Memory Man

by Jimmy Magee

  It wasn’t affecting my work. I never went on air with any drink on me; I would have been afraid to, as I needed to be in total control. And I wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to either, if I had been the producer.

  But I did find it hard to give up the drink socially, because my colleagues wouldn’t believe that I was sworn off it. ‘Don’t be codding us, Jimmy! Sure have one anyway. Sure that’ll last for a week.’

  I got through that with tons of stubbornness, and I just kept telling myself, ‘I know I’ll never have a drink again.’ I had also given up smoking in 1971, because I had angina and the doctor told me that down the road cigarettes would kill me.

  ——

  If the Jacob’s Award was the highlight of 1972, the low point was being in Munich for the Olympic Games and witnessing the massacre of eleven Israeli athletic heroes by the Palestinian terrorist organisation called Black September.

  I had been excited at finally going to cover an actual Olympics for the first time, as I had been disappointed not to get to Mexico four years previously, in 1968. The first two weeks of the Munich Olympics had been wonderful, with an almost carnival-like atmosphere. The Germans were thrilled to be hosting the event for the first time since the infamous Berlin Games in 1936. There was a real sense that a successful Olympics would go some way towards erasing the militaristic image of wartime Germany, which was etched in people’s minds thanks to the image, which always sent shivers down my spine, of Hitler at the Olympic Games, using them for his own evil propaganda purposes.

  I know that the documentary One Day in September claims that security was lax in Munich, but at the time colleagues were remarking about it being the first time we in the media were aware of serious security at such events. Even getting in through the gate of the stadium was unbelievably hard, so tight was the security—to such an extent that my producers decided that I should do a piece for television depicting all this for the viewers at home. ‘We want you to show how difficult it is to break the system.’

  ‘Great. I’m looking forward to being your guinea pig,’ I moaned.

  The plan was simple: I was to attempt to gain entry to the Olympic Village without any identification and, I hoped, be refused entry. At Munich—as with any other city staging the Olympics—there was photographic accreditation, but in Munich you also needed a special pass if you were going to be at the news conferences, which allowed you access for three hours approximately.

  Outside the village the cameraman concealed himself and the camera. We began with me speaking to the camera and showing them my special day pass for the village. I put it into my pocket, and then I showed my accreditation, without which I shouldn’t be there at all, and then I took that off. Now, naked of badges, I strolled up to the gate to walk past security, but was immediately stopped—as we had hoped—and told I couldn’t enter.

  ‘I left my accreditation and pass back in the office,’ I said, and then gave the security guard my accreditation number, which I knew by heart. ‘You could check it with the powers that be. I have to get in urgently to do a piece on the Irish team.’

  ‘Nobody can go through without a pass.’

  I then spoke to him with the little bit of Irish I knew, and I baffled him so much that he got fed up and eventually told me, ‘Go on inside.’

  I felt that the whole piece, which had been sensitively and sensibly set up, was now a waste of time, because we had wanted him to refuse me entry. Little did we realise that my piece about breaching security was soon to become a sensation and to be beamed around the globe; for that night the Black September group broke into the athletes’ village through the very gate that I had gone through earlier. We were inundated with requests for the film after other media heard we had it. I felt sorry for the security guard and would imagine he got into serious trouble over the incident.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that I became aware that terrorists had stormed the village. I had come into work early, and I remember thinking, ‘There’s an awful lot of action around the place.’ Then someone said to me, ‘Did you not hear about it during the night, that there were some Israelis killed?’

  We had a ringside seat for the unfolding horrifying events, as just across the way from our office you could see the men in the white hats and the balaclavas on them. I looked up and saw police coming down the roofs. There were all sorts of eejits in the media camp who had obtuse ideas along the lines of ‘Let’s rush them!’ This nonsense was coming from the type of fellow who couldn’t even rush to the bar.

