Chapter 1

| EARLY YEARS

I was a twelve-year-old boy listening on the wireless to the 1947 all-Ireland final between Kerry and Cavan in New York—the only one ever to be played outside Ireland—when I first dreamt about becoming a sports commentator. All these years later I still have to pinch myself when I reflect on how I have travelled more than a million miles and visited more than eighty-five countries in my broadcasting career, which is still going strong after six decades. It makes me, according to those who know these things, one of the longest-serving sports commentators in the world today.

For the first three thousand miles of those epic journeys I didn’t have to pay the fare, nor did I select the journey or the mode of transport, because my mother brought me from my birthplace of New York to live in Ireland when I was three years old.

Even though both my parents were from north Co. Louth, they didn’t know each other until they met in the Big Apple and fell head over in heels in love—as did thousands of other Irish expatriates who had left the old sod to seek their fortune. I’m not too sure how my father, Patrick Magee, met my mother, Rose Mackin, but if I was a betting man I’d put my money on them first clapping eyes on each other at a dance or at one of the frequent functions organised for Louth natives.

I was born on 31 January 1935 in the Bronx. I was the first-born of four children—two boys, myself and Seán, and two girls, Mary and Patricia—but, tragically, my younger brother, Seán, died as an infant. I have vivid memories of Seán, and even though I was too young to realise what was happening, I remember sensing that something was not right, as Seán was always ill and cried a lot. I don’t know what the cause of death was, and strangely I have little recall of the death itself, but I do know that it was a devastating experience for my parents, and I doubt that they ever got fully over it.

At the time the threat of America entering the war was looming, and my parents, who were homesick anyway and were being drawn home, like everyone else, used this as an excuse to permanently move back to Ireland. I never spoke to them about it, but I believe their rationale was that America probably wasn’t a place for young James to be growing up in.

It’s something I can sympathise with, because many years later I got an offer of a job in Akron, Ohio, as a sports broadcaster and DJ. It would have been a perfect gig—the money and job package offered were very attractive—but I had two children at the time and I thought they would be better off being reared in Ireland than in America. To her credit, my wife, Marie, did encourage me to take the American job, because she could see I was really tempted, but I reluctantly turned down the offer and have never had any regrets or thought about the path my career might have taken. What’s the point in having regrets? Life is too short for that.

To this day my ties with America are strong. I have an American passport as well as my Irish one, and I still get excited when I return to my birthplace. There’s a buzz about the place that you get as soon as you leave JFK Airport and head towards the bright lights and the big city on the Long Island Expressway, the excitement building as you pass Shea Stadium and then the magnificent skyline of Manhattan suddenly appears. Without fail, it always awakes special feelings in me; I don’t know if that comes from the fact that I was born there.

Travel has become a very important part of my life. It’s funny how travel and sports have combined to bring me to places that most people only dream of. I love going back to New York at least once a year and soaking up the atmosphere and walking the streets to relive memories of my very early childhood and also of later years, after my father died and my mother and sisters returned to start afresh.

Before my father’s tragically early death, when I was fifteen years old, I had an idyllic childhood in rural Co. Louth, in the Carlingford-Greenore area, about ten miles from Dundalk.

My father would be best described as a building engineer or mechanical engineer, and he did most of his technical work on the Cooley alcohol factory, which is now Cooley Distillery.

Before rural electrification, when the ESB put the poles up across the country, most households had paraffin lamps. My father, Lord have mercy on him, created his own wind-charger and electricity unit, and we had power pumped into our house long before anyone else had it. He had an amazing engineering brain, which I unfortunately don’t possess. When I think of the man I think he must have been a genius in his own way.

First he built a base for the electricity unit; then he put a hole in the base, into which he fitted a pole that was about 25 to 30 feet high, and then filled in the base around it. I remember watching him then get a ladder and attach a dynamo to the top of the pole. He brought the dynamo up to the top, then reached into his pockets for all the screws and washers and tools—because he did all this single-handed, without any help. Down below he had batteries connected up to suck in the power from a propeller that rotated when the wind blew it.

