Eddie Hemmings prepares to call time as the voice of rugby league - 'How do you replace the irreplaceable?'
Eddie Hemmings and I walk around the pitch at St Helens on a chilly morning, discussing his retirement from commentary after tomorrow's match against Wigan.
Sky's anchor man has been indivisible from rugby league on television since 1990, and it is with St Helens that he is perhaps most associated for his "wide to West" commentary on their legendary last-gasp try in the 2000 Super League play-offs against Bradford.
In these sort of valedictory features about well-liked sporting figures it is traditional to say at this point that they were well thought of by everyone from the club president to the bloke who mows the grass. And on this occasion it is actually true.
Justin Holbrook, the head coach, leaves the training warm-up to tell Hemmings: "You have done so much for the game up here, you are the one who always keeps things upbeat." His assistant, the St Helens great Sean Long, bounds up to shake hands, and here indeed is the groundsman, thanking Hemmings for "everything he has done for the sport".
Later, we run into Saints chief executive Mike Rush, who wonders: "How do you replace the irreplaceable?"
He also jokes to Hemmings: "Once Stevo left, you were a bit like Ant without Dec, weren't you, so maybe it is a good time to go on your own terms."
Stevo would be Mike Stephenson, the former Great Britain hooker and the other half of rugby league's best-known commentary double act until he called it a day in 2016. It came to be the on-screen partnership that would define both men's professional lives, as well as the sport's coverage in the UK.
Hemmings explained how it came about: "I was working at the BBC in Manchester in the late 1980s and this bloke turned up in reception saying that he had a parcel to deliver for his mate from Australian radio. I said, 'Well there's no one in the office' and he said, 'Well I've brought it 12,000 miles so I'm not leaving until I find out what's in it'. So we went and had a beer while we waited, which I paid for I might add, and that's the first time I met Stevo."
Stephenson returned to his adopted home in Australia, but the game was afoot in the UK sports broadcasting world.
"When the satellite went up, I went to the BBC personnel officer and said that I was going to go and do sport for BSB and she looked down her nose and said, 'Why? You'll be back'. It was a massive gamble. Nobody thought that satellite television would work," said Hemmings.
"In 1990, when Sky took over and it became BSkyB, you obviously weren't sure what was going to happen. But David Hill, the head of BSkyB, was a big rugby league fan, and when they created Sky Sports in 1991 I knew that league could be done better than it had been, with a dedicated sports channel. When they got the football deal in 1992, we all celebrated. It was clear that football was going to be the king, but the rest of us would be carried along in the backwash."
The new channel needed new talent, and Hemmings got Stephenson over. "He came for six weeks and stayed 26 years," he said. And in 1996, Sky's money led to the creation of the Super League.
Hemmings reckons that the stroke of genius was to switch it to a summer sport, although he did not feel so at the time, "because we'd just bought a one-bedroom holiday home in Spain on a golf course".
Sky's money brought serious professionalism to the sport, "ending the days of the pot-bellied forward forever," according to Hemmings. Marketing and pre-match hoopla made it a family spectacle. "Bradford in winter: cold and bleak, with 4,000 watching. But now they put on a show, it's at a warmer time of year, and we have 18,000 in the ground."
Rugby league, a sport born of a schism, has always been willing to take the plunge and embrace change. But one factor has remained immutable: with due respect to the London Broncos and the Catalans Dragons, this is a sport of the north. A certain other oval-balled pastime remains the nationwide choice.
"I'm not a fan of rugby union," sighed Hemmings. "I cannot understand the game, there's about 150 rules around the scrum: he's stood up, he's not.
"Heads down, backsides up. All the referee decisions. I cannot fathom it out. Obviously it appeals to a great number of people. Perhaps it is that people play at school and at university, they become captains of industry and have a natural affinity with rugby union.
"But people who watch league... they come to this once and they are hooked. I was. It is an honest, decent, rough, tough, athletic and skilful 80 minutes."
Hemmings has been there for all of the sport's great moments since the early 1990s, the Super League finals, countless internationals, and his calling of the aforementioned famous try eventually scored by Chris Joynt. His commentary for that is celebrated in a mural at the St Helens ground.
Other personal favourites include the time that Sky Sports did a feature pre-match at Knowsley Safari Park and Stephenson expressed a desire to get up close and personal with the residents of the ostrich pen. One got hold of his scarf, which was enjoyable, "but then the next thing you know, another ostrich came along and took a big chunk out of his ear. There was blood everywhere, I couldn't move with laughter. We got it all for the TV."
For the best part of three decades, Eddie Hemmings has got all of this sport for the TV. And it is clear that rugby league will miss him a lot.
