Malcolm Brodie and Me Kindle Edition

Malcolm Brodie is one of the best-known journalists in British/Irish history. The legendary former sports editor of the Belfast Telegraph is the only person to have covered 14 World Cup football tournaments. And by the time he died in 2013, aged 86, he had reported on an astonishing 72% of all Northern Ireland international matches ever played, home and away, stretching back to World War II. He was awarded an MBE for his services to sport and journalism in 1979. A Glasgow native, his concerned parents sent “Hitler’s gift to Ulster” to live with relatives in Belfast just as war was declared in 1939 and, less than decade later, aged 23, he persuaded the Telegraph editor to let him set up the paper’s first sports department, which became one of the most renowned in the British Isles. Close friends included Sir Alex Ferguson, Dame Mary Peters, Sir Bobby Charlton, Sir Matt Busby, Sir Everton Weekes and legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Malcolm has broken some of the biggest stories in UK sports history. He was a man John Laverty admired – and envied – as a teenager delivering ‘the Tele’ to houses in Ballymena and reading globe-trotting Brodie’s back page stories on the way home. At 14 years old, the thought of replacing this world-renowned behemoth was no more than a boyish pipe dream – but, just over a decade later, and through a series of remarkable, ironic twists, outrageous good fortune and perhaps just a little bit of talent, it came to pass. For three years John worked as Malcolm’s assistant until he officially (but never actually) retired, then took over from him as the largest Northern Ireland paper’s main football writer. The more the travelled, the more Malcolm opened up about the extraordinary life of one of the most celebrated and charismatic journalists. But what begins as a coming-of-age tale morphs into a ‘be careful what you wish for’ parable of high-profile professional mistakes, envy and mistrust which climaxes with rancour, retribution and, ultimately, lasting redemption during a two-month long, coast-to-coast World Cup adventure in the United States. The remarkable ‘cast’ includes Sir Alex Ferguson, Bob Hope, Billy Bingham, former NI First Ministers David Trimble and Ian Paisley, George Best, John DeLorean, notorious loyalist paramilitary Winkie Rea, sex-scandal Catholic bishop Eamonn Casey, Roy Keane, OJ Simpson, Whitney Houston, Roberto Baggio, Jack Charlton, Barbra Streisand, Eric Cantona, Glenn Miller and Irving Berlin! Read more