Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero. Leo McKinstry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