Jim on BBC TV’s Eggheads in 2016.
Adam Lanigan
Very sad news about Jim.
It is particularly pertinent for me because my dad, who’s 90, has been on the same ward at Wythenshawe as Jim for five weeks. At one point, Jim was in the bed in the bay opposite and hearing the regular Man City chat from my dad’s stream of visitors (I’m one of 4 sons with grown-up grandkids as well), Jim started regaling us with tales of drinking with ex-City boss Malcolm Allison.
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David Facey
Jim Mossop was everything you could want in a friend – loyal, funny, good company, and someone who knew where the bar was!
And more than fifty years at the cutting edge of sports journalism – most of it at The Sunday Express and the Sunday Telegraph – provided him with a huge bank of anecdotes that he passed on with that inimitable ‘Messup’ charm.
You do not need me to tell you how that long service highlighted what a terrific operator Messup was. He famously rammed home the point himself, when one of our colleagues from a provincial newspaper was naive enough to suggest Jim “did not know what it was like to work under pressure”, because he was “only” a Sunday newspaperman.
The outraged response was a classic. “Pressure? You’re telling me I don’t know what it’s like to work under pressure! Eight Olympic Games, ten football World Cups, dozens of big fights, countless major golf championships, F1 racing and so on with two commendations in the British Press Awards commendations, AND the Sports Journalism Awards winner of Olympic Sports Writer of the Year for 1992. Meanwhile you constantly churn out stuff that would find the spike at any decent paper. The bloody nerve!”
As that story suggests, Jim was fiercely proud of his distinguished career. And rightly so.
It was a real eye-opener to hear him talk about spending the night with Jack Charlton at the Astor Club in London on the day England won the World Cup in 1966 – they woke up the next day on separate sofas at a house in Walthamstow after being invited to a celebration party by a random stranger. How many journos could relate a story like that one?
Jim also had a prickly side, which frequently surfaced when his “uncanny” physical resemblance to disgraced President Richard Nixon was mentioned. The similarity was dismissed as absolute nonsense by Jim – he tended to use more colourful language – but it was always a good strike to beat him with.
My relationship with Jim started out as a ‘friend of a friend’. Martin Hardy sensed we would get along like a house on fire, and of course, he was right. The three of us later founded the Nevertheless Golf Society (it’s a long story) along with Alan Fraser, when we decided some R&R at Myrtle Beach was needed after a particularly exhausting Ryder Cup. Jean van de Velde is our president, and he was deeply saddened to hear of Mossop’s passing.
Jim’s career in journalism actually began at the North West Evening Mail in Barrow, joining the paper at the same time as a certain Bob Cass. That began a lifelong friendship, interrupted when Bob passed away ten years ago, but certain to be rekindled in the afterlife.
RIP Jim.
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Martin Hardy
I have had to write too many tributes of late, but none has hurt more than this one to my old mate Messup.
Messup was Jim’s nickname among his inner circle of golf writing, drinking buddies, earned following a late-night return – and there were many – to a hotel in America alongside myself and Bill Elliott. As we were spewed out from the hotel’s revolving doors, the late Alister Nicol, then Daily Record golf correspondent, remarked: ‘Watch out, here come Messup, Hardup and Nevershutsup’. (Alister was referencing my emergence from a costly divorce and Bill’s ability to speak endlessly on a number of subjects while back-handedly recognising Jim’s excellence of journalistic skills, appearance and dress sense.
Proud of his Barrow Boy roots, Jim started an outstanding and award-winning career alongside his good friend, the late and equally-missed Bob Cass, at the North West Evening Mail in the 1950’s. (Seventy years on, there’ll be plenty of wine and laughter in heaven tonight).
The Sunday Express and Sunday Telegraph benefitted most from his enviable talents while few among the world’s sporting elite ever rejected an interview request or chance to share a glass or two.
Jim was the first journalist to interview Sir Alex Ferguson when the Scot came to Manchester from Aberdeen, Jack Charlton ‘kidnapped’ him for an all-night celebration after England won the 1966 World Cup, golfing and broadcasting legend Peter Alliss invited him for an around-the-world book-writing tour while Ernie Els took him to a match against Everton at Old Trafford. There were many other such instances of how much he was respected in sport although he was never shy when it came to self deprecation.
