Ah no. Not Eddie Butler. Eddie Butler can’t be gone.
But he is. Gone, the voice of BBC rugby. Gone, at the age of 65, dying peacefully in his sleep in Peru during a charity walk. Gone, one of the last originals.
The deaths of well-known people happen all the time, of course, and most of them are nobody’s business. There’s the silly pantomime of co-opted grief, never more so than over the past week. But most people are sane and they know better than to be sucked into the vortex. Life has real pain to dole out. Once you’ve wept for someone belonging to you, you tend to cop on when it comes to strangers.
So when some of us get a pang of sadness for the death of Eddie Butler, we know it’s not really him we’re sad for. We haven’t lost a friend or a family member. We won’t miss him in daily life. We will feel his absence on half a dozen occasions in a year. Maybe even less than that. But those few times that we do are meaningful. They are the best tribute to what a singular and brilliant presence he was.
Those pangs are for death’s unanswerable change, for the rupture of the norm and the smirch of the innocent good. What will we do when spring comes around? When the snowdrops start to peep up from behind the winter and the Saturdays tick down to a Six Nations kick-off? The BBC will do a montage because the BBC always does a montage. But there’ll be no Eddie Butler to do the voiceover. So it will be a diminished thing, automatically less than what is was before.
And the games will start and the action will rattle along and somebody else will be behind the microphone. It will be a commentator who is excellent at their job, diligent and prepared according to their training, ready and expert in all the ways modern commentators are. But they won’t be Eddie Butler and we’ll know and feel the difference.
His Welsh burr won’t be there, all those long vowels and growled ecstasies. Nor his judicious inserts of mischief, those sardonic asides that reminded his viewers that this is all only a game. Virtually no commentator in any sport had his lyrical ability to convince you that this was somehow an occasion of grave import while at the same time really just a bit of a lark. The broadcasting courses don’t have a module for it.
There won’t be another Eddie Butler because there’s no real pathway for one. He was touching 40 before he got into the media. He was an ex-player who went off and lived another life away from the game after retirement. He taught for a bit, he worked in a property company. Even so, he turned out to be the natural heir to Bill McLaren on the BBC, not by aping the great Scot, but by being himself – laconic, articulate, unapologetically wordy.
Would those qualities see a commentator rise through the ranks now? On the basis that none have, we can only assume the answer is no. Switch on Match of the Day on a Saturday night and if there are seven games on there will be seven different commentators who all sound the same. The accents will change from match to match. Mercifully, the gender will too. But when you listen out for things like inflections and intonations and vocabulary, there’s precious little to set anybody apart.
This isn’t a criticism, it should be stressed. And it isn’t just the BBC or just the UK or just broadcasting or just sport. It’s mostly just modern life. At the top level of every human endeavour, success invariably becomes a recipe for homogenisation. The edges get planed off, the wild cards get weeded out.
There’s a great line in the last series of the TV show Succession where a Swedish tech billionaire played by Alexander Skarsgård talks about how he isn’t interested in success any more. “It’s too easy,” he says. “Like, it’s analysis plus capital plus execution. Anyone can do that.”
And so, to a greater or lesser extent, goes the world. TV and radio commentary is so much better now across the board than it was 30 years ago. It’s more informative, you learn more about each sport and each player, the action on the pitch is explained more clearly and with more nuance than has ever been the case. Commentators spend a full week coming up with notes for every player in every game and end up not using half of them. Analysis plus (human) capital plus execution.
But there was only one Eddie Butler. Not that he didn’t prepare – of course he did. But he had a gift for making it seem natural. Effortless, serene, fun. For years, he would finish his commentary on a Six Nations game and then come back into the press room and fire up his laptop and bang out his Observer column on the same game. You’d read it the next day and seethe with envy at how his prose rolled along so perfectly. How could he jump from lily pad to lily pad like that without ever wetting his feet?
If we’re lucky, we get to be good at one thing in life. But Eddie Butler went from student to player to captain to Lion to teacher to writer to commentator to novelist to montage-maker and he was better than most people at most of them.
Rarely has the great seanfhocal felt more apt.
Ní bheidh a leithéid ann arís.
