He is the man with the microphone who ended up on the bench in a European Cup final.
He almost died during an interview with Muhammad Ali, persuaded Sebastian Coe to run to a TV studio immediately after winning Olympic gold and dropped Chris Eubank from a chaise longue.
He introduced Jimmy Greaves to a career in television, brought the post-match flash interviews to football and put Gary Neville on course for punditry. Some might say Gary Newbon has a lot to answer for.
He also captured one of the sport’s most enduring quotes when he shoved his microphone under Sir Alex Ferguson’s nose during the euphoric afterglow of Manchester United’s Champions League victory in Barcelona.
“Football, bloody hell,” Ferguson said after strolling with Newbon through a long tunnel to the designated interview area.
Gary Newbon enjoyed a legendary broadcasting career that lasted more than 50 years
He regularly worked closely with the hugely charismatic and iconic manager Brian Clough
“The longest tunnel I’ve ever seen,” Newbon explains. ‘There’s a chapel halfway up. Ferguson was always fantastic to me. He had prepared for a defeat against Bayern Munich and then gets the two late goals and is in shock for a few seconds.
‘I look at him and his eyes are gone and I ask for his reaction and he says, ‘Football, damn it’.
“Then he recovers, realizes what he’s saying and says, ‘You never give in.’ When he made the documentary with his son Jason, they cut out ‘Football, bloody hell.’
Newbon knew better. The phrase has been adapted as the title of his memoir, Newbon, Bloody Hell, a book packed with these stories and many more from a broadcast career spanning more than 50 years and more than 10,000 shows.
“My family are tired of hearing them so I thought I should put them in print,” the 78-year-old says by way of explanation over tea and biscuits at his kitchen table in Solihull.
The journey through countless nights on the track, on the field or ringside began in 1968 at Westward TV. One of his first assignments: a feature film about a 14-year-old called Trevor Francis, the talk of football at Plymouth schools and sought after by the biggest clubs. “I was shaking, he was shaking, it must have been terrible,” Newbon recalled.
Francis joined Birmingham and Newbon followed him to the Midlands with a move to ATV. The region was a football power at the time, with Derby County and Nottingham Forest winning titles and Brian Clough captivating TV audiences with his charisma.
“Clough was a genius,” says Newbon. ‘Crowded social clubs in the Midlands fell silent when he came into the picture. You never knew what he was going to say, but he always said something outrageous.
‘He was so sharp. I once came over to do the Star Soccer highlights show from the ground and I had lost my voice. He said: “Two and a half million people in the Midlands will be happy.”
‘The only others close to him were Ron Atkinson and Tommy Docherty. This year, just before Trevor died, I wrote about his debut in Birmingham at the age of 16. His first home game was a 1-1 draw against Oxford and Ron marked him, so I called Ron, who told me that Trevor had never been kicked. Then I called Trevor, who said in his innocent way, “I scored the goal.”
Newbon was Cloughie’s designated attendant on the infamous night he flippantly called Jan Tomaszewski a ‘clown’ as the Polish goalkeeper made a series of brilliant saves to send England out of the 1973 World Cup.
“I didn’t do very well,” Newbon admits. ‘I was told to take care of him and keep him sober. We crashed a BBC party. He told me not to be so boring and gave me a glass of champagne.’
Newbon (bottom right in black top) was even on the bench for the 1982 European Cup final
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When Aston Villa won the European Cup against Bayern Munich in Rotterdam in 1982, it was live on ITV and Newbon’s job was to provide an immediate post-match reaction.
UEFA insisted on no interviews until an hour after the final whistle, but Villa boss Tony Barton agreed to let him watch the match from the bench and talk live once it finished.
“People think I made it up,” Newbon says. “Luckily there’s a photo.” He was sitting alongside Nigel Spink, Villa’s then unknown back-up keeper, when number 1 Jimmy Rimmer was injured after nine minutes.
‘Spin turned to me and said, “What happens now?” I said, “You’re busy.” He said, “I hope my mom has the TV on,” then ran and played a blinder.
‘I have my job interviews. We even went into the tunnel to film in the locker room. I thought I was going to get in trouble, but I didn’t. In those days you could get away with things that you couldn’t get away with today.’
The value of an immediate pitch response was clear, especially for the terrestrial channels. “ITV wanted to know three things: how much will it cost, how many viewers will we get and how quickly can you get off air,” says Newbon.
‘So I started with the flash interviews. The first was a disaster. I tackled Chelsea’s Bobby Campbell and held him because he didn’t want it. The second, Gordon Strachan, then walked straight past me in Leeds and refused. The third was make or break, but I got it right.’
The ATV Sport team also made the inspired call to put Greaves on screen, shortly after he came out of rehab for alcoholism, as Newbon’s sidekick in Star Soccer.
Greaves declined, saying it was too far from his home in Essex, but called back a few days later to say his wife Irene had told him to take the job. “I had no idea how funny he would be,” Newbon says. ‘He was nervous at first and there were critics in the Midlands who thought he shouldn’t be a Londoner, but I remember the time he cracked it.
‘Birmingham v Blackpool with a controversial penalty and Greavsie came out with: “Alan Ainscow is about to take a deeper dive than Jacques Cousteau”. I started laughing because I didn’t expect it. Then he took off.’
Greaves, who died in 2021 at the age of 81, became one of the country’s top TV personalities.
“I owe my film career to four people,” says Newbon. ‘Clough, Ferguson, Greaves and Chris Eubank. They had the biggest impact. Eubank drove me crazy sometimes, but he was a cashier.”
Their first meeting took place in Brighton when Newbon covered one of his early fights for Midweek Sports Special. “It was a terrible fight,” he says. “I went up to him too aggressively and said, ‘You’ll never be world champion if you fight like that,’ and he said, ‘That tells me you don’t know anything about boxing.’
By the time Eubank summoned Newbon to his hotel before fighting Ray Close in Belfast to confirm rumors he was leaving his ITV contract for Sky, the pair had become close.
“I went into his suite and he’s lying on a chaise lounge, and we talked and at the end he asked how many of his fights I had beaten. It was 16 and he said, “What do you remember most?”
Newbon is drenched in champagne as David Seaman looks on after Arsenal won the 1991 title
‘Newbon, Bloody Hell: A Life in Sports Broadcasting’ will be released on Thursday, November 16
“I said, ‘Well, I’m grateful to you Chris, because after the last fight I complimented you and you said it meant a lot that it came from someone with so much knowledge and steeped in boxing, so over the course of your I have had sixteen fights. I have turned from knowing everything into an absolute expert.”
‘He laughed so much that he fell off his chaise longue and almost twisted his ankle, the fight was almost stopped.’
Years earlier, Newbon had been sent to interview boxing legend Ali outside a Ladbrokes store in central Birmingham when he took a much more serious fall himself.
“They were stopping traffic and I’m interviewing him when a woman lost control of her car, hit the wrong pedal and hit me,” he says. ‘I was immediately thrown into the air. My film crew was so frozen in horror that they never filmed it.
‘They thought I was going to die and Peter Lorenzo, a famous journalist who did PR for Ladbrokes, didn’t want me to die under the sign and pulled me into the shop.’
Luckily he lived to tell the tale. And much more.
Newbon, Bloody Hell: A Life in Sports Broadcasting is published by Biteback and will be released on November 16