Among his poking-fun-at-himself moments was one back from the 70’s when he was entertaining a group of friends over dinner at his home in Hendon when Bill Grundy came on the television’s What The Papers Say proclaiming: ‘How about this for hyperbole and gobbledegook’ before holding up one of Jim’s intros to a football match.
Jim enjoyed sport in general and loved golf almost as much as he did football while recognising that he was never particularly proficient at either. His playing partners marvelled at his long drives – not because of the distance they travelled, but for how high they soared. Handing out complimentary golf balls at one Pro-Am, South Africa’s Hugh Baiocchi said to him: ‘These normally add 10 yards to your drive, but in your case it will be height’.
Highly respected, enormously revered and endlessly loved, Jim’s qualities covered every page of the book of superlatives, but I can pay him no greater tribute than to say of the 50 years I knew and appreciated his company, I never heard one person say a bad word about him.
And he very rarely, if ever, he spoke ill of anybody. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me recalling an episode when were billeted in adjoining rooms in a Vancouver hotel while covering The Commonwealth Games there. If I hadn’t known him better, I would have sworn he was entertaining somebody in his room one morning when all I could here was the deafening screams of ‘Yes, Yes, Yes, YESSSSSS’ for over a minute’. ‘What the hell was that about’ I asked later. He was merely celebrating the demise of a Sunday Express editor who hadn’t appreciated his qualities as much as the late Sir John Junor had.
Jim’s long-standing issue with bronchial problems and latterly dementia finally caught up with him after 89 fun-filled and hugely successful professional years. No consolation whatsoever, but at least dementia saved him from the heartbreak of losing his much-loved wife Sandra a month ago.
Farewell my friend. You will be missed.
Rest in Peace Messup.
Hardup.
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Peter Higgs
Jim Mossop was one of the best. Not simply among the leading sports writers of his generation but as sound a bloke as you could ever wish to meet. The excellent tributes from David Facey and Martin Hardy sum up his prowess as a journalist but explain why everyone who knew Jim was proud to do so.
I worked out that when Jim celebrated England’s 1966 World Cup triumph on that famous night with Jack Charlton he would have been 29 years old and already among Fleet Street’s elite, a position he was to maintain for another 40 years or more.
As a chief sports writer for the Sunday Express for so many years Jim saw it all, knew them all and wrote it all with such distinction. As such he might have been entitled to put himself on a pedestal, as one or two in our profession have been known to do. But not Jim. He was always one of the lads, such good company and prepared to laugh at himself, if necessary. I can picture him now at the centre of a football triumvirate with Joe Melling and Bob Cass(both now sadly departed) in which the banter flowed relentlessly.
Although he comfortably mixed with the biggest names in sport Jim was loyal to his friends. One of my memories of him revolved around ‘Champagne Wednesday’ at the Open Championship. when Jim would meet up with a couple from near his home in Cheshire and Alison (I think I’ve got the name right) would provide egg sandwiches, lovingly wrapped in tin foil and produced for our pleasure. There in the Bollinger tent we’d tell the tales while devouring champagne and egg sandwiches. What a treat! Thanks, Jim.
One day I was in the Press Tent alongside Jim as he carefully prepared an 800-word piece for his paper. Leaving my seat for an urgent cup of tea I tripped over the wire leading to Jim’s laptop and wiped out the entire story. It was one of those situations where ‘sorry’ didn’t quite cut it. But Jim, ever the gent, declined to give me the bollocking. I deserved. He just shrugged, told me not the worry and said he’d write it again. You don’t forget gestures like that.
When he reached 65 Jim could stop paying his subs to the Association of Golf Writers. But he wanted to support the AGW. So he kept on paying, every year, his last payment coming a few weeks ago. Thoughtful, generous, kind, all those things and more.
RIP Jim, it was a privilege to know you.
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John Hopkins
News came of Jim Mossop’s death just minutes before I set out for a drink with a fellow resident of Henley-on-Thames, a man who knew him well: Jon Ryan, sports editor of the Sunday Telegraph during Jim’s time there.
Ryan’s face fell as I broke the news. “It’s an oddity,” Ryan said. “He was 89 and I didn’t think he would make it past his 80th. He was a wonderful man, a good friend. He came to my 70th birthday party. I loved working with him. He was so professional. I never had a cross word with him in the years we worked together. Nobody had a bad word to say about him.”
