Czytaj książkę: «Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero»

1 A Contradictory Personality

Wednesday 21 July 1999: Geoffrey Boycott attends an early evening reception at a restaurant in central London where he is one of the guests of honour for the launch of the Federation of International Cricketer Associations’ new Hall of Fame. Accompanied by his partner Rachael Swinglehurst, he moves amiably through the gathering, sipping from his glass of champagne and indulging in banter with some of the other guests. Then, in the central ceremony of the evening, he is summoned by the former England batsman Tom Graveney on to a stage to accept his induction into the Hall of Fame. In a polished acceptance speech, mixing modesty, humour and charm in equal measure, he describes Tom Graveney as his boyhood hero and pays fulsome tributes to Ian Botham and Fred Trueman, the two other guests of honour.

Anyone watching this performance who did not know of Boycott’s reputation would have thought he was one of the most gracious and popular figures in the cricket world. There was no inkling of the festering animosity that has long characterized his relationships with Botham and Trueman, no sign of his notorious boorishness, no evidence of his supposed inability to socialize with others.

22 January 1998: Geoffrey Boycott attends a press conference in central London, where he gives his response to the decision of a French court to convict him of assaulting his former girlfriend Margaret Moore. With his position as a media sports star under threat as a result of the £5,100 fine and three-month suspended jail sentence, Boycott decides to go on the offensive. Bristling with indignation, he denounces Ms Moore, accusing her of telling lies about the incident and claiming that she is out to destroy him because he refused to marry her. As journalists begin to question his account, Boycott slips into the belligerent tone so well known by colleagues from broadcasting and cricket. ‘Shut up,’ he tells one reporter, ‘this is my conference, not yours.’ Finally, there is a collective admonition for the press: ‘I am a public figure and the only people I have to answer to are the public, no one else.’

Alec Bedser, who saw the best and worst of Boycott during his 13 years as chairman of England’s Test selectors, once spoke of the Yorkshireman’s ‘enigmatic and contradictory personality’. And these two events, the champagne reception and the stormy press conference, encapsulate the different sides of Boycott’s character. On one hand, there is the brilliantly successful cricketing figure – in his time the greatest run-scorer in the history of Test matches and, after his retirement from the playing arena, a commentator in demand throughout the world – relaxed, affable and generous when basking in the recognition of his achievements. On the other hand, there is the sorry figure with the tangled web of personal relationships and the reputation for selfishness and bad manners, who, in the words of one former England cricketer, ‘has left a trail of social wreckage across the cricket world’.

In a rare moment of self-analysis, Boycott once admitted to being baffled by his own contradictions. During an appearance on the BBC radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, he told Professor Anthony Clare: ‘We are like diamonds. There are so many facets to the diamond and you cannot tell why it glows on one side and why it doesn’t on the other. Like me, I don’t always understand myself.’ We all, of course, have different, often conflicting, aspects to our personalities. Yet for Geoff Boycott the contrasts are much stronger than for others. He is an intensely private man who has lived his entire adult life in the fiercest public gaze. Indeed, almost two decades after he played his final Test, he is still probably the most famous name in English cricket, though many colleagues who have played and commentated with him say that they hardly know him. He has developed an image of self-confidence bordering on arrogance, yet possesses a streak of almost chronic insecurity.

He craves respect yet, through his behaviour, continually alienates those who might provide it. Even his admirers admit that his extreme moodiness and introspection make him something of a Jekyll and Hyde character. Fellow England star and broadcaster David Gower says, ‘He has the ability to be extremely charming, and an equal ability to be a complete sod.’ Peter Willey, the Test umpire and an England colleague of Boycott’s, told me: ‘Some days he won’t seem interested, then on others he will sit down and talk for hours. He is definitely a split personality – and it’s just a shame that the good side has not come out more.’ Brutally frank in his opinions of others, Boycott can be overly sensitive of any criticism fired in his direction. His career has been littered with the debris of constant feuds and rows. As Derek Hodgson wrote in Wisden on his retirement from cricket: ‘He has a facility for making enemies much faster than he made runs.’ Always a loner, he revels in the adulation of the crowd, whether as a media star in Calcutta or a century-maker in Leeds. He has displayed great inner strength during his rise to the top but is so emotional that, during much of his career, he burst into tears at professional setbacks. Despite often being the most dour of openers, he built up a personal following that no other English cricketer has ever attained. Even in his batting he could be contradictory: in 1965 he played what is still the greatest innings in a Lord’s one-day final and then, less than two years later, he was dropped for slow-scoring against India.

