Ted Macauley, the veteran Daily Mirror sports journalist who counted Bobby Charlton, George Best and Barry Sheene among his friends, has died aged 91 on Wednesday, with his wife Dee at his side.
Macauley was described as one of the great Mirror writers, and Paul Smith called him “one-off” and “one of a kind” after the news of his death. He spent more than 35 years at the paper and became a familiar figure around major sport, from Formula 1 to motorbike racing and the Isle of Man TT.
His name is searched now because the death closes a long career that stretched across football, motorsport and celebrity sport. Based in Manchester, he was close to Manchester United figures such as Charlton and Best, and he travelled the world for the Mirror, interviewing film stars including Paul Newman and Lee Marvin along the way.
Yet the story of Macauley is as much about the company he kept as the copy he filed. His memoirs, Raring to Go, leaned heavily on those friendships, and he wrote that his coverage of global sport overlapped principally between football and Grand Prix racing on two and four wheels. He said Best regularly slept on his sofa in his village farmhouse 10 miles from Old Trafford, a detail that captures how close those ties were.
That closeness also sits beside the harder truth of the era he covered. Macauley said Best and Sheene remained close friends and allies until their deaths, and he described them as men who departed this life too soon. Best died in 2005 at 59, after Sheene died of cancer in 2003 aged 52, leaving Macauley to keep telling the stories of a sporting world that was already disappearing.
He is survived by Dee, his son Iain, his daughter Kerris and four grandchildren. The unanswered question now is not whether he mattered to the Mirror or to the sportsmen who knew him; it is how a reporter so woven into the lives of the era's biggest names will be remembered beyond those friendships.
