You don’t automatically link Ian Botham with Yorkshire. Like many another
professional player, he seemed to be at war with the county and its
cricketing chauvinists for most of his career. He was a Somerset man in his
prime, together with the great West Indians Viv Richards and Joel Garner, at
a time of fabled feats and riotous celebrations.
But here he is, just to the east of the Pennines, deeply embedded in the
castle village of Ravensworth. Both his parents were from Yorkshire
families, and he came “home” 20 years ago, after his mighty frame finally
succumbed to the grievous jolts which are the lot of the crucial
all-rounder.
The village is like a redoubt that is standing easy now after a few centuries
of peace. It is a long throw from the army garrison at Catterick. The houses
are shoulder to shoulder around a large green on which, according to
Harrison’s Local Charters, one Thomas Hulk slew William Stellyng with a
club.
Botham’s house is the most imposing: set back, gated drive, 17th-century core,
newer buildings, outhouses and offices stretching back into the 20-acre
estate; lots of cars, grandchildren, an adventure playground built into the
trees; a lolloping wolfhound on the loose and plump trout gliding through
the lake. Heaven on earth for an avowed country boy.
In the kitchen is Kath, his wife of more than 30 years and once the very model
of a long-suffering sports spouse. Their marriage nearly broke up six years
ago after revelations of his two-year affair with an Australian waitress.
Her name was Kylie Verrells and she claimed Botham had said he would leave
his family for her.
There were tabloid headlines so familiar that they might have been recycled
from the mid-Eighties, when he was reportedly having a bed-busting affair
with a former Miss Barbados named Lindy Field. But now, in the age of the
love-text, there were allegedly messages in which the England legend told Ms
Verrells: “The mighty Beefy sword awaits – and that’s just for starters.”
Some reports suggested that Botham was in effect running a parallel
“marriage” with her, 12,000 miles from his Yorkshire home.
The big difference was that whereas he dismissed the Lindy Field allegations
as false, he owned up to the affair with Kylie Verrells. You could say he
had little choice, given the details in the press. On the face of it, he and
his wife have made a lasting peace after some scorching rows and reproaches
from the children.
She is all smiles and goodwill, a grandmother at the hub of a thriving ménage;
their 30-year-old son Liam lives with his wife and three children just
across the yard. Injury has ended his career as a rugby player and he now
runs an upmarket travel company, Botham Miller. He’s certainly a chip, says
the old block, but not so… “Let’s just say he thinks before opening his
mouth.” Not so impetuous? “That’s putting it politely.”
Upstairs in the old part of the house, in a room heavy with English wood and
flock wallpaper, Botham Senior talks candidly of the many crises in his
turbulent life and of his uncontainable pride at being knighted for his
services to leukaemia research. He’s still as beefy as his nickname suggests
but, at 51, there’s also the strong suggestion of Yorkshire pudding around
his middle.
His hair is cropped close, in a way that can make him look severe as well as
sober. As a commentator – an excellent one – with Sky Sports, which is now
his main work, he can come across as thoughtful to the point of restraint.
Compare this with the flamboyant athlete in full plumage, putting the old
enemy Australia to the sword with his astonishing power and technique, and
you can almost see the passage of an individual from Cavalier to Roundhead
in the space of two decades. Almost.
“I’ve done going to pubs,” he says. “I would certainly never walk into one
that I don’t know. But I will go into a restaurant where I can have some
good food and a nice glass of wine. It took me a while to say, ‘Beefy, you
just cannot do it as you used to.’ How many times have I come out of a pub
and someone’s put a key down the side of my car? Luckily I never actually
caught anyone doing it, otherwise I would have exploded.”
All this is delivered in his peculiarly multi-regional voice, with the old
Taunton burr rising when he grows emphatic, as he regularly does. It was
those West Country vowels that fuelled so strongly his image as an
agricultural; a most classical striker of the ball, to be sure, but at heart
a huge boy just come from the baling.