Watching him at such a height I remember feeling nervous for him—and, to be honest, I don’t think he fancied being up there in the first place. He had to tie up the propeller so it couldn’t move in the breeze until he had fitted the batteries to take the power and feed it. When he had the batteries all linked up he went back up the ladder again, loosened the propeller, and descended. As soon as the wind blew we had power, and when the wind stopped we had reserve power from the batteries. I have to say I wish I had thought of telling him before he died that he was fantastic in being able to undertake such a challenge.

My mother used to wonder if I would ever be able to do anything with my hands. But I was the complete opposite of my father, who was so handy: he had the brain and the hands of an engineer, while his first-born son was bloody hopeless using his hands. Just to show how bad I am with my hands, I once made a clothes-horse in school, which had a dovetail joint, but when I had all the joints done and it was time to assemble it I discovered that one side was slightly higher than the other. I had to get the plane out to narrow it down, and of course then it was too much tilted the other way. This thing that started out at four foot high was suddenly two-and-a-half foot high. When I brought it home, my mother thought I was the bee’s knees and was boastfully showing it off to all the neighbours. ‘Look what my Jimmy made,’ she said. Then one night she put a tea towel on it and the thing just collapsed. I think I decided there and then that I was not cut out to be a tradesman.

When we finally had electricity, I was amazed by the lights and particularly having a working radio switched on, listening intently to the sports programmes.

I was fascinated hearing Mícheál O’Hehir doing the commentary for the 1947 all-Ireland final in New York, and I thought, ‘Some day, I’m going to do that.’ And I made my mind up there and then that this was it for me, and nothing was going to derail me or detour me from becoming a sports commentator.

Apart from O’Hehir, in those early days my broadcasting idols would have been the likes of Stewart MacPherson, John Arlott, and Raymond Glendenning, who worked with the BBC. They all helped bring out my passion for broadcasting and made me seriously think that I would like to do it.

I not only got to meet Mícheál O’Hehir but also got work from him when he was head of sport at RTE. When I was still a teenager I got my first taste of being on the radio when O’Hehir had me on a quiz one time. He had heard from someone who knew me that I was good at quizzes, and he invited me on to test my knowledge. Though it was my first time to be on radio, I wasn’t nervous about speaking live on air, and in fact it felt innately natural. It was a fantastic experience. I remember O’Hehir firing off a couple of questions to test me, just for the fun of it, smiling and giving me the thumbs up when I impressed him with my quick and correct replies.

Looking back now, I don’t know how I succeeded in getting into broadcasting, because nobody belonging to me was involved in broadcasting or in show business. I think my father’s enthusiasm for sports rubbed off on me. He played a lot of football in New York, and in Cooley when he came home.

I fell so much in love with listening to the sports programmes that by the time I was seven or eight I began to do my own imaginary programmes. Everybody thought I was stone mad. I can only imagine what people made of this boy walking through the local fields doing an imaginary sports programme with ‘live’ commentary—and music to accompany it, because I also wanted to be a disc jockey.

I would do this programme without fail every time I was visiting my grandfather, who lived on the side of a mountain. It was a journey that would often take me an hour to make, even though he lived only thirty minutes away from us, because I would be so wrapped up in my show. I was always ‘broadcasting’—or you could call it ‘narrowcasting’. I had names, league tables, full reports; I would even change my voice when pretending to be a legendary sports figure being interviewed on my show.

On my walk to my grandfather’s house I could get lost if I had a few extra reports to do, something like ‘And now let’s go to Dunedin to find out how the rugby test match is going. The New Zealand out-half’ (whoever it was at the time) ‘is suffering from an injury.’

How I laugh now when I think about it! But I loved it. Now that I look back on it, it was actually great experience for when I finally got in front of a microphone.

One of the local people heard me doing my imaginary show and said, ‘That boy should write to Radio Éireann and look for an audition.’ I was about eleven years old at the time, and I didn’t even know what ‘audition’ meant; my mother had to look it up in the dictionary for me. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I got out the pen and paper and I wrote to Radio Éireann asking for my chance.

