Audiences tuned in to televised rugby union matches as much to listen to Bill McLaren’s commentaries as they did to watch the game itself. It was not just that, like any good critic, he alerted you to hidden plots and sub-texts. It was that, through the poetry of his commentary, he rendered a muddy, brutish game, played by men the size of small trucks, a thing of beauty and grace.
Like John Arlott in cricket, John Motson in football, and Dan Maskell in tennis, Bill McLaren’s vocabulary, the rhythm of his speech, the idiom of his insights, the timbre of his voice, all became as much part of the game as the game itself. Who does not have their favourite Bill McLaren catchphrase, delivered in his warm, welcoming, come-and-take-a-seat Scottish brogue?
“There goes 18 stones of prime Scottish beef on the hoof,” he would regularly announce, in the admiring tones of a country show judge ready to pin on the winning rosette. “He’s as quick as a trout up a burn,” was another, along with: “He kicked that ball as if it were three pounds o’ haggis”. For many armchair rugby fans, the 30 men on the field often served as little more than the raw materials for McLaren’s artistry; the canvas on which he would, over the following 80 minutes, paint his vivid portrait of the match.
“My goodness,” McLaren would gasp, “that ball’s gone so high there’ll be snow on it when it comes down.” Every scuffle was greeted with a schoolmasterly “a little bit of argy-bargy there”.
He leaves a mark on rugby that, even years after he laid down his microphone, remains as indelible as the impression of a fossil on a rock. He died, at 86, after a life worth celebrating. Let there be dancing in the streets of Hawick tonight.