no sitting around for me. From the moment I arrived at the ground, it was like a circus. First there was a press conference that lasted 55 minutes, probably the longest of my career. Someone asked if I thought the rain would turn the day into something of an anti-climax, but I joked that as I had spent a lot of the last twenty years praying for a cloudburst, in some ways this would be a fitting end. I had hoped that my last day in first-class cricket would end more quietly than it did. I just wanted to drift back into the dressing room, pack up and go. The rain delay destroyed any prospect of a result, contrived or otherwise, but the skies cleared enough for us to play a pretty meaningless three or four hours in the afternoon. If ever there was a case where umpires or captains should be given a little bit of discretion in deciding to end the match, irrespective of the weather, this was it. The crowd was marvellous but nobody gained anything from us going out there except those who had spent so much time in the beer tent that they would have been captivated by watching Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall. Steady, I wasn’t that overweight!
In my final spell of bowling I decided to have a bit of fun to try and cheer everyone up by doing my Jeff Thomson impersonations, among others. Then, after a few overs I turned to David Graveney and said: ‘Thanks David, I think that will do’. It was quite a moment. As I turned to take my position in the field, the reality of what I was doing suddenly hit me – no more bowling, no more batting, no more anything. The pavilion clock showed there was still half an hour to go but that was it from me, my time was over. It was the end.
Both batsmen, David Boon and Matthew Hayden, came down the wicket to shake my hand and I cannot remember anything that happened between that moment and the time stumps were drawn. I had, as they say, lost the plot. In fact, the only thing I do recall was my appalling attempt at keeping wicket for the final over of the match, minus pads and gloves. However, I was soon brought back down to earth when at the close of play I went into the dressing room to clear my locker. The bastards had pinched the lot!
On arriving home I threw myself into a small party we had arranged for close friends. I finally crashed at ten to five the following morning after talking Egyptian into the small hours with Alan Herd. It was only a short nap as I had to leave the house at 7.15 a.m. to catch a plane to Alderney where we have our second home. I have no idea how any of the others got home. It is quite possible, of course, that one or two might still be there now.
There was a time three months into my mother Marie’s pregnancy when the entire Ian Botham story might have been over before it had even begun.
Both my parents had been good at sport, highly competitive and fit as fiddles. Les, who was a keen cricketer, ran for East Yorkshire, had a soccer trial for Hull City boys and played for Combined Services, while Marie had played cricket, badminton and hockey to a reasonable standard. For some reason, however, they had acute difficulties in starting a family.
Marie had suffered four miscarriages before she became pregnant with me. Then, a third of the way through this pregnancy, she went through a particularly rough patch of health, and there were very real fears that she was going to miscarry again. Towards the end she was confined to bed, and it was obviously a worrying time for her and Les. What must have made it worse for her was that Les, serving in the Fleet Air Arm, was stationed in Northern Ireland so he was absent when the time came for Marie to enter the maternity hospital in Heswall, Cheshire. There must have been an overpowering sense of relief when, on a drizzly 24 November 1955, the first shout was heard from a bouncing 10lb loz baby Botham and a telegram was duly sent to inform Les he had become a father. In the excitement, when he finally arrived on leave a week later, he managed to oversee a complete muddle in the registering of my birth. My parents had been married in Scotland and for sentimental reasons had settled on the Scottish spelling of ‘Iain’. But the birth certificate read ‘Ian’ – so that was to be my name. It also (thankfully) read ‘Terence’ rather than the family’s traditional second name for boys, ‘Herbert’ (although some would say I have been a right one ever since). There is a familiar ring about a Botham father being out of town for the birth of a Botham child. I was in Australia on a Whitbread Scholarship in 1977 when Kathy discovered she was pregnant with Liam; I missed Sarah’s birth because I was on tour; and I was again missing for the arrival of Becky when I made my first walk for Leukaemia Research from John O’Groats to Land’s End.
Once on the planet, it seems I was determined to make my mark from the very start. Soon after I was born the family moved to Londonderry where we were put up in services’ married quarters, and it was here that I showed the first signs of the adventurous side of my nature. Mum recalls how she left me sitting with a box of toys inside a playpen in the living room while she was working in the kitchen. A few minutes later she was surprised to find me crawling around her feet. Puzzled, she carried me back to the playpen and convinced herself that, perhaps, after all, she had not put me inside in the first place. When I appeared in the kitchen for the third time she realized something was up and decided to keep an eye on me through the crack in the door. She couldn’t believe her eyes. I was lifting the edge of the playpen onto the toy box, crawling out under the gap and then pulling the playpen down to the floor again, leaving everything in the right place. Everything, that is, except me.
Once I had found a way out of my confinement, nothing was going to stop me as I found a variety of ways to get myself out and about and to cause parental palpitations. If I was left outside the house in my pram, brake or no brake, I would bounce it up and down until I eventually succeeded in getting the thing moving. I managed to cover some fairly impressive distances but, luckily, everyone knew who I was and where to return me. By the time my sister Dale was born in Ireland in February 1957 – I have one other sister, Wendy, and a brother Graeme – I was 15 months old, up on my own two feet and walking. Of course, that posed a new set of problems for Mum and Dad who were constantly running around trying to contain my wanderlust. Dad decided to fence in the garden but that was more of a challenge than an obstacle. For baby Botham, if it was there, it was there to be scaled. I regularly managed to escape and often the only evidence of me ever having been in the garden was a pair of dungarees left hanging on the fence.
At one time I even got as far as the driver’s seat of a big armed forces’ truck, where I was found playing happily with the steering wheel and fingering the hand brake. The cab was so high off the ground that nobody could work out exactly how I got there, and I shudder to think what mayhem might have been caused if I had prised the hand-brake loose.
If these were the first signs of the free spirit that was later to shape my life for good and sometimes for ill, my competitiveness took only slightly longer to manifest itself. After 18 months in Northern Ireland we returned to the mainland and Cheshire. During a toddlers’ 20-yard dash at the navy sports day, I hit upon a novel method of dealing with the opposition, which involved me barging into the rest of the field, leaving most of them on their back-sides, and consequently finding myself about as far ahead as you can get in a 20-yard race. Surprised, I stopped to look where the rest of the runners were, only to find them all back on their feet and streaming past me. Unfortunately, running was never one of my strong points; distances I could manage most of the time, but sprints and races were not my forté. Years later, a certain tactical naiveté led to my first sporting calamity at Buckler’s Mead School in Yeovil. As house captain for the school sports day, I had asked for volunteers for someone to compete in the mile race. Thank you, volunteers, for your vote. I was so determined to do well that if I had to run I was going to win or die trying. When they carried me off, I was about a lap ahead – it was just a pity that there were still another two to go.
Life as a toddler in Ireland had also been significant for the first of my many trips to hospital. A hard crack on the head led to my first stay in a hospital ward as I was kept in the Londonderry Hospital for four nights of observation. No serious damage was done that time, but it caused enough of a scare for the doctors to suggest that I should be fitted with some kind of protective headgear. Just
