and when finally pushed to the limit of his endurance, he brought proceedings to a halt, pointed his bat at each of them in turn, told them what he thought of them and then told them what he was about to do to them; his revenge was a savage hundred.
And when the curtain of prejudice was finally torn down, walking on to the pitch at Newlands during England’s first post-apartheid tour there in 1995–96 to receive a standing ovation from a packed house was one of the proudest moments of his life. It was almost as if the whole city of Cape Town, if not the whole country, was applauding him.
What struck me most through all the years of turmoil, though, was the man’s simple, straightforward love of the game. As a coach at New Road he was always worth listening to, and impressed upon young players the need to maintain the highest levels of concentration at all times. He kept his coaching simple, never wasted words or filled you full of science, and I believe he would have been able to help Graeme Hick cope with the ludicrous expectations placed on him during his early career if he’d been allowed to work with him without interference from members of the England team and management who thought they knew better. I recall taking to Graeme after he had been dropped by England for the first time, and his head was so full of the crap that they had pumped into it that it took Basil the rest of the season to persuade him he could play again. Had Basil been handled properly at Worcestershire, as a director of coaching perhaps, working with other younger men, the club would surely have got more out of him than they did.
Watching Basil going about his business in later years, it was somehow reassuring to see that such an important figure in the history of our sport loved nothing better than a session in the nets helping players learn the game, followed by a session in the bar nattering about it to his heart’s content. The whole point of our game is that it crosses all boundaries of colour, creed and race. It’s just a crying shame South Africa took so long to get it.
In a cricketing context, the name John Davies is probably not widely known. But John is one of the most significant characters in the Botham story, for he is the man who added five years to my playing career. Without him, my back injury would have finished me as early as 1988.
It may surprise some people to learn that my back problem was first diagnosed ten years before that, during my first Ashes tour in the winter of 1978–79. I was just 23 years old with a dozen or so Test matches under my belt when I started to feel odd pains in my lower back. Just as a precaution, I was shipped off to hospital for X-rays, and when the specialist called me in to show me what he had found, I got the shock of my life. There was a deformity of the spine, he told me. The problem was at stage one, he said. When it gets to stage three, you’re in trouble, he said.
Deformity of the spine? Stage one, stage three? He wasn’t talking about me, was he? I’ve no idea whether that is normal in such cases or not, or whether I was just born lucky, but I was too young, too keen and had too much ambition to allow myself to be sidetracked. It was a case of mind over matter. The back was going to have to take whatever punishment was in store. So, from then on, I treated the occasional spot of early-morning stiffness as simply that, and put the gloomy prognosis out of my thoughts and I’m happy to say that the condition stayed at stage two for the next ten years.
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