“I could never understand why people had to be jealous,” he goes on. “Why not
just enjoy it. I mean, I’m not jealous of George Best, or Tiger Woods, or
whoever it is. I enjoy watching their success. I don’t know what goes on in
these people’s heads [the kind who scratch cars].
I think, get off your arse and do something. Don’t just sit there waiting for
someone to do it for you. That’s one of the problems we have in society now.
Then we let the Poles come in and those same people start whingeing that
they can’t get a job. They don’t want a job, they never did.”
It’s nearly 20 years since I last met Botham, and I couldn’t have been more
intrigued over what I was about to find now. In the spring of 1988, he
famously walked across the Alps with three elephants in the footsteps of
Hannibal to raise money for the Leukaemia Research Fund.
I joined the tour to write about it for The Times. He had come to the southern
French town of Perpignan direct from Australia, where he had been sacked by
the Queensland state cricket side after an incident on board an aeroplane.
(Altercation between two Aussie players on the Brisbane to Melbourne flight;
Botham intervenes; passenger in front turns round to complain about
language; Botham places hands on man’s shoulders to redirect him frontwards;
charged with assault, fined A$1,000.)
On landing in France, he made a rather classy joke about the distinction of
being a transport in reverse – an Englishman sent back to England from
Australia. The elephant tour was, well, a circus. Most days on the 500-mile
route the animals were parked up a mile outside the town and then loaded
into their lorries.
One of them picked up a tour-threatening injury to the nearside elbow and was
sidelined at once. Some animal rights people arrived and made a huge fuss
about it all. The tabloids nipped in and out to see if they could catch him
smoking dope or misbehaving in other ways. Security was overseen by two
French champion kick-boxers, les deux Michels. Some of the walkers boozed on
the hoof during the gruelling legs of 30 miles and more. Eddie the Eagle
showed up. And the entertainer Kenny Lynch.
And Botham’s erstwhile drinking companion Eric Clapton, mobbed by boys with
plastic guitars as we went down the Italian side of the Col de Montgenèvre.
There were practical jokes, one of them involving a huge pile of elephant
dung being shovelled overnight into the lavatory of Australian batsman Greg
Ritchie.
Botham himself was then a massive national celebrity, as famous and fêted as
any English cricketer who ever lived. Apart from his astonishing
performances with the bat, he was also on his way to becoming the nation’s
most prolific taker of Test wickets.
Yet for all his talent and exuberance, he was, during the elephant tour,
muted and modest. He was walking vast distances each day – distances that
were sometimes miscalculated by the organisers. He would drag his body to
his hotel room and nurse the raw blisters on his feet with not a murmur of
complaint. Kath was on the tour with the children, along with other friends
and members of her family.
Once, she made an off-hand remark about “Ian and his little peccadilloes”, as
if she knew his flaws but tolerated them. Her father adored Ian but would
rather not have looked when he was making headlines because of his life away
from the pitch. I can remember thinking that there was something truly
perilous about this man, as if his boundless appetite for action and
excitement could at any time implode and destroy him.
It nearly did. During his relationship with Kylie Verrells he became quite as
foolhardy as ever he had been when stepping down the wicket to a rampaging
Dennis Lillee. In Australia, he was sharing a Sydney flat with the then
31-year-old divorcee.
He had even brought her to England where she had been seen topless with him at
a friend’s home in Sussex. Kath, who has known Ian since they were
teenagers, became suspicious. After the affair became public, Verrells was
reported as saying she was about to end it as Botham refused to deliver on
his promise to leave his marriage for her.
It was, he now says with an unfortunate turn of phrase, “a big cock-up… Why I
did it I don’t know to this day. I had got myself into a hole and I couldn’t
get out of it. I have to tell you that when I got it off my chest and we sat
down and discussed it, as a family, I felt a better man, instantly. It was
like someone had lifted a lump out of me, a growth, something that was
annoying.”
Does he share this view of himself, I ask, about some continuing need to place
himself in jeopardy. After a long, ruminative pause, he says: “Hmmm.