Ryan recounted the famous story of Jim’s night out with Jack Charlton hours after England had won the 1966 World Cup. “Jim was staying west London and Jack Charlton was at the Royal Garden hotel in Kensington. Before Jim left and knowing what sort of night he was in for he attached a luggage label to his jacket and wrote on it: “Jim Mossop. If found, please return to 57 Laburnam Drive, London W4.””
I worked alongside Jim for 30 years and remember a quiet night out with him in Monte Carlo and countless other nights which were not quite so quiet. I also remember his golf. It was not as good as his writing. He was friendly, helpful, cheery, always well dressed and determined to play as hard as he worked.
Above all he demonstrated what I thought was an exceptional level of professionalism. No matter what he had been up to the night before (and it could have been something quite momentous) he would appear after breakfast the next morning, settle in front of his typewriter and get on with his work. I often thought to myself that if I could operate as well in the later years of my life as he had in his, I would be very pleased. He was my hero.
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Alistair Tait
I first came across James at Royal St George’s during the 1993 Open Championship media day. Myself and my playing companions had to dive for cover when a ball came screaming across the third green as we were preparing to putt. We had no idea where the ball had come from until James walked through us to retrieve the ball he had hit from the fourth tee. Anyone familiar with St George’s will know it’s not easy hitting a full bloodied drive from the 4th tee to the third green. Typically deadpan, James said: “That’s not an easy shot you know. It takes bags of talent to play a shot like that.” With that he carried on to his ball and hit it back into play, leaving us laughing our heads off.
On a more serious note, I still recall James imploring members during an Annual General Meeting at The Open to resist editors calling for us to write stories off TV. He knew it was a slippery slope to our eventual demise. He was right!
I will remember him fondly.
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Norman Dabell
Like many newbies to the golf circus I was in great awe of the legendary sports writer James Mossop when I first took tentative steps on tour in the late 80s. Very soon, a few drinks and dinners with him later, I felt comfortable enough to refer to him, like many, as ‘Jimmy Mossop’. That rather suited his character, sense of fun and youthful looks for his age.
Jimmy had seen it and done it all in sport but his enthusiasm never waned. We’d marvel in the press room at some of the calls he’d field from great sporting icons while putting together ideas for his Sunday golf piece. What a contacts book he had.
Away from the laptop Jimmy loved a good night out and it was a joy to accompany him at dinner and listen to the myriad yarns of his escapades with the likes of Frank Clough and Bob Cass on the football circuit. He loved good food and drink. I remember one Dunhill Links Championship when he and ‘Cassie’ used their powerful means of persuasion to get the owner/chef of the St Andrews Sealion Centre to open up his restaurant, which had been closed for some weeks because it was out of season. The pair enjoyed a convivial fish dish the sealions would have envied.
Then there was the allure of a hog-roast at the 2009 Turnberry Open. The trouble with that was, we were expected to ride the penny-farthing bikes featured at the bash, to sing for our supper. Needless to say, I fell off mine but Jimmy half-mastered his and took great delight in careering down the road, accompanied by typical Mossop guffaws, until the copious amounts of pre-prandials took their toll and deposited him in a ditch.
Time regrettably caused me to lose touch largely with Jimmy after we both retired. The last time I spoke to him was in 2020 when I called him to congratulate his beloved Barrow Bluebirds on getting back into the Football League after 48 years in the wilderness. Typically, he was bubbling over with excitement at the thought.
Proud to have known him.
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Trevor Peake
A gent with the glint in his eye of a rascal.
RIP James
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Patricia Davies
Fabulous tributes to Jim, who was so knowledgeable, generous with his time to greenhorns like me and so much fun with his wealth of stories. The thought of him and the great Bob Cass together makes me smile. Lucky to know them even just a little bit xo
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Graham Spiers
I’m writing this simply to get it off my chest, and also because I think Jim Mossop, among all the other tributes paid to him, deserves some sort of recognition and testimonial from here in Scotland.
There was a time – and I caught the tail-end of it – when the world resonated with the ominous rumble of the giants of Fleet Street. Usually, they all had a glass in their hand. Men such as Ian Wooldridge, Jim Lawton, Hugh McIlvanney, Brian Glanville, Bob Cass and others. And Jim Mossop – both understated and great – could certainly be listed among them.
