James Mossop, the former golf correspondent of the Sunday Express and the Sunday Telegraph, has passed away at the age of 89 following a lengthy illness.
One of the one most distinguished sportswriters of his generation, Mossop covered a wide variety of sports in a journalistic career that spanned more than five decades.
Born in Barrow-in-Furness in 1937, and educated at Barrow Grammar, Mossop’s first job after leaving school was working as a labourer at the local steelworks. Three months of hard work around the fiery furnaces was enough to provide the youngster with all the incentive he needed to start his writing career, which he did so at the North West Evening Mail in the mid-1950s.
Mossop’s talents soon attracted the attention of the national press, and he went on to join first the Daily Mail‘s Manchester office, then the Sunday Express, and then, for the last 11 years of his career, the Sunday Telegraph, where as a general sportswriter he covered eight Olympic Games, ten football World Cups, dozens of big boxing matches, countless major golf championships, and many F1 races.
In 2008, at the age of 71, he was made redundant by the Sunday Telegraph, but before he stepped down he covered one last Masters Tournament, where, after the final day’s play, he was cheered by his fellow journalists as he left Augusta National’s media centre for the final time.
Mossop, who went by the nickname of ‘Messup’ and also ‘Milhaus’ due to his passing resemblance to former US president Richard Nixon, whose middle name it was, was a member of the Association of Golf Writers for over 40 years. According to fellow AGW member Martin Hardy, the northern sports correspondent for The Times and The Sunday Times, Mossop “enjoyed sport in general and loved golf almost as much as he did football, while recognising that he was never particularly proficient at either. His playing partners marvelled at his long drives – not because of the distance they travelled, but for how high they soared. Handing out complimentary golf balls at one Pro-Am, South Africa’s Hugh Baiocchi said to him: ‘These normally add 10 yards to your drive, but in your case, it will be height”.
Hardy, one of many fellow sportswriters to pay tribute to Mossop, added: “I have had to write too many tributes of late, but none has hurt more than this one to my old mate ‘Messup’. Highly respected, enormously revered and endlessly loved, Jim’s qualities covered every page of the book of superlatives, but I can pay him no greater tribute than to say of the 50 years I knew and appreciated his company, I never heard one person say a bad word about him.”
David Facey, the former golf correspondent for The Sun, and a long-time friend, added: “Jim Mossop was everything you could want in a friend – loyal, funny, good company, and someone who knew where the bar was! My relationship with Jim started out as a ‘friend of a friend’. Martin Hardy sensed we would get along like a house on fire, and, of course, he was right. The three of us later founded the Nevertheless Golf Society along with Alan Fraser, when we decided some R&R at Myrtle Beach was needed after a particularly exhausting Ryder Cup. Jean van de Velde is our president, and he was deeply saddened to hear of Mossop’s passing. RIP Jim. You will be missed.”
As well as his extensive journalistic career, Mossop wrote a number of sports books, including an autobiography of 1966 World Cup winner Alan Ball called Playing Extra Time, which was published in 2004; while in 1997 he co-authored A Golfer’s Travels with Peter Alliss, which saw the BBC Golf commentator and Ryder Cup legend play against a series of celebrities, including Gene Hackman, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Darius Rucker, lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, at a range of high-profile courses around the world.