[2] He had one sister and two brothers, including the novelist and crime fiction writer William McIlvanney.
[12] In 1974, immediately after The Rumble in the Jungle, he made an approach to Muhammad Ali and was granted a two-hour interview.
[13] In September 1980 he reported from Los Angeles on the professional fight where Johnny Owen was defeated and knocked unconscious.
[14] In The Football Men, he examined the life and careers of three great modern Scottish football managers – Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Bill Shankly for the BBC television programme Arena.
[17] In the 1996 Birthday Honours, McIlvanney was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to Sports Journalism.
[1][2] Paying tribute to McIlvanney, The Press and Journal described him as "a giant with a genius for transforming sport into literature" and said his voice was "akin to Humphrey Bogart's in The Big Sleep; a gravelly drawl of dry-as-Nevada humour interspersed with a man's-gotta-do cynicism.