If peerless commentator David Coleman, to whom the BBC rightly paid a fine tribute recently, was the master of the spoken word then surely Frank Keating was his equal with the written one.

Both giants of their respective trades, they passed away within a month of each other at the turn of the year, Coleman at 87 and Keating at 75.

Coleman had a fitting star-studded memorial on screen while Keating's now comes with a newly-published collection of his Guardian essays (The Highlights, Frank Keating), edited by his former colleague Matthew Engel, Faber and Faber, £19.99 ($33.48/€24.57)

I shared many joyous assignments with Keating, who was somewhat less economical with his bon mots than "one-nil" Coleman.

His language could be flowery, but the prose, which delighted and enthralled readers over four decades, was always compelling.

Frank Keating, much like David Coleman (pictured), was a master of his trade ©Bob Thomas/Getty Images




Several modern sportswriters, not least the marvellous Hugh McIlvanney, with whom I worked on The Observer, have aspired to and reached great literary heights, but few have had such an eloquent talent to amuse and entertain as did the Hereford-born Keating with phraseology that was always fresh and inventive.

As one former colleague puts it: "He didn't write so much about sport's language or technique, he wrote about its soul."

As the book shows, barely a sport was left untouched by his lyricism, and he had a special passion for the Olympics, covering several Games with joyous appreciation of their ideals coupled with a rare wit. But he could be acerbic with his criticism too.

It is an easy pleasure to pluck gems from this collection of Olympic observations. This is how he began a perceptive piece on the Ben Johnson affair in Seoul 1988:

"I don't know how many Olympic competitors say their prayers night and morning as a matter of course. But I bet a heck of a lot more than usual woke up to Seoul's chilly grey dawn yesterday and, with a shiver, offered thanks: 'There but for the grace of God go I.' Ben Johnson is taking the rap for a pretty large army."

Of the heavy-handednesss of those uniformed jobsworths in charge of  so-called security at the awful Atlanta Olympics he opined:

"To us in the vast congregation of hangers-on who piled out of the caravans three weeks ago, the true heroine of the 1996 Games was not a tweetie-pie gymnast, a runner, a jumper, a standing-still long-legged length of pulchritude frozen in concentration as she prepared to defy gravity in the women's long jump...to us lot in the invading army which marched across Georgia cursing, the heroine was Mrs Dick Pound, wife of Canada's IOC bigwig, who kneed an Atlanta policewoman in  the groin. It goes without saying that the cop was over-officious and over-harassed and over-the-top. Every one of them has been, male or female...they hated us and it was mutual."

And he had this to say of Atlanta's Opening Ceremony. "It was a stroke of genius to ambush the world with the surprise appearance of Muhammad Ali to light the flame of goodness and expectation .Up travelled the sacred lick of the flame by pulley to ignite the Olympic bowl in the  topmost  plinth. Hurrah-until we saw that the bowl was cast in the open-shell shape of a gigantic chip-wrapper for McDonald's French fries. The hamburger conglomerate has been cashing in." Every heroic image, said Keating, was capped by something seedy.

Anyone for fries? The cauldron for the Atlanta 1996 Olympics, pictured being lifted into place two months before the Games, somewhat irked Frank Keating ©AFP/Getty Images



But by and large he loved the Olympics, finding them beguiling and uplifting

He also had literary love affairs with cricket, rugby and boxing.

My favourite boxing intro of all time remains his preview of the Ali-Dunn world heavyweight title fight in 1976, which began: "Tonight, in Munich's Olympiahalle, Muhammad Ali, of the Universe, meets Richard Dunn of No 2 Northcote Terrace, Bradford."

Who else but Keating could have described the moment when John Conteh had his teeth knocked as: "A faint tinkle of crystal like a chandelier caught in a Waterford breeze."

Keating liked not so much the brutality, but the bonhomie of boxing, particularly among fellow scribes. We used to josh him when he walked into the media room at big fights in Las Vegas, seeking a dinner companion or two for that evening. "Much love, m'dears," he would wave cheerily as he left.

His use of that phrase usually left macho American writers spluttering into their coffee. "Is he some sort of fag?" they'd query, eyebrows raised. Well, family man Frank may have been fey, but he certainly wasn't gay.

He did rather enjoy a bottle or two of decent vino when he was composing his pieces, which he would self-deprecatingly dismiss as "my  drivel." A waiter, with bottle and glass balanced on a tray, tapping on his hotel room door, was a familiar sight.

But much as he loved most sports, there were some he couldn't abide. One was ice dancing. To him Torvill and Dean were "Borevill and Preen."

And he positively loathed tennis. Or rather, its ancestral home, Wimbledon.

Wimbledon was most definitely not one of Frank Keating's favourite haunts ©Popperfoto/Getty Images



To Keating, politically a lifelong leftie, 'Wimmers' represented what was wrong with British society. He found it stuffy, smug and snooty - a veritable Tory garden party. And he frequently said so.

On one occasion, years ago, he temporarily loaned his Centre Court press pass to a young fan who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get in all day. A cardinal sin. Keating was rumbled by officials and hauled before an All-England Club committee.

They told him that as a result he would be banned from Wimbledon for the next three days. "Can't you make it life?" he pleaded.

David Coleman, the first broadcaster to receive the Olympic Order in recognition of his contribution to the Olympic movement, would never have committed such an aberration.

Here was the consummate pro, a wordsmith as equally but differently gifted as Keating but with phrases judiciously selected and imparted over 46 years of broadcasting.

Keating had also been versed in TV but as a producer and editor rather than a presenter, while unlike today's celebrity sportscasters, Coleman had been weaned on real journalism, editing his local newspaper. So they were both very much two of a kind professionally.

Yet while Keating was affable and easy-going, Coleman was difficult and demanding. Someone once said his bark was worse than his bite. "Don't you believe it," his former colleague John Motson remarks cryptically.

However no sports commentator - before or since - has had such a commanding all-round presence at the microphone. He knew sport inside out and had the respect of those who played it - as underscored by the great and the good who packed the memorial event organised by the BBC.

Many a Coleman commentary was vividly recalled, not least his masterful conveyance of the Black September raid on the Olympic Village at Munich in 1972, a day-long marathon from dawn until the dreadful conclusion late that evening.

David Coleman's reporting of the unfolding hostage crisis at Munich 1972 was masterful ©Sports Illustrated via Getty Images



There were the multitudinous "Colemanballs" famously columnised in the satirical magazine Private Eye, which Coleman himself much enjoyed. Especially those that were not even uttered by him.

His widely-attributed classic that the Cuban 800 metres double Olympic gold medallist, Alberto Juantorena, "opened his legs and showed his class", actually spilled from the lips of  the late athletics pundit Ron Pickering.

Equally though, it might have been penned, rather more tongue in cheek, by dear old Frank Keating. With much love, m'dears, of course.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Games, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.