Kitabı oku: «Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero», sayfa 3

3 ‘Dedicated Absolutely to Cricket’

From Fitzwilliam Junior School, Boycott, having failed his 11-plus, went to the local Kingsley Secondary Modern School. The teaching there was poor, the cricket facilities almost non-existent. The only positive result of this move was the development of his soccer skills, which he had already revealed playing in defence for Fitzwilliam youth club. As on the cricket field, he always wanted to win on the soccer pitch. He is remembered as a tough, physical player, with enough talent to attract the attention of Leeds United scouts in his mid-teenage years. He even played a few games for the famous club’s Under-18 team alongside Billy Bremner.

But cricket remained his first passion. Fortunately for Boycott, after just a year at Kingsley he passed the late-entry examination for grammar school and thereby won a place at nearby Hemsworth, which had both an excellent cricket ground and a cricket-loving headmaster in Russell Hamilton. With this kind of support, Hemsworth Grammar was to be almost as important for Boycott’s game as the Lawrence coaching clinic and Ackworth Cricket Club.

Hemsworth was a traditional institution, with a mixed intake of about 800 pupils, high academic and sporting standards, and strong leadership from Hamilton. ‘It was a smashing school. If you got there, you had a real sense of achievement,’ says one of Boycott’s fellow pupils, Terry Newitt. ‘Russell Hamilton was both strict and inspiring, the sort of gentleman you looked up to. When he walked down the corridor in his black flowing gown, we’d all jump out of the way.’ During his years at the school, Boycott proved himself to be not only an excellent cricketer but also a fine rugby player, a sound academic pupil and a mature, likeable young man. Ken Sale, who taught him biology and rugby, remembers him as ‘bright, diligent, anxious to please. In the classroom he was keen and alert. He was as careful in his approach to his studies as he was to his batsmanship. I also remember he was fastidious about his dress, always looking immaculate both on and off the field. As with most school sporting heroes, he was the idol of quite a few of the girls, had a little following of them, though I don’t think he was ever involved with any. He was a product of his background, very determined to get on and make the most of his talent at cricket. His personality could be described as intense; he didn’t seem to mix much but, underneath, I sensed he was a gentle, vulnerable pupil who tried to hide that vulnerability.’

Boycott was soon established in the Hemsworth First XI and at 15 he was made captain. Sale recalls that he had ‘a certain streak of arrogance about his game, which came from being so much better than the other boys’. In one match against the staff, Boycott was dominating as usual. Sale continues: ‘So our fast bowler, George Pacey, came on with the threat: “Right, I’m going to bowl as fast as I can straight at his legs.” I was fielding down at fine leg and soon Boycott was regularly clipping the ball straight past me. To make such a cool response to an adult fast bowler at only fifteen showed Boycott’s talent and character. He had an excellent defence off both front and back foot. He absolutely loathed to give up his wicket and hated any false strokes.’

The cricket coach at Hemsworth, Dudley Taylor, who was also a science teacher, has equally fond memories of Boycott. ‘Because he was a late-entry pupil, he was a year older than most in his class, so he seemed more mature. He was well-mannered and hardworking, though he could enjoy a laugh in the classroom.’ Taylor says that Boycott was good at all games, even basketball, and remembers him as a ‘brave and determined full back in rugby’. As with his soccer, his rugby skills aroused an interest beyond school – Boycott played in one Under 18 trial match for South Yorkshire District against Wakefield. Once more, however, it was his cricket that most impressed Taylor. ‘I knew even at thirteen that he would go on to play for Yorkshire. He was a more expansive player then but that is probably because he was in a different class to the other boys. I will never forget the way he played the pull. It was so effortless and the ball sped to the boundary, whereas the rest of us were liable to hit the ball in the air when we attempted that shot. In fact, he was so confident about technique that he actually used to coach the staff team in the nets.’

The tension that characterized many of his relationships in later life appears to have been largely absent during his time at Hemsworth, possibly because Boycott felt relaxed in his pre-eminence. Roland Howcroft, a schoolmate of the time, says: ‘He was always quite confident; there was no sense of insecurity about him. He was just a normal lad, liked normal things. On the buses to away games, for instance, he would join in singing with the rest of us. He was always outstanding at cricket, of course. Even in those days he was deadly serious about the game, was never a slogger or tried to hit over the top.’

