Brendan O'Reilly, who died on April 1st aged 71, was the face of sport on RTE Television for many years. It seemed a natural progression for an athlete and champion high-jumper, and yet a deep love of the arts, which embraced music, drama and painting, made him a man of remarkably diverse tastes.
He was born in Granard, Co Longford, on May 14th, 1929, the son of James P. O'Reilly and Catherine (nee Donegan). His father, a shopkeeper, was also a violinist and an accomplished singer, whose proud boast was that he sang duets with the great John McCormack at concerts in the midlands.
As a child, Brendan O'Reilly was taught the piano, and his love of music was such that he had ambitions of becoming a professional singer. And those who heard him sing on the Late Late Show during the 1960s would have seen it as a perfectly reasonable aspiration.
When he was nine the family moved to Dublin. He was educated at the Christian Brothers School in James's Street, where he excelled at Gaelic football. It was there that he was introduced to drama. However, his acting debut, as a nurse, was somewhat inauspicious, given that he went on stage without his wig.
During his final school year he met a man who was to have a profound influence on his career: Jack Sweeney, a leading athletics coach, guided the young sportsman towards the high jump at which he would later excel.
After acquiring a job in the insurance business in 1950, he pursued an athletics career with Donore Harriers, while attending drama classes at the Brendan Smith Academy in the evenings. This led to awards for mime and poetry reading.
His athletics skills earned him Irish records for javelin and high-jump at 6ft 53/4ins in 1954. Earlier that year, he won a British AAA title which led to a four-year athletics scholarship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he improved his high-jump record to 6ft 7ins. He was also asked to play an Irish cowboy in a Hollywood film, but he declined because of his studies.
While he was in the US, he got the opportunity of conducting his first interview, with the great Olympian Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals at the Berlin Games in 1936. Years later, Brendan O'Reilly recalled: "I was in Cleveland [Ohio] the previous winter, competing in the high jump, when, after I had knocked the bar at 6ft 4ins a couple of times, an official told me: `I think your angle is too sharp. Would you think of moving it out a bit?' I did - and got over. I did not know it at the time, but that was Jesse Owens."
Bad luck ruined his chance of becoming an Olympian. He was selected on the Irish team for the Melbourne Games in 1956, but two days before he was due to depart, it transpired that his club didn't have enough funds to finance the trip and he didn't go.
He had also experienced the heartbreak of missing the European Championships in Berne in 1954. Rated as the number two high-jumper in Europe and apparently assured of a medal, he fractured an ankle in practice only a few days before the event. "In sport, one inevitably meets with defeat," he recalled later. "But this helps to build a philosophy towards life - to take the knocks and get up again."
Having gained a liberal arts degree at Michigan, majoring in speech and drama, he moved to New York, where he met his first wife Linda. He began working as an actor, touring with the Irish Players in a programme of Synge plays. He was also offered a singing part in a musical version of Juno and the Paycock, but was forced to turn it down because his student visa had expired. In 1959, he returned to Dublin, where he worked as a vocational teacher and a director with an advertising agency. He joined the newly-launched RTE Television in 1961 as an announcer/interviewer, describing himself self-deprecatingly as "a champion high-jumper who could enunciate properly and keep my hair neatly combed".
Brendan O'Reilly fronted IT]Sports Stadium, RTE Television's flagship Saturday afternoon programme, on and off, for 14 years and had the honour of co-presenting, with Tracy Piggott, the final programme when it came off the air in December 1997. He also filled the same role on Sunday Sport, while being deeply involved in the presentation of junior sports programmes during the 1960s and 1970s. His light-entertainment skills were reflected in The Life of O'Reilly, his own television show in which he played host to celebrity guests.
Away from television, he engaged in considerable extramural activities. He appeared as Det Insp Michael Roarke in the classic children's film Flight of the Doves, made a number of successful records - two of which reached the Irish charts - became a member of the Wine and Food Society and played the count in Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde at the New Eblana Theatre in 1992.
Remarkable versatility also saw him become the first person outside politics to deliver the oration at the annual Michael Collins commemoration at Beal na Blath in 1980, an honour which was accorded him largely for having written and recorded The Ballad of Michael Collins. He also wrote the official Olympic song Let the Nations Play, which was first performed at the Seoul Games in 1988.
Brendan O'Reilly - described by friends as "a wonderful family man" - is survived by his wife Johanna (Lowry O'Reilly), children, Hannah, Rossa, Kelan and Myles, brother Frank and sister Winnie. His brothers, Jimmy and Tommy, and sister Maureen pre-deceased him.
Brendan O'Reilly: born 1929; died, April 2001