Words of Wooldridge

Sportswriting lost a glistening luminary when Ian Wooldridge died at 75 last spring. In four decades he produced more than seven million words for the Daily Mail which, aware of his unmatchable worth, rewarded him and his expenses chits with grateful generosity. It was never necessary for Ian, as it was for his impoverished peers, to bolster the weekly pittance by recycling the tired old stuff in book form. For their part, his employers, no mugs, guarded the Wooldridge byline with severity. In the1970s a publisher annually produced a few ‘best of the backpages’ anthologies, This Sporting Life, the ‘buy me’ potency each year ruinously diluted by a routine preface apology that ‘sadly once again the Daily Mail refuses to allow us to consider inclusion of work by its sporting columnists’. They meant only one man: it was the Rothermere way of saying: ‘Lay off, losers; to read Wooldridge, then first buy the Daily Mail.’