HARRY CARPENTER:THE SPORTS commentator Harry Carpenter, who has died aged 84, was a popular professional stalwart towards the end of the age in which the BBC monopolised British television sports broadcasting.
The pioneer anchorman of the BBC's set-piece outside broadcasts of all the great sporting occasions, he displayed a steadfast unflappability in front of camera that appealed to producers. While he projected very few shafts of "showbiz" charisma, he made a considerable impression with his out-of-vision boxing commentaries.
He was closely associated with the career of Muhammad Ali as well as, later, the British fighter Frank Bruno. Both honed catchphrases to Carpenter's straight-man - "Harry, you're not as dumb as you look," in the case of Ali - while Bruno's "Know what I mean, 'Arry?" briefly entered the general lexicon.
A diminutive, definitive south Londoner, Carpenter was born in South Norwood and went to Selhurst grammar school, Croydon. He was in his first year in autumn 1937 when his fish merchant father, also Harry, woke him at dead of night to listen on the crackly "wireless" line to the US commentary from New York - the first by transatlantic landline of a live sporting event - on Welshman Tommy Farr's brave challenge for Joe Louis's world heavyweight title.
After serving the final two years of the second World War in the Royal Navy as a morse code operator, he started out as a journalist on demob in 1946 with the Greyhound Owner. Via stints on the Speedway Gazetteand the Sporting Record, he joined the Daily Mailin 1954, where, as well as writing columns on dog racing and boxing, he regularly contributed on those sports for both BBC radio and television from 1949 onwards. When he moved full-time to the BBC in 1962, he was a seasoned broadcaster.
With a clipped staccato delivery punctuating his affability and expertise, Carpenter covered the young Ali's two notorious championship-winning contests against Sonny Liston (1964, 1965) as well as his two victories in Britain against Henry Cooper (1963, 1966). The commentator was meticulous in his research as well as his habits: at ringside, he would always dress in a dark suit and tie - "in case of bloodstains showing".
Into the 70s, with satellite channels unknown and rival Independent Television's sport concentrating mainly still on wrestling and horse-racing, BBC's sporting pre-eminence seemed unassailable, and Carpenter, his safe pair of hands and unhysterical style ideally suited those presumptions. There was boxing, the Olympic and Commonwealth games, the Boat Race, the greyhound Derby, tennis and golf.
The latter became a hobby and he took pleasure in his grace-and-favour memberships of St Andrews and Sandwich's St George's.
In one of his television reviews in the Observer, Clive James wrote in 1979 of anchorman Harry's qualities: "Carpenter calls Wimbledon Wmbldn and is a necessary part of the scene when he delivers his famous Rain Commentary: 'And people quite happy to stand out there under their umbrellas and watch the covers being put on.' What makes Harry's Rain Commentary such a revolution in communications is the underlying assumption that rain is fascinating in itself."
At a time when it became good sport to log commentators' gaffes, Carpenter's slip-ups were comparatively few. At the end of one boat race he told the nation: "Ah, what a happy gesture, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew." At the clobbered conclusion of one boxing match, Carpenter observed the vanquished on the canvas "looking up at the victor through bloodstained lips"; and in the eighth round of Ali's epic "rumble in the jungle" in Kinshasa in 1974, at the very moment when Ali launched his famous knockout blow to melt the mandible of George Foreman, the BBC's Harry at ringside was sagely observing: "I'm afraid Ali is now looking terribly, terribly, tired." (For all future recordings, the line was cut.)
In 1989, he received the international award of the American Sportscasters Association, and by the time of his retirement in 1994, he had covered tennis at Wimbledon and all the major golf tournaments since 1967, and all the Olympic Games from 1956 to 1992. He presented Sportsnight, Grandstand and Sports Personality of the Year, and in 1999 returned to pay tribute to Ali as sports personality of the century - "not only the most remarkable sports personality I have ever met, he is the most remarkable man I have ever met." In a further comeback in April 2001, he gave expert analysis of Lennox Lewis's loss of his world heavyweight title to Hasim Rahman in South Africa.
Carpenter edited and contributed to a number of books on boxing. In one, he admitted his doubts about the pastime at which he had made his living: "The dangers must make you question the sport's value. But I have also seen the good it can do, principally in re-routing young men from possible deliquency into decent citizenship. No one becomes a proficient boxer without immense self-discipline - and it cannot have escaped your notice that boxers are far better behaved in their arena than are, say, soccer players and tennis stars in theirs."
His wife, Phyllis, whom he married in 1950, survives him, as does a son.
Harry Carpenter: born October 17th, 1925; died March 20th, 2010