At a time such as this you feel that any words you can compose about Hughie will fall way short of what he deserves by the very standard of writing that he himself created.

I doubt if there were a sports journalist in the land in the last few decades who has sat down to create something, without pitting himself, perhaps subconsciously, against the seemingly effortless way Hughie could produce elegance and lyricism on a page, for event after event.

Fortunately my own career, in many ways, paralleled his, although in different areas. Starting off in broadcasting, I first came across him in the press box at Hampden Park just after he had joined The Observer in the mid-sixties. Jock Stein was in his second season as Celtic manager. The game was between Celtic and Clyde, the semi-final of what I believe was the Glasgow Cup. Hughie clearly was not there because of the event itself, but because he had taken up his pen now in appreciation of Stein and was probably there for an in-depth interview.

He was sitting only a couple of seats away from me, and I was to hear, for the first time, that huskily-soft baritone voice speaking to his companions, extolling the virtues of Stein and his side who were romping to a comprehensive victory.

Hearing Hughie’s words that sunny evening about Stein, as a new force in European football, makes me only now appreciate I was an initiate into a golden era of both sports journalism and Scottish football, which at the time I could not possibly have appreciated.

Although he was to ply his trade south of the border and around the world, he never seemed far distant for any Scot. Prose doesn’t have a twang, but as you picked up your Observer every week without fail, simply to read him, you couldn’t help but hear the cadences of that Ayrshire voice murmuring in your ear. But it was principally world events and work for the BBC in London that brought me nearer him.

In the World Cup in Germany in 1974 which was prefaced by a disastrous tour of Belgium and Norway, we came across each other in Erbismuhle where Scotland were camped in a hunting lodge, and I recall him sounding distinctly saddened by what in general terms was his worry about Scotland’s tendency to self-destruct.

This was to be followed by Argentina in 1978 where that ability to self-destruct was almost prototyped, and we had the first of many drinks together in our careers, with other mostly English journalists in the press centre in Cordoba.

Although I had been painfully aware of the scornful nature of some of my BBC London-based operators about Scotland, I noticed his Fleet Street peers treated him with awesome respect because they knew that he could be easily riled and did not suffer fools gladly.

I learned more of that nature in our nights in London, especially after the annual BBC Personality of the Year Awards programme which at that stage was always held in a studio in the city.

Afterwards, by ritual, we would get together with the editor of Grandstand, Mike Murphy, and make our way to the Cricketers Club in the west end for a blether. That’s where the drinking started. I can always remember when it commenced, but sometimes not when, or where, it ended.

We were both discovering that we were stoic, unflinching drinkers, with sometimes Hughie developing a growing belligerence about nothing in particular. I did ask him once if it had been true he had a fisticuffs altercation with the famous author Norman Mailer one night in New York, but he was reticent to admit to that, although I suspect he was not averse to having a myth like that attached to him. "Wha daur meddle wi’ me", was etched in his countenance from time to time.

Eventually, one year I invited him to Glasgow to take part in a Review of the Year programme, along with "Mighty Mouse" Ian McLauchlan and Peter Alliss, which I was to present from the studio. It was a night to remember. During the programme with Alliss pontificating about standards in life degenerating, the golf commentator then pronounced that old women could not walk down the street nowadays for fear of rape. There was a sharp intake of breath and a kind of silence. Hughie then made a remark sotto voce which I misheard, and thought he had said something about why shouldn’t we try citizen’s arrests or something like that and I found myself saying, ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it’.

However, the public hadn’t heard his remark, which meant my response was laid against Alliss's words about rape. I leave to your imagination the landslide of opprobrium I got from a public which stormed the switchboards. Hughie and I reminisced a few times about the night he accidentally put me in the public stocks, and about old times, like veteran troupers who didn’t put on the greasepaint as often as we used to. And I would always bring up Los Angeles.

It was the Olympics of 1984. We bumped into each other at certain venues and it was comforting to hear his Scottish voice, surrounded as I was by my London colleagues, morning, noon and night.

Then came the unforgettable closing ceremony in the Coliseum. Hughie was sitting just in front of me as Lionel Ritchie on the stage, very close to the media in fact, was belting into his rendering of "All Night Long". Now, computing had just come into the journalistic world. It was meant to make the job easier. You tapped the report in and, hey presto, it would end up on a page somewhere, sort of thing. Adeptness with this was not universal among the press. Hughie was a traditionalist. He liked a phone in his hand to get through to anybody.

That evening this new-fangled contraption was reacting obviously like a spoiled child. I saw him in anguished exasperation take the computer and, from what I could see, dropping it like a stone beneath him. Technology would have to wait. And since his copy was dripping in gold anyway, he would have the final say on a phone.

His sad departure from us draws down a curtain on an era in which there was great sports writing, which, you could argue, came almost singlehandedly from the encouragement of his talent. Of course, historically, there were other great writers in all kinds of sport; Neville Cardus in cricket, Red Smith in baseball, Geoffrey Green of The Times in football. But none had Hughie’s width. He penetrated the barricades which had been built around sports writing, separating it from so-called mainstream journalism, by dint of quality writing which earned the admiration from such as Mailer – and he did so over a wide range of sports.

He was not only a master of his trade. He was an evangelist who drew converts to that cliché-free Elysium of his.