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By your name shall you be known and by his name he was indeed known. He was simply “Jock.” Many people wouldn’t have known his surname and, if they did, they probably couldn’t spell it. Whether to Tom Watson or Billy Casper or almost anyone in golf, he was Jock, the doyen, the Voice of Scottish Golf and his death at age 83 was mourned throughout golf as few are. “We have lost one of the very best,” Peter Dawson, former chief executive of the R&A, said.
This is Jock MacVicar, a man who hated Maris Piper potatoes because they were ever-present on menus and joked that his close friendship with fellow golf writer Norman Dabell was jeopardised because Dabell had lived in Lincolnshire, a county known for its production of that type of potato. The Jock MacVicar who disliked bagels because he couldn’t put butter on them. The Jock MacVicar who pronounced the green vegetable “as-pa-RAY-gus.” The Jock MacVicar who, when he received flyers describing Global Golf Post as “a must read,” would turn to his colleagues and say: “Why must I read it? If I want to I will. Why must I?”
He loved jazz, red wine, youthful company, Macallan and Springbank malt whiskies and if all were present he was content. “We were in this nightclub during the 2004 Ryder Cup,” Martin Dempster, the golf correspondent of The Scotsman, said. “And he turned to me and said: ‘I hate this music. Can’t they put on some Ella Fitzgerald?’ ”
Euan McLean, the former Sunday Mail golf writer, said: “On the Saturday night of the 2011 Open we were in a nightclub in Deal. The air was thick with sweat and rap music was blaring when who should come in but Jock who was then surrounded by people who were a quarter of his age. Jock would go anywhere with friends. He never was one to end a party. He’d say “yin (one) for the stairs,” meaning a drink to take upstairs. Trouble is it was usually more than one.”
Jock MacVicar, longtime golf and football correspondent for Express Newspapers, was the leader of a very close group of Scots which as well as Dempster and McLean included Steve Scott of The Courier, Jim Black of The Scottish Sun, Nick Rodger, golf correspondent of The Herald in Glasgow, and Stewart McDougall, formerly the Open Championship press officer. They were devoted to MacVicar as were so many who loved him, though not only, for his friendliness. Bob MacIntyre, in his first Masters, placed a black ribbon on his hat in tribute to Jock MacVicar, his fellow Argyll and Bute Scot.
“My standard greeting to him for 20 years was, ‘Well, bless my stars, Jock, you’ve lived another year,’ ” Steve Eubanks, the American golf writer, said. “To which he always replied, ‘So they say.’ I guess I thought that banter would go on forever.” McLean added: “The first time I walked into a press centre at a golf tournament this benevolent elderly gentleman came over to me to introduce himself and offer to help me. He was our figurehead, a mascot.”
Some aspects of modern life confounded MacVicar. He and cars didn’t really get on. He locked his keys inside one, left his wallet at home and had to get a taxi there and back in order to pay the rental fee on another. Another time he forgot to put the handbrake on, and a car door was ripped off as it rolled backwards. He was always losing his way. A colleague joked that MacVicar at the wheel of a car could be “overtaken by a bicycle.”
“After that, bloody hell, there was no stopping him. He went to PGA Cups, Ryder and Solheim Cups in the US, to the Masters, the Johnnie Walker in Thailand. He loved Dubai. He was the Sheikh of Al Barsha.”
Martin Dempster
Nor did he get on with aeroplanes. During national service in Cyprus, MacVicar had to jump out of a burning helicopter. That left him with scars on his upper body and started a fear of flying that was compounded in 1974 when he flew to Pescara, Italy, to cover a Scotland B football game. The game was abandoned because of heavy rain and the landing and take-off in Pescara so frightening that MacVicar didn’t fly for 20 years.
Then over dinner in the Royal Golf hotel at Dornoch during the 1993 Scottish Amateur, Peter de Savary, then the owner of the Carnegie Club at nearby Skibo Castle, offered MacVicar some Ativan pills to help calm his fear of flying. They worked. “After that, bloody hell, there was no stopping him,” Dempster said. “He went to PGA Cups, Ryder and Solheim Cups in the US, to the Masters, the Johnnie Walker in Thailand. He loved Dubai. He was the Sheikh of Al Barsha.”
Renton Laidlaw, the golf writer and TV commentator, recalls a story about a MacVicar misadventure in Paris. “Jock, enjoying a refreshment in a bar in Versailles, had been persuaded by some locals to take part in a table soccer match,” Laidlaw said. “Imagine the scene. Six men, three on each side, working the rods in an effort to score goals. Innocent enough, you might think, until an over-enthusiastic Jock had a chance to score. Instead of kicking the ball, however, he blew out his front denture and sent it down the chute that collects the balls.
“Play had to be abandoned for an hour while the locals man-handled and upended the heavy football table, doing their best to retrieve Jock’s plate. Play resumed when the teeth finally fell out, but Jock was no longer a welcome guest at the table. He had been given a ‘carte rouge.’ ”
For a man who had led such a glorious life, the end was inglorious. Late last month neighbours noticed his newspapers were lying outside the door of his flat in Glasgow’s West End. Calls from friends went unanswered. Wobbling uncertainly about his flat on 24 March, MacVicar had clutched at a radiator, pulled it down as he fell and lay there for 12 hours or more unable to get up.
Nick Rodger got to the flat first in the early afternoon of the next day and kicked the door down. He was followed minutes later by McDougall. They found their friend in the fetal position on the floor with the radiator against his back. Knowing they should not move him, they fed him tea by teaspoon and covered him in coats while they waited for an ambulance. “He was conscious and very lucid,” McDougall said. “His head was bloody.”
“I asked him about the football results,” Rodger said. “He knew Scotland had beaten the Faroe Islands, 4-0, and that England had scored a late winner and Germany had lost.
“To whom?” Rodger asked.
“South Macedonia,” MacVicar said.
“Wrong, Jock. North Macedonia.”
He was taken to the accident and emergency ward of a local hospital and was moved to another ward on Saturday morning. That afternoon a doctor rang McDougall to say their old friend “ … has had a trauma. He is unresponsive. He is at the end of his life.”
Rodger and McDougall rushed to his bedside and sat with him for 45 minutes. “He lay there with his eyes open but unresponsive,” McDougall said. “He passed away at 8.40pm. He’d had a very good life.”
Top: From left, Colin Callander, Nick Rodger, Jock MacVicar and Martin Dempster at the Scottish Golf Awards dinner where MacVicar received a lifetime achievement award
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