Sports writer with a remarkable gift for phrase and observation
Frank Keating, who has died aged 75, was the Guardian sports pages' prime columnist for more than four decades. Few modern sports writers have brought alive sporting people, past and present, champions and also-rans, as Keating did. Few have written with such sympathy, able to laugh with them, not at them, at the same time minting fresh, inventive phraseology. He created a new language for the nation's sporting press. He was unique, and beloved by contemporaries, who saw his writing skills and awards as a guiding path for their own.
And yet, with inherent modesty, Keating, as he wrote in 2002, saw himself only as a Sancho Panza "sidekick" to the likes of John Arlott and Matthew Engel, David Lacey and Richard Williams, David Gray and Richard Baerlein, Pat Ward-Thomas and Peter Dobereiner, John Rodda and David Frost, all frontline Guardian sports writers over the years. His columns, he suggested, were the "witterings of a sports-mad whippersnapper", in which his heroes were heralded with schoolboy relish.
For many it was the Irish in this west-country boy that gave his columns an instant visual quality. Priest ("M'dear, much love …"), scourge (Wimbledon, "the stench of armpits when it's wet and of armpit when it isn't … Sorry!") and jester, he had an extraordinary gift for phrase and observation, people and places made sentient as rarely before on sports pages.
Never was it bettered than his homage to the ball in one Christmas column of 2001: "If not a reindeer on the roof, sheer excitement had woken me that wartime midwinter at dead of night. At the bottom of my bed was a brand-new blown-up, saddle-shiny, leather-fragrant football. From Ma and Pa – Happy Christmas. It remains a family legend, how, overwhelmed in childish delight, I proceeded to wake the whole household and frighten the dogs and neighbours by joyously, bashingly, slippering my prize around the bedroom's four walls and ceilings like a demented squash player."
His many readers could then expect the spread of verbals, as he traced the four-letter noun to the leather, sphere, orange, orb, globe, pill, pigskin, bladder, "thing". Then, relentlessly, cherry, turnip, crimson rambler, fuzz, pea, pellet, puck, bead, aspirin and, finally, dimpled onion. Only Keating would have made it there. And then capped it with Ferenc Puskás's remark on Hungary's 6-3 victory over England at Wembley in 1953, "We would have scored 12 if your English ball hadn't been as heavy as a block of wet wood!"
Long Days, Late Nights (1984), a miscellany of Keating's articles from the Guardian and Punch (he also wrote extensively for the Spectator, New Statesman and Oldie), carried a foreword by Arlott, who remarked how an earlier book, Another Bloody Day in Paradise (1981), an account of the 1980-81 MCC tour of the West Indies, was one of the most admired by players. Keating's boyish enthusiasm was so well carried into maturity that men of both sides offered serious confidences.
In High, Wide and Handsome (1986), he charted the progress of Ian Botham, England's renaissance man in the Ashes defeat of Australia at Headingley in 1981, but, typically, noted him equally for his epic walk four years later for a leukaemia charity – 874 blistering miles. As he reported, Botham gave a single-word press conference at the end of it: "Knackered!"
Writing about Botham in 1992 for the Guardian, he looked back 20 years to recall the MCC's grizzled old coaches, Harry Sharp and Len Muncer, thinking the gangling Yeovil youth might at best make a fair-to-middling, lower-order pro for a season or three. Then what? A carpet layer or a corner shop. Not their rustic, rumbustious pupil breaking every all-rounder Test record that was going, resurrecting the game as a sport and ending up as an estate-owning squire with columns framing the front doorstep, trout in the lake, horses in the stable, farm workers in the yard and a Mercedes on the gravel.
Such nostalgia permeated Keating's writing. On the 1980-81 West Indies tour, for example, although he would evaluate play professionally enough, he took particular relish in a visit to the Trinidad family home of Sonny Ramadhin, yet another of his boyhood heroes.
Keating was born on a farm in Herefordshire, son of Bryan Keating and his wife Monica (nee Marsh), and brought up in Gloucestershire. Boarding school with the Benedictine monks at Belmont Abbey, near Hereford, and Douai in Berkshire meant sporting nights listening to Raymond Glendenning and Eamonn Andrews on the radio under the pillow. Briefly Frank was articled to a Cheltenham estate agent, before joining the Stroud News as a local reporter in 1956.
As a 20-year-old cub on the Hereford Times, he typed a report of a third-round FA Cup tie between Hereford and Sheffield Wednesday and posted it to the Manchester Guardian. It received a rejection slip from a Bill Taylor, thanking him for his trouble, but with encouragement enough to keep him trying for "the writers' newspaper" through stints in Guildford, Bristol, southern Rhodesia and Slough.
His breakthrough finally came with the Manchester Guardian's desire for national status and the need for editorial staff to back its London printing. So in 1963, Keith Harper, a longstanding Bristol evening newspaper friend, by now representing the Guardian in the west country, helped arrange an interview for him for a general subediting post – he got the job, at £5 a week, rising by two guineas a week after a year's satisfactory service.
