Sir Geoffrey, my hero
It wasn’t meant to be like this, this historic encounter. There’s been a mix-up over the timing and I’m a quarter of an hour late; I’m fretting about the likely cost of lunch at the Michelin-starred hotel, close to his home in Jersey, which Sir Geoffrey has designated for our meeting; and the great man is keen to talk about his new book, The Best XI, while I want to discuss his epic life.
Once, this would have been a recipe for disaster, but Geoffrey Boycott (the knighthood was conferred by we diehard fans, not by the cricket-hating Queen) has mellowed. Clutching a large glass of red wine – oh God, the bill! – he is looking almost avuncular when I arrive, and goes off in search of a glass of Chardonnay while I settle myself on a sofa. He suffers with his back and has brought his own large black cushion, which he places on a chair, thus raising himself several feet above me. I am in the position of a supplicant, paying homage to a monarch, which is perhaps how it should be.
From the mid-1960s, when I fell in love with cricket, until 1986, when he retired at the advanced age of 46, Boycott was my cricketing idol. He played for Yorkshire – and England, in 108 Tests – while I supported Glamorgan, so I didn’t get to see him play live very often. My interest was primarily statistical: I admired his obsession with scoring runs, his detestation of getting out, his robotic reliability. But the adolescent contrarian in me also warmed to his bloody-mindedness, his belief that he was right and the rest of the world was wrong. Some saw it as selfishness, egoism, vanity, but I admired him for it. Geoffrey Boycott contra mundum.
His conflicts could fill – indeed have filled – several books. In 1967 he scored 246 not out for England against India and was promptly dropped for slow scoring; in the mid-1970s he took a three-year break from Test cricket, citing stress; he returned in 1977 and, unforgettably, made his hundredth first-class century in a Test match at Headingley, his home ground. By then he was synonymous with Yorkshire, but the last 10 years of his career were marred by byzantine battles with the club’s committee, who stripped him of the captaincy and in 1983 tried to sack him as a player. Instead, the Boycott-adoring Yorkshire public rose and sacked the committee instead.
Why does he inspire such reverence? Why do I recall my 14-year-old self running to get the paper one on holiday in Porthcawl and skipping with delight when I found he had scored a double hundred against Essex? It was, I believe, that he wasn’t an exceptionally gifted player: he was a good player who pushed himself to the maximum – and beyond – to be a great player. So total was his dedication that he lived with his mother until he was 38, shutting out the rest of the world. The complexities of his relationships with women surely reflect those sheltered early years. Cricket was his only love.
What’s his explanation for the devotion of the fans who have stuck with him through all the disasters, professional and personal, which have beset him? “I’ve always tried to be myself,” he says. “I always had a determined spirit, a mental strength. I loved every second of it, and I still love it now I’m a commentator. I’m lucky that I have a job that I don’t regard as a job.”
Boycott is a fixture on the BBC’s Test Match Special, on Channel 5’s highlights, is given acres of space in the Daily Telegraph and is especially loved in India, where his cry of “roobish” has become a subcontinent-wide catchphrase. As a commentator, he is just as forthright, opinionated and convinced that he is right as he was as a player.
But there’s a mellowness about him now; even, whisper it, an ability to laugh at himself. He has been through the mill in the past decade. First, in 1998, he was convicted in a French court of beating up his girlfriend Margaret Moore. Then, in 2002, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He survived both, albeit narrowly. The conviction still rankles and he continues strenuously to deny having assaulted Moore; the battle with cancer transformed him.
“When you’re just jumping in a wooden box and you manage to get out again, it’s quite an experience isn’t it?”, he says with a laugh. “I was told in October 2002. I said, ‘What happens if I do nothing?’ The doctor said, ‘I’ll give you till just after Christmas. It’s a very fast-growing cancer.’ I said, ‘Really, just after Christmas?’ That concentrates your mind. You’ve got a lot to cram in then, haven’t you?”
He is very self-knowing about how his greatest test – the radiation treatment was brutal – affected him. “You can’t change what you are totally, but it can smooth off a few edges and give you a different perspective,” he says. “When I nearly died of cancer, I realised I had to make the best of my life. You don’t know how much longer you’ll live; you don’t know what’s around the corner.”
In 2003 he married Rachael Swinglehurst, with whom he’d had an on-off relationship over 30 years. He had always run away from commitment, even when Swinglehurst gave birth to his daughter, Emma, in 1998. Now, at last, he was willing to stop running, and when he talks of Emma his eyes light up, though, like the good Yorkshireman he is, he complains about how much it is costing to put her through university.
Boycott rambles on happily, unstoppably, optimistically, expletives rarely deleted. He is good company and I almost forgive him for going à la carte while I have the set lunch. It takes a while to arrive and the old Boycottian impatience resurfaces. “We want our lunch. Where is it?” he demands. “At this rate, we’ll still be here at Christmas. Is it coming from Paris?” Eventually it comes, crab to start, then scallops. He tips the accompanying sauces on and eats at a phenomenal rate, far faster than he ever batted.
After lunch, while being photographed, he gives me a final lecture. “What I am I don’t know. But I think you have to come to terms with what life throws at you. Cancer teaches you that. I faced a lot of crises in my life – the committee trying to sack me at Yorkshire, the French court case, illness, so many things – but you’ve got to deal with it. When you get something like cancer, you can sit down and cry, which I did – I’m not ashamed or embarrassed to say so. It could be the end of your life. But sit down and cry, and then get over it. Get your crying out of the way, and say ‘What am I going to do about it? Am I going to try and survive?’ That’s the key.
“It’s like making nought. I’ve made nought many a time. I even made a pair [two noughts in the same match] once. That’s really ignominious. I don’t want to make nought or get a pair, but my other thought always was ‘If I don’t go in to bat, I won’t get a hundred. Hiding away and avoiding it doesn’t get you a hundred, does it? And I wanted the hundred. It’s the same with life: if you want to live, you’ve got to deal with it, and when you get a difficulty, whatever it is, it’s bloody annoying, sometimes it’s mind-blowing, but you’ve got to deal with it, or you shrivel up and die, and life’s too precious for that. You should never give it away.” Boycott’s remarkable innings is not over yet.
The Moore episode and his leading role on a rebel tour to apartheid South Africa in 1982 will tarnish him in many eyes, and I’m no longer the besotted, statistically minded teenager who followed his every innings. But his flaws and quirks make him a more intriguing figure. He has carved out a second career, overcome cancer, become more thoughtful and expansive. He refuses to look back, dislikes cricketing reactionaries, understands that the generation which counts most is the one currently playing the game. Boycott the man is bigger than Boycott the cricketer. As a player he has a great average, but as a man, for all his faults, he is truly exceptional. And, by skipping dessert, we managed to keep lunch to £90. One of the few times in his life when he fell just short of a hundred.
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