Ronald Atkin, a former sports editor of the Observer, was a journalist of impeccably high standards, whether looking after other writers’ copy or fashioning his own, usually on top-level tennis or football matches. But as a representative of an old Fleet Street newspaper community that did not take itself too seriously, he also had an ability to laugh at the foibles of his profession.
In an amusing piece written in 2012 for the website of the Sports Journalists’ Association, which had voted him their journalist of the year almost 30 years earlier, he listed some of the many ways in which his byline had been mangled over the years. Among the variations, he had been Atkins, Aitken, Atkinson and Hatchkin, and sometimes Rod or Tim rather than Ronald. In the citation for their supreme award in 1984, even the SJA had managed to get it wrong.
