Bill McLaren, who died on January 19 aged 86, was to millions of sports fans “the voice of rugby”, bringing wit, erudition and style to hundreds of commentaries on BBC radio and television in a career spanning half a century.

His hallmark was the mellow Scottish baritone with which he described the action on the pitch, a voice once described as being as warm and satisfying as a flask of Scotch broth on a raw January afternoon at Murrayfield. It could be clipped or melodious as the occasion demanded; such was his command of language and knowledge of the game that even viewers with no particular interest in what was happening would be drawn in by his narrative flow.
Famously fluent, McLaren cheerfully broke the first law of television commentating, which holds that you should only speak when you can add to the picture. But as his fellow broadcaster Brian Johnston noted: “I honestly don’t think I have ever heard anyone say they did not like Bill as a television commentator and there can be precious few — if any — of whom that can be said.”
 
Self-effacing, undemonstrative and steadfastly traditionalist, McLaren fashioned a unique style at the microphone, adopting a wryly Olympian tone in which he treated victor and vanquished with equal respect. But beneath the surface calm lay a deep reservoir of nervous angst: “You have got to be keyed up like the players,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2002, the year he retired from broadcasting. “Trust in your ability and experience, just as the players do.”
McLaren was never less than totally prepared, and always did his homework before a game. Following a tip from the racing commentator Raymond Glendenning, he reinforced his research by preparing cards for each player and a large piece of paper — his “Big Sheet” — containing essential details of the teams, ground, referee, touch judges and coaches. On the morning of a match, he would re-read the laws of Rugby Football.
He took another tip from Richard Dimbleby – to collect as much information as possible before a game. “You’ll only use about three per cent and you’ll feel that much of your work was wasted,” Dimbleby warned. “But don’t you believe it.”
McLaren’s encyclopedic knowledge of rugby was matched only by his scrupulous impartiality. But his customary sang-froid threatened to desert him in the 1969 international between Scotland and France. When, with a minute to go and the score tied at 3-3, Jim Telfer broke to score the winning try for Scotland, viewers could just discern an upward change of pitch in McLaren’s normally unruffled tones.
William Pollock McLaren was born on October 16 1923 at Hawick in the rugby-mad Scottish Borders. In 1935, when he was 11, his father took him to watch the All Blacks. William played at flank forward for the local high school and later for the Hawick side. During the Second World War he served in Italy with the Royal Artillery, where as a second lieutenant he fought at Monte Cassino. As a forward spotter in 20/21 Battery, 5 Medium Regiment, he was identified enemy targets and relayed the information back by radio.
His ability to report concisely and accurately proved invaluable in his future career as an observer of top-class rugby.
Another wartime experience haunted him all his life: a huge pile of some 1,500 mutilated and unburied corpses in an Italian churchyard, the victims of a massacre. At 21 the sight changed his life and forged his attitude to sport. Rugby was in his blood, he explained, “but in the great scheme of things it really doesn’t matter”.
On his return from the war he trained as a physical education instructor in Aberdeen. But on his arrival home in Hawick he went down with tuberculosis. He spent 19 months in a sanatorium where he was treated with the new miracle drug streptomycin, which saved his life.
Always a useful rugby player as a young man, McLaren had turned out for Scotland against the Army and in 1947 had played in a Scotland trial, but the onset of TB put paid to any hopes of an international career. After his recovery he taught physical education in local schools, became a supervisor and coached several players who went on to play for Scotland.
At the same time he was covering rugby for the Hawick Express. Without his knowledge, the editor recommended McLaren to the BBC. By way of an audition, he was invited to commentate for Scottish radio on a game between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and this led, in 1953, to his national radio debut covering the Scotland v Wales international. In 1962 he switched to television.
His years commentating on rugby for the BBC’s Grandstand programme on Saturday afternoons (largely unseen, for he rarely appeared in vision) earned McLaren the accolade of “the players’ commentator”. He intuitively knew what the players were thinking — “He’ll be cursing himself” or “He’ll be sorry about that”.
In 2002, on his retirement from the commentary box, the crowd at Cardiff Arms Park for the Wales v Scotland international sang For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow, while one Welsh supporter unfurled a banner proclaiming “Bill McLaren is Welsh”.
“No one voice is more closely associated with a single sport,” declared the Telegraph’s rugby correspondent, Brendan Gallagher, “and ironically that is now a cross rugby must bear. We have heard the 'best’ already. Nothing can or will compare with McLaren in his pomp. He didn’t just reflect rugby’s camaraderie and ethos, he helped inspire it. Right sport, right man, right time.”
McLaren’s services to rugby were recognised in 2001 when he became the first non-international to be inducted into the International Rugby Hall of Fame. He was appointed MBE in 1979, OBE in 1995 and advanced to CBE in 2003. His autobiography appeared in 2004.
Away from rugby, McLaren was a keen golfer, playing off 10 in his late seventies.
Bill McLaren is survived by his wife, Bette, and their elder daughter.
Their younger daughter died of cancer in 2000.


