about that, lads,’ I said, as I slid back into the dressing-room. ‘My bleedin’ bat got stuck behind my pads.’
‘I didn’t notice they were strapped to your bleedin’ head,’ replied John Emburey.
The bottom line was immaturity. For me, the slightest admission of failure or inadequacy was out of the question, and it was the same whatever I did. When, at the age of fifteen I returned home from a school cruise on the Mediterranean having shot up in height on the trip to over six foot, my behaviour was quite extraordinary. Dale and I used to measure ourselves against the kitchen door and it annoyed me intensely that she had always been taller. This time I insisted that Mum measure me and when I discovered how much I had grown, I ran into the garden to find my sister, shouting ‘Dale! Come here now. I want to measure you!’ You wouldn’t have believed my reaction upon discovering that I had finally outgrown her. FA Cup winners have celebrated less. It was pathetic.
If I drove a sports car I had to drive it faster than anyone else, as the men from Saab found out when I managed to write off two in the space of an afternoon’s sponsored racing at a cost of £24,000. When I decided to try and raise money for leukaemia research the only way to do it was to walk the length and breadth of the country (or over the Alps with some unenthusiastic elephants), and if I was drinking with mates, I had to drink them under the table as a matter of principle. I would do anything or try anything to show how big I was, and that included drugs.
I won’t go into details now because you will read more later, but, yes, of course I have overdone the booze in my time and smoked the odd joint. I may have been depressed, I may have been tempted to do it for kicks – and believe me, on the international cricket circuit during the years I played, there were a multitude of kicks to be had – but the fact is that I did so for no other reason than because they were there. I broke the law. I’m not proud of it and there were occasions when I could have gone seriously off the rails.
But when people ask me what I dislike most about myself, the answers are very simple and straightforward. It has taken me long enough to confront the facts, but I am not afraid to do so now. When it comes to getting myself into hot water, a lot of what you will have heard and read about me is absolute rubbish, but some of it is not. I have been a selfish bastard. At times I have also been aggressive, tyrannical, chauvinistic and hot-tempered.
My only plea in mitigation is that if I hadn’t been, none of what you are about to read would ever have taken place.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened to the career of Ian Botham if Andy Roberts had not smashed my teeth in.
I remember the occasion as though it was yesterday – and who wouldn’t? After all, it is not often that you take a ball in the face from one of the greatest and most fearsome fast bowlers of all time, and live to tell the tale.
I only made the final XI for Somerset’s Benson and Hedges quarter-final against Hampshire in June 1974 because our pace bowler Allan Jones was ruled out with a leg strain, but I had already made my mark on proceedings in peculiar circumstances when I managed to remove Hampshire’s premier batsman, the South African Test star Barry Richards, rated as one of the all-time greats. Our wicket-keeper Derek Taylor used to stand up to the stumps for my bowling in those days (bloody cheek!) and, after I had bowled him, Richards actually stood his ground for a few moments because he was convinced that the ball with which I had beaten him all ends up must have cannoned off Derek’s pads onto the stumps (even more bloody cheek!). As a young tyro I was reasonably satisfied with the rest of my performance in the field that day, which brought one more wicket and the chance of some purposeful hurtling around the boundary. In fact, although I didn’t know it at the time, my whole life was about to change.
When I came to the wicket, Somerset were more or less dead and buried. Seventy runs were required from the final 15 overs as I marched out to bat at number 9, with only three wickets remaining. Tom Cartwright, my batting partner and the man to whom I owe more than anyone for helping me become a top-class bowler, soon departed from the action, caught at mid-on. And then, shortly after I had been joined by Hallam Moseley, it happened.
Andy Roberts had been terrorizing English county pros all season playing for Hampshire and was about to establish himself as the West Indies’ main strike bowler for a decade. With 38 runs needed, hooking him for six seemed like a good idea at the time. But I paid for my foolishness when, next ball, Roberts bowled me the fastest delivery I had ever seen, or, to be more accurate, not seen. I knew roughly from which direction it was coming and my first instinct was to try and hook it. Halfway through getting into position to play the shot the truth hit me – and then, a fraction of a second later so did the ball. These were pre-helmet days, of course, but I did just manage to raise a gloved hand in front of my face, and that instinctive act of self-preservation almost certainly saved me from serious injury. In the event, the force of the ball smacking into my glove which then, in turn, smacked into my face, was still sufficient to knock out one tooth and break another clean in half. Looking back, the worrying thing was that the teeth in question were on opposite sides of the jaw.
By the time I had spat them out, taken a glass of water and had a spot of treatment, I was fully aware that there were some in the crowd who, believing that the game was up, actually wanted me to go off retired hurt to avoid further, unnecessary punishment.
The thought never crossed my mind. In fact, there was very little crossing my mind at that particular moment. The effects of mild concussion meant that it was not until some time afterwards that I had any kind of clear recollection of what followed, but in a curious way I think the incident helped to settle me down. I predicted that Roberts’ next delivery would be a yorker, guessed right and managed to get enough bat on ball to clip it away for three runs. From then on, I succeeded in farming as much of the strike as possible so that, after Hallam departed, there were just seven runs needed to win from sixteen balls when number 11 Bob Clapp joined me.
Although those watching must have found the tension unbearable, my total concentration meant that I was in a cocoon. In the penultimate over I played and missed three times before connecting with the winning hit to the cover boundary. As a batsman, Bob was what is commonly known in the game as a ferret – he went in after the rabbits. But I will always be grateful to him for helping me make my name. He finished with one of the best nought not outs in history, I collected the Gold Award and the first chapter of the fairy tale was written.
That evening a couple of old Somerset players, Bill Alley and Kenny Palmer, who later went on to become Test umpires, warned me: ‘Today, you are everybody’s hero. Tomorrow, they’ll have forgotten you’. Needless to say I thanked them for the advice, but what I really felt was more along the lines of ‘Give it a rest, you old buggers’. In fact the lesson they were trying to pass on could not have been more apt and, as time passed, that peculiarly English phenomenon they were warning me about – newspaper today, fish-and-chip paper tomorrow – became a recurrent theme. For the moment all I could see were the headlines.
The first produced unexpected results. When I strode into the Gardener’s Arms for a celebratory pint of bitter and a spot of mild adulation, I informed the landlord, ‘The usual, please’.
I was somewhat taken aback by his response when he turned and asked: ‘And just what is your usual?’
‘The usual,’ I replied, a shade irritated. ‘You know what it is, the same as it’s been for the last year and a half.’
At this point, the local evening paper was produced and waved under my nose. The headline read: ‘17-YEAR-OLD SOMERSET YOUTH PLAYS A BLINDER’. Fortunately
