Memory Man

by Jimmy Magee

  However, if I had my own broadcasting outlet, the first man I would try to sign would be Darragh Maloney, the best all-round man in the business. As a studio presenter and play-by-play commentator, he should be on prime pay.

  ——

  After the Summer Olympics my next port of call was the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. I love the Winter Olympics. I had been at them before, in Innsbruck in 1976.

  I got into a taxi in Turin and I asked the driver, ‘Do you support Torino or Juventus?’ Juventus is the most popular Italian club in the world but in Turin itself not necessarily; it’s a bit like comparing Manchester United and Manchester City. It’s said that more Mancunians follow City than United.

  ‘I . . . am . . . Juventus,’ he said.

  ‘Liam Brady?’

  ‘Ah! Liam Brady! You . . . amico . . . with . . . Liam Brady?’

  I told him I was indeed a friend of Liam Brady. He left me at the main railway station, and he refused to take any fare, because I was an ‘amico’ of the great Liam Brady. It just shows you the reverence in which he was held in Italy.

  I later recounted this to Liam and he grinned, ‘Did you get the number of the taxi, because I’ll be back there shortly!’

  The first time I met Liam Brady was when I was over in Leeds visiting John Giles, who is a great friend of mine. I went to Elland Road one day to see Leeds playing Arsenal. Giles was the key player in centrefield for Leeds, but playing for Arsenal in the same position was a long-haired young fellow called Liam Brady, who stood out as a top-class player. I knew immediately that he was on his way to becoming one of our most important players—as apparently did John Giles, who was the Irish manager at the time.

  I waited until the teams showered and changed, because I was travelling with Giles. We got into his car in the car park while the Arsenal players were getting on their bus. ‘Hold on a second,’ John said to me, and he jumped out of the car and ran over to the Arsenal bus.

  ‘Liam, can I speak to you for a minute?’ I heard him say. They had a brief conversation, but I didn’t know what they were chatting about.

  John returned to the car and I asked him, ‘What do you think of Liam?’ I really wanted to ask, ‘Will Liam make the next Irish team?’ But I would never invade his privacy—that’s another very important thing. I would never ask him anything about his team or his team members; if he wanted to tell me stuff, that was fine, but I wouldn’t expect him to tell me.

  ‘I spent enough time being close to him on the pitch to know what he was like as a player. You’ll find out soon enough that he’ll be on the next Ireland squad.’

  And sure enough, in the next Irish match Brady was playing centrefield with Giles. So I can say I was there the night Brady was auditioned, right beside the man who was picking the Irish team at the time!

  I’m friendly with lots of footballers and hurlers, but I was really close in those day to John Giles and would often stay at his house in Leeds when I went over there to cover matches. I have vivid memories of his wife, Kay, always making big heaps of delicious chips for us—something that would be frowned on today by the dieticians at the big clubs, but it never adversely affected Giles’s performances.

  He was without doubt one of the greatest players to don an Irish international jersey. I had first heard about Giles when he was a schoolboy from his future wife’s brother, Paul Dolan, who worked with me in ‘Junior Sports Magazine’. Dolan, who was an Irish Olympian 400 and 200-metre sprinter, came into the studio and told me, ‘You have to see this young guy playing. He’s a genius.’

  I went to see him play a couple of times. He was a little fellow—they were all little fellows, but he was little little. Yet I knew immediately that I was watching a genius. I then got to know Giles when he made it as a professional footballer over in England, first with Manchester United, and then we became more friendly when he went to Leeds United. He was brilliant at football, a brilliant man with a brilliant mind. Giles would respect you if he thought you knew something about football, or whatever subject you were knowledgeable about. He is a very solid person and a good, dependable friend. We don’t get to talk as much these days, but I do see him occasionally when he comes over at the weekend.

  Apart from soccer, John Giles is one of the best golfers I know. During the World Cup in Germany in 1974 he was there as a guest of the Brazilian Football Federation, because of his fame as a European footballer. He looked me up when he arrived in Frankfurt, which was our base for the competition.

