SPORT was a major thread running through our family growing up. The usual routine would involve walking down to either Leicester City football club or Leicester Tigers rugby club to watch whichever one was playing at home that particular day.
Jock Wallace was the manager of Leicester City back then. I can vividly recall being there on New Year’s Day in 1979 for Leicester versus Oldham when a certain Gary Lineker made his debut. He was hopeless. Indeed, he was eclipsed on that day by two other debutants in Andy Peake and Dave Buchanan. Of course, Gary went on to become a huge hero. He’s also developed into a very, very accomplished broadcaster.
Would I have ever have envisaged then that Leicester would win the Premier League? No, frankly. I always yearned for Leicester to flourish into a bigger club. When I was growing up in the East Midlands, we were in the shadow of Derby County and Nottingham Forest. My ambition for Leicester was to be the biggest team in the East Midlands and then maybe the Midlands. I never thought for one minute they’d win the league and as I like to say to everybody now, win it by 10 points. It was not a fluke. That will stay with me forever. I was lucky enough to get to eight or nine of the games and taking my then 14-year-old son to them and trying to explain to him that this scenario was all very unusual. He now thinks that Leicester are a massive club but those of us who have been around them longer know otherwise.
Back in my early years, Saturday was very much a spectating day. Sunday on the other hand was a participation day and after a sizeable fry up I’d be off to play golf with my dad. That was the way of things until work got in the way. My dad was a keen club golfer and I found that golf was the best way of spending time with him. It just felt a very natural thing to do. I certainly didn’t play to any great standard but simply loved partnering dad in club competitions. That’s where my interest in the game started. Rolling into that weekend, we would watch Pro-Celebrity Golf on the Sunday evenings and I became captivated by the patter of Lee Trevino and the insights the likes of himself and Tom Watson gave on the game. For me it was a brilliant vehicle to cement my interest in golf, not just the playing side of it but the players and characters within it.
Despite a healthy sporting background there are not any great athletic deeds on my resume. It’s the oldest cliche in the book but if you can’t be a sportsperson then the next best thing is to talk about it. I became hugely fascinated by the radio in my teenage years. I found it the most magical medium and to this day I contend that the pictures painted on radio are far better than any HD TV can serve up.
Great radio broadcasts stimulate the imagination and that generates the most vivid images in my opinion. I loved Peter Jones, the old football commentator on Sport on Two, while Renton Laidlaw just had the most wonderful voice and delivery on golf. At Radio Leicester they did a youth programme which was run, largely, by volunteers and I popped in on a whim. From the moment I stepped into the booth just to absorb how a programme was put out, I knew that was the environment I wanted to work in. I made the teas, I took phone calls and from there I was off and running.
In my career, I’ve been fortunate to have covered some great moments. The Ryder Cups are always special and the Miracle of Medinah in 2012 will take some beating. The feeling of momentum that Europe managed to harness was incredible. To be able to describe that to what I know is one of our biggest audiences on Five Live was a huge privilege. Even now, having been golf correspondent since 2003, I still get that feeling of fortune. You are walking inside the ropes and you have this great position at such epic sporting occasions.
At Troon in 2016, I followed Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson over the final weekend of that astonishing Open. The closing shoot-out was the greatest golf I have ever witnessed. I remember watching the Duel in the Sun in 1977 at Turnberry and always holding that as a benchmark for the game but Stenson and Mickelson surpassed that standard in 2016. As for an ideal sporting weekend for me? It would consist of a few things and would start with a trip to Murrayfield to watch Scotland overcome England in the Calcutta Cup on the Saturday afternoon. I’d have a night in Edinburgh and then go up to the Old Course at St Andrews and whiz round there - even though I know there’s no golf on the Old Course on a Sunday - before, somehow, getting back down to the Kingpower Stadium in time to see Leicester beat Manchester United to go top of the Premier League.
Despite all that, I’d probably still have the weekly golf column to get out of the way .
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