David Gower (Text Only). David Gower

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СКАЧАТЬ and clarinet lessons, and actually studying quite hard. On the cricketing side, the First XI used to play about seven or eight other schools during the course of a summer but also a number of club sides – mostly from Kent, but including the likes of the Stragglers of Asia and the MCC. Now when we played against the clubs, the visiting captain was allowed to invite the boys into The Beverley, which was the pub just around the corner from the cricket field, for the odd half of shandy. Like most people, I suppose, my first taste of beer was pretty foul, but after a few net sessions, so to speak, I began to see the attraction. So much so, that one or two of us decided not to wait for the next club match for our next visit and try a spot of freelancing instead. Inevitably, having cycled with a classmate early one evening and ordered a couple of pints of foaming best bitter, we had hardly started an illicit glass of Kent’s finest hop when in walked a couple of adults we were more accustomed to seeing in gowns and mortars chalking Latin verbs up on the blackboard. I attempted some weak joke, along the lines of ‘What are you having, sir?’ which for some reason failed to reduce the two masters to helpless laughter, and we were duly ordered to leave and await further developments. Fortunately enough, it was a fairly enlightened establishment – no Flashman to roast you over an open fire and not much use of the cane. But although we avoided physical retribution, the next few weeks were not terribly pleasant: confined to barracks, report cards, jankers – that sort of thing.

      So that was an early blot, head of school prospects out of the window, but the cricket was going well. I had made the First XI at the age of fourteen, which was by no means a school record, but it did mean that I grew up fairly quickly in cricketing terms. The difference between fourteen and eighteen-year-olds is quite a large one, and, like all sports, if you are stretching yourself against better and more experienced opposition then you learn a good bit faster than you would against boys of your own age. On top of this I was playing club cricket in Leicestershire during the summer holidays, which also broadened my social horizons, as a boarding school is somewhat cloistered, and in my last year at Canterbury I had gone on to captain the side. I made a few cock-ups, of course, but it was all part of the learning process, as indeed was the earlier business of getting caught in the pub. Entering a hostelry so closely connected to the school was not a great idea, particularly when Canterbury has one of the highest densities of pubs per square mile in the country. Ergo, if you are a schoolboy in Canterbury you can find a pub that is unfrequented by authority and have a fairly good chance of avoiding detection – as most of us proceeded to prove.

      Anyhow, it seemed like a good idea to get the hang of beer drinking in preparation for a rugby career, having at that time established a nice, undemanding little number as Fourth XV fly-half. We had a choice between rugby and athletics, which involved tedious things like jumping into sandpits, over hurdles, and cross country runs. The only time I did a cross-country run I cannily missed off a third of the course, and still only came about 80th. My big mistake on the rugger field, however, was to play well enough to get into the Second XV where, with King’s having a strong tradition in the sport, they took the game fairly seriously.

      The school rugby coach was a Welshman by the name of Ian Gollop, a man dedicated to mathematics and rugby, and who possessed an overwhelming desire to win that was conspicuously absent on the Fourth XV pitch. We even had training sessions, which was not quite what I had in mind when I gleefully kicked athletics into touch. The Second XV backs did an awful lot of running around without the ball – as a foil to our first-team counterparts – and I raised this point with Mr Gollop. ‘Do you really need us for this?’ I inquired, whereupon he told me that if I didn’t like it, I could get on my bike and clear off. So I did. However, this actually turned out to have much the same effect of saying ‘sod ‘em’ to the England selectors fifteen years later, as I then found myself in the First XV. I didn’t quite make it until the end of the season, though. Dropped for ‘lack of effort’.

      Even in those early days I realized I was a touch closer to the Baron de Coubertin’s philosophy than Ian Gollop’s. Critics have since earmarked it as a failing, a character defect, and maybe they’re right, but I’ve always liked to win. Life’s much easier when you win – it’s just that I sussed out from a fairly early age that you don’t always. I actually had to learn and develop a stronger competitive spirit at school, where I made the discovery that losing in itself is not something to tear your hair out over, but not performing as well as you can certainly is. I remember playing in the school squash competition against a lad I should have beaten. I’d won the first game, and was so far ahead in the second that I almost felt sorry for him and relented. Then, of course, I started to play very badly, and to cut a long story short, got stuffed. That annoyed me so much that I actually felt ashamed of myself. So it’s not so much the winning or losing – it’s more that if I feel as though I’ve played as well as I can, I feel okay. Translated in to cricket, if you’ve done well, scored a century maybe, but the side has lost, there’s definitely a feeling of disappointment but you’re not personally depressed.

      I used to play a fair amount of tennis with a good friend of mine from Leicester, Tim Ayling, and to be perfectly frank he can beat me anytime he wants to. As I recall, the only time I’ve ever won a set off him was when we had not prepared in the regulation manner, and he was slightly more pissed than I was. But as long as I’ve felt I’ve played hard and competed against him, I’ve enjoyed the game. It might sound a bit futile, but I’d sooner play out of my skin and lose than beat an inferior player. But as for the so-called lack of a competitive streak, I once played tennis with Robin Askwith when he came up to stay with me in Leicester a few years back, and for all Askwith’s charms and abilities, he happens to be deformed. He’s actually got one leg shorter than the other, which he’s hidden quite well in most walks of life, but it doesn’t do much for his agility on a tennis court. He’d also done something to his ankle, so he could barely move at all to his left, which is where I kept hitting the ball. By the end of the game, he was barely able to crawl into the shower, and he said: ‘If anyone says you haven’t got a competitive streak in you, I am living proof to the contrary.’

      I don’t think you can get through sixteen years of first-class cricket, with a reasonable amount of success, without some kind of competitive edge. It’s all about maintaining a balance in many ways. For instance I play golf, or a strange version of it, not too often and not too well a lot of the time. But if I can make a contribution, make the odd par here and there, then I’m happy, but if I go round like a total novice, and spend half my time hacking out of bushes or failing to drive past the ladies’ tee, then frankly, I get bloody irritable. Going back to the rugby, and the ‘lack of effort’, I scored plenty of points with the boot, and also popped over for a few tries – but apparently there was something wrong with my work-rate. Even in those days, it seems, skill took second place to sweat. Micky Stewart would have loved Ian Gollop. Generally, I think my philosophy has stood me in good stead. I’ve never been one to mope around looking miserable after losing, which in some ways is a good thing, and in others bad. Putting on appearances to suit other people is not really me, but I now know, for example, that had I looked a touch more suicidal after losing a Test match to India in 1986, I might not have been relieved of the England captaincy. I felt bad about it, but to the man that mattered – Peter May – not bad enough.

      King’s has a fabulous setting, well worth a walk round if you are ever in Canterbury, and most of the school is within the Cathedral Close. To get to breakfast in the morning there was a walk of about 250 yards past one of the great cathedrals of the world, and a passage through a dark alley reputed to have been haunted by Nell Gwynne. You are surrounded by architecture dating back to the eleventh century, and wherever you go you are surrounded by history. I can perhaps appreciate it better now than I did then, because as you became older as a schoolboy boarder, your main thought is not so much ‘Look how beautiful this all is’ as ‘How do I get out of here?’ You are well aware of one or two social attractions outside, and basically you are walled in. The gates are shut, wander lust strikes (or just lust), you get a bit thirsty and your mind is not so much on Latin or cricket as mountaineering. A young man’s thoughts lightly turn to spring, or to be more accurate, springing out.

      There was a light on top of one of the walls we used to СКАЧАТЬ