  Our meeting in Germany all those years ago is still a standout moment, because of our golf games. We decided to team up as golf partners, Giles-Magee, and we would meet two other guys and go for a game whenever we could. We would meet different people each day and we would always win, because Giles was brilliant. He could beat them out of sight.

  One day we played a championship course in Frankfurt, and when we came to a section of the course where there is an up hole and a down hole parallel to each other, Giles said to me, ‘You might be tired walking up the hill. Why don’t you sit there and I’ll try and hold the two other boys, and when we come back down you can have a shot at the next hole.’

  He gave me a wink and headed off. Time dragged, and there was no sign of them. ‘Where the hell are they?’ I wondered. About twenty minutes later he was back down again. He told me that he won one of the holes and halved the other one.

  ‘It’s your turn,’ he said.

  I hit the ball and knocked it up to about five feet from the hole, and knocked it in for a par. Giles thought this was great and that they wouldn’t match it. So now we were three up, which was really good. They couldn’t believe it and promised they would get us the next day.

  The next day we played against the trainer of the Leeds team, Les Cocker, and the day after that they had the number 1 golfer in Denmark; but not one of them could beat us, because Giles was on fire.

  One day Giles said, ‘See the top of the trees there? See the way the leaves are blowing? This is a dog-leg hole. Put the ball into them as high as you can and don’t worry about it.’

  The others were up first and they drove their balls, and the wind brought them right into the wood. I did as Giles suggested and our two balls went the far side of the wood. It was just brilliant coaching from Giles—and that was just at golf!

  I also got to see him up close operating as a football manager when he took over as player-manager at Shamrock Rovers when my son Paul played for them. Paul made this step up to the League of Ireland after four or five of the lads from his team, Cherry Orchard, were block-signed by Shamrock Rovers during Giles’s first season. And I must add that Paul wouldn’t have told Giles that he was Jimmy Magee’s son.

  Paul was a very good striker, and Leeds United and Birmingham both wanted to sign him when they saw him playing with Shamrock Rovers. He was in the League team that won the cup with all these Irish internationals: Dunphy, Giles, Eoin Hand, Mick Gannon and Pierce O’Leary (who later became an international). That was a great team, which should have done better.

  I did the commentary four times when Paul was playing. There was a certain amount of pride there and hoping he would do well—not fall over a ball or miss an open goal, which thankfully never happened. If I wasn’t working I would go and watch him play. Paul never got booked—not even a yellow card—which is amazing when you consider that he would have been kicked around, as all strikers are. His motto was, ‘If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be out there.’

  I was taken aback one day when John Giles and Ray Treacy came to the house and said, ‘We’re going to do something tomorrow. We’re going to leave Paul out of the team and we’re going to ask him to play with the B team.’

  ‘Sure you don’t have to come and tell me that. It’s your club; you play it the way you like.’

  They explained that they were going to play him at centre-half. They had something in mind, and at half time they took him off the B side and told him he would be playing for the first team the
next day at centre-half. They were short a centre-half, and they had wanted to test him. He played so well in centre-half that he got man of the match in the papers. The two Rovers centre-halfs at the time were Noel Synnott and Johnny Fullam, but one of them was injured and the following week he was still out, and Paul continued in defence.

  After a couple of weeks he was back, but then the other defender went out injured and he was out for a couple of weeks. So Paul had a long run at centre-half. It was actually in this position that Birmingham fancied him. He thought about going, but I told him I didn’t believe it was a wise move, because he was struggling with a hamstring injury. ‘What if the injury doesn’t fully clear up,’ I pointed out to him, ‘and you went over there and were then turfed out?’

  I think he made the right choice, because the injury did worsen, and he might have become surplus to requirements. Besides, he was a home bird anyway.