Jim saw it all and wrote it all – never, ever playing down a scene – in over 50 years of covering sport, most notably for the Sunday Express. He was, back in the day, much loved and admired by John Junor, the ferocious Sunday Express editor, who himself was once called “the most influential man in Britain” due to the Express in its heyday selling almost 5 million copies on the UK streets every Sunday.
In the old days the newspaper game was booming, and Jim, entirely predictably, won round the splenetic Junor, just as he did almost everyone else he encountered. You could hardly meet a more agreeable man.
I came to know Jim Mossop at Augusta where, over a number of years, he and I pitched up among scores of other writers each springtime to cover the Masters. At first I wondered: who was this kind, warm, witty man who appeared to have been everywhere in the world, and interviewed everyone, while wearing his career experiences lightly? Jim had not a trace of self-importance in him.
Mossop’s toll of reporting over these decades was prodigious: football, golf, boxing, a few Wimbledons, World Cups, the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games. His passport was in the classic state of all the old sportswriters back then: battered and dog-eared, traipsing in and out of the great airports of the world, ever alert to where the nearest bar was situated.
Everyone in my game knows Mossop’s most famous outing. On the night of July 30 1966 he got in cahoots with a number of England’s famous World Cup winning team – Bobby Moore and Jack Charlton among them – and went carousing uptown in London, winding up in Danny La Rue’s nightclub in Hanover Square, where they ordered a fresh crate of champagne.
In Geoff Hurst’s autobiography “1966 And All That” he relates how Charlton, who had gone off with Mossop, ended up waking up the next morning on the downstairs sofa of a complete stranger in Leytonstone.
The story shows how utterly and completely the sportswriting game has changed. Mossop belonged to The Jazz Age. The idea that any of us today could go off quaffing like this with the sports stars, fresh from their conquest, is absurd. Back then, in the age of innocence, it was how Fleet Street’s finest did it. And their lavish expenses were rarely questioned.
At Augusta, Jim was all eyes and ears over Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, Greg Norman, Seve Ballesteros, Tiger Woods and the rest. The stories and interviews were endless. He was there in 1996 when Norman collapsed completely, having held a six-shot lead going into the final round, handing the green jacket to Faldo. Slightly boozy and thoroughly revelling in the drama – it was a Sunday, his week’s work was done – Jim had a few days to recover, fly home, write up his reflections on that Masters drama before asking his sports editor for the thousandth time: “Right, where next?”
I wish I could remember Jim’s most famous story to me…but the details of it are hazy. It was to do with him once completely missing out a day in the year – either December 31 or January 1 – due to a trip that was planned and executed through time-zones by the Express, precisely because an editor had realised you could “miss a day” by doing the assignment.
Jim happily volunteered for the task and, years later, cackled to me in an August bar about it. “I went from December 31 to January 2,” he told me with boyish joy. “I never saw January 1. I completely missed it!” Fleet Street back then would come up with any wheeze that might titillate the industrious, hard-working Brit, his feet up after another working week.
Mossop lived through the rascal, ridiculous age of Fleet Street, too. Alex Metreveli, the now long-forgotten Soviet tennis star, who actually reached the Wimbledon men’s singles final in 1973, was said to have learned to play tennis “by hitting balls against the walls of the Kremlin” according to one Sunday tabloid (Metreveli was actually Georgian…he grew up 1400 miles from the Kremlin). An Olympic swimmer of African descent – which was highly unusual in the all-white world of men’s swimming – was said to have learned to swim “by racing away from crocodiles” in the rivers of his youth.
Such preposterous stuff was part of the fun-laden days of sports reporting back then, and Jim would often laugh along with his more imaginative tabloid colleagues. Nor, himself, would he ever naturally play down the drama or cliff-edge excitement.
He used to call me “Billy Jo”. This is a generational joke which will be lost on anyone under the age of 50. She was a brilliant country singer of the 1970s and 80s. In modern times this joke has been replaced by “Britney”.
The lovable Mossop has now gone to join those others currently manning the great press box in the sky. What a scene it must be. The Jazz Age of sportswriting is now officially ended.
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