The late Jonathan Rendall was a writer of rare talent but sadly wasted potential
That attractive rogue Jonathan Rendall, whose death at the age of 48 was announced last week, could be numbered among the most gifted British writers of his generation. The despair of his newspaper, magazine and book editors, he was the delight of readers hoping to find stories from the netherworld of prizefighting and gambling told from the viewpoint of a modern Damon Runyon.
Starting in newspapers in the late 1980s, he found a niche for himself during an era in which journalists were increasingly putting themselves at the centre of the story. It was to the Observer Magazine that he contributed a column about drinking, titled "The Last Chance Saloon".
When you sent Jonny on a story, you could never be sure what you would get or when you would get it. Or, sometimes, if you would get it at all. You prayed for its arrival not just to fill a hole in the page but because you knew that there was a fair chance of getting something extraordinary, even if it bore only the most tenuous relationship to the original outline of the assignment.
If you were his editor at Faber & Faber in 1997, you might have got a manuscript that started like this: "It was a few hours after Frank Bruno attacked me at Betty Boop's Bar in the lobby of the MGM Grand that I decided to get out of boxing." That was the irresistible opening paragraph of his first book, This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own, which won him the Somerset Maugham award for young writers and seemed to be the prelude to a great career – unless you knew the author and his propensity for screwing up.
There would be two more books – Twelve Grand, about gambling, and Garden Hopping, a memoir about the search for his birth mother – and a three-part TV series called The Gambler. Had he been truly capable of playing his cards right, had he possessed the tiniest sliver of the discipline that can turn a talent into a career, he might have become Britain's Hunter S Thompson or the Jonathan Meades of the casino and the racetrack. Or, at the very least, given his penchant for picaresque self-mythologising, the 21st-century Jeff Bernard.
But Jonny was trouble, in all sorts of ways, and most people eventually found him more trouble than they decided he was worth. Sending him on a story, for example, could be complicated by the discovery that he was not allowed to have credit cards, which made life tricky with the sort of hotels that don't accept cash. Of course he could turn that, too, into a story: part of a lifelong narrative of petty rejections and reverses. And you never knew what he was really thinking, behind that sidelong glance and that short laugh.
He had been born in Oxford, taken into care after 38 days, and adopted a few weeks later. He spent his early years in Ashtead, Surrey, before the family moved to Greece, where he spent some of his teenage years. Schools were a problem, but he went on to read history at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he enjoyed a very brief career as a boxer. There, too, he met his future wife, Susie. They married in 1988, lived in an East Anglian farmhouse, had three children and separated 12 years later.
He wrote for the Sunday Correspondent, the Independent on Sunday and the Times as well as the Observer, but a surprising twist of his career saw him become the manager of the featherweight boxer Colin "Sweet C" McMillan, who briefly held the British, Commonwealth and WBO world titles in the early 90s. Jonny fancied following in the footsteps of Billy Gutz, a colourful Detroiter who managed fighters during boxing's golden age. The experiment did not last: he was, in the end, an outsider.
There is no more poignant reminder of his existence than a page on Amazon announcing a book called Scream: The Real Mike Tyson by Jonathan Rendall. Almost any publisher would have commissioned that book because Jonny wrote with particular acuity about the greatest heavyweight of the age. When I sent him to Washington DC in 1992 to cover Tyson's trial for the rape of Desiree Washington, he came back with a piece that probed far beneath the story's tabloid-friendly surface.
"Sign up to be notified," the Amazon page says, "when this item becomes available." It has been making that promise for five years. Another deadline missed.
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