There was a time when Hugh Keevins would have approached two games in a week between Celtic and Rangers like a meerkat scanning the horizon for the next juicy headline.
A serious health scare changed all of that. The voice of Radio Clyde’s Superscoreboard for the last 41 years, a duodenal ulcer followed the narrowing of an artery to the brain in July and triggered a change of outlook and perspective. His lucky escape served as a reminder that football is merely the most important of the unimportant things in life.
“I hope Martin [O’Neill] and Derek [McInnes] have a nice time but I can’t get terribly excited over two derbies back to back these days,” the veteran journalist and broadcaster tells The Fixture. “Not when I have just spent time in a situation where I was lying on the ground bleeding internally thinking, ‘What on earth is happening?’”
Back riling the masses with verbal uppercuts on the Clyde phone-in, while writing a column for the Sunday Mail, the game’s most pugnacious pundit has yet to return to his old fighting weight. He is trying to put a few pounds on and his concession to obesity is a pack of Jammy Dodgers with a pot of tea in a Costa coffee shop in Bearsden as he recalls the events of July 23 and an implosion which reared up without warning.
Storing groceries in a cupboard after a trip to the supermarket, his wife Janet left him alone to walk to the nearby home of their daughter Lisa for a few minutes.
Realising something was wrong, Keevins began feeling unwell.
Sweating profusely and overcome by a wave of nausea, he made it as far as the bathroom before his legs gave way and buckled.
“I actually compared it to the medical people to when they put dynamite under a block of the high-rise flats,” he says now. “I went straight down and hit everything on the way down.
“I was lying on the floor when Janet came back in. I was very lucky she did.
“When I returned to Clyde Superscoreboard, the host Gordon Duncan asked me live on the radio, ‘How would you describe what happened?’ And, as I said, I had an encounter with my own mortality.
“I was as guilty as anyone in the past of taking football too seriously. And taking the job too seriously.
“I would be prowling around waiting for the next intro to hit me. But newspapers always refer to sport in disparaging terms as the toy department.
“And when I was ill, I just wanted to get back to playing with everybody once again. I just wanted to get the toys out again.”
The first sign of a problem coming down the tracks was a collapse in the street during a walk to the local cash machine. Whisked to Accident and Emergency for stitches, a consultation with his GP was followed two hours later by a call from a stroke specialist.
“He thought I might have a narrowing of the artery on the left hand side of my brain. And that this caused my problem. He arranged to have all sorts of tests done.”
The test results had yet to come back when he keeled over in the bathroom of the family home. When an ulcer tore through the wall of the duodenum, a life-threatening emergency was averted by his wife returning home in the nick of time to call 999. An ambulance sped the couple through the Clyde Tunnel to Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, where the patient had the first of his six blood transfusions.
“They were getting blood inside me as fast as they could. I then had a surgical procedure done and when I came round I texted my Radio Clyde colleague Andy Halliday to warn him that if all the blood donors were Rangers supporters, I’d finish up a bigger bluenose than him.”
His “lowest point” came at 5am the following morning when, with his three grown-up children scattered in Barbados, Anstruther and Brighton, he had to find a way to get his 78-year-old wife back to the family home for rest and respite.
“I will never forget a nurse by the name of Mirren McInally,” says Keevins.
“She gets my wife a taxi, puts her in the taxi, pays for the taxi, gives the driver our address then calls the house to make sure she is home okay.
“I spent four days in high dependency before I got my own private room. I remember eating cornflakes on my feet, enjoying standing up again, when a guy comes in to get the tray and does a double take when he recognises me.
“It’s all, ‘Hugh, I’m Shaun…’ And he proceeds to give me chapter and verse on Celtic’s week.
“I asked him if a trolley would come round with newspapers to relieve the boredom a bit.
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“I’m on the eighth floor and Shaun goes all the way down to the shop on the ground floor unprompted and comes back with a Daily Record.”
Even the care and indulgence of the National Health Service has its limits. On day five, with the demand for beds pressing, he was more or less escorted from a premises for the first time since the infamous day when he was ejected from the Celtic Supporters Association in Barrowfield by a supporter called Finbar O’Brannigan.
This journalist still recalls meeting Keevins on the steps with a phone in hand telling the Sunday Mail to hold the back page. But for the intervention of his wife of 55 years, he accepts the Mail might have been been writing about a different kind of exit.
“I was fortunate that as I hit the ground, I could hear the front door open.
“That’s the imponderable in all of this. Had Janet stayed at my daughter’s for a coffee and a chat, who knows how it might have ended. I was losing a lot of blood.
“If the experience taught me anything, it’s that football is not really that important. I confronted the most important thing in life at 5 o’clock in the morning and I think now of Mirren McInally and Shaun clutching a Daily Record in his hand and I realised how grateful we should all feel for what we have in life.”