He has accumulated great wealth and adores luxury, always staying in the best hotels and flying first class, yet has a reputation for colossal meanness. ‘He is for ever trying to squeeze another few pence out of whoever he is dealing with,’ fellow commentator Simon Hughes told me. He professes his undying love for Yorkshire cricket, yet helped to tear the club apart in the seventies and eighties. No one was ever better equipped technically and tactically to lead country and county yet, because of his inability to relate to colleagues, he failed dismally in both jobs when given the chance. Though he left school at 16, and has an accent and mannerisms that are a gift to impressionists, he is more articulate and insightful behind the microphone than a host of far better-educated analysts. Despite living with his mother until he was almost forty, he long enjoyed a surprisingly exuberant, even chaotic private life, one that eventually landed him in court. His cosmopolitan outlook, love of travel and phenomenal popularity in the West Indies, India and Pakistan – Asian children have even taken to copying his accent – are in contrast to the narrow horizons of his upbringing in a tightly knit Yorkshire mining community.

It is, perhaps, because Boycott’s own personality is riddled with contradictions that he arouses such violently contrasting opinions in others. For all the antagonism he has incurred during his career, he has a circle of friends and supporters who maintain a passionate loyalty towards him. It is a tribute to his ability to inspire long-term devotion that the key women in his life, Anne Wyatt, Rachael Swinglehurst and Shirley Western, have always stuck by him through his many crises. Other close friends, like Tony Vann of the Yorkshire committee, George Hepworth from Ackworth, and Ted Lester, the former Yorkshire scorer, speak of his personal kindness. And while there are numerous ex-players who loathe him, there are also many cricketers who feel just the opposite, such as Paul Jarvis, the Yorkshire fast bowler, who describes him as ‘a father figure’. Batsmen like Graham Gooch, Bob Barber and Brian Luckhurst have told me how much they enjoyed playing with him. ‘I am convinced that Geoffrey made me a better player, without any doubt,’ says Luckhurst. In the same way in the media today there are some who object to Boycott’s behaviour, such as Henry Blofeld, who recently gave a newspaper interview headlined WHY I WON’T GO IN TO BAT FOR THAT BULLY BOYCOTT. But again, many commentators, such as Jack Bannister, Charles Colvile, David Gower and Tony Greig, have found no problem in working with him.

All the contrasting flaws and virtues of Boycott have to be seen within the dominant theme of his life: his relentless pursuit of success in cricket. In his seminal book Rain Men (often described as cricket’s answer to Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch), Marcus Berkmann wrote of the hold that the game has over its enthusiasts: ‘At some cathartic moment in our stunted childhoods, this ridiculous sport inveigled itself into our consciousness like a virus and never left. In adulthood, you somehow expect to recover from all this. But it doesn’t happen. Your obsession remains as vivid as ever.’ Boycott, having been drawn in by street games in Fitzwilliam, Yorkshire, and by his uncle Algy’s enthusiasm at the local Ackworth club, never attempted to let go of this obsession once he had succumbed. Instead, he made cricket the driving force of his existence.

‘Cricket mirrors life, if you think about it. Life, death and change in the middle,’ said Boycott philosophically, in May 1999. Many would argue that Boycott’s approach to cricket mirrors his personality. The adjectives used to describe his batting could be applied to his character: cautious, tough, single-minded, intelligent. His fear of failure, which compelled him to eliminate all risks, also reflected his insecurity. In an interview on BBC 2 in 1978, Ray Illingworth said: ‘In technical terms, Geoff Boycott is the best batsman in the world today. His problem is his own insecurity. He’s never trusted people and I think this facet of his personality comes out in his batting style.’ Mark Nicholas, the Channel Four presenter, put it to me like this: ‘Every time he went to the crease he was batting for self-justification, not only as a cricketer but as a man.’ A duck, therefore, was not just a disaster in cricket terms, it was a blow to his self-worth.

Yet it must also be said that cricket helped to mould his character. For Boycott, unique among the great batsmen, was not endowed with phenomenal natural talent. No one who saw him in his early days with Barnsley, Leeds or the Yorkshire Colts would have believed that one day he would become a leading international cricketer. Boycott only reached the top through an astonishing effort of will and all-consuming dedication. And in that process, he had to be more ruthless than his contemporaries. Focusing every fibre of his being on his ambition, he eschewed almost everything else in life, marriage, family, friendships, a social life and all the other normal compromises of human existence. He was not interested in being popular or likeable, only in batting himself into the record books.