Good question. I hadn’t thought of it in that way. Maybe. Maybe there’s
something in there, a little fire burning. Something that needs to do
things. Maybe that’s why I take on the walks. I’m not someone who’s going to
sit around and wait for things to happen. I’d rather go out and see what’s
going on.”
The pace bowler Bob Willis, who shared the glory in England’s astonishing Test
victory over Australia at Headingley in 1981, once said that if it had not
been for the restraining influence of Kath, the young Botham might very well
have landed in prison.
There were an uncomfortable number of fracas, scuffles, incidents. After one,
during a night out with his team-mates at Scunthorpe Football Club in 1980,
he faced assault charges, which were later dropped. In his new book, Head
On, he describes matter-of-factly how he once dealt with the Australian
cricketer Ian Chappell, no sissy himself. The scene, inevitably, is a bar.
“If there’s one thing I hate it’s a loudmouthed Aussie insulting my country.
I gave him three official warnings, all of which he ignored, so the next
time he started I just flattened him.”
Remind him of these episodes which got him the reputation of a brawler and he
says, rather hurt: “Honestly, I never went looking for trouble. But because
of the way the press wrote me up as the hard man of English cricket, there
was always the danger of coming across someone in a pub who’d had a few and
was feeling bullet-proof and would be saying, ‘We’ll see how hard he is.’
In Taunton or Yeovil, that’s not hard to do. My problem, I admit, was that I
wouldn’t walk away.” As for the Ian Chappell episode, he adds: “He’s just a
nasty piece of work. We never got on.” No good searching his big bold face
for signs of penitence on this, because they wouldn’t dare show themselves
there. What you find instead is the sidelong wolfish smile that still speaks
approval of his own devilment.
Still, the achievement of which he is proudest is not a thunderous innings or
an eight-wicket haul, but the knighthood that he has earned largely because
of his fund-raising for leukaemia research. For the past 20 years or more he
has gone at this with the same big-heartedness and fierce commitment that
characterised his cricket.
For the game’s fusty establishment figures, most now passed from the scene,
this heroic altruism was an inconvenient detail. His interest in the cause
started when he was a young Somerset player. He had a foot injury and the
team doctor sent him to see a specialist at Musgrove Park Hospital in
Taunton. On his way for the X-ray he passed through a children’s ward where,
seated among some plainly sick or injured youngsters, were four who seemed
to have nothing wrong with them. He remembers them sitting round a table
playing Monopoly.
When he asked the specialist what was wrong with them, he was told they had
leukaemia; two had very little time left. “I didn’t need a second to make up
my mind what to do,” he writes in Head On. “I wrote out a cheque
straightaway. It was the start of a lifetime involvement with the fight
against that terrible disease.”
It certainly was. The first of his fund-raising walks was the 900-miler from
John O’Groats to Land’s End in 1985. It was covered as much for allegations
of pot-smoking en route as for its swift public appeal. “Listen,” he says,
“I was no saint, but some of the stuff I’ve been accused of is ridiculous.
There was a guy who came along claiming to be from a fitness magazine. He
turned out to be a greasy slimeball from a tabloid. He was trying to plant
gear. We caught him and had him removed from the walk. We should have handed
him over to the police. Instead, we just chased him off.”
He has since led ten more such walks, which have raised between £10 million
and £12 million. Leukaemia has become his main opponent, and he has taken it
on with an even greater hostility than he reserved for Ian Chappell’s teams.
“If you can beat it,” he argues, “who knows what doors will open to other
cancers? I think we are getting closer by the day. In 1985, you had a 20 per
cent chance of survival.
Today it’s 80-plus. It might get a little tougher, now that we’re getting over
the last hurdle, as it always is. But we are getting closer, and that’s what
is driving us all on.”
He adds that the donations that come through his fund- raising projects are
just the tip of the iceberg; now that awareness has been increased, people
are leaving money in their wills and large companies are making the
Leukaemia Research Fund their charity of the year.
Douglas Osborne, the recently retired chief executive of the LRF, has said
that this indirectly generated income might total as much as £200 million.
