When Gabby Logan’s husband Kenny was diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier this year, Logan says she ‘never entertained the idea that he might die’.
‘We never had any conversations about mortality or the impact it may have on us as a couple – all that was secondary.
When you weigh up him potentially dying versus him losing some sexual function, first and foremost all it was about was keeping him alive. I was really positive right up until the day of the operation, when I spent a few strange hours wandering alone around Borough Market [in London], waiting for the call from his urologist.’
The wait in the hospital while he was in theatre at Guy’s Cancer Centre had been unbearable, she explains: ‘A cancer hospital is a horrible place to hang out. The reception area where I was waiting had people in the later stages of cancer with no hair and looking very ill. Any time anyone goes under an anaesthetic, there’s always a risk.’ She pauses. ‘We had a friend who went in for a simple procedure and just never came out.’
Gabby wears coat, dress and shoes, Michael Kors Collection. Earrings, Vicki Sarge. Tights, CozyWow
Logan, 49, has had a busy year. She’s presented the Six Nations rugby, the Commonwealth Games, the thrilling Euros, and immersed herself in cold water therapy with ‘Ice Man’ Wim Hof for TV. She also hosts a buzzy podcast called The Mid Point. Next week her self-penned autobiography comes out, which – since she is one of the country’s best-known football anchors and will turn 50 next April – is aptly called The First Half.
When we meet, the latest episode of The Mid Point has just come out. In the aftermath of Kenny’s cancer, the pair decided to make a podcast of their journey. It’s brutally and surprisingly frank, and does not flinch from discussing the realities of removing his prostate: Kenny describes waking in a pool of urine; at one point he tells Logan he is going to ‘show her’ his recovering erectile function at the weekend.
How did that go, I ask? ‘I think I’ll keep that to myself,’ she says.
After keeping Kenny’s diagnosis, operation and recovery secret for seven months, what made them decide to reveal so many details – or ‘finger up the bum’ moments, as they both describe them?
‘This way, Kenny could fully own his story. We’ve always been honest people and aware of our privilege in that we have got a platform.’ One of Kenny’s best friends, Tom (Smith, a fellow Scottish rugby player), died from bowel cancer. ‘He’d ignored the physical signs. Through this we could talk to men of his generation,’ says Logan.
Logan, 49, has had a busy year. She’s presented the Six Nations rugby, the Commonwealth Games, the thrilling Euros, and immersed herself in cold water therapy with ‘Ice Man’ Wim Hof for TV
We meet on 8 September, and when we start talking, Her Majesty’s health is ‘of concern’. When we finish and check our phones, we discover she has died. The news gives us both goosebumps. I ask if she’s met the Queen and she tells me of the time in 2006, not long after giving birth to her twins Lois and Reuben, that Her Majesty had asked her about how she breastfed two at once. Logan duly explained what she called ‘the rugby-ball hold’.
I was getting off with men who weren’t very nice to me because I didn’t like myself very much
Dressed in a quilted jacket, wide trousers and white trainers, Logan looks coolly sleek and still has the athletic figure acquired as a teenage gymnast who represented her country, Wales, at the Commonwealth Games in 1990. However, she admits it’s a physique that requires work, including lifting deadweights until ‘my legs are so sore I can’t walk’.
Her autobiography is unexpectedly raw for someone who comes across with so much poise and containment. Lacking any self-pity, she details the three traumatic shadows cast across her life. First, the Bradford City Football Club fire that in 1985 killed 56 people, including 11 children, which she witnessed first-hand as a 12-year-old (her father, former Leeds United and Wales international footballer Terry Yorath, was the club’s assistant manager at the time). Then – most devastatingly – her brother Daniel’s sudden death when he was 15 and she 19. Both events, she believes, triggered the third – her father’s descent into depression and alcoholism. In her book she reveals that decades on, her father remains unwell. ‘My kids ask me, ‘Hey, do you think Grandad will come for Christmas?’, and I have to say, ‘I just don’t know.’
Daniel’s death from an undiagnosed heart condition was followed by her parents’ divorce and she writes of how she didn’t start to process the trauma of it until well into her 20s. What saved her, she says, ‘is that until I was 13, I had strong foundations’. And then, as her parents struggled with the grief, ‘I had an amazing group of girlfriends.’
Daniel’s death from an undiagnosed heart condition was followed by her parents’ divorce and she writes of how she didn’t start to process the trauma of it until well into her 20s
As a sports presenter, commentator and interviewer, Logan has been on our TV screens for nearly 30 years. Fellow sports presenter Alex Scott describes her as a mentor. ‘When we were doing the Women’s Euros this summer,’ Logan says, ‘[former footballer] Fara Williams used to run in with her interviewees going, ‘Do you know who this is? It’s Gabby Logan. It’s the Gabby Logan’. And I admit, it did make me feel proud, but you’ve got to put that away very quickly. It’s not about me. The fact that these spaces existed where women weren’t welcome, that were exclusively male, isn’t healthy for anyone: not for kids growing up, girls or boys, nor for society as a whole.’
Her book describes some of what she encountered as a woman in a very male world. Her 17-year-old children, she says, ‘hear my stories about those times and can’t believe it. They’re heading into a different world.’ (As an aside, she adds, ‘Not entirely a better one. Social media? Twitter? An online universe of hate.’)