Another of his Hemsworth contemporaries, Peter Jordan, now a journalist, says: ‘He was mature, sensible, never involved in any pranks and because he was serious and dedicated he seemed much older than the rest of us. Yet you could not have described him as a loner. He joined in everything at school and could take part as well as anyone in school debates. But there was never any bullshit with him. He never just talked for the sake of it but if he had something to say, he’d say it.’ Jordan was sure that Boycott would play for Yorkshire because of his determination. ‘He wanted to practise all the time. It was almost as if he was on a crusade. When he was out, he often didn’t come back into the pavilion but would sit on his own, holding an inquest on his dismissal. He was friendly and polite to the girls but nothing was going to stand in the way of his cricket, he was that dedicated. If he’d gone into medicine, he would be a top surgeon by now.’

One of Boycott’s closest friends at Hemsworth was the school wicket-keeper, Terry McCroakham, who therefore had some direct experience of Boycott the young bowler. ‘At this level, he was fast medium, very accurate, with a good inswinger. Because of his control, he was more reliable than many others.’ Against Castleford in 1956, Boycott had the remarkable figures of 7 for 4, though he finished up on the losing side. Like others from Hemsworth in the mid-fifties, McCroakham enjoyed Boycott’s company. ‘I never found him big-headed at all. There was no side to him, he was just part of the team. Yes, he could hog the strike but then he was a much better batsman than any of the rest of us. I don’t think he was a natural; you got the impression that he lived to practise. He was very ambitious, knew where he wanted to go.’ McCroakham has stayed in contact with Boycott and remains an admirer. ‘Just before the Leeds Test in 1964, he had damaged a hand and was having a net to see if he would be fit to play. I was standing nearby. Though he hadn’t seen me for seven years and was now an international player, he came straight over for a chat. To me, he has always been like that, unlike some other of these so-called England stars.’

Sadly, all the school records and scorebooks from this period were destroyed in a fire. However, Terry McCroakham has retained a press cutting from this period, which recorded Boycott’s largest innings for the school, when he made ‘a fine 105 not out’ from a Hemsworth total of 143 for 4 against Normanton Grammar School, ‘including two sixes and 14 fours’. Unfortunately rain brought the match to a premature end. Eddie Hambleton, another schoolfriend, remembers that day: ‘It started to rain quite heavily and the masters had a consultation. They then said that there were not often centuries in schools cricket so they would play a few more overs to give Geoff a chance to reach his hundred. When we came in about three overs later, Geoff had made 105. Back at school on Monday morning, we consulted the old scorebooks and found that the school record was 106. So Geoff just missed out there.’

The summer of 1958 was Boycott’s last at Hemsworth. He passed seven O levels and could have easily stayed on to do A levels, perhaps going on to further education. Ken Sale says that he was certainly competent enough to have gained a good degree at a red-brick university. Dudley Taylor goes even further: ‘With his brains and cricketing ability, he might well have got to Cambridge if he had been to public school.’

But two factors made him leave school at 17. First, he felt he had been a burden on his parents for too long. In an interview with the BBC in 1965 his headmaster, the late Russell Hamilton, who had been keen for him to stay on for his A levels, said: ‘Always at the back of his mind was the fact that financially he had been a big enough strain on his parents and that he really ought to get himself a job.’ The second, perhaps lesser, consideration was Boycott’s iron determination to make cricket his career, for which a university degree must have seemed an irrelevance. Everyone who knew him in the mid-fifties was struck by his single-minded ambition to become a Yorkshire cricketer. ‘Cricket was always going to be his trade,’ says Terry McCroakham. Indeed, the choice of Boycott’s occupation appears to have been dictated by his playing ambition, for the post he took up in the Ministry of Pensions in Barnsley, though mundane, offered a great deal of flexibility in his working hours. What Boycott did was to work every shift he could in the winter thereby building up extra leave that could be taken during the summer.

