A meeting with the King

'When he went to the ring, he was often smiling. He knew that when the heavyweight champion of the world defended his title, it was a solemn moment, but he found it hard to forget how strong he was.'

Good that, isn't it... AJ Liebling wrote it about Rocky Marciano, but it might just as well be about Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards walking out to bat. He was usually chewing gum instead of smiling - although the flash of teeth from underneath that Roman nose sometimes gave the impression of one - and his journey to the wicket was inordinately slow for the entrance of a gladiator.

'Hurry up,' someone in the Yorkshire crowd once heckled. 'That's why,' Richards said, 'when you look at records and things, and you see the record of Vivian Richards against Yorkshire, I could be high up where averages and runs are concerned'.

I met him last year. It was on a flat, cold morning at the University of Surrey, and he'd come straight from the airport to a reception to promote the Antiguan Olympic team's use of the facilities there come 2012. The room was full of journalists and local radio and TV people, and I heard him before I saw him. He was talking to a young and beautiful radio reporter standing somewhere towards the side of the bar. 'My full name,' he was telling her slowly, 'is Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards... It's a very long name, isn't it...' He left an arch pause before breaking into that unmistakable, high laugh.

He was 58 then, almost 59, but aside from the smallest fleck of grey in his goatee, he looked the same as he had when he retired from cricket in 1991, head shaved, face unlined, eyes bright and dark, stomach washboard flat and shoulders and waist still ascribing the perfect 'V' of a middleweight boxer. He'd famously never been inside a gym, but those boxing references just kept on coming. Some who knew him well called him 'Smokey' after Smokin' Joe, with whom he'd shared such indomitable spirit. To everyone else though, he remained simply King Viv, destroyer of bowlers, avatar of modern batsmanship. Even the knighthood, which he shrugged off ['Hi man, hi... call me Viv'] didn't seem quite enough. King Viv it was, and is.

I'd known for a while that I might be able to speak to him, and I knew exactly what I was not going to say: that the first three times I saw him bat, he made 291 at the Oval, 138 not out at Lord's in the World Cup Final and 118 in a Benson and Hedges final for Somerset a couple of years later - 'You see, Viv', I was definitely not going to tell him, 'you were getting worse every time...'

We sat down at a small table overlooking some plastic hockey pitches. He was drinking orange juice. 'You know Viv,' I heard myself saying in a voice that seemed to come from a distant, empty room, 'the first three times I saw you bat...' He listened patiently. '...So you see,' went the voice that was apparently mine, 'you were getting worse every time...'

He looked at me for a second, glanced down at his juice... and then smiled. It felt a bit like like I imagine getting off the mark in your first Test innings feels. We had some common ground - not a sentence you can utter every day - in that we'd both been to Alf Gover's cricket school in Wandsworth; he reminisced about the eggy smell of the old gas lamps that lit the place and the penetrating winter cold that took until lunchtime to lift, and remembered lovely, Patrician Alf and his famous 'one to drive...'

What he recalled most about that 291 at the Oval was also something sensory: how hot and brown the pitch was; how un-English. We spoke for about 15 minutes, I suppose, and he said something I'll never forget, a phrase that serves as an epitaph for his epic career: 'You see,' he said, 'with the bat, I was a soldier...'

That's good enough for Liebling, good enough for anyone. 'With the bat, I was a soldier'. He was, and more. Happy birthday King Viv.

Wisdom of the Ancients

One of cricket - and sport's - great archetypes is the aged and taciturn coach, the kind of man who will watch silently for half an hour and then impart, often via a single and devastating sentence, a thought that changes not just how you play the game, but how you see it.

My own was the great Alf Gover, a man I wish I had appreciated more. I thought of Alf when I read this interview with John Jacobs, who has coached golf to Open champions and desperate hackers for sixty years. There is wisdom here that comes only from decades of observation. It doesn't come second-hand, from books or anywhere else.

Jacobs has distilled his philosophy down to one thought: you can learn everything you need to know about a player's swing by watching what the ball does once it's been struck. It's fantastically obvious and wonderfully true, and it applies equally well to cricket. All that matters is that moment when bat meets ball. You could discover how to coach anything by talking to John Jacobs.

NB: It's interesting to contrast the Jacobs interview with this one. It's with Tiger Woods' much-hyped new coach Sean Foley. He quotes Ghandi and Aristotle in one answer. I know who I'd rather have coaching me. Good luck, Tiger...

A touch of the vapours

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth...* Yeah, Shakey may have beaten me to that one by a few hundred years, but it feels like the right time to be melancholic; there's no more summer in the air, the last first-class overs go down tomorrow, club outfields are beginning to grow long as the final matches ebb away. Last week the sun came down at a low angle and because of all the rain the grass was an almost iridescent green, just like it is in that picture of Steve Waugh walking off at the SCG late in the day after one of his final innings, a deep shadow cast behind him.

Today I picked up a book that mentioned Alf Gover and it got me thinking about the old man. It was all so long ago, yet it's still sweet and bitter in the memory. I googled some pictures of the school and I could almost feel what it was like to be there, and it was strange and sad to think it exists now only in the minds of people who knew it. It made me want to find some of them, but then maybe best not.

The end of the season. It always comes for you, one way or another...

* Is that the greatest passage in the English language? I didn't used to think so - I was a St Crispin's Day man - but at these times of year, with the weight of experience, maybe it is. Till next spring at least, then it's old Henry again...

