Clive Gammon, one of the great angling writers, has died aged 83. Clive was one of the world’s top sport’s journalists, covering Olympic Games, Ali fights and World Cups.
Among the finest angling writer that Britain has produced, he was also a critic for The Spectator, making him, he later said, “the only man in the world who earned his living by fishing and watching the telly”.
As a star writer for the American magazine Sports Illustrated, then with a circulation of more than 13 million, his job demanded just 12 articles a year and he covered almost every major sporting event for two decades from the late Sixties. Ali, James Hunt and Gareth Edwards were friends.
But fishing was his first love and through Sports Illustrated’s travel agency he was able to fish all over the world from Christmas Island to the Falklands and write about it. He wrote several pioneering books on Welsh and Irish fishing, but his best works are those documenting his travel adventures, I Know a Good Place (1989) and Castaway (2005).