Yet, despite the advantages of this job for his cricket, Boycott’s early departure from school left him, in the longer term, with feelings of resentment towards the more privileged. The lack of a university education rankled, and was regularly used as a stick with which to beat his opponents in the supposed ‘cricket establishment’, with Boycott posing as the champion of the ordinary working public against the public-school, Oxbridge ‘gin and tonic brigade’. When Mike Brearley was awarded an OBE, Boycott said, ‘If I’d been to Cambridge, I’d have a knighthood by now.’ Similarly, this chip on his shoulder has also been reflected in his often boorish antics at official gatherings – ‘he could be so disrespectful. You’d be at a reception, chatting to some dignitary, perhaps an Oxford-educated bloke, then Boycs comes barging in, doing the guy down, “all the bloody same, you lot,” and so on. You would just feel so embarrassed,’ says one ex-England player who toured with Boycott. Mike Atherton, Cambridge graduate and England’s longest-serving Test captain, told me, ‘I have never had much of a problem with Geoff but I always felt he had a slight beef about people who went to Cambridge University. There is definitely a chippiness there, though in my case it may have been mitigated by the fact that I was a fellow northerner.’

Boycott worked as a clerical officer at the Ministry of Pensions from 1958 until 1963. His duties were hardly taxing for a man of his intelligence, but because of his cricket ambitions he never applied for promotion. Even in this job, Boycott demonstrated those patterns of behaviour that became so well known to his cricket colleagues. One fellow employee, who gave Boycott a fortnight’s training when he started in his post, told me: ‘I liked him and never had any problems with him, perhaps because I had shown him the ropes. But he could be very rude to others, never hesitating to tell someone to get stuffed. There was also a degree of resentment over the time he took off for cricket in the summer. He was something of an eccentric – when he brought in his lunch it often consisted of half a dozen cakes, no meat or bread. The social side of office life, like parties or outings, never interested him. He was very much a loner.’

By the time Boycott entered the civil service, he had already made rapid progress up the ladder of Yorkshire cricket. As well as producing a string of outstanding performances for Hemsworth Grammar, he had also appeared successfully for both the South Elmsall district team – averaging around 70 per game as well as captaining the side – and Yorkshire schoolboys. In the summer of 1958 he was vice-captain for the Yorkshire Federation’s Under 18s tour of the Midlands. Boycott had little chance to shine, however, as the tour was ruined by poor weather.

Just as importantly, he was also playing club cricket for Barnsley, in one of the toughest environments in the world, the Yorkshire and Bradford League. Boycott had moved from Ackworth to Barnsley when he was 16, on the advice of his uncle Algy who felt that ‘we ought to get him into a higher class of cricket’. Furthermore, Barnsley also had a very good batting track. So Algy had taken Boycott to the winter nets one night at Barnsley’s ground at Shaw Lane, where his batting was watched by Clifford Hesketh, chairman of Barnsley and a leading member of the Yorkshire committee. According to Algy, Hesketh took a brief look at Boycott, then said, ‘Oh, yes, we’ll have him.’

Given the strength of Barnsley, Boycott could not immediately break into the First XI, but he did well for the seconds, enjoying an average of 66. Then, towards the end of the season, he played two games for the senior side, making 43 not out in the second match in a victory against Castleford. In the following two summers, 1958 and 1959, he was a regular member of the Barnsley First XI, performing creditably but with few heroics. One of the leading members of the Barnsley club, Gordon Walker, was later to recall Boycott as a moody loner, with an inclination towards foul language and slow scoring: ‘I’d say we had several players who looked better at the time. It’s been sheer determination that’s made him one of t’ best we ever had in county.’

Through a remarkable twist of history, the modest south Yorkshire club at this time included a trio of cricketers who were subsequently to be amongst the biggest stars of modern Britain: Boycott, Dickie Bird and Michael Parkinson. It is perhaps no coincidence that all three had the same background, the sons of coal miners who learnt early in their lives the value of hard work and strength of character. But even Dickie and Parky were struck by the intensity of Boycott’s ambitions. In a radio interview in the seventies, Parkinson explained: ‘He always had this extraordinary, obsessive dedication. I have never met an obsession like it in any athlete. I remember the first game I really clocked his talent was when we were playing Scarborough and they had a bowler called Bill Foord, good enough to play for Yorkshire on a few occasions. And Geoffrey came in at number five. It was a soggy, wet day, and the outfield was damp, with a lot of sawdust on the run-ups. Bill Foord bowled his first ball to Geoff who went on the back foot and hit it like a shell past him. It went right through the pile of sawdust behind the bowler and hit the sightscreen. Foord turned to me and said, “Christ almighty, what’s this lad’s name?”

‘“Boycott.”

‘“I’ll remember that.”’

