Sporting Limerick’s George Lee remembers the great Jimmy Magee

Since early morning today tributes have been pouring in for the late broadcaster Jimmy Magee. It seems like Bono everyone has a Jimmy Magee story. In fact I have two.

Like everyone else that lived in that monochrome single channel TV country that was the 1970’s I grew up with his voice. It seemed that Philip Greene covered the domestic football games but that Jimmy did the international events. Ever before colour television Jimmy created colour in matches.

I remember in his booming voice, he once referred to Horst Hrubesch the West German hero of the European Championship Final in 1980 as “The man they call the monster” and on another occasion as Bruno Conti stepped up to take a penalty for Italy he referred to him as “The little genius of football” (he missed the penalty).

However the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics are my most abiding memory of his commentating skills. It was in the middle of the night in a sleeping bag in a caravan in Kilkee on a little walkman radio.

I had just started doing a small bit of broadcasting the year before with “John The Man” Frawley and even to my untrained ear his commentary was superb. The balance of emotion, fact and timing as John Treacy ran down the home straight to take the Olympic Silver medal in the Marathon was something that can’t be taught or learned, it was to use his own term “different class”.

I met him just once, it was the summer of 1996 and I was going on Holidays with my wife to the USA, and we were in a queue for priority boarding with Jimmy Magee and none other than Pat Hickey of the International Olympic Committee.

Getting ready to board a flight to Atlanta the talk was of the upcoming Olympics and the prospects of a swimmer called Michelle Smith. Jimmy was at his ebullient best.

I remember telling him of my experience of a caravan in Kilkee and his commentary from far flung Los Angeles and how it had impressed me so much and he commented how when he was commentating that he was telling the story not to many people but to just one and how he would keep the image of a young child like me in his mind in future commentaries.

His presence that day was “larger than life” and from others who knew him much better than I did, that seems to be the general consensus.

So, in these days of wall to wall matches and commentaries when everyone with a microphone can be a commentator, we bid farewell to one of the sports voices of my generation who along with other great voices of my younger days like Don Cockburn have this year gone to broadcast in the real “Sky”