Jimmy Hill a football and media revolutionary hidden by those glasses
The former Fulham player, Coventry manager then chairman, linesman, impresario, pundit, TV magnate and outright mainstream celebrity remains one of a kind at 85 years of age.
Ah, Jimmy. You were once – it seems important to remember now – so very cool.
The newspapers called you the Beatnik with a Ball and it's true you really did look startlingly modern in those old photographs of English football's great salary cap resolution summit, with your jazz flute chic projectile goatee beard and your air of Branson-style hipster hustle. After which, it must be said, you became less cool.
The 1980s, in particular, were not kind, a period when you seemed bound up in English football's constipated light entertainment hierarchy, transformed into an opaque, chortlingly clubbable figure in a biscuit-coloured lounge suit, almost entirely concealed behind what seemed less a pair of glasses, more a small portable conservatory.
If any good could possibly be dredged out of the very sad news that Jimmy Hill is seriously ill, it is the opportunity to take a glance back at one of the more brilliant, mercurial and frankly quite bonkers careers in British sporting history.
It may be news to those who only knew late, Sunday Supplement-era Jimmy – a prickly, paternally vague figure, condemned to roam his weather-less uPVC garden room – but Hill, who is now 85, remains one of the most persistently influential figures in modern English football, with a back-story that reads like a picaresque sashay through pretty much every innovation of the past 50 years.
He is in effect the man who did everything, English football's own Forrest Gump, condemned by a combination of opportunity and ambition to find himself lurking in the background of history time and again. Point at anything.
You can be pretty sure that, on some level, Jimmy did that.
Employed at various times as player, manager, chairman,*linesman, impresario, pundit, TV magnate and outright mainstream celebrity (at the height of his powers he spent a weekend escorting Raquel Welch around London before turning down the offer to become her European agent), it is his relentless alchemical impact that stands out. Most famously as a pioneering head of the players' union when the cap on salaries was abolished in 1961, a staging post in the dilution of football's ancestral structures and a major step towards the current appalling inferno of profit‑driven operetta that is the Premier League. Or as some people like to call it, the Premier League.
After which Jimmy just kept on Jimmying. Appointed as Coventry manager, he invented almost overnight the notion of modern footertainment-style matchday gimmickry, introducing his "pop and crisp days for kids", writing and recording*The Sky Blue Song*(first sung at a press conference attended by Frankie Howerd and Sid James) and only abandoning the idea of exploding a mortar shell every time Coventry scored after being forced to accept that this would endanger players' lives.
Later he would oversee Highfield Road's conversion into the first all-seat stadium, but for now management couldn't hold him. By 1970 he was head of ITV Sport and engaged in single-handedly inventing the punditry panel for the Mexico World Cup. Under his guidance, Malcolm Allison, Bob McNab, Derek Dougan and Pat Crerand were transformed into a scowlingly brown-suited One Direction, taken by limousine from door to door, mobbed by female fans on shopping excursions and even, in McNab's case, deluged with hundreds of teenage marriage proposals.
Plus Hill was the first real pundit in the modern sense. A natural in front of the cameras – great whiskered head framed thrillingly by the pulsing Bakelite square – he was a pioneer of slow-motion replay analysis, not to mention the basic idea of actually having contentious televised opinions in the first place. As head of ITV Sport in the years that followed, he would force the first competitive football rights deal negotiation, ushering in off the top of his own head the basis for the current subscription TV-fed Premier League.
No doubt this quality of naked, self-propelling commercial ambition has contributed to Hill's occasional – or pretty much constant and indissoluble*– unpopularity in some quarters. In part this was simply a product of his own cartoonishly improbable celebrity, that sense of existing rather too happily within his own self-made inner sanctum.
Plus there was separately the Scottish question. For several years at England versus Scotland matches banners with the phrase "Jimmy Hill is a poof" would surface, a collectively hostile Scottish riposte to assorted Hill goadings, most notably the suggestion David Narey had "toe-poked" his toe-poked goal against Brazil at the 1982 World Cup.
There is perhaps an issue of perception here. Jimmy may have been the visible face of the Jimmy-made football entertainment establishment, but even at the height of the Hill Supremacy he was never a time-server or a placeman, just the son of a Balham milkman and a former Fulham inside-forward driven on by nothing more than that friskily insistent sense of vim.
There is a broader lament in our sporting nation, the lack of standard bearers and market leaders when it comes to the real business of actually playing football. But it is here in the periphery, in the staging, administration and general sense of organisational theatre that a consolatory strain of energetic English innovation has flowered, with Hill at its head. The world has moved on since. It is a more codified corporate environment, and there will simply never be an opportunity for one person to do quite so many things ever again. Striding across that pre-modern landscape of corrugated stands and teak veneer TV studios, Hill remains the first – and last – of his kind. Love him, hate him, feel inexorably irritated by him, his is one of the great British sporting lives.