  On the night when they began murdering the athletes I had been out for a drink in a little bar in the Olympic Park with the late Noel Andrews, and we heard a helicopter overhead. ‘That’s the boys being taken away to the airport. They got their wish,’ I said, obviously thinking that the terrorists’ demands were being met and hopefully now the Israelis would be released unharmed. But, tragically, it was when they arrived at the airport that the massacre took place. It was a horrific episode, which made me begin to lose faith in human nature.

  Flowers are still placed daily at the site of the Israeli compound in the athletic village. The name of the street is Connollystrasse, after James B. Connolly, the first Olympic gold medallist of the modern games in 1896. I have been back there a couple of times and it never fails to send shivers down my spine when I think about those evil actions.

  ——

  I have a nice story about Jack Nicklaus, who is still the King of Golf. He has won more majors than anyone else; the only one likely to catch him is Tiger Woods, who has fourteen titles, compared with Jack’s eighteen.

  At the British Open in St Andrews in 1970 I introduced myself to Nicklaus and asked him if I could interview him for Irish radio the next day, and he said that would suit. We arranged to meet outside the clubhouse in St Andrews at 1:30 p.m. As luck would have it, in the meantime the RTE newsroom rang me to ask me to do a news piece the next day at the same time. I thought, ‘This will be awkward, having to go and find Nicklaus and tell him I had a bit of a problem with meeting him and explain it all.’

  But he was very kind about it, telling me, ‘Sorry about that, but we’ll do it again.’

  He was true to his word. Three years later, at the 1973 Ryder Cup in Muirfield, I spotted Nicklaus practising putting on the green. I went over to him and said hello and he replied, ‘Hello! How are you? Would you like to do that interview now?’

  Three years later and he still remembered. I thought that is the measure of the man.

  We did the interview in the Muirfield clubhouse, which you cannot get into unless you are a member. The members are very honourable people: Major This or Captain That—no ordinary people! It was all very pretentious. But Jack brought me in, and we did the interview in the locker room.

  On the day that I finally interviewed Nicklaus I went out onto the course while practice was going on; back then, journalists were still allowed to walk around the side of the fairway. Nicklaus was playing with Lee Trevino, Billy Casper and Arnold Palmer. ‘Jaysus! Talk about Hall of Fame material!’ I said to the others with me.

  This demonstrates how talented these guys really were. During the tournament Lee Trevino, who was a great comic as well as a great golfer, was putting and doing a commentary to himself: ‘Lovely putt from Trevino’—that sort of thing.

  Somebody threw him a ball and asked, ‘Can you putt that?’ The ball was still in its wrapper, and instead of taking it off he putted it with the wrapper still on. He took it out of the hole, unwrapped it, and asked the man who threw it if he wanted it signed. He autographed it, put the wrapper back on, and gave it back to him.

  As my colleagues and I walked up towards these living legends on the course, Nicklaus was slightly to the right of the fairway. He looked over to where I was and said, ‘Hello, Jimmy,’ and the others with me said, ‘How do you know Jack Nicklaus?’ I told them a little lie. ‘Ah, sure we’ve been mates a long time.’ I didn’t tell them that it was only ten minutes after I interviewed him,
because it wouldn’t have sounded as impressive.

  Tiger Woods, as I say, is probably the only golfer at the moment who can catch up with Nicklaus’s impressive record. I met Woods in the most unusual circumstances in the year he won the Masters for the first time in 1997. He was only twenty, and already he had smashed the course record with fantastic golf, the likes of which had never been seen before.

  There were hundreds of journalists waiting for him outside the press tent. I went outside and I noticed that there was a woman waiting there, who turned out to be his mother. We got talking about what a marvellous man he was and what a fantastic career he had ahead of him. Eventually Tiger came out to meet his mother. She said, ‘Eldrick’—which is his real name—‘I want you to meet my friend from Ireland. This is Jimmy. He’s been keeping me company all afternoon’ (though we were only talking for about half an hour).

  Afterwards, at a press conference, I asked Tiger a question. He replied, ‘And here’s the man who kept my mother company!’