Harold, Alf and me

Harold Pinter called cricket 'God's greatest creation'. The Nobel laureate had no problem denouncing governments and rubbishing prime ministers and presidents with a few well-placed f-words, but he was too shy to meet Len Hutton, his all-time hero. Above his writing desk he had a portrait of himself batting in the nets, given to him by the cricket club he formed, the Gaieties. 

I didn't recognise Pinter in the painting, but I knew the net he was batting in instantly; it's as familiar to me as any house I've ever lived in. It's Gover's Cricket School, Wandsworth, and what's more, the stumps in the portrait are the wrong colour - they were grey not brown.

Seeing that thick canvas net again brought everything about the place back. The stairs were so narrow you had to take your bag up longways. They opened out onto a snooker room and a small bar, both dimly, effortfully lit by yellowing bulbs, the changing rooms tucked behind, smelling of leather and Deep Heat. Entry to the nets was up another thin, dark corridor, a walk you'd make for the first time with plenty of butterflies in the stomach, for the four narrow lanes behind the canvas doorway had hosted - and still did - some of the greatest players in the game, from Andy Sandham and Alf Gover, who'd founded the school, to Viv Richards, Andy Roberts, Barry Richards, Garry Sobers, Frank Tyson, Ian Bishop; even, way after I'd last left the place, Brian Lara.

The nets themselves were no more than 18 yards long. Bowlers might get five strides in if they were lucky. The building was an old garage with no electricity supply, lit with gas lamps that smelled damp and eggy, especially first thing in the morning. There was no heating. The temperature lifted only incrementally. The mats were made of some indeterminate kind of vinyl of the sort I've not seen before or since, but they were quick and true. The ball could thud into the canvas behind with the sound of a carpet being beaten. The place was steeped in cricket, it surrounded you, almost holy. 

Amongst it all was Alf himself, in his seventies by then. I must have seen him hundreds of times and he was always dressed identically: immaculate cream flannels, a white cravat under his stiff collar, hair swept nobly back and, most impressively, his England sweater, three lions in its centre, now so long it almost reached his knees. Sometimes, in his office, which was behind the snooker room, he would wear a blue England blazer, too. 

It was tradition that anyone's first lesson at the school would be with Alf, and occasionally after that too. Being young and full of piss and vinegar, I didn't really like 'getting Alf' as it was known. He bowled little round-arm dobbers, and often called the ball he was going to bowl: 'one to drive...' It all seemed so... gentle. 

What I know now of course is that the arm was round from an epic career of 1,555 first class wickets at 23.63. I wish I'd relished it more, enjoyed the moment more, but I didn't. I didn't like 'getting Alf'. 

My coach for several years was, in complete contrast, an Australian named Jim Cameron. Jim was a buccaneering, quixotic figure, red-headed and bearded, fiery and wise. He'd spent so many hours bowling, he could do almost anything from peppering you with a new ball to all kinds of weird, wristy spins. He was usually in the company of impossibly glamorous women who seemed to be in his thrall and he often looked like he'd been up all night, which he probably had. Jim taught me how to bat, properly bat, and he toughened me up. There were no helmets then, and no health and safety either, not that Jim would have taken much notice of either. 

Jim was often behind the bar serving drinks too. All kinds of people met in that bar. I never saw Harold Pinter, but Timothy West, the actor, took his son along; Monty Lynch used the nets in the winter, pounding ball after ball; Jim and the other Australian coaches brought in all sorts, most of whom engaged in long snooker matches on Alf's pay-as-you-go table; Alf would, very occasionally and if the bar was quiet, tell some stories, too. I remember one about the time he was night-watchman at the Oval for Surrey, and somehow - he was a proper number eleven - survived long into the next morning, until his partner walked down the wicket and told him it was about time he got out. His partner was Percy Fender. His captain was Douglas Jardine. Alf once opened the bowling for MCC in India, and, in the grip of the dreaded belly, simply ran past the stumps without delivering the ball, straight up the pavilion steps and into the toilet. 'Lost by a few yards,' he used to say.

I went for probably five or six winters. Everyone could - there was no hierarchy, just the need to go into Alf's office and pay the bill. He'd let anyone he knew hang around and bowl, or just hang around. Every saturday, a guy called Joe would come in for a net. It was usually booked for the end of the day, and I'd often bowl to him, as Jim's arm would be losing its edge. Joe didn't mind. He'd have been drinking brown ale in the bar since lunchtime, so he wasn't that bothered about what came down at him. I used to wonder what Joe was doing at Gover's, why he came; it wasn't until some years later that I realised he was alone and just needed somewhere to go. Gover's was his place.

One winter, my mate Simon, who was one of the coaches by then, discovered it was Joe's birthday, and organised a whip-round. We got him a little trophy of a batsman and had it inscribed, and a silver tankard for his brown ale. After his net, all of the coaches, Alf's son John who ran the shop downstairs, even Alf, fresh from the office, crept into the bar and gave them to him. It was the first time I'd ever seen a man cry. 

It was a magical place, one that I miss very much, along with the people. It's an upmarket housing development now. I don't know what happened to Jim Cameron, but I bet it was good, and I'd love to find out. Jim, if you ever see this, buddy...

Alf himself died in 2001, aged 93. Sleep well, and thank you.