Before returning to work, his doctor expressed concern over the stress attached to a two-hour stint on the Clyde Open Line. An unforgiving spotlight for a man at any age, Keevins turns 77 in November but still revels in an exchange of views on live radio with Laurie from Dennistoun once a week.
“My wife says I am fighting old father time,” says Keevins. “I honestly don’t believe that I am raging against the dying of any light.
“I am doing it because I like it and I happen to be vain enough to think that I am quite good at it.
“Much as I loved Dion Dublin as a player, I don’t want to spend my days watching him on Homes Under the Hammer for the rest of my life.
“I am lucky that, despite my recent time in hospital, I am healthy enough to go and do it, I like doing it and there will come a time when either they will put a gun to my temple or I will say, ‘Okay, enough’. But not right now.
“I feel the pressure of having a wife, two daughters, one son and six grandchildren. One thing I will never feel any pressure from again is work.”
For all the brickbats and grief which come his way, his return to live radio was accompanied by an outpouring of affection which must have felt like a man reading his own obituary.
Former Celtic midfielder Pat McGinlay lights a candle for him every Sunday while his brother is a priest who asked his congregations in Townhead and Garngad to pray for a sibling whose distinctive, spiky manner rarely provokes much evidence of Christian spirit among fans of Scottish football.
“The man who dislikes me most on Radio Clyde is a guy called Brian from Stirling,” says Keevins. “And his welcome back message was so touching, it was the first time I had actually felt a bit emotional on radio. The bottom lip trembled…”
A print journalist with The Weekly News and The Scotsman, Keevins tried to hang up his pen until The Sunday Mail asked him to return to column-writing duties seven years ago.
His distinctive tones have been present on Radio Clyde since he replaced the legendary Jimmy Sanderson as presenter of the lunchtime sports bulletin in the mid 1980s.
“After 30 years at Clyde, I met the former station head Paul Cooney at a dinner and he told me why I got in there in the first place,” he says. “I was interviewed by Richard Park, the old Superscoreboard presenter, at Hampden on the centenary of the Scottish Cup.
“Richard and Paul listened to the programme and Richard said to him, ‘That guy has a weird voice’.”
The voice is so unique, it draws recognition in the most unexpected places. Before a Europa League game in Vienna, he was eating lunch with another journalist when he was approached by a German gentleman keen to establish if he was, indeed, Mr Hugh Keevins?
“He introduces himself as Viktor and tells me, ‘I listen to Superscoreboard online and it’s how I learned to speak English’,” says Keevins.
In a broadcasting landscape saturated by former players, offering varying levels of insight, Keevins remains one of the last old-school journalists traversing the airwaves. One of the few who can speak with any authority about how the game’s ecosystem actually works or drop names from the past casually into the conversation.
“When Aberdeen won the European trophy, Alex Ferguson and I were exchanging Christmas cards,” he says of the man he now calls “Sir Furious”.
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Cathy and Alex would swap cards with Hugh and Janet every year.
“He fell out with me the way he fell out with everyone, of course. I don’t really know why we fell out once and for all,” says Keevins.
“There was a testimonial match at Old Trafford when Chic Charnley played for Celtic when Lou Macari was the manager.
“The game finished and I was admitted to Fergie’s inner sanctum room.”
His grandparents hailed from Govan and, to Ferguson, that afforded a man a level of gravitas rarely accorded to mere mortals from Garngad or Garrowhill.
“I don’t know why it turned sour. My guess is somebody heard me say something – or mis-heard something more like – and relaid it to Fergie.
“We had a fall-out at Old Trafford and have never spoken again.”
Keevins helped the late Celtic legend Tommy Burns write his autobiography and owed a debt of gratitude to Rangers great – and close friend – Walter Smith when his wife’s nephew endured a brain operation and Keevins pitched up at Ibrox seeking a favour.
“I turn up at Ibrox and Walter comes out with a towel on and says, ‘Am I supposed to see you today Shug?’
“I go into my sales pitch with the wee boy in the car outside.
“And all I can hear is Walter saying to me, ‘Shug, SHUG, you’re not seriously telling me you’ve got a Rangers supporter in your family?…’
Smith dressed quickly and granted the young supporter a VIP guided tour of Ibrox he would never forget.
When Herald Sport ventures the opinion that he should get stories like that down in a book while he still can, he chuckles slightly.
“When people say that to me I keep hearing my mother’s voice in my head saying, ‘A book? About you? You think you’re a big shot?’
“I was born in 1949 and brought up in Partick in the 1950s, a place where you were never encouraged to get ideas above your station.
“But it’s 2026 now and I already know the book title would be, ‘The Guy With The Weird Voice’.”