To many observers, it seemed that nothing and no one could stand in the way of Geoff Boycott, a disastrous attitude in a team sport. His total self-absorption made him careless of the needs and feelings of others. Tales of his rudeness and social ineptitude became legendary in the cricket world. David Brown said to me of his first tour to South Africa in 1964/65: ‘He thought of nothing else other than Geoffrey Boycott and the rest of the world could go lose itself. He treated everybody, public, press, the players, the same. He was intolerably rude.’ The outrage he caused was made all the greater by both his gift for ripe language, honed in the back-streets of Fitzwilliam and the dressing rooms of the professional cricket circuit, and the traditional Yorkshireman’s love of plain-speaking. But if Boycott had paid more attention to the usual niceties of relationships, I doubt that he would have become such a great player. Social acclaim had to be sacrificed to professional glory.

It would be wrong, though, to argue that Boycott’s social difficulties stemmed entirely from his cricket. After all, to this day, long after his retirement as a player and despite a new mellowness in his personality brought about by the ordeal of cancer, he still retains the capacity for brusqueness and irascibility. Mark Nicholas has worked all over the world with Boycott and is a great admirer of his talent as a broadcaster, but says that ‘he can be so rude to people that sometimes you just want to punch his lights out. It is rudeness born of bad manners.’ Even as a child and young man, he could be pigheaded and moody. One of his colleagues at the Ministry of Pensions in Barnsley, where Boycott worked before he signed full-time with Yorkshire, says that he was a loner who did not hesitate to tell other employees to ‘get stuffed’. So, parts of his character were already deeply ingrained before he became a professional.

Without going too far down the road of pop psychology, I suggest that Boycott’s close relationship with his mother must have been at the heart of the development of these traits. His mother’s unconditional support led him to develop a self-absorbed, naive and childlike outlook on life. This meant that, in some respects, he behaved as he felt. If he was in a bad mood, he did not attempt to cover it up. If he thought someone was ‘roobish’, he said so to their face. Like a child, he continually wanted his immediate demands fulfilled, and was furious when they weren’t. And, like a child, he clung to routine and stability and security – one reason he treasures the loyalty of friends and family.

Given the complex nature of his personality, it is hardly surprising that Geoff Boycott should have been such a controversial figure throughout four decades in our national summer sport. His has been a rollercoaster career, with Kipling’s twin imposters of triumph and disaster waiting to greet him at every turn. It is one of the most telling features of his life that each success has invariably been accompanied by some misfortune. Barely a year after his unique achievement of scoring his hundredth first-class century in a Test, he was sacked as Yorkshire captain and was fighting for his career at his beloved county. Only days after becoming the greatest run-scorer in the history of international cricket in 1982, he had to resign from the England tour of India, having appalled his fellow players with his conduct in Calcutta. His reinstatement as a Yorkshire player in 1984 after his sacking the year before only plunged the club deeper into turmoil. At the peak of his career in the nineties, he was brought low by Margaret Moore’s case against him. More recently, just as he was being rehabilitated in the British media, he contracted throat cancer, one of the most deadly forms of the disease.

Yet through all these tribulations, including the brutal experience of cancer, which meant that he lost three stone and could only be fed through a stomach pump, Boycott has displayed a remarkable fortitude. Lesser men would never have reached the heights he attained, nor would they have been able to cope with the catastrophic lows. Even if he has often been the author of his own misfortune, he has never surrendered, whether it be in taking on the most fearsome West Indies attack of all time at the age of forty or overcoming the sneers of critics to become best Yorkshire batsman of his generation. It was England’s finest captain of modern times, Mike Brearley, who wrote this tribute to Boycott during the Australian tour of 1978/79: ‘As I stood at the non-striker’s end and watched him avoid yet another hostile ball, I felt a wave of admiration for my partner, wiry, slight, dedicated, a lonely man doing a lonely job all these years. What was it that compelled him to prove himself again and again among his peers?’ In recent years, he has proved his courage once more in overcoming the twin challenges of the French court verdict and a life-threatening illness. Not for him the prolonged sulk or the retreat into seclusion. Instead, he has kept on fighting, to clear his name, to rebuild his career, and, above all, to save his life. Now, like some heroic knight emerging triumphant from an arduous quest, he is back where he belongs on mainstream television, pontificating, hectoring, wisecracking, and exulting about the game that has been his obsession since childhood. ‘You have to remember that he is in love with cricket, more than anything else. He would never knowingly do cricket down,’ says Mark Nicholas.

For all his many faults, the game has been richer for his presence.