I didn’t mention how young I was, but it had to be obvious from my childish penmanship; but it didn’t stop them sending a curt reply, along the lines of ‘Sorry, we have no vacancies at the moment, but we will put your name on file’—the usual brush-off reply.

On another occasion another neighbour, who was involved in athletics, stopped me and enquired, ‘So, you think you can do athletics commentary?’

‘Not really,’ I modestly replied, before cryptically adding, ‘I’ve done several, but I’ve never done any!’

My imagination was so good that I knew in my heart that I could do it. ‘I’ll do a mile race for you right now, if you like,’ I said. At that time the four-minute barrier still hadn’t been broken, before Roger Bannister broke the world record. Amused by the confidence oozing from me, he watched as I started off, staring into space, and gave the commentary on a mile race—with no watch or anything like tapes of races running to recite—and I finished at four minutes and two seconds.

‘How did you do that?’ he asked, amazed.

‘I could just see them running the race in my imagination,’ I explained, and then I continued on my journey with yet another imaginary radio show.

I was obsessed with sports to such an extent that I wrote letters to footballers. I don’t know if children still do that these days, writing away to famous players. But I wrote to a who’s who of English footballers of that era: Stanley Mathews, Wilf Mannion, Raich Carter, Tommy Lawton, Tom Finney. I suppose it was a childish thing—and all the letters were written in childish language, with bad spelling and grammar—but I wanted football tips, and I would ask them questions like ‘How do you this trick?’ and ‘How do you do that particular defensive block?’ and ‘How do you make the ball swerve?’ Or ‘How do you get off your marker when somebody is marking you tight?’ The letters would be a single page only, because I realised early on that nobody would get to a second page when reading such letters.

Sadly, I never got a reply from any of them. I had been giving these letters to my mother to post, so perhaps she never posted them—but I didn’t know that: innocence is great—and that’s probably the reason why I never got a reply.

My father, in cahoots with a neighbour, decided to play a prank on me. One day I received a letter—and I had never received a letter in my life. I remember with trembling hands looking at this letter addressed to Master James Magee. As I opened it I wondered who was writing to me; but the thrill quickly vanished when I discovered to my horror that it was from the head office of the GAA, and it went something like ‘It has come to our attention that you have been writing to stars of cross-channel football. You would be better served making contact with the great people who play our own Gaelic games, such as Eddie Boyle,’ etc. It was signed ‘Yours faithfully, Pádraig Ó Caoimh,’ who was the general secretary of the GAA at the time.

‘How did they find out about my letters?’ I pondered out loud. I was very worried, because I was sure my father, who was ill at the time, would be upset about how I had put shame on the family with my letter-writing carry-on. I must have looked really worried, because after a while my father enquired, ‘What’s wrong, Jimmy?’

I was too worried to tell him, but he persisted. ‘You don’t seem yourself. Are you all right?’

Nervously, I opened my mouth, and the whole story poured out. Taking the official-looking letter from me, which I subsequently learnt my neighbour Willie Lowe had got his wife to type, he pretended to examine it before exclaiming, ‘God! That’s unbelievable.’ He would have made an excellent actor. Later, Willie and his wife dropped by, and the letter was brought up. After they all enjoyed winding me up—without punishing me too much—I was told the truth, and they broke out in laughter.

I eventually got to meet one of my sports heroes, although not a soccer-player, when the undisputed world flyweight champion, Rinty Monaghan of Belfast, visited my home town when I was twelve years old. He had arrived in Carlingford to visit some friends, and I rushed out looking for him when I heard the exciting news. There was no television back then, but I felt I had ‘watched’ all Rinty’s fights when I listened on the wireless.

He was a fantastic character. When he won his fights, sometimes in London and sometimes in Belfast, he would stand up in the ring and sing for the audience, usually ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’. No matter what condition he was in, he sang; after he had done it a few times the crowd expected it. He was a good singer, and even made records.

