Sad news in learning of the passing of AGW member Michael Blair. Mike joined the AGW in 1997. A number of members have provided a tribute to Mike.

JOHN HOPKINS

I saw Mike Blair only occasionally and it was always a pleasure to do so. He would extend a hand, lean back with his head slightly cocked to one side as if sizing you up and then say words of welcome, often accompanied by phrases such as “oh, good of you to turn up. I thought you’d retired.” We met at Opens before he stopped attending them after what he felt was a badly organised one at St Andrews as far as journalists were concerned. I was chairman of the AGW at that time and he wrote me powerful criticism of the event describing in some detail why he would not be covering any more Opens.  

His writing was crisp, clear, vivid and could have appeared comfortably in a national newspaper. You always knew where he stood on the issue under discussion. I remember being told of the two opening sentences in a piece he had written about a trip to Australia. They went like this: “Australia and I do not get one. And it’s not my fault.”

[For clarity I should point out that two journalists who knew Mike much better than I did not corroborate this story, much to my disappointment. Both laughed however when they heard it and both said something like: “that sounds like him.”]

I once heard him dictating a rugby report from the press box at Twickenham when the few telephones for journalists were adjacent to a small writing room which was next to an even smaller bar in the press rooms in the old east stand. In other words a lot of us were crammed into very little space and as the drink was free there was, how shall I put this, a jovial, animated atmosphere.

Mike’s voice had to carry because the connection to a copytaker at his paper might not have been very good – and it did. He didn’t hold back, laying into the performance of England, I think it was, with unsuppressed vigour. Come to think of it, as a proud Welshman, he would have relished that and he took it with both hands. Peering over his glasses at some scrawled notes on a piece of paper, and occasionally turning to glance at his colleagues, he uttered one magnificent, damning phrase after the other and when he put the phone down a stunned silence followed. Somebody, it might have been Tony Lewis, then writing for the Sunday Telegraph, said drily: “Why don’t you say what you mean, Mike?”

To say Mike was Welsh and proud of it is a bit like saying night follows day. To hear him late at night with a drink in his hands extolling the merits of Barry John or Phil Bennett or JPR Williams, his great heroes from the Wales and British and Irish Lions teams of the seventies, was to see a man on earth as close to heaven as he could be. If he was moved to sing then we were very lucky. He had a wonderful voice, once good enough for him to have sung in the chorus at Covent Garden and if there is one thing that everyone who knew Mike says about him it is that it was a privilege to hear him sing. If he hadn’t been so inconsiderate as to die before me I’d have asked him to sing at my funeral.

I played with him a number of times for the Wales team in the AGW Home Internationals and I dare say we lost most times. At a course in Ireland he had driven to the edge of a lake on a par-5. I sensed that I could carry the water and give us a chance of winning the hole. He did not. With all his Welsh passion and considerable oratorical skills he beseeched me not to go for the heroic shot but to play away from the green and take the longer route to dry land.

I ignored him, choosing my 3-wood. Of course he was right. I couldn’t make the carry and thereafter every time we saw each other he would enquire smilingly after my 3-wood.

His backswing was unusual. Soon after starting there was a bit of a lunge and his arms and the club veered away from the traditional path and sharply towards his right ankle. Seeing this manoeuvre for the first time you thought to yourself: “Hello, what’s going on here?” In geographical terms you could say it started in Birmingham, travelled west towards his beloved Aberystwyth in mid Wales before returning to somewhere close to its target – Watford, say. Oh, and somewhere in that journey came a grunt. But it worked and as I recall he had a handicap of ten or 11.

Late one night during the Home Internationals we came up with the madcap idea of rowing from Dublin across to Aberystwyth which I believe is where he was born. He might have left Aberystwyth and its surroundings but it never left him.

Patricia Davies, wife of the late Dai Davies of The Guardian and the Birmingham Post when Mike Blair worked for it, told me that Blair often left rugby matches in the dying minutes in order to beat the crowds. She said she thought that Blair’s record time for exiting Murrayfield in Edinburgh and getting to The Duke in Sutton Coldfield, a favourite pub, was four hours.  

Mike Blair was sports editor of the Birmingham Post when Derek Lawrenson worked there as a young writer. “You couldn’t get much out of him much of the time,” Derek said. “He could even be a bit doleful. But when he had had a drink he became very gregarious and wonderful company. When I left he gave me nice words of encouragement and said I would do well on a national newspaper.” How right Mike Blair was on that count. Derek Lawrenson went on to become the golf correspondent of the Daily Mail for nearly 20 years.

TIM TAYLOR

The death of Mike Blair brought back memories of a golden age of regional newspaper journalism for myself and John Wragg when we worked alongside Mike on the sports desk of The Birmingham Post in the late 1960s and early 70s.

We were young sub-editors arriving from weekly newspapers, keen to learn about the more exacting demands of a morning newspaper.

What role models we had  …  guys like Mike, the rugby writer and keen golfer, his fellow AGW member Dai Davies, the golf columnist, and our cricket correspondent J.M. Solan.

All three wrote with knowledge, passion and style as did the chief football writer, Colin Malam.

Both John and myself took enough on board from them and others to go on to become national newspaper sports writers. After we had left, the Post sports department hired somebody who would become familiar to AGW members in the truly great golf writer Derek Lawrenson.

