FRIENDS raise sceptical eyebrows when I tell them that I used to be the sports editor of the Morecambe Visitor, though it was over fifty years ago.
I was not a good sports editor.
I didn’t know the difference between a free kick and a penalty and caused outrage by attributing greater failure to the local team, the Shrimps, than their performance had warranted.
And football being a major local concern, the greater umbrage I faced was not from my editor - though that was bad enough - but first from a woman I didn’t know, who worked in a shop downstairs and came storming into my office to berate me as thoroughly as I would have deserved had I slept with her husband or used her last paper clip.
And then, in a wee place like Morecambe you would run into the players themselves in the pub.
Though my incompetence presented a quandary for them. They wanted me to write nicely about them so had to restrain their contempt.
I was young, a bit of a hippy. I was careless and uncommitted, a bit slack in my general demeanour.
In the humour of some around me I felt that I was being patronised. I began to sense that they attributed my personal and professional failings to my being Irish.
At lunch in a pub the barman asked if I wanted French or English mustard on my sandwich. The editor himself said, “Give him Irish mustard”, and everybody laughed.
I don’t have to explain how unfunny that actually is.
I had not grown up in a soccer culture. Indeed, at school we were not allowed to play it.
If Bro Gibbons had seen a few boys kicking a ball about the yard he would watch to be sure they were occasionally picking it up, playing Gaelic style — even though with coats for goal posts there was no prospect of anyone scoring a point.
Then the cricket season came along.
I assumed that cricket was basically just rounders in a straight line.
My editor took me aside to explain that it was a religion.
I was never going to be a devotee.
My job was made easier by bowling clubs and other lesser sporting organisations sending in their own reports.
I was inundated with press releases giving the results of contests between cycling clubs and go karting clubs in the general west Lancs area, and I was glad of them.
Sometimes I could barely read the handwriting but I could trust the compositors down below to sort them out, as they had been doing for years before I turned up.
But I was never going to thrive in Morecambe.
True, I did not deserve to thrive.
I made some terrible blunders. One day the editor dropped onto my desk a photograph which he wanted prominently displayed. It showed him presenting a prize to somebody or other. I forgot to put it in.
Which was daft because it could have filled a chunk of a page and saved me the bother of subbing a barely intelligible report from a badminton club to fill the same space.
This was unforgivable but not as legendary as my mistake in the tide tables which also went on one of my pages and nearly drowned the editor when he was out sailing with the mayor. I suspect they are still talking about that.
Morecambe Bay is a dangerous stretch of water.
I was given a column to write reviewing films. My copy had to be in two days before the films opened in Morecambe, so I drew on reviews in magazines.
I wrote admiringly about the ‘raw physicality’ of a new Marlon Brando film called Last Tango in Paris.
After they sacked me, with the film still running, someone changed my review to include the line, ‘don’t know what the fuss is about’ - under my by-line!
Yet ironically it was my pinching phrases from another paper that provided the legitimacy for a sacking that was inevitable. I had been sent to cover a football match that was going to overlap with a dinner the staff had been invited to, hosted by the mayor. I should have realised that I’d been sent to the match to keep me away from the dinner.
A reporter from another paper urged me to go ahead to the dinner and get the details of the match from him afterwards.
I went to the dinner and didn’t enjoy it, squeezed between the editor and the town clerk.
Instead of calling Bill, the journalist on the other paper, I read his report and presumed to be acting with his approval when I used some phrasing of his.
I was summoned to the editor’s office. He had received a complaint from the editor of the other paper. This was embarrassing, though I had only done for a football match what I was expected to do with the cinema reviews.
I knew they’d got fed up with me long before this and did not mount a defence.
It was time to move on.
