Bill McLaren talks poignantly about his entire life, focusing on his 50 years as chief rugby commentator for the BBC.
Bill McLaren was born in Hawick in 1923. He was on the verge of a
full international cap when he contracted tuberculosis and spent
nineteen months in a sanitarium.
It was through his junior reporting with the Hawick Express tha the
launched himself into a career of commentary, making his national
debut for BBC Radio in 1953. The switch to television came six
years later. Recognition of his services came in November 2001 when
he became the first non-international to be inducted into the
International Rugby Hall of Fame.
The familiar rugby stories are still there but the haunting
chapters on the bloodiest of wars, his fight for life against TB,
the last-ditch arrival of a miracle cure and the death of his
beloved daughter Janie, constitute largely unchartered and painful
territory - at least emotionally and in public - for the most
private of men
*Daily Telegraph*
It has plenty about the rugby world and his inherent sense of
fairness but, even more pertinently, about the real, sometimes
apocalyptic, world
*Sunday Herald*
He has a remarkable story to tell ... it is in turn heart-warming
and heart-rending. Bill McLaren was and is a one-off. So is his
book
*Yorkshire Post*
Bill McLaren, the legendary commentator, may have hung up his
microphone, but moving words still flow
*Daily Telegraph*
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