland to earn his 119th international, against Brazil. This Brazilian commentator had asked me if I would do an interview with him on the day of the match at an appointed time. Brazil always has a gang with them, dozens of people who dance and bang drums—and as many women as men among the fans. We started the interview, even though I didn’t know any Portuguese, but he interpreted it there and then while the fans danced behind us the whole way through it. I don’t know how I managed to keep my concentration during it all.

  At the end of it a fellow broke from the crowd and came over to me. He said, ‘Jaysus, Jimmy! I didn’t know you knew Brazilian!’ It was a fellow from Co. Clare who went to the World Cup and decided that the best gang to be with for the fun was the Brazilians. So he got a yellow Brazilian shirt with the number 10 on it and went everywhere with them.
/>   For the record, Brazil beat Northern Ireland 3-0 on the day. I think Northern Ireland’s best result was the quarter-final in 1958, or the magnificent result against Spain in 1982.

  After São Paulo I went to Buenos Aires. I decided to go to a football match and came across a certain up-and-coming sixteen-year-old Argentine footballer. Argentina Juniors were playing Vélez Sársfield. At half time a sub came on. He was a little tubby for a young guy, with bushy kind of hair; but he was just sensational. I said to myself, ‘This fella is unbelievable; he can do anything.’ I knew even then that this kid was going to be an international sensation.

  They don’t have programmes at matches like they do here. I think this is based on the principle that all the home supporters know their own team, and they don’t give a damn about the others. But there’s a magazine there called El Gráfico, which is essentially a football magazine with some other sports thrown in. It had this feature of giving marks out of ten (which is now popular everywhere around the world), but they were very conservative, to such an extent that even if you played really well you would get a maximum of 7 out of 10, the average being about 6. Everybody seemed to get a 5 or 6 unless they were exceptional.

  That night, after seeing Maradona in the flesh, I waited at Avenida Florida, where the latest editions of magazines and newspapers would usually hit the news-stands at about midnight. I grabbed a copy of El Gráfico, which came out every week and after special matches. The ink was still damp. I looked up the match I had seen earlier, and there was the name Diego Armando Maradona. He played only half the match, and he scored 9 in the magazine. I thought to myself, ‘This backs everything I thought when I saw him play.’

  I’m open to correction, but I probably did the first piece on Maradona for a European publication when I wrote about him for my next column in the Sunday World. In it I said something along the lines of ‘Watch out for this fellow in the World Cup, 1978. He is going to be the sensation.’ Sure enough, a year later Maradona was in the Argentine squad. They thought he was too young to play in the World Cup, so, sadly, he didn’t get any match time. Those who had heard me off air talking about him said, ‘Ah, sure that was a lucky guess! Did you really see him play at all?’

  ‘Mark my words,’ I told them, ‘you may have to wait another four years, but he will be there. He’s the next great player.’

  I was eventually proved right in 1982 when he arrived on the international scene and in 1986 when he single-handedly beat England with his ‘different class’, as I called it when commenting on that game.

  I never had a proper conversation with Maradona, as he doesn’t really speak English. I have talked to him, but through an interpreter, which is always unsatisfactory. But he knew that I liked him as a player. He was wonderful. Pelé and himself would be the big two players for me. I suppose George Best (who I will discuss later) would have been up there with them, but unfortunately he never played in a World Cup, and that wasn’t his fault: how could he have played if the team isn’t good enough to play in it? Nowadays there are two other great players that I admire: Lionel Messi, also from Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal.

  Reluctantly, after almost four weeks of a marvellous sojourn, it was time to return home. But my luck was still in when it came to meeting my sporting heroes. I had met Eddy Merckx, had been greeted by my personal hero Pelé, and had watched Maradona in one of his first games.

  To cap a remarkable journey, when I was coming back to Europe from Buenos Aires I got word from a contact in Swissair that Juan Manuel Fangio, a Formula 1 driver who boasted a record of winning the world championship series five times, was travelling on the same flight as me back to Zürich.

  I knew the seat he was in in first class (needless to say I wasn’t travelling first class). When we were airborne I pressed the call button and gave the steward a note to pass to Fangio, asking him if I could interview him somewhere en route to Zürich. The steward returned and said, ‘Señor Fangio would be delighted to, but he will do it after Rio.’

  We touched down in Rio and were there for an hour. After we left Rio he sent a message down to me to join him at the front. I interviewed him in mid-air for about an hour. ‘This is one of my great interviews,’ I thought, ‘talking to the fastest man in the world at the highest elevation I was ever at,’ which was probably 33,000 feet. To this day he has the highest winning percentage in Formula 1—a remarkable feat when you consider how technology has dramatically improved since the days when he was behind the wheel. Even the great Michael Schumacher once said: ‘Fangio is on a level much higher than I see myself. What he did stands alone, and what we have achieved is also unique. I have such respect for what he achieved. You can’t take a personality like Fangio and compare him with what has happened today. There is not even the slightest comparison.’