  He was only in his mid-twenties when the injury occurred. He couldn’t wait for it to clear up, because he wanted to play. But our hunch came true and the injury did cut short his career playing League of Ireland. So he decided, of his own volition, to give it up and went on to play instead with the local team in Stillorgan, alongside his brother, Mark. He could still have kept playing at the national level—he was very quick with the ball and very fast and strong—but when he had the injury looked at it was discovered that it was gone right up the back of his leg. It was operated on, but it never really cleared up properly.

  Mark was a fantastic all-rounder and was amazingly fast. Both of them came on trips to America with the All-Stars.

  ——

  It was through my friendship with John Giles that I also got to know Jack Charlton. It was a contact that would be very helpful in later years when he became the Irish manager. We first got to know each other during his Leeds days, and after the matches John would bring me along for post-match drinks with the other players.

  Whenever I’m reminiscing with Giles about the times I went out with the Leeds players we always get around to mentioning what we call the ‘Greek tragedy’ episode. After a European Cup match in Saloníka the Leeds teams were invited to a cabaret. It was one of the funniest cabarets ever, because they had obviously gone out on the highways and byways and got three acts to come in and do their thing for these eejits coming in.

  The first act came out and did a song, then introduced a woman who came out and did a song and went back in and then out again—just the three of them trying to do everything. Without a doubt it was the worst cabaret you could possibly see in the worst village hall in the world.

  Through my friendship with Giles I got to know their legendary manager Don Revie very well. He was very kind to me. I would go to the ground, like an innocent boy, and he would always come over and ask how I was. And then he would get somebody to ‘go and tell John that his friend Jimmy is here’. I might have only gone over to Elland Road a couple of times a year but they all knew me, and it was good for my morale that people at the top level of the game would accept me into their circle.

  Like Giles, I was sad to see Revie leave the club. I know Giles got upset about the film The Damned United, based on the book by David Peace, and he successfully sued to have scurrilous passages in the book removed. He was depicted as the ringleader of the anti-Clough campaign. Now, I think it’s fair to say that probably none of them liked Brian Clough, but I think the fact that he was Irish made him a juicy character for the book. Giles didn’t really moan to me about him, because Clough was only there for forty-four days, so there wasn’t really a lot of time to moan.

  I met Clough once for dinner with the late Brian Moore on the eve of a cup final in London. Brian was a really nice man, while Clough was his usual abrasive self. He was quite nice to me, but I could sense why the Leeds players weren’t enthusiastic about him, to put it mildly.

  I met Norman Hunter some years later at a match in Elland Road and he was doing stuff for Leeds radio. I told him, ‘I saw the old Leeds team on Sky Gold the other night and they were a marvellous team.’

  ‘Yes, they were a great team. The thing about us was we had three or four natural left-footed players: myself, Terry Cooper and Eddie Gray. Then we had Paul Madeley and Billy Bremner, who were naturally right-footed. And then we had John, who could be anything he wanted to be.’

  I thought that was the greatest tribute you could pay anyone. I told Giles about that and he seemed chuffed.

  Chapter 15

  | MUSIC MAN

  I could probably be retired and sitting comfortably on my laurels if I had taken up a business opportunity with Garth Brooks!

  Let me explain. I decided to go over to Nashville, because it’s the place for country music. As a big country-music fan I wanted to visit the studios to see how the session men work, how they put songs together and how they record the singer with the band, which is not always the normal way of recording.

  On one of my first days there I went to visit a country-music agent. She said she had a very good artist that she was trying to get going in Europe and wondered if maybe with my radio connections I could do something to help him break into Europe.

  This agent was keen on the idea because of the precedent set by Nanci Griffith. She became big in Ireland first and then continental Europe and then got in the back door to become big in her native America.

  The agent played me some of her client’s tracks and I thought they were fantastic. ‘What’s the musician’s name?’ I enquired.

  ‘Garth Brooks. He’s going to be a major star, believe you me.’