“I hope I’m alive – I’m sure I will be – when it’s finally cracked,” says
Botham. “We will win. As science improves, we will win. What will happen
then? I don’t know. I’ll have to find something else to challenge me.”
Like his own best deliveries, Botham is not as easily readable as he would
have you believe. He seems to delight in his early nickname of “Bungalo”
(nothing up top), but instantly admits this is a device.
“Of course it is. I just wanted to play cricket, but I didn’t want to get
involved in arguments with some of the smart guys about things I didn’t know
enough about, so of course I’d play the village idiot in the dressing room.”
The son of a Westland Helicopters employee, he left school, Buckler’s Mead
Comprehensive, at 15, insisting that he was going to play sport for a
living. “Fine,” said the predictable careers master, “but what are you
really going to do?”
He was, and remains, a working-class hero in a game that was still riven with
the distinction between gentleman and player. No one before or since – not
even his friend Andrew Flintoff – has managed to empty offices so thoroughly
in the middle of the afternoon.
He was the game’s nearest answer to George Best. The story of his life is full
of drink. A river runs through it, even though he is a wine buff rather than
a beer guzzler, and insists he can take or leave alcohol these days. He was
aggressively modern, with a flash agent and an embarrassing, mercifully
brief flirtation with Hollywood, but he was also a massive Queen (the
monarch) fan. His brand of belligerence seemed like an apt decoration for
Thatcher’s post-Falklands Britain. And if he was a bit of a yob, at least he
was our yob.
He still seems to bear the birthright Francophobia of the free-born
Englishman: “It’s taken a long time for the English to become a
wine-drinking nation,” he says. “Probably down to the French giving us all
that crap and charging a shed-load for it. Moooton Cadday!
Now we’ve kicked them back over the Channel and they are struggling to
compete.” Barely an inch of him went uninjured through 20 years at the top.
When they opened his back up, they found, in the surgeon’s words, “a map of
Beirut” made of old stress fractures and all manner of damage that he
routinely ignored.
He has withering contempt for the players of today who rush for an X-ray
because they have a hot spot. “What is a hot spot anyway?” When he appeals
to the air for an answer you can see the gnarl of a rough mend on virtually
every finger. Surely Beefy pulled a longbow – the biggest ever seen – in a
previous incarnation at Agincourt.
He says he can’t wait to feel the Queen’s sword on his shoulder. “Finest hour?
October 10, no doubt about it.” That is when he goes to the Palace for the
investiture, and then a small reception (150 friends and relatives) in the
very belly of the cricket establishment, Lord’s.
Then back to the open acres, the grandchildren, the animals, and Kath. When he
got the word from Downing Street about the knighthood, he could hardly
contain himself. On this occasion at least, he made sure Kath was the first
to know, beating the tabloids hands down. She was as proud of him as she has
ever been, although she’s never been one for the limelight. Nor, he insists,
has he. In his version of events, there’s still the sense of things just
happening to him, and him going along with them.
For an impetuous man, Botham has proved to be a stayer, just as he was in the
game that he took and shook as it had never been shaken by an Englishman.
That cheque he wrote at the Taunton hospital may have been impulsive, but 30
years on he is the president of the Leukaemia Research Fund.
He may have fallen for Kathryn Waller on June 26, 1974, and proposed to her
within a few weeks, but here they still are, one way or another. Nor has the
impetuosity gone. Well into middle age he left his table at a restaurant to
go and sort out a man outside who was mistreating his girlfriend.
Not impetuous at all, he says: “I didn’t feel I had a choice.” It’s a feeling
that has brought him trouble and glory in roughly equal quantities. But
there he still is, Sir Beefy now, using his talents, giving it his best
shot, looking after his family, holding strong views on his country, being
useful, being fallible, getting caught with his pants down. Just like many
others really, except on a massive scale.
Head On: The Autobiography by Ian Botham is published by Ebury Press
on October 4 and is available from BooksFirst at £17.09 (RRP £18.99), free p&p,
on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy.
Serialised exclusive extracts from the book will be featured in Times Sport
from Monday
