Last Thursday was a sad, sad day. Bad enough that the King announced his retirement, after floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee for over two brilliant decades atop world tennis, but altogether more shocking was news of Eddie Butler’s passing at a mere 65.
It was only in his passing that you fully appreciated what a wonderfully gifted, multi-dimensional and talented man Eddie was, as well as simply being a lovely man. And what a privilege it was to be among his wider circle of press box colleagues, especially on tours abroad.
It was one thing being a seriously accomplished number eight for Pontypool, Wales and the British & Irish Lions, quite another to then drift into a career as a unique broadcaster and journalist via stints as a teacher and working for a property developer. He was also multi-lingual, a novelist of both fact and fiction, a charity worker and campaigner for Welsh independence, and much more besides.
And it is as the iconic voice of rugby on BBC, eclipsing even the great Bill McLaren, that he will be best remembered and loved. For as well as being intelligent, erudite and articulate, he was blessed with a ridiculously lyrical voice. Whenever the BBC put together a rugby montage with Eddie’s mellifluous voiceovers they were compelling viewing. He could have made reading the telephone directory absorbing.
That he did drift into commentating as a largely untrained broadcaster made him all the better. For aside from his mastery of the English language, as well as French and Spanish (which he studied at Cambridge University) and Welsh, Eddie brought a reassuringly and balanced soundtrack to a game in his absorbing double-act with Brian Moore.
Thanks to the BBC, we’ll always have Eddie’s voice. “The timeless voice of our rugby winters,” as Robert Kitson put it in the Guardian last Saturday. And no doubt they’ll do a moving tribute to his life and career, albeit it’s a poor substitute.
As Malachy Clerkin observed in these pages last Saturday, Eddie’s commentary had a way of both conveying the importance of the Six Match he was commentating upon, but also that it was still a bit of a lark as well.
In keeping with this, in the Observer on Sunday, Paul Rees recalled one of Eddie’s mottos: “You can take rugby seriously but you must not take yourself too seriously.” In this he was utterly true to his word.
It helped, too, that he had a whimsical way with words, and while his commentaries were what set him apart, Eddie wrote far more than he spoke. And he was a genuinely brilliant writer too.
About a decade ago, Eddie eased away from writing for the Guardian and the Observer, or at any rate the weekly treadmill of pooled interviews, press conferences and match reporting, in order to spend more time in his beloved home in a remote part of Monmouthshire with Susan and their six children.
Thankfully, Eddie remained a regular member of press rooms on international days, and after completing his first fictional novel, he revealed to me with those raised eyebrows, and seemingly much to his own surprise: “There’s actually quite a lot of sex in it!”
The turning point in his decision to step back from the newspaper grind, he explained to me once, was being stuck in a traffic jam on a motorway en route to a Premiership match in the English midlands one Saturday afternoon. There and then he decided that he’d had enough of that grind and duly resolved that he would do it no longer, ringing his editor the next week to advise him accordingly. “I simply had enough of it.”
Eddie had never been part of the pack or run with the herd. His slightly idiosyncratic reports, more match pieces really, were anything but formulaic; more his view of the match told in story format.
Through our long-standing relationship with the Guardian, The Irish Times often used his distinct prose, and a personal favourite was his piece on the 2011 World Cup final in Eden Park in Auckland, when the All Blacks ended 24 years of hurt by stumbling over the line against a French team which had been hammered by New Zealand and lost to Tonga in the pool stages and had a players’ revolt.
“The All Blacks had a gruelling night, which may be no way to start a celebration of their victory. But they were made to look distinctly uncomfortable by France, who were so extraordinarily unrecognisable from their shambolic selves at all other stages of the tournament that we should have known all along and beyond any reasonable doubt that it was inevitable that they would play like this. They remain contrary to the depths of their gorgeously unfathomable rugby souls, and we should treasure every mutinous sneer and sardonic shrug as indications merely of beauty ahead.
“There remains something, however, of an elephant in the room. The referee. Craig Joubert did not rise to the global occasion, only to the Kiwi event. He was not a 16th man out there, for the Eden Park crowd had already claimed that role, an expression of a nation’s will that was not going to be denied.
“But Joubert was not a curious investigator here. He seemed to take the view that this was not a crime scene but a house party and it would be rude to be too probing. In short, he refereed France but not the All Blacks. These seven weeks have not been the referees’ finest.”
On and on it went, every word a gem, until he concluded: “It was ugly and it was beautiful, as contradictory as France throughout the World Cup. The All Blacks were the best and they won it at their worst. They deserved everything that came their way, the hard way.”
He just nailed it, as Eddie invariably did.