  At the time Brooks wasn’t completely unknown in America, but he hadn’t completely knocked down the front porches.

  ‘I’ve no doubt about that,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’d better tell you the truth here. These songs are fantastic. You have a genuine musical genius here; but I don’t think I can be of much help in Europe. Yes, I have plenty of connections in Ireland and can do something there to open some doors for you. And I could probably do something in Britain. But there’s no way I can do anything in Germany, because I just don’t know anyone over there.’

  I would be later kicking myself for not taking up the opportunity to be their European agent. Over the next eighteen months this little-known artist went on to sell $14 million worth of records, without me, and became one of the biggest names in music ever. Ten per cent on those figures would have set me up nicely.

  I got to meet the man himself on my trip to pay homage to the musical greats of Nashville. The next time I was in visiting his manager Garth was passing through the office and he was called over and introduced to me.

  ‘You’re from Ireland? Wow! One day I want to visit your beautiful country.’

  He seemed a genuinely happy man. The one thing that struck me was that he knew where he wanted to be going and he knew his present status and wasn’t above his station.

  I met him briefly once more in Dublin when he played here, which was a fantastic show. I have to say it was nice that he remembered me, and we reminisced about our conversation in Nashville and his dreams of making it big.

  ——

  In retrospect I think I should have told Brooks’s people that I would take the gig and boasted about how I did have some experience in music promotion back in the 1960s when the ‘twist’ was all the rage. Leo Nealon, who ran the Irish Club in Parnell Square, Dublin and was an entrepreneurial figure, got me to go to London to try to track down a good Twist band and bring them on an Irish tour. I went over for him and I spent a lot of time in Soho, where the agents were based. I discovered an act called Peppi and the New York Twisters, and I arranged for them to come over to Ireland for a tour, which did really well.

  Near the end of the Irish tour we arrived in Belfast one day to be met by a huge crowd of people on the street. Peppi couldn’t understand it and thought they had a brilliant promoter who had all these people on the streets waiting for him. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that the crowd was out for Louis Armstrong, who was
staying in the Royal Hotel and also playing a concert that night!

  I’m predominantly known now as a sports broadcaster, but in my early days I was known also for my music shows on Radio Éireann. The station used to stay open late for the weekly Hospitals Trust programme, which was a late-night show; otherwise the place closed at 11:30 p.m. I was the first to keep it open until midnight with a programme every Wednesday night sponsored by Spar called ‘The Golden Hour with the Millionaires’, about records that sold a million copies. Larry Gogan does the same show now, called ‘The Golden Hour’.

  It was my idea to start the Irish top ten chart show on RE, which began in 1962. I first had the idea when I was reading New Musical Express, which was the big music-industry paper. It always carried the British chart, and I thought, Where is the Irish chart? But there was no Irish chart, because Irish programmes played the music from Britain and sometimes the big American hits. Bit by bit I convinced re that we should have an Irish charts show.

  ‘How would I do it?’ they asked me. I told them I had a way of doing it, by going to the manufacturers or distributors and asking them what their big sellers for the week were. I would then contact all the main music shops, county by county, and ask them the same. If it didn’t coincide I knew there would be something wrong somewhere. I would take into account radio play and would balance the three together to create the charts. They agreed.

  I was meticulous and conscientious about it; and Ireland’s first top ten was broadcast in October 1962. The first number 1 was Elvis Presley’s ‘She’s Not You’. The reaction from the station was good, and the reaction from the public was fantastic. There had never been anything like this before, and it’s going ever since. It was a good first to have to one’s credit.

  ——

  On the subject of Elvis, I’m a huge fan of the King, to such an extent that I have paid homage to the man by visiting Graceland about five times. It’s a fantastic place to go to, but I also found it quite eerie and it gave me goose bumps. I asked a couple of people if they felt something was present in Elvis’s mansion, and they agreed that they too felt something—you just can’t explain it in words, but it’s as if you can feel the presence of Elvis still in the building.