Football: Jimmy Hill transformed the game and that's how we should remmeber him

In this April 9, 1987 file photo shows footballer turned broadcaster Jimmy Hill at Fulham Football Club in London. Photo / AP.

Some 20 years have passed since that winter midnight when Jimmy Hill sat in the bar of a Midlands hotel, sipping Scotch and telling stories. Earlier that evening, he had spoken at a charity dinner, charming his audience with a string of breezy anecdotes. Now, in reflective mood, he looked back down the decades.

He recalled his broadcasting career and the central part he played in pioneering televised football. He touched on his experiences as a club chairman, director, chief executive, coach and manager. He mentioned his firebrand days as leader of the players' trade union.

But his warmest memories were of his playing days, especially those at Fulham, when life was less complicated and pressures were lighter and the worst that could happen was a bellowing curse from Johnny Haynes when yet another exquisite pass was wretchedly squandered. Jim's face would light up when he told his Fulham tales. Despite enjoying a whole string of remarkable careers, you knew that nothing would ever quite replace the joy, the laughter, the sheer fun that he found at Craven Cottage.

Jimmy Hill died at the weekend at the age of 87. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's for several years, his vivacious personality buried beneath the blanket of that cruel disease.

Those who knew him only in his later years saw a man who tended to live in the past, constantly returning to familiar themes: cheating players, timid referees, cynical coaches.

In fact, he was much, much better than that. When his massive contribution has been adequately assessed, Hill will be seen as one of the most significant figures in the modern history of British football.

It was during the Fulham years that Hill came to prominence as chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association. While his fellow executive Cliff Lloyd supplied the grafting and the groundwork, Hill became the public face of the movement which was to revolutionise the professional game.

Hill marshalled his forces, threatened strikes, outwitted the employers and won public support for his cause. After a bitterly protracted battle, freedom was achieved. The most prominent beneficiary was the great Haynes, who was paid £100 per week by Fulham amid dark mutterings that the game, and quite possibly the nation, was going to the dogs.It helped, of course, that the face in question was so distinctive; the elongated chin decorated with a vaguely piratical beard became a familiar feature on back pages and news bulletins as Hill sought to overthrow the iniquitous system of players being effectively slaves of their clubs, with a £20 maximum wage and no freedom of contract.

But Hill had dislodged the pebble and the resulting avalanche started to envelope the game. There was a certain logic to it all: if there was no maximum, then the sky was the limit. Yet when the likes of Wayne Rooney, Theo Walcott, Raheem Sterling and various assorted Chelsea players started to pocket salaries of up to £10million, even Hill would concede that wage inflation had moved far beyond his imagination.

Having retired as a player at 33, Hill swiftly became manager of Coventry City. He was full of ideas for the Division Three club. Backed by a resourceful chairman, he renamed the club the 'Sky Blues' and began to transform the team, the ground, and the very image of an ailing institution. People became aware of Coventry, as he never missed the chance to steal a headline. In just a handful of seasons, he took them through Division Three, then on through the old Second Division, leaving when promotion to the top flight had been achieved. There were those who said that Hill was more sound than substance. Those days at Coventry told a different tale.

Typically, his next move was both brave and timely. He moved into television; first, and briefly, with the BBC, then, memorably, as Head of Sport at London Weekend Television. The lasting memory of four heady years at LWT was surely the coverage of the 1970 World Cup and the arrival of the pundits.

While the BBC covered Mexico 70 in the approved, professional manner, ITV offered flamboyant controversy from former players such as Malcolm Allison, Derek Dougan and Pat Crerand. They argued and asserted in the way that pro footballers had always done in the privacy of their dressing rooms, yet those arguments were a revelation to Seventies audiences. They proved an enormous attraction and surpassed the BBC in the ratings for the first time at a football event. The ITV executives bathed in the reflected glory and Hill took the share he deserved.

And yet, within two years, he was off to the BBC to present Match of the Day and become, effectively, the face of football. Saturday night after Saturday night, through 27 years and more than 600 appearances, he introduced, analysed and explained the state of the national game to a nation deprived of live coverage. With the possible exception of the incomparable David Coleman, no sporting media personality has remotely approached that level of importance.

He had, years earlier, renewed his links with Coventry, becoming first managing director and then chairman. It was while he was with Coventry that he put through an idea he had long espoused; persuading the rest of the League to adopt three points for a win.
Along with Hill's maximum wage abolition, it is the reform which has had the greatest, and most beneficial, impact on English football. He also made Coventry's Highfield Road the first all-seat stadium in the country. It was described as an idea whose time had come, but that time would have been long delayed without the input of J Hill.

At some stage, he had found the time to pass a refereeing course, on the grounds that the knowledge would come in useful. Sure enough, one afternoon at the old Highbury Stadium, the referee fell injured, a linesman took over and the appeal went out for a qualified replacement linesman. With an entirely bogus show of reluctance, Jim stepped into the breach, accepting the predictable abuse from the fans with jutting chin and evil grin. It was around this time that he hit on the idea of taking an unofficial 'Old England' team to Belfast. The Troubles had begun to ease a little and Jim thought a match between English and Irish veterans might hasten the process. I was invited to accompany the side for the purpose of a newspaper feature, and a group of us packed into a minibus from the airport to the city centre hotel.

There were British Army patrols at almost every road junction, tribal murals on every wall and an air of unease hanging over the old town. Jimmy Greaves sat up near the front, alongside a security guard who introduced himself as 'Bill'.

Jimmy chatted amiably about the situation in the province. 'So tell me, Bill,' he said. 'What's it all about? I mean, why's everyone got the 'ump?' Bill seemed reluctant to explain. We were entering a troubled area and Bill produced a large automatic weapon, with which he swept the landscape.

'Oh my Gawd!' moaned Jim. 'I know who got us into this. Why did I listen to that bleeding Jimmy Hill?'

Yet he knew that we loved him, no matter what. Because we all loved him. Those of us who were on the rota for his Sunday Supplement show on Sky would fall in at dawn to sit around a table in an unconvincing mock-up of his kitchen, and join him for chatter and chuckles. He could be crotchety and stubborn, yet he was endlessly endearing.

Sadly, we witnessed the change which crept over him, the unmistakable signs of the unspeakable illness. He hung on for as long as he could, but it became too much and the darkness descended.

Yet that is not the way we shall remember him. For, in his stunning prime, he was lively, witty, audacious and brave. Above all, he was an innovator, possibly the greatest innovator the sport has known. Jimmy Hill transformed the game he loved so well. And that is how he deserves to be remembered.

-- Daily Mail