Botham: My Autobiography

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 telling me to mind how I went would have done no good at all, so Dad ended up making me a special foam helmet. Inevitably, it was only a matter of time before I was back in casualty. On settling in Yeovil, where Dad took up a position with Westland Helicopters after a year in the North West, Mum virtually had a waiting room chair reserved for herself in the local hospital.

I had my first operation in Yeovil General Hospital at the age of four. I had been out shopping with Mum in town when I suddenly collapsed with a terrible stomach pain. There was a panic, I was rushed to hospital and less than an hour later I was on the way to the operating theatre for surgery on a hernia. To make things easier for me, my parents brought in my teddy bear, Mr Khrushchev, the name inspired by the influence of television in my early upbringing. To make me feel better the hospital staff pretended the bear had been through the same ordeal as me and had undergone the same treatment. On my discharge I gave probably the first and last hint that I might possibly be interested in anything other than sport as a career. Mum told me to thank the doctors for looking after me and, according to her, I said: ‘The doctors don’t make you better. They just stand there at the end of the bed, say “Good morning” and ask the nurses how you are. It is the nurses who do all the work and make you better. I think I’ll be a doctor when I grow up’. By the time I had another hernia operation four years later, I understood more about how the system actually worked and abandoned that idea for good.

For the next six years, home was 64 Mudford Road, Yeovil, a house with plenty of trees and a large garden, although not large enough for my liking. What lay beyond the garden gate still proved an irresistible draw and led to one of my first encounters with the iron fist inside the velvet glove of Marie Botham. It was only the shock of being told that Dale and I were found running across the busy main road that led Mum to administer the spanking, for that had certainly not been the normal reaction to our misdemeanours. When Dad came home at lunchtime to find us in bed, he thought we were ill. Punishments usually took the form of the ‘you have nearly pushed it too far’ warning movement of Mum’s hand towards the wooden spoon she kept in the kitchen as a deterrent. But as I grew older the occasional smack was administered, superseded at my secondary modern school by the cane, a regular adversary, and they certainly did me no harm. Pity there is not more of it these days.

It was about this time that my sporting life began in earnest. The house at Mudford Road backed on to the playing fields of Yeovil Grammar School, where I could often be found watching the older boys playing cricket. I was frequently discovered here by Len Bond, an assistant groundsman at the school, who would cart me back home in his wheelbarrow. My love affair with sport began in earnest when I moved from Miss Wright’s private school at Penmount to Milford Junior School in September 1962. The school day worked on the basis that I went home for lunch, until I discovered that if you stayed for a school dinner you could also play football. I managed to persuade Mum and Dad to let me stay on even though I was in my first year and you were not meant to play football until the second. My ally was Richard Hibbitt, the deputy headmaster who was in charge of games. He saw how keen I was, made room for me and was soon asking my parents for permission to pick me for the school team. That was all the encouragement I needed, and by the ripe old age of seven I was already practising my autograph for the day when I would be famous.

I didn’t have to wait long for my first appearance on national television, although Songs Of Praise from St John’s in Yeovil was not exactly what I had in mind. At the time the family attended church fairly regularly, and as the church choir was struggling for numbers I was drafted in. I should point out that my singing talents, which are legendary, had no bearing on my selection. I was so bad that when the big day came I was told politely but firmly to mime. Ironically, when the programme went out, I was the chorister who received the most attention from the cameras. Indeed, my ability as a mime artist was to stand me in good stead in pantomime later on in life.

Considering the number of times I have been called upon to scribble my name since then, all that handwriting practice at the age of seven was of great use. Not that you would ever have convinced my parents or teachers at the time: for them it was another distraction from the real job of inwardly digesting. My form mistress at Milford, Mrs Olwyn Joyce, was heard despairingly telling my parents that she wished the school had been built in a traditional style rather than with modern, panoramic windows. Being easily distracted by the sight and sound of a bouncing ball, I was forever staring out of the window watching other classes playing games and wishing I was out there with them.

There were no such problems with Mr Hibbitt. He even forgave me for breaking a school window since the damage had been caused by a cricket ball. Although I had been bowling daisy cutters at the garage door from the age of six and disappearing into the local park for games of cricket at every available opportunity, Mr Hibbitt showed me that there was money to be made from sport when he placed a pile of coins on a good length on the pitch and told us that if we managed to hit them, the cash was ours. I cleaned up, as I did later when, at thirteen, I made my debut for Somerset Under-15s against Wiltshire. The deal was 6d per run, and my score of 80 ensured a jackpot which my Dad was forced to cough up but did not risk again. Needless to say, my one great sporting achievement at Milford came in the form of a six which Mr Hibbitt reckoned would have carried at either Taunton or Lord’s. Then, one sports day I took part in a contest to see who could throw the cricket ball furthest on the playing fields of Buckler’s Mead.