What Dickie Bird remembers most about Boycott at Barnsley was ‘his application, concentration and his absolute belief in himself. He had one great gift, mental strength. You can have all the coaching in the world but the most important thing is to be mentally strong.’ At Barnsley, Dickie Bird and Michael Parkinson generally opened, and Boycott came down the order, ‘though he handled the quick bowlers pretty well. He was a fine player off his back foot, which is always the hallmark of class, whatever the level. His punch through the offside was his bread and butter shot, with a lot of bottom hand in it. Then he would also pick up his ones and twos off his legs. That is all he did. He played to his limitations. His one weakness was that he played with very low hands going forward but that is the way we were coached in Yorkshire to cope with spin and movement on difficult pitches. The problem with that technique is that, though it might cover deviation it can also leave your hands vulnerable to the one that suddenly rises.’ Dickie Bird is also interesting on Boycott’s personality: ‘He always kept himself to himself, even in those early days. He was very private, didn’t mix much with the people. Parky, Boycott and I were all from the same background but we did not go out together in the evenings. All he seemed interested in was playing and practising as much cricket as he could. Yet he was also very confident and I think some of the older players resented that, meeting this young man who had so much belief in himself.’

Achievement with Boycott has usually been accompanied by setbacks, and his teenage years were no exception. Just as he had to cope in childhood with his father’s disability and the loss of his spleen, so, when he was about 17, he was faced with a serious threat to his sporting ambitions, that of poor eyesight. When Boycott was told that he would have to wear glasses, he feared it was an end to his hopes of becoming a professional cricketer. In a BBC interview he explained: ‘I suddenly found when I was doing my schooling in the classroom that I could not see the blackboard very well. My friends kept pulling my leg about this and said that I needed glasses. It had never struck me at first because I was playing cricket fairly well at school but in the end it got under my skin so much that I had to go and see an optician.’ Unfortunately the other boys were right. Boycott was told he would have to wear glasses. He was plunged into the blackest despair.

Uncle Algy takes up the story: ‘Geoff would just not accept it. He said that if he had to wear glasses, his future was finished. For three or four days he cried, he were that upset.’ At the request of Boycott’s mother, Algy went to see his nephew and gave him a stern lecture. ‘I told him that other people with glasses had made names for themselves in cricket, like Roy Marshall of Hampshire and M.J.K. Smith of Warwickshire. I said to him, “If you say you’re finished, you’re finished. But if you fight, you can go on.”’

Invigorated by his uncle’s talk, Boycott wrote to M.J.K. Smith. The future England captain, who was to be Boycott’s first skipper on an MCC tour, still recalls the schoolboy contacting him. ‘Fellows used to write to me quite a lot because I was one of those wearing spectacles. I had a standard letter saying that it was not a problem at all. I always used to suggest that they had their eyes tested every year so they knew their eyesight was 100 per cent, which was probably better than some blokes who didn’t wear glasses.’ Smith further explained that he wore rimless spectacles with shatter-proof plastic lenses, so glass would not go into the eye if they were hit.

Boycott was later to claim that glasses had made him more introverted, more of a loner. After he exchanged his spectacles for contact lenses in 1969, he told a reporter from the Sun: ‘I started wearing glasses when I was seventeen and my personality changed dramatically. From a carefree youngster, I turned into a withdrawn character who just couldn’t go out and meet people. I cut myself off and everyone began to think I was hostile.’ This, to say the least, is something of an exaggeration. Not even the most excitable observer would have ever called the young Boycott ‘carefree’. Few teenagers can have been more consumed with such a ruthless sense of purpose. His close friend George Hepworth remembers him as ‘very intense, almost an introvert’ in his early days at Ackworth, long before he found he needed glasses.

Still, having acquired a pair, Boycott was more optimistic about the future. There was now no reason why he should not return to the playing arena with renewed confidence. But not everyone was so sure. His schoolfriend Eddie Hambleton, who played in the Hemsworth School First XI and also drove Boycott to Barnsley games on the back of his Triumph motorcycle – ‘two bags in his hands and no crash helmet’ – remembers the first time Boycott wore glasses in a match: ‘We were playing at the village of Wath. I was sitting about to watch the cricket as Geoff went out to open. The groundsman, Mr Mansfield, whom I knew well, turned to me and said, “Is Boycott wearing glasses?”

‘“Ay, I think he is.”

‘“Well, that’s the end of his career, then, isn’t it?”’

Mr Mansfield, like many others before and since, was to be proved hopelessly wrong.