'It's high-time I stopped' – Voice of shinty Hugh Dan MacLennan reflects on 40-year career ahead of final Camanachd Cup broadcast
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This weekend's Camanachd Cup final will be a landmark occasion in many ways.
As well as marking 100 years since the showcase match was first played at Bught Park in Inverness, it will also see the voice of shinty step away from the sport.
Hugh Dan MacLennan has been commentating on shinty's showcase match over the last 40 years, but Saturday's battle between Kingussie and Oban Camanachd at Bught Park in Inverness will be his last.
It has been no secret – MacLennan announced his impending departure back in March – but that has only meant a string of well-wishers and "last evers" leading up to Saturday's finale in shinty.
"I made up my mind quite a while ago, because the 40 years was a nice, neat number and then I realised there was the historical nicety of it being 100 years at the Bught Park," MacLennan explained.
"I had this cup that I was going to donate to the Sutherland Cup, which is also 100 years old, for their player of the match, so there was a heap of things coming together which has made it easier.
"I've been at it an awful long time, and it's high-time I stopped. It has been 100 years of the BBC in Scotland, and when you realise that I've been there for 40 years, I've been doing this for nearly half of the BBC's existence in Scotland, and that becomes frightening.
"In commentating in the Gaelic side now, there are enough people where they are not going to struggle to replace me.
"I look back at when I replaced John Willie Campbell in so many of his roles in 1990, and he was fortunate that I was there – I'm very fortunate that there are so many people around now.
"Myself and my wife have had health issues in the last 12 months too. I had treatment for cancer in January, which was all very successful, and my wife had an operation and was actually in hospital during last year's Camanachd Cup final.
"That focused our minds and our priorities for the rest of our lives. It's not that it doesn't involved shinty, but it needs to be free of the burden of fixtures and people in Dublin deciding what I'm doing on a given Saturday in July.
"My wife and I want to do a lot more travel. We want to go to the Panama Canal as a retirement present, do a month-long cruise, and travel to other places – those are things you can't do when you're doing two or three games every weekend.
"It's the right time. I've had a spring of lasts, which have all been very nice and people have been very good to me. I suppose I'm resigned to it, and comfortable with it."
Growing up in Caol, it was inevitable that MacLennan would get involved with shinty – in his own words, there was "hee-haw" to do apart from playing shinty or football.
Eventually some older players took the likes of MacLennan under their wing and began teaching them the skills of shinty, which eventually led to the broadcaster being part of a fairly successful juvenile Fort William team.
He would continue to play after moving to Glasgow for university, where he studied to become a Gaelic teacher so that he would have a fall-back option for whatever he wanted to do – catching the eye of the BBC.
They were looking to expand their Gaelic talent pool, so were offering Gaelic speakers scripts for radio. MacLennan impressed at that point, being offered a job that he turned down to complete his teaching qualifications.
That brought him to Millburn Academy in Inverness, where he would connect with John Willie Campbell, who was one of the assistant rectors at the school.
Campbell was the go-to man for shinty, and he enlisted the help of MacLennan and others to provide results and reports on a Saturday afternoon – keeping him on the radar of the BBC, who once again offered him a job in the early 1980s.
"I began as what was called a station assistant, which sounds like I was working on the railway but it was actually playing all the records and the tapes," MacLennan recalled.
"I was sitting at the desk putting out all the programmes, then I worked my way through the system to become a senior producer of news in the Gaelic service which took off in 85.
"My timing was right. There were no opportunities for me to progress career-wise in Gaelic really, but there were in the BBC.
"We were sent for 10 weeks of training in London, and early on in that period I took a phone call from someone in Glasgow doing sports radio, and they asked me to do the shinty cup final for radio since I was working for the BBC anyway.
"I thought it was a wind-up, I just didn't believe, but David Francey, the great commentator, picked me up to take me to Wembley to show me how it worked because I discovered he was going to be the commentator and I would be the co-commentator helping him through it, because he had never seen a shinty match.
"That was quite an experience being linked up with the doyen of broadcasting when I only just had my foot in the door, and that led me to doing my first Camanachd Cup final in 1983 in Fort William funnily enough, at Claggan Park which is no longer used, and that set me up for the next 42 years.
"The next step change after that was when John Willie decided he was retiring in 1990. That coincided with an expansion of telly doing more and BBC One doing a live cup final. John was a radio man through and through, but because I was already in radio they decided that I could do the telly as well.
"2008 was the next big change, when the Gaelic TV service came on and we went from one game a year to five, six, seven and eight games-a-year, so there was a lot more to do.
"There was a bit of logic to it, a bit of being in the right place at the right time, and taking the opportunities when they were there. No-way did I, in 1983, think I would have ended up doing all the stuff I've done. It wasn't anywhere on the horizon – and just as well probably."
Across those 40 years, technology has changed massively, altering the ins and outs of MacLennan's role.
Another thing that changed was his relationship with the sport. Although his love for shinty never wavered, MacLennan had to adjust to a different dynamic with players as a journalist, as well as elements of politicking with governing bodies.
He would delve even further into the sport when he wrote a comprehensive history of shinty and every club for the Camanachd Association's centenary, and in recent years has added the shinty memories project to his portfolio.
Much like John Willie Campbell before him a few decades ago, MacLennan has become the main point of contact for anyone with a question about shinty history. With the memories project, though, he has seen first-hand the impact that sport can have on people who are struggling.
"Early doors there was a perception issue – some people wouldn't go to groups because they might catch dementia," MacLennan explained.
"It was like the HIV thing, it was all perception, and I get that. It's part of an education process, but where they worked they work really well, and none more so than in Badenoch.
"The first two ambassadors we had were Donnie Grant and John MacKenzie, who were horrendous opponents – they would admit that themselves, they were the world's worst when they were together on the field.
"After that, Donnie was diagnosed with dementia, and he openly declared that he wanted to be used as something of a guinea pig, although I don't like using that term. We learned an awful lot from Donnie, because we kept asking what he wanted us to do.
"There are such a variety of types of Alzheimer's, but we also quickly realised that Shinty Memories couldn't possibly be just about Alzheimer's. There are other issues like peripherality in shinty and loneliness, and actually we realised we were dealing with the same thing that leads to completely disproportionate amounts of suicide in Highland communities.
"In a sense, it's no different to me and a bunch of older folk who have got dementia, because society is losing someone for a reason that might have been – not avoided, but certainly they could have been helped or supported with.
"It would be very easy to say that none of this would have happened if I hadn't done it. It's for other people in the future to decide the value of it, but I can see the value of it already.
"It's very fulfilling and rewarding. We filmed one woman with her husband, Douglas Mackintosh, who was just reclusive, but when John MacKenzie went in to his sitting room and started talking to him about matches with scarves and books and all of that stuff, he became a different man.
"We filmed his wife Anne's reaction to that, and she spoke to us afterwards and said that was the Douglas she married, but he won't be with her when we go home. It's sobering stuff.
"The benefit you get out of one successful meeting makes all the rest of it worthwhile. None of it isn't worthwhile, but it gives you a better return. Now we have to build on Donnie's legacy as a next step for us."
MacLennan has a string of rugby commentaries on the agenda over the coming months before finally hanging up his microphone for good.
As well as travelling in his retirement, he will be sorting through roomfuls of shinty documents and memorabilia to preserve them for future generations.
So while Saturday's Camanachd Cup final will be the last shinty broadcast he takes part in, he will not be disappearing completely from the shinty community – not that they would let him go that easily.