I shall let John, my friend for almost 60 years, lead off with his memories of Mike:

“To know Mike Blair was to grow up very quickly. I was a young and very raw sports sub on the Post, then a highly respected newspaper, and making my way. Mike showed me.

“His rugby reporting was simply wonderful, both on the national level and local Midlands level.

“I had only a passing knowledge of rugby union at the time but brushed up very quickly on that, inspired to do so by Mike’s words.

“Not least because if you subbed out the wrong sentence or phrase, put up a crap headline, he, er, let you know about it.

“At the Post’s local pub, the Queen’s Head, after a few pints, he would hold court and all you had to do was listen and get a free lesson in the merits and heroes of rugby union.

“He once tried to build a Birmingham Post rugby team. After one not very long training stint he judged what he’d got and abandoned the idea and retired to the Queens. One of his many good decisions.

RIP Mike. And thanks.”

Joining John in looking back at our time in the Birmingham Post & Mail building reminds me we used to do shifts on the Sports Argus, a cracking Saturday night pink paper.

There we came under the guidance of another ideal mentor in a tough as teak Geordie, Vic Wakeling, a great guy who later became the first Sky TV sports editor.

The Post sports desk at the time also ran to a sports editor/tennis writer, a deputy sports editor, another football writer and two racing sub-editors.

These days, the sports editor of my nearby Macclesfield Express, Richard Partington, is also the sports editor of 11 other weekly newspapers.

My initial memory of Mike is of at first being faintly terrified by him, something he found amusing in later decades when we used to meet occasionally at AGW events.

(How hard it is for us to see ourselves as others see us: I felt shy and overawed by the talent around me when I was on the Post but Patricia Davies once told me at another AGW event that her late husband Dai described me as “unruly”).

I digress. This is about Mike and, like John, I remember him teaching us by example to never hesitate to tell it as it is and to stand up for anything you believe in.

Mike could be acerbic, but only if you deserved it.

He was never at his most fervent when denouncing any “traitor” who deserted his beloved Welsh rugby union team to switch to rugby league.

I remember playing with Mike in a Press football team and I was in goal. He was unhappy with my not getting enough distance punting up field.

He demonstrated what he wanted with a phantom follow-though so exaggerated it can best be described a pantomime punt. It worked.

Mike always knew how to get his message across.

MARK GARROD (Joint Mike Blair and John Collard tribute)

Like John Hopkins I remember Mike not only for the excellence of his golf journalism, but also for his love of rugby and especially Welsh rugby. He took immense pleasure every time they downed England, but after the halcyon days of Barry John, Gareth Edwards, JPR et al the pendulum did swing and the camaraderie enabled us to enjoy each other’s successes. Same with the Home Internationals and our matches at Celtic Manor, The European Club, Slaley Hall and elsewhere. Great weeks all of them. But in case nobody else mentions it there was also the day he won either our Spring or Autumn Medal at Wentworth and found himself being presented with his trophy and prize by Prince Andrew. I can recall him saying how proud his parents would have been of him being pictured in royal company – although maybe not as much after subsequent revelations about the then Duke of York!

John, meanwhile, was a wonderful friend to us on the golf circuit, his association with Wilson enabling us to enjoy many an enjoyable day on such fine courses as The Berkshire and the New Zealand Club. I managed to win a golf trolley at one of them and while that was probably 30-40 years ago I managed to keep using it until last year when it finally gave up on me. It was a constant reminder of the good times we had with John. The two of us last met up in 2015 at the Milton Keynes Stadium after both of us became part of “The Pack” as volunteers for the Rugby World Cup. It included thousands of us all belting out “Jerusalem” under instruction from England’s singer-in-chief Laura Wright.

Two fine men now departed. Sad.

PATRICIA DAVIES

I got to know Mike – usually known as Blair, to distinguish him from the myriad other Mikes – when I married Dai and ended up spending a lot of time in various pubs in Sutton Coldfield, where we all lived, most notably the Duke on Duke Street, where the landlord was a right grump and the walls were that ghastly nicotine browny yellow but the beer and the crack were excellent.  

Blair and Dai worked on the Birmingham Post in the days when it was a widely-read daily newspaper and the sports pages in particular were always worth reading. They were both very opinionated, so I don’t think it was a quiet newsroom, if there ever was such a thing. Like many a Welshman, Blair migrated to Birmingham and I’m not sure how many of the stories I was told – and only vaguely remember – were true or well-woven myth and legend. Blair was a great storyteller and whenever he was in full flow he became very Welsh.

What I remember about the time he won that AGW trophy at Wentworth, at the age of 80, I think, presented by the now unmentionable Prince Andrew, was his wonderful timing when he made his speech and how very very Welsh he became. He did carry on after his opening gambit but he didn’t really need to because the room was in bits, in fits of laughter. Looking at the prince, then up to the heavens, in his best Welsh accent he came out with the immortal words: “If my Mam could see me now…”. His timing was impeccable and writing it down doesn’t do it justice.

Undoubtedly difficult to live with, he was the greatest company and a dear friend.

FOOTNOTE ...

No information was provided when Mike passed away of his date of birth and also the day he passed away. Also, the AGW was advised no funeral was being arranged at Mike’s request.