In 1964, Keating joined Rediffusion television as outside broadcasts editor. Then, from 1968 to 1970, he was special features editor of Thames TV, but although two Olympic Games and two World Cups were a part of it, the ITV of the time was frustratingly outgunned by the BBC. Backed by freelance football reports for the Times from the 1970 Mexico World Cup, he applied again to the Guardian, this time to the sports desk, and was taken on by me, initially as a subeditor.
It was something of a return gesture. A couple of years earlier, Keating had given four journalists, including me, a commentator trial at a Crystal Palace schoolboy event, me a little frivolously, since I was on the verge of being appointed Guardian sports editor. Keating's prize, as it happened, went to a young British Forces Network lad named Barry Davies, who had studiously interviewed every boy beforehand.
By the time of Keating's appointment, Guardian sport had been given a major boost by the management's backing of a full horse-racing service, and money and some space to go with it. Now Keating went to work with his soft smile, teasing out precious seconds for essential corrections on the stone, the 70s frontline of printer and journalist over hot-metal forms. More importantly for his subsequent career, he enjoyed the sports department's gift of weekend football or rugby reports, those on Jimmy Hill's Fulham an early sign of his growing minstrel flair.
Manchester's earthier subeditors were not amused by a style they deemed more Daily Express than Guardian, but, to an increasing number of readers, it was obvious a writer of note was trying to get out. When finally, under Peter Preston's editorship, the budget was eased to find him "outside work", the question was: "What work?" Outside his writing Keating had dozens of different answers, among them freelance TV extras, such as the sporting interview series Maestro, for the BBC, a softly toned re-engagement with long-time heroes such as Len Hutton and Tommy Farr, which ran from 1981 until 1985.
By the late 1970s he was in full stride as a columnist: "What with rugby union championship, Cheltenham races and St Patrick's day, March is the month for brogues. In the Catholic church, Lent relents … They could print the race card in Latin at Cheltenham … Hey ho, what a darling jig the Irish bring to a prim place."
His careful interviews for the Guardian, "wheedling" as he put it, drew unexpected responses from some of the more difficult men of sport. He told of Brian Clough's hospital visit with a bunch of flowers for a newspaperman who had given him constant stick; and of Geoffrey Boycott, and what he really thought of Yorkshire, Yorkshiremen and of course himself. "Perrier? I'm English. Go out and get some Ashbourne water … WG Grace? I've scored a bloody sight more runs than that bearded old bugger, I'm telling you."
There were plangent memories, too, of Alec Bedser, chairman of cricket selectors by the 70s, but his eyes a sad grey-blue in remembering Len Hutton's Ashes-winning tour of Australia in 1954-55. Sickly with shingles for England's disastrous first Test ("one for 131 but seven dropped catches, mind you"), Bedser was dropped for the second Test. "Funny bloke, Len. Do you know, when I was ill on that tour I was in the next room, but never once did he pop in and visit." It was typical of Keating to extract such a memory.
Fervently anti-apartheid, Keating rejoiced in having his visa blocked when covering the 1980 Lions tour, with the South Africans claiming he had not filled in the appropriate forms. Less politically, his rugby sympathies were more for the Celtic nations than for any "swaggering squeaky English". But a day training with Will Carling's England squad helped put that right.
Anti-establishment and anti-apartheid went with the man, but the historian had his practical as well as human side. The England bodyline captain Douglas Jardine might suddenly be reappraised in the same good light as a Harold Larwood. Well, almost. Or he might remind readers that Scotland lost more "caps" to the first world war trenches than England.
Together with his first wife, Sally Head, a prominent TV producer, Keating in his middle years enjoyed the ample, arty life of Holland Park and the Chelsea Arts Club in west London. His classic Victorian terrace apartment was stuffed with books, displays of sporting pictures, and albums, all carefully notated. His table at the Ark restaurant nearby would be still going far into the night. For the Guardian cricket team, his middle-aged leg-break bowling could be a captain's last, desperate move in the over before lunch, his fielding such that in the fading light he might be buried at mid-on. But well into the evening his sympathetic eyes would be drawing out the opposition's life stories.
In 1987, Keating was profoundly happy to return to Herefordshire with his second wife, Jane. With her strong support, many a Guardian column followed. Quick-wittedly aware, humorous or nostalgic, his way with words never failed him.
One of the worst days of his life was in 1997, and Hereford's 1-1 home draw by which on goal difference they lost their Football League place to their basement rivals, Brighton and Hove Albion. His chief alternative recreation, growing roses, helped get him over it. Hereford regained their League place in 2006, and all was well again.
Keating is survived by Jane and their children, Paddy and Tess.
• Francis Vincent Keating, sports writer, born 4 October 1937; died 25 January 2013