Source:-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituarie...            


t was said that Bill McLaren, who has died aged 86, was the voice of rugby. Of course, it was never said quite like he would have said it himself, in his honeyed, Borders burr, tinged with the impishness that suggested that none of this was to be taken too seriously. He would never have said anything about himself in such a way, for he was famously modest, a son of Hawick for whom a day away from his home town was a day wasted. But in truth, he was much more than rugby's voice, more its full-blown orchestra, devoted to the works of the Romantic movement, and only the Romantic.
For a year short of a full half-century, first on radio and from 1962 on BBC television, Bill's voice washed over rugby union, soothing and harmonious. He saw no evil and spoke no evil. If there was violence, it was never anything more than "brief shenanigans", and nobody ever kicked a ball badly, but merely made it look a bit like one of Bill's own "scruffy nine irons".
He played golf every day, come hail or shine, with his wife, Bette, whom he met at a local hop in 1947. When his body – never his voice – began to show signs of age and the second finger of his right hand curled down permanently into his palm, he was told that a simple operation might restore it to the vertical. He decided to leave well alone, since it seemed to improve his grip on his clubs.
As a rugby player, he was, to borrow one of his phrases, a "tearaway flanker", a forward with the Hawick first XV, hugely promising by all accounts and fanatical from the day his father took him to see the New Zealand All Blacks at Mansfield Park, Hawick. I remember interviewing him once about his early influences, and he mentioned being impressed by the great Jack Manchester, captain of the All Blacks, in 1935. We searched and searched for images of the player and came up with a few grainy, jerky frames that stood in stark contrast to Bill's sharp recollections.
The son of a knitwear salesman, during the second world war Bill found himself in Italy, a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. He was a forward spotter deep in hostile territory, often on his own, identifying enemy targets and relaying the information back to his unit. One day, drawn by the smell of decay to a village cemetery, he rounded a corner and was confronted by a mound of 1,500 corpses. The image would haunt him for the rest of his days.
In 1947 he was back in Hawick and playing in a Scottish trial. But in that same year he contracted tuberculosis, and so began the second fight for his life. At the East Fortune sanatorium in East Lothian, he was selected as one of five patients to take part in trials for a new antibiotic, streptomycin. Three of the five died. Bill survived.
While he convalesced, he began to commentate on table tennis for hospital radio. When he was discharged, he supplemented his work as a PE teacher with rugby reports for the Hawick Express, and was recommended from there to the BBC, joining the corporation in 1953.
He had some tests along the way, especially when his son-in-law, the scrum-half Alan Lawson, or later his grandson in the same position, Rory Lawson, were playing for Scotland. Or when some of his former pupils, such as Jim Renwick, Colin Deans or Tony Stanger, scored for Scotland. But his impartiality was never questioned. The Welsh golden age of the 1970s would not have been so gilded without the soundtrack of Bill to the exploits of Gareth Edwards.
Bill's preparation was meticulous and involved a lot of card-play. He would shuffle a deck and flash through the cards, matching a player with a number. Having memorised the names, he then liked to watch the players in training, listening to them. It hurt him just before his retirement in 2002 that he was once denied access to an Australian training session. Professional rugby has not always been kind to the romantics.
In 2000 Bill and Bette lost their daughter Janie to cancer. It troubled him that he was not by her side when she died, but Janie had ordered him to the commentary box.
It was there that Bill became music. I worked with him for a decade, one of his many "second voices". He would offer us that curled hand in a two-finger shake and a bag of Hawick balls, round brown sweets boiled in peppermint oil. He would then resume his consultation of his match chart, a mass of tiny notes in many colours, before, at kick-off, turning his back on us. It was nothing personal. It was just that Bill, given the choice of two television monitors, liked to hunch over the one closer to him. "Give me a wee tug on the sleeve, son, if you want to come in." Sometimes you had to tug away for a wee while.
It simply did not matter. I suppose somebody had to be alongside him, to offer the odd jarring note, but once the game and Bill were in full flow, they were best left to themselves. Rugby for orchestra and full voice, and nobody made a sound quite like Bill McLaren.
Appointed CBE in 2003, he is survived by Bette and his daughter Linda.
• William Pollock McLaren, teacher and rugby commentator, born 16 October 1923; died 19 January 2010
By:-  Eddie Butler


Source:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/jan/20/bill-mclaren-obituary