When I saw him up close in the flesh I was struck by how much smaller than me he was, and I a boy only reaching his teens. I made my way through the crowd and brazenly introduced myself as he was going into a pub. ‘My name is Jimmy Magee, and one day I’m going to do commentary on boxing.’

‘I hope you do, I hope you do. Keep at it,’ he replied in his strong Belfast accent. It was the usual uninspiring advice, but in fairness to him I must add that he stopped and chatted to me for a few minutes. In its own way it was inspirational. Here was a real live world champion, Rinty Monaghan—the first world champion I ever met.

He gave me his autograph before disappearing into the packed bar. It was one of the very few autographs I picked up over the years. Though later as a broadcaster, interviewing so many legendary sports figures, I would have the opportunity to pick up autographs, I just wasn’t interested. In fact I only ever asked two people for their autograph—Pelé and Maradona—when I went on a ‘world tour’ in 1977 to visit many of the sports landmarks that had made a lasting impression on me.

My parents also instilled in me a love of music, which I have to this day, and in fact in later years I was involved in a record company and wrote several songs. My mother could sing a good song; she wasn’t a pro singer, but she was a good amateur singer. She didn’t sing at céilithe or anything like that: she just knew a lot of songs and could sing them well. I learnt a lot of old songs from her, but she didn’t sing them to teach me: I just picked them up, songs like ‘Teddy O’Neill’ and ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’.

My father played the accordion and was a musician of fairly high quality. He would perform locally with a little group of fellows, which was more like a jam session, in houses and sometimes in the pubs. I heard him play in the house a lot. I used to say to him that he was a fantastic musician, but he didn’t think he was great and would instead list off the names of those musicians he held in high esteem. He continued to play until his health started to go.

He preferred Irish music, but he could play anything. The accordion was a big, heavy instrument. He got it specially made for him and it had Magee embossed down the front of it on the key side. It was a button-keyed accordion, which makes a big difference. A button-keyed accordion plays a different note in and out, which makes it more difficult to play. Dermot O’Brien, a late friend of mine, found it hard to perform on the old button-keyed accordion, because it was a different system.

One day when I was eight or nine my father was going somewhere and he left the accordion in the house. My mother told me not to touch it, but I went over to it anyway, because I was fascinated by it. It had what looked like ivory keys, and I started pressing them and began to play a tune. Haltingly, a tune came out: ‘Boolavogue’. I couldn’t lift the accordion, so it was still on the floor, and I could only go on playing for a certain bit of time. I deeply regret that I didn’t learn how to play properly. I can play notes with my right hand but I can’t play chords, and I can’t play the bass. I was fascinated by how my father could play all the chords and how you put the keys together and where you put your fingers.

But sport was always my main passion. And even though, as I told my new boxing friend Rinty Monaghan, I passionately loved sports commentary, my main dream was to be a professional footballer, though truthfully I wasn’t talented enough. I was playing sports every spare minute. I played a lot of football, but not hurling, because it wasn’t really popular in my area. I don’t suppose there would have been a single hurley stick in that part of Co. Louth at the time. And of course in my imagination I played for every team in the world that I described in my sports commentaries. I always ensured that a young Jimmy Magee scored the winning goal in injury time.

Any aspirations I had to play football professionally were killed off completely when, at the age of sixteen, I received a nasty knee injury while trying out for Dundalk. Even though I hurt the knee during the trial, I told myself, ‘I’m not going to let this stop me.’ I continued going, because I felt this was my big chance to shine. But the pain was horrendous, and they eventually had to bandage the knee up for me. I wasn’t sent for an operation, and it did clear up eventually, but that was the end of my ambition to play professionally. I played a few minor matches with the injury, and I still don’t know how I managed to put up with it. But even when it did clear up eventually it was never enough for me to take part in a real football match.

I decided then that one thing certain was that commentators lasted longer than players, which is true. I don’t know where I got that wisdom from at such an early age, but I was right—as I’m still going strong to this day.