  ——

  Soon after my memorable interview with Jack Nicklaus, I was very excited when I heard about ‘Superstars’, an American invention for television, launched in 1973, that had international stars from different sports meeting in competition in sports other than their own special field. Ireland became involved in it through RTE, and I was selected as the show’s presenter for every season that it ran until NBC, the channel producing it, dropped it in 1994 because of a decline in ratings.

  The first Irish winner was the great Kerry footballer Pat Spillane, and his prize was a visit to the World Superstars in the Bahamas. Over there Pat, who was a truly great footballer, competed well but didn’t win.

  One day Spillane and I watched some of the other athletes killing time by passing around an American ball to each other. Spillane was fascinated by this. He knew quite a bit about the American game. Toying with them, he said, ‘You know these fellas who come out to take the kicks: how high do they have to kick it? How long do they have to kick it for it to be a success?’

  They explained to him: ‘It would have to be hit long, but it would also have to be high enough to stay so that the players could get up around it and not be off-side.’

  He asked how long it would have to be hit for that to happen. ‘If I hit it up to that boundary fence, would that be long?’

  ‘Oh, Paddy, that would be fantastic.’

  And then he asked in mock innocence, ‘How high would I have to hit it? Would I have to hit it up to that cloud there?’

  ‘Yep.’

  He asked for a ball.

  ‘But there’s one difference,’ they told him. ‘When the ball is snapped back from the scrimmage there’s ten thousand tons of flesh coming on top of you.’

  They all got involved—even the truck-drivers and the television crew—and somebody snapped the ball back to Pat and, as everyone charged towards him, he kicked it high. Now Pat was a fantastic kicker and a high kicker. He kicked that ball right up to Heaven’s door and right down to the perimeter fence. They couldn’t believe it, and they kept telling others and kept asking him to show it again. Sure Pat could do it with his eyes closed.

  Pat actually got two offers to go to American football at that time, one from a New Mexico team and the other from a team in Ohio. They were telling everyone about the Irish footballer who could kick the ball so long and so high.

  I was walking across the fields in Clones one day and a slightly irate Tyrone supporter came up to me and said, ‘Sure what does Pat Spillane know about Gaelic football?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged and added, ‘all I know is, Pat Spillane has eight all-Ireland medals and nine All-Stars. Apart from that, I don’t know what he knows about it all.’

  ‘Message taken,’ he responded.

  On one occasion, after the Superstars finished shooting, on our way back to Ireland we decided to stop in Mumbai (then known as Bombay). The producer insisted that we take a bus to the hotel. Of course I said, ‘We couldn’t go on a bus. We’ll get a taxi.’

  ‘No, you’ll be ripped off in a taxi.’

  ‘But sure what if they did rip us off? What would the actual charge be? You could quadruple the cost and still what would it be between a few of us!’

  He kept insisting, and eventually myself and Marie, who was with me on the trip, got on this bus, which was packed like a tin of sardines. It was like one of those buses in the films that are full of people with ducks and hens and with suitcases stacked high up on the roof. The bus was jammed, and people wanting to get off at a stop had to be passed through the windows in this Indian heat. I kid you not.

  We eventually arrived at this hotel that I had booked, the Taj Mahal Intercontinental. It had liveried porters outside. It was a beautiful hotel, one of the finest in the world, and we arrived as guests getting out of this clapped-out bus. I’ve never seen anything like it, with fellows getting onto the roof to get our cases down. Marie giggled about that bus journey and we staying in such an expensive hotel.

  I didn’t realise it until I began working on my memoir, but I was fortunate that Marie was able to travel with me to so many places. She was in such far-flung places as the Philippines, Australia, Hungary, Canada, New Zealand and America with me. These travels were mostly when our children were grown up, because when they were younger she was unable to get away from home.