The Gabby Logan we meet in the book is flawed but funny about it. She gamely shares far more of her bad moments than personal triumphs. ‘I wanted my autobiography to be entertaining, not some long essay on what it’s like to be a woman presenting Match of the Day.’ Sexism in sport has been and still is a problem. Yet despite Logan giving her backing to a Women in Journalism Scotland campaign for greater diversity among sports reporters earlier this year, she doesn’t really ‘go there’ in the book.
Football broadcasting’s #MeToo moment came in 2011, when recordings of off-air conversations between two then popular Sky Sports commentators, Andy Gray and Richard Keys, were leaked to the press. Keys had earlier played a role in Logan’s career, after seeing her doing pitchside radio interviews at a football game and handing her his business card. Later he introduced her to his boss at Sky Sports.
When the scandal broke, Keys tried to save his own bacon, saying how he couldn’t possibly be sexist when he had ‘made’ Logan. What he neglected to mention was the conversation he’d had with Gray in 2005 when they, along with Logan, were flying to Istanbul for the Champions League final. Sitting behind Logan, the pair loudly discussed how sexually repellent they found pregnant women. Logan was heavily pregnant with twins at the time, which begs the question – why doesn’t she tackle these people in her book?
‘I didn’t want to give them the airtime. Neither of them will work again back in the UK, and I think they’d like to.’ I note both are now saying the sexism allegations were a set-up. ‘Yes,’ she says, with unusual sarcasm. ‘I noticed Richard tweeting recently that they should consider Emma Hayes for the Chelsea [men’s team manager] job. I don’t know if that was a stab at redemption. Perhaps he thinks he’s suddenly going to have an army of feminist fans.’
The Gabby Logan we meet in the book is flawed but funny about it. She gamely shares far more of her bad moments than personal triumphs
Logan shows a lot of self-effacing criticism in her book, but on occasion, it tips into an admission of low self-esteem. She recounts New Year’s Eve in 1998 when a man she barely knew, high on coke with cigar breath, stuck his tongue down her throat. ‘I was getting off with these loose men, not sleazy exactly, just not very nice – and not very nice to me.’ Why? ‘I suppose I didn’t like myself very much.’
She decided things must change, and just three weeks later met Kenny. The Scotland rugby international is what an older generation might describe as a ‘new man’. ‘He is sensitive, in touch with his feelings, selfless and has always been there for me.’
Like her husband, there is something modest and decent about Logan. As we talk, I wonder what’s kept her so grounded and calm. Earlier this year on BBC’s Freeze the Fear Wim Hof introduced her to breathing methods that have given her emotional, spiritual and meditative benefits.
Logan receiving her MBE from Prince William last year. When Logan hits 50 and looks back on her ‘First Half’, she does so as a strong and capable woman who is warm and kind, and unafraid to show her vulnerability
In the book she describes this breathwork as ‘a gentle, all-over-body orgasm, if such a thing exists. I have never done hallucinogenic drugs, but I can’t imagine they’d make you feel any better.’ Her fellow competitors, who she adored, struggled with these meditative practices. ‘Chelcee [a footballer and songwriter] was saying to me, ‘Oh my God, how do you do it?’ So, how does she? ‘I don’t know, maybe it was the hour we spent [as children] in church each week. That regular peace and silence is a sort of discipline.’
Logan’s mother Christine was Catholic. However, she questioned her faith after Daniel’s death. ‘She never left the church, she just started to explore. She went everywhere trying to find answers… from all the faiths, all different sources.’ Does Logan believe in God? ‘That’s not a question I feel comfortable answering,’ she says, before explaining that ‘from a very young age, sitting in church, I knew God didn’t exist in the way they talked about him.’
What she does believe is that religion is good for leading people towards ‘being a decent person. I don’t care if people believe or not, or how they get there – what’s important is that they can peacefully coexist with others.’
‘I remember when Mum was meeting all these different faith leaders and one of them said to her, ‘All around the mountain are people of different religions – Catholic, Sikh, Muslim – but they’re all trying to get to the same summit.’ I’ll always remember that.’
Logan with her husband Kenny. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier this year, Logan says she ‘never entertained the idea that he might die’
She also spent many hours with the A-list’s favourite acupuncturist and ‘energy healer’ Wendy Mandy (who attended Logan’s 2001 wedding). She first went in her mid 20s, ostensibly because she had some skin issues, but these sessions quickly became ‘therapy’. ‘I was there, week after week… I would lie there just getting everything out. The Bradford fire, Daniel dying, Dad. I’d never spoken about it.’
Logan says, ‘I’m not sure I have a spiritual practice exactly, the way I do it is through movement and the [Wim Hof] breathing. And I’ve always trusted my gut. I’ve got a strong intuition. When I was in Italy with Wim I really reconnected with that power and feeling.’
When Logan hits 50 and looks back on her ‘First Half’, she does so as a strong and capable woman who is warm and kind, and unafraid to show her vulnerability. I can’t think of a better place from which to head into the second half.
Gabby’s autobiography The First Half will be published on 13 October by Little, Brown, £20*
*To order a copy for £17 until 16 October go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £20.
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