I was standing at the throwing line when the teacher doing the measuring in the distance shouted at me to have my go. It had to be pointed out to him that not only had I already done so, but my ball had landed many yards behind the spot where he was standing. Later, incidentally, in the summer of 1968 the same thing happened when I managed a record throw of just over 207 feet in the Under-13 tournament of the Crusaders’ Union National Sports Day at Motspur Park in South London. The judges did not believe the distance I had achieved with my first throw and made me throw again. They measured this one and I came home with the Victor Ludorum Cup for my age group and a record that stood for many years.

By the time I moved to secondary school at Buckler’s Mead, my sheer bloody-mindedness about getting my own way was well established. In general, I enjoyed myself. My lack of aptitude for an academic life was well-known by my mates who christened me ‘Bungalow’. I got into a few scrapes and scraps, but when the punishment was handed out I took it without complaining. The most serious incident came when I walked out of a woodwork lesson and never went back. Woodwork and I never really got on. I would start to make a coffee table and the legs would get shorter and shorter until all that was left was a big tray. My dovetails never dovetailed and I had no interest at all in the subject. The end came when I was in the workroom one day and the teacher, a Mr Black, suddenly turned round because someone had been mucking about behind me. There were no questions asked, he just walked up to me and whacked me on the head with a T-square. I was so angry, I was shaking. I wanted to flatten him there and then. Instead I told him I was going to do him a favour and leave the room. I went straight to the headmaster, explained what had happened and told him I was not the sort of person who would go home bleating about what had gone on in school. I said that I was never going in a class with Mr Black again, and I got my way.

Adolescence brought the usual horrors for me and my family. My ideas about fashion were to cause one or two run-ins. I was a teenager at the time when platform shoes were all the rage – the first time around. Quite naturally I wanted some, whatever Mum said, but shortly after I eventually got hold of a pair, I realized that she might just have been right all along. Mum was always keen to be with me when I bought clothes because she was rightly fearful of the consequences of my colour blindness. This time I spurned her offer and went into town on my own with the inevitable dire results: blue flared trousers, a bright orange shirt with a huge collar, and a pair of immense platform shoes. Mum and Dad were going out that evening to watch some five-a-side football at a local sports centre and I told them I would join them later in my new gear. In the process of putting on this ghastly costume, I managed to trip over my shoes and rip the trousers.

Mum also noticed around this time that I had begun to open my eyes to the possibility that girls might offer more than pig-tails to pull. When I came home one day and announced casually that I required some Lifebuoy soap, Mum’s response was immediate.

‘What’s her name?’ she inquired.

‘Margaret,’ I told her.

‘And what is the attraction?’

‘She can run faster than me.’

We all have at least one tale from this grisly adolescent period which we pray will be forgotten about on Judgement Day. Mine involved my sister Dale and her pet hamster. My return home for the weekend from the Lord’s groundstaff, where I had been taken on as a ‘trainee cricketer’ following a recommendation by Somerset, coincided with its untimely demise. On hearing the news, I went up to Dale’s room, removed the hamster from its cage and, paying scant attention to her grief, proceeded to swing it around by its tail to make sure it really was dead. Dale somehow failed to see the funny side.

I was a real charmer to Dale and my other sister Wendy, putting live spiders in their beds etc., and once I very nearly caused our charwoman, Mrs Whittle, to have a heart attack. I decided it would be great fun to deposit a large plastic snake behind a chair she was about to clean. You could hear the shrieking all down the street.

Every youngster threatens to leave home at one time or another. My big moment came when I announced to Mum I was off to London to see the bright lights. Within ten minutes, there waiting for me in the hall were my bags, packed and ready. When it dawned on me that if Mum did not clean my cricket gear I would have to, I thought better of it. But the real battles at home were over my absolute determination to make a career out of sport. My parents were worried about what would happen if I failed to make the grade or was badly injured, not that the thought ever existed in my mind. When, after I had succeeded in escaping from school at fifteen, Somerset arranged for me to go to Lord’s, Roy Kerslake, a prominent member of the county’s cricket committee, had to do the hard sell on my Dad who was worried that if it should all fall apart I would be a 16-year-old with no qualifications. What swung the decision for him was being told that those who failed to make it to the county circuit would often use their groundstaff experience to find jobs coaching cricket at independent schools.