  On one of our trips to America in the early 1970s we visited Dallas, because she had always wanted to go there and do one of those tours where they bring you out to the ranches. I imagine this fascination was derived from watching the eponymous television show, which was the biggest thing on television at the time—apart from sport, obviously.

  We stayed in the Fairmont Hotel, which is a beautiful place. A chap named Frank Zito got talking to us in the foyer, telling us that he ran the hotel’s PR. I would later learn that this was a man who wore many other hats. It turned out that he was a friend of Jack Ruby’s—or so he claimed. He spoke with enthusiasm when describing the night that Ruby murdered Lee Oswald. His story about the connection sounded believable enough.

  When we mentioned that Las Vegas was our next port of call he told us, ‘Everyone knows Frank Z in Las Vegas. So just tell them I sent you and they’ll look after you.’

  ‘Great. Thanks,’ we responded, not sure about this boast.

  In Las Vegas we decided to test it. We walked up to the Riviera Hotel, where Neil Sedaka was playing that night, and said to the door staff, ‘Frank Z sent us from the Fairmont in Dallas.’

  ‘Ah, Frank Z! How is he? Good old Frank! Big friend of Jack Ruby’s, you know!’

  And we were ushered in and given complimentary tickets for the Sedaka show.

  I later learnt that Zito was one of the most infamous mobsters, who controlled criminal activities in the state of Illinois for more than twenty years. It so happened that this is where Ruby was from. Zito was charm personified when we met him, and you would never for a moment have thought that here was a crime boss who had worked his way up the criminal ladder after starting off as a bootlegger during prohibition before making his way into the seedy rackets of prostitution and illegal gambling.

  I never met him again, as he died shortly after our meeting in 1974. But it just shows you who you can meet and what can happen when you travel all around the world.

  ——

  About two years later, after my trip with Pat Spillane to the Bahamas, I was back at the Superstars and met Gerd Müller, who had scored ten goals in the 1970 World Cup and then four more in the 1974 World Cup, thus becoming the highest scorer of goals in the history of the World Cup until recently, when Ronaldo scored fifteen.

  As we were waiting for the camera crew to set up we played five-a-side football and I got to see this German legend up close on the play. Now, not many fellows can say they have done that, calling passes from him and passes to him. He spoke only German, but we were able to communicate, because a ball is a bloody ball.

  Another famous man who compe
ted in the Superstars was Ed Moses, the greatest 400-metre hurdler in history. He held the world record for donkeys’ years. He had competed in the Superstars show a few years earlier, and we had got to know one another then, because I was with him for about four or five days on set and we would do little one-to-one interviews.

  During the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984 I was outside the gates of the Coliseum one day waiting for the traffic lights to change so as to walk across, and right there beside me was Ed Moses.

  As we stood at the traffic lights a car pulled up in front of us in which there were three or four Irishmen, who called out to me. Amazingly, I noticed that inside the car was Bob Tisdall, who had won the 400-metre hurdles in 1932 and on the same track as the man beside me, Ed Moses! There wouldn’t have been more than three yards between the car and where Ed Moses was standing. In that space were the only two men who had won the same event in the same stadium, in 1932 and 1984. The Olympic Games in both years were held on the same track in the Coliseum in Los Angeles, the only time this has ever happened.

  Being there waiting at the traffic lights was one of those moments when you wish you had a camera. And I wish now I had had the good sense to say to Ed Moses, ‘Here’s a special man I want you to meet,’ and stop the car. It was just too awkward, because the lights changed quickly and the car had to move on. Neither of them knew the other was there—a historic moment for a sports buff like me.

  ——

  The tragic events of Munich were still fresh in everybody’s minds when only two years later West Germany staged the 1974 World Cup. Even though I had been to the 1966 World Cup in England, this was the first World Cup that I was sent to cover for RTE. I had been bitterly disappointed when RTE told us they had no budget to send anybody over to cover the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. It was painful doing all the commentary for the games in the studio, knowing that I was missing out on witnessing at first hand one of the most exciting World Cups in living memory.