James Mossop obituary: sports writer for more than five decades

On the evening of English football’s greatest day, in July 1966, the FA hosted a celebratory banquet for the players in the Royal Garden Hotel in west London. Waiting patiently in the foyer, in pursuit of a story, was James Mossop, a young sports reporter with the Sunday Express. When the banquet ended and the players’ wives were permitted to join the fun, England’s towering centre-half Jack Charlton found himself at a loose end. His wife, Pat, was at home, a few weeks from giving birth to their third child, and when he spotted Mossop, whom he knew well, he said, “Come on, you and I are going out for a few drinks.”

Over the next few hours, Mossop got his story. It has since become one of Fleet Street’s greatest sporting anecdotes, one that Mossop was as happy to recount as his colleagues were to hear. Mossop said he only had a tenner on him, at which point Charlton produced a wad of cash — given to him, he explained, by his boot manufacturer. “We’ll spend this, and then we’ll spend your tenner,” Charlton said. Aware of what the night might hold, Mossop tied a baggage label to the lapel of his jacket that said, “If found, please return to 57 Laburnum Drive, London.”

Outside, they hijacked a cab in which the passenger, a classical musician returning from a concert at Wigmore Hall, did not recognise Charlton and was only vaguely aware that an important football match had been played in London that afternoon.

The pair dropped off the bemused musician and then visited the Astor Club in Mayfair — although it may have been Danny La Rue’s in Hanover Square. Perhaps it was both. Either way, they received a standing ovation and many bottles of champagne were consumed. Not that they had to pay for any of it. They slept that night, what remained of it, on a pair of sofas in a stranger’s house in either Leytonstone or Walthamstow — recollections vary, understandably in the circumstances — and woke the next morning to the sound of the Sunday papers thudding on to the doormat.

If the story speaks to a simpler, more innocent time, it also says much about James Mossop, or Jim as he was known, who throughout his 53 years as a sports writer was as respected by those he wrote about as he was by his peers. Working out of the Manchester offices of first the Daily Mail and then the Sunday Express, he became close friends with United’s Alex Stepney and Paddy Crerand. His footballing idol was George Best and they too became friends, Mossop co-authoring Best’s regular column in the Sunday Express and his 1968 book, Best of Both Worlds. When Alex Ferguson arrived at Manchester United from Aberdeen in 1986, Mossop was the first to interview him. He even got on with Don Revie. The sports writer David Miller said of Mossop: “He blended into the fabric of what he was writing about and it endeared him to sports people.”

Football was Mossop’s first love. He signed amateur forms with Barrow AFC but never got a game and he remained a passionate Bluebirds fan his whole life. Golf came a close second. When he became the Sunday Telegraph’s golf correspondent in 1998 it did not take him long to build friendships with those on the other side of the ropes, including Ernie Els. After Els had missed the cut at a tournament in Dubai the pair flew home together and Els invited Mossop to his box at Old Trafford for United’s game against Everton, stopping on the way at Mossop’s home to borrow a red tie. Els described his friend as “a great man”.

The Masters in 2008 was Mossop’s last big sporting assignment, at the conclusion of which his fellow golf writers “banged him out” of the media centre — a Fleet Street tradition for departing journalists in which colleagues thump their desks.

Mossop would have been the first to admit he was better writing about golf than playing it. What his drives lacked in distance they made up for in altitude. After the 2004 Ryder Cup at Oakland Hills, Mossop and three friends and colleagues — Alan Fraser, David Facey and Martin Hardy — flew to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina for some golfing R&R. They established the Nevertheless Golf Society and persuaded the French golfer Jean van de Velde to become its president. He laid down some important ground rules: only van de Velde could choose the wine, which had to be paid for by the others; and under no circumstances was a player permitted to lay up on a hole with a water hazard.

James Mossop was born in Lancaster in 1936 and grew up in Barrow-in-Furness, the eldest son of James and Emma (née Wilson). His father was in the Royal Marines and in May 1943 was shot in the back and killed in a training accident. Young James was six at the time, and his brother Gordon was a year old. Their mother later remarried and the boys had two half-siblings.

Mossop married twice in his life, first to June (née Large), with whom he had two children — John, who became a chef, and Judith, who worked with the John Lewis Partnership. The marriage ended in divorce and he later remarried, to Sandra (née Dodgson), who predeceased him.

After leaving Barrow Grammar School, Mossop worked as a labourer at the local steelworks in shifts close to the furnaces. “Tough is not the word,” he said of the job, and after three months left to chase his dream of becoming a journalist, joining the North-West Evening Mail.

Over the course of his career, his enthusiasm never waned. Jon Ryan, his sports editor at the Sunday Telegraph, said he volunteered for everything. Copy filed, he would leap from his desk and ask Ryan, “Where next?” For Mossop, this included ten World Cups, eight Olympics, Commonwealth Games, F1 Grands Prix, world title fights, Grand Nationals and Epsom Derbies, Rugby World Cups, Wimbledon, and golf’s majors and Ryder Cups. There was barely a press box in the world he had not sat in.

His contemporaries say Mossop knew how to have fun around the edges of sport. So familiar was he with the airports of the world that he knew where the bars were located. At the 1994 World Cup in the United States, he stayed at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort in Florida for 28 nights, every one of them like New Year’s Eve, he said. He was something of a gourmand. On assignments, once his copy had been written, he would choose the local restaurant in which to gather his colleagues and examine how far their expense accounts stretched.

The Sports Journalists’ Association made Mossop its Olympic writer of the year in 1992 and he twice received commendations in the British Press Awards. He served as chairman of the Football Writers’ Association in 1983 and 1984. He also co-authored Playing Extra Time, the autobiography of another 1966 World Cup hero, Alan Ball, and A Golfer’s Travels, detailing Peter Alliss’s globetrotting encounters with golf-loving celebrities.

As proud as he was of these achievements, what would have meant more to him was the reputation he earned among his peers for being a truthful, persistent and thorough sports writer, with an ability to impart great warmth about all that he wrote. Young sports reporters often sought his advice and his mantra remained the same: “Build relationships, have a sense of purpose, don’t strive too hard with the words, let them flow. Take the job seriously, but not yourself.” He practised what he preached.

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