  I knew quite a bit about the man dubbed ‘el Maestro’ and ‘el Chueco’ (the bow-legged one), so that helped make it quite conversational. He was in his late sixties then but he was bright and fresh and still had a remarkable memory. He was still working for Mercedes and had the franchise for Argentina. He lived to the grand age of eighty-five and passed away in 1995.

  ——

  The following year I returned to South America for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. It was the second time that year I had been to Argentina, because I had also covered Ireland’s participation in the hockey World Cup a few months earlier.

  But the trip for the World Cup began on a worrying note when, as we were coming in to land in Buenos Aires, the pilot decided to abort his landing at the last moment and steer the plane back into the sky. While doing this he narrowly missed the control tower, and passengers sitting around me were as white as ghosts and some were screaming. For me it wasn’t really a frightening experience, but it would have been if I fully realised what was going on. When I saw my fellow-passengers’ reaction I told them, out of bravado, that there was nothing to worry about. The pilot had to make three attempts to land before touching down.

  When I wasn’t at games I would tag along with some of my colleagues to try the many wonderful restaurants in Buenos Aires. In fact the fellows had this thing about wanting to discover the best restaurant, and who had found it. To settle it all once and for all, four of us decided one night that we would have a dinner in Buenos Aires in five different restaurants. We had soup in one place, a starter in another, the main course in yet another, then desert in a fourth restaurant and coffee in a fifth. It was mad, but it was a sensational experience.

  Of course it did help to have some perfect scenery—and I’m not talking about the landscape! For me Argentina can lay claim to having the most beautiful women in the world. The women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four were just incredible. Yes, I was a happily married man, but I never felt it was a crime to admire such beauty.

  The atmosphere at the matches was electric. Argentina were deserved winners of the tournament. They had some amazing players, such as Osvaldo ‘Ossie’ Ardiles, Mario Kempes, Daniel Passarella and Alberto Tarantini, who were managed by the chain-smoking César Menotti.

  There were strange allegations about Peru throwing a match. I covered that match in Rosario. Before Argentina scored, Peru hit the post twice; so tell me how that could be a set-up. Argentina won, 6-0, and they had to win by four clear goals.

  On the evening of the final, when they beat the Netherlands—who had also lost out in the previous World Cup at the last hurdle to Germany, after extra time—it was spectacular watching what appeared to be every fan in the stadium ripping up their tickets and throwing them high up in the air. I wouldn’t have envied the cleaning staff in the stadium!

  Afterwards I struggled back to my hotel. There was no transport, but no problems; there was bedlam, but no rowdiness. I circumnavigated the estimated two million people wildly celebrating on the streets as they sang ‘Vamos, vamos, Argentina!’ All the singing and shouting, noise, singing, noise, singing . . . it went on and on.

  However, m
y favourite experience during that particular World Cup was a friendly game that was meant to be between the visiting press and the hotel staff but turned out to be something far more extravagant.

  We used to play football wherever we were, so in Argentina we decided to get a game together, and we were wondering if we had enough players. As we were discussing this I noticed a very well-known person strolling into the hotel lobby, and I pointed him out. ‘Look who’s coming in the door. It’s Bobby Charlton! Will I ask him to play?’

  The others were aghast and told me, ‘Jimmy, you couldn’t embarrass us by asking him. He’s a legend.’

  I didn’t let on that I knew Bobby quite well from covering football over the years, talking to him and doing interviews. I haven’t seen him in an age now. I purposely never spoke to him about the Munich air crash in 1958, because I didn’t know whether he would be comfortable talking about it. It’s not a subject I’m too keen on myself. To this day it sends shivers down my spine when I reflect on one of the most inexplicable, eerie experiences of my life, when I did a radio interview with Matt Busby in his office at Old Trafford, and among the things we talked about was the terrible Munich crash of 1958. He lost a club really; he lost so many young men. I think that affected him a lot. He talked about all the great boys he lost, and went into a blow-by-blow account of what happened on the plane. When I was in the room there was as much quiet as there could be; the music was turned off altogether and nobody else was in the office except Busby, myself and the producer, Ian Corr. But when we listened to the tape there was an aircraft noise on it, which I thought was weird and eerie, because we weren’t near an airport and there was no obvious sound at the time. There was this constant aircraft noise when we were talking about the plane crash. I do really think it was a sign. I didn’t go into it too much because that sort of thing bothers me a bit.

  Anyway, everybody that day in the hotel lobby was in awe of the great man, and all were impressed when he came over to me and said, ‘Jim.’