Brian Viner: Sheene the superstar who had everything including humility

The techno band Prodigy pitched up at Sheene's home in Surfer's Paradise

There have been plenty of eloquent eulogies following the untimely and inappropriately prosaic death, from cancer, of the former world motorcycling champion Barry Sheene, whose thrilling life was spent aboard and sometimes underneath some seriously mean machines.

But I didn't want his death to pass without adding a fleeting tribute of my own. Of the many sportsmen I have interviewed, Sheene was one of the most engaging. I met him just once, a couple of years ago. He had arrived in London from Australia that very morning, yet made me feel as if a newspaper interview was the first thing he wanted to do, when in all probability it was the last.

He was hugely charismatic, and a terrific raconteur, with the gift – rare among world champions past or present – of self-deprecation. He told me that a few months earlier a bunch of musicians from the techno band Prodigy had pitched up at his riverfront home at Surfer's Paradise in Queensland. They were motorbike devotees, and had sent a fax explaining that they were touring Australia and could they possibly visit him?

"We mucked around on waterskis," he recalled. "They're a fabulous bunch of guys." His daughter Sidonie, then 15 and a Prodigy fan, thought so too. But she was bewildered by their presence. "Did my dad ask you to come here," she asked the lead singer, Keith Flint. "No, we asked if we could visit him," came the reply. Sidonie could not believe her ears. "But dad's a dork," she said.

I could go on about Sheene, but, as I say, others more qualified have done so already, so I'll leave it there. His story about Prodigy, however, is worth expanding upon, for it not only underlines the perennial truth that even the hippest of dudes is considered uncool in his own household (the Beckham boys will doubtless reach a stage when they think their old man is a bit square), it is also a nice example of how those who walk tall in other creative professions prostrate themselves before sport.

I happen to know, for instance, that when Elvis Costello was introduced to Kenny Dalglish, he was utterly tongue-tied. And I have a celebrated musician friend, a Manchester United fan, who tells a lovely story about going to an Italian restaurant in London with Costello and Paul McCartney. He had Costello to his immediate left, and McCartney to his right, yet spent the evening gazing in awe at a nearby table, where Alex Ferguson was sitting.

Not only that, but he clocked Fergie gazing back, similarly awe-struck.

This brings me to the late Richard Burton, in his heyday perhaps the world's greatest movie star, yet captivated by anyone as gifted with a rugby ball as he was with a script. That said, he was no slouch himself on the field of play. Another of the most enjoyable interviews I have conducted was, just a few weeks ago, with the great Cliff Morgan, who told me that Burton could have gone on to represent Wales had he stuck with the oval ball under his arm, instead of replacing it with poor Yorick's skull.

Morgan also told me that his good friend Burton wrote probably the finest and funniest essay he has ever read on the subject of rugby, which was published some years ago in a book he edited. He promised to send it to me, and characteristically he was as good as his word. The book arrived a few days later, and Burton's essay is indeed a gem.

Writing about the great rugby characters he had encountered, he recalled a "Welsh woman from Taibach who before a home match at Aberavon would drop goals from around 40 yards with either foot to entertain the crowd, and her name, I remember, was Annie Mort, and she wore sturdy shoes, the kind one reads about in books as 'sensible', though the recipient of a kick from one of Annie's shoes would have been not so much sensible as insensible".

Priceless. But best of all is Burton's description of the last rugby match he ever played, against a team from a mining village "with all the natural beauty of the valleys of the moon, and just as welcoming". He was by then already famous, in fact he was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic at the time, "but for the next few performances I was compelled to play him as if he were Richard the Third". The opposition's attitude towards him, he wrote, was "never mind the bloody ball, where's the bloody actor?" And shortly after that match a clause was inserted into his film contracts, forbidding him from playing the game of rugby football, "the inference being that it would be all right to wrestle with a Bengal tiger, but not to play against, shall we say, Pontypool at home".

Apparently the clause remained in Burton's contracts until his dying day – which, like that of Barry Sheene, arrived decades too soon.

b.viner@independent.co.uk