As far as I was concerned, however, the only choice I had to make was which sport to concentrate on. I already had an offer to join Crystal Palace football club. The manager at the time, a West Country man named Bert Head, wanted to sign me and I asked Dad for some advice as there were other clubs, five from the First Division as I recall, who were after me as well. Les said ‘Right, son. I think you are a better cricketer’, and that was the decision made. Had the offer come from Stamford Bridge, things might have turned out very differently because I was a Chelsea fanatic. When my turn to choose the bedroom decor coincided with their FA Cup winning run of 1970, I gave Mum a Chelsea rosette so that she could buy the wallpaper and bed covers in exactly the right colours. She drew the line when it came to the carpet, but even so the name Chelsea was stencilled all over the house, and when they beat Leeds United in the Cup Final replay at Old Trafford, I went up to my room with a piece of chalk and sketched the trophy on the wall as the finishing touch.

If you were to ask a psychoanalyst to explain the awesome significance of all these early experiences (and I can assure you I have no intention of doing so) I suppose that he would conclude that here were the makings of a character that was determined not to be shackled and to have his own way. Certainly, my hatred of confined spaces is well known. In later years, it was very easy for my critics and others to point to my dislike of net practice as yet another sign of a supposed lack of professionalism. ‘What, Beefy in the nets? He must be ill’, they would jibe.

The fact is that I have always suffered badly from claustrophobia and although some will still take this with a cellar full of salt, nets felt like prisons to me. I genuinely used to suffer acute anxiety from being in them, and I suppose that is why on many occasions my batting practice would degenerate into a slog. As so often with me, it was a case of covering up a genuine fear with sheer bravado. It goes without saying that I am a show-off – I don’t hide from that and I’m not trying to excuse it. If I hadn’t been, I’m sure I would not have been able to produce some of the great performances I did. But I’m sure it is no coincidence that I felt most fired up when my back was against the wall. That was not simply a Roy of the Rovers mentality: the fact is that when you have nowhere to go, the only way out is to emerge with all guns blazing. Imran Khan, the great Pakistan all-rounder and captain, talked about this when he described how his team had come from the depths of despair to win the 1992 World Cup. After they had been humbled in the initial qualifying matches he told his players ‘Be as a cornered tiger … Come out and fight’, and sometimes that is the only option available.

All through my life I have possessed extraordinary self-belief. Even as a kid, there were no doubts about what I was going to do when I grew up. I was going to be a professional sportsman. When I encountered the careers master at Buckler’s Mead this attitude of mine would often lead to a series of pointless rows as I would be summoned to the library to go through the same ritual time and again.

‘Morning, Ian. What thoughts have you had since we last met?’

‘Nothing new. I still want to play sport.’

‘Fine. Everyone wants to play sport. But what are you really going to do?’

I would end up repeating myself, getting angry and saying that there was no point in my attending these advisory sessions because I knew precisely what I was going to do. There were dozens behind me in the queue who had no idea what they wanted to do, and they were the ones who needed a careers master, not me.

Clearly these aspects of my character have been absolutely vital in enabling me to enjoy my career and live life to the full. All sportsmen who make it to the top have to be ultra-competitive, there simply is no other way to succeed. Without the desire to win and the need to be better than the rest, you won’t last five minutes. However, as the Americans are prone to saying, ‘If you want to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk’. As a kid I simply had to win at everything, and that desire to be No.1 has never left me. I make no apologies for the way I have conducted myself over the years and I have no regrets. Life is too short to be forever wondering whether you did the right thing. But I fully appreciate that there has been a price to pay and that, more often than not, others have had to pay it.

I have always found it difficult to admit to mistakes. I had enough trouble conceding that I might possibly have made an error on the cricket field. My cricketing team-mates will tell you that, according to me, I was never, ever, out. If a bowler was lucky enough to take my wicket, I had a never-ending supply of excuses to run through when I got back to the dressing room. As far as I can recall, I don’t think I ever came up with something totally ludicrous; there was always a hint of plausibility in the argument I put forward. No, I didn’t claim to be distracted by UFOs and there was nothing like ‘I crashed the car, sir, because the tree that wasn’t in my driveway yesterday was there now’. But I have to admit to serving up some real beauties in my time; like being put off by someone turning the page of his newspaper, for instance. Similarly, when I was bowling, if a batsman hit me for four it was not because he had played a good shot or I had bowled a bad ball. Invariably it was all part of a grand plan and it was simply a matter of time before the poor sucker fell for it. If I dropped a catch it was obviously because the ball was coming out of the sun. If there was no sun in the sky at the time, then a passing cloud would get the blame. If no cloud, then the moon. I would come up with anything rather than admit that I had been at fault. It was a case of protecting my pride, making myself feel invulnerable. Perhaps the most comical of all of these incidents took place during the Old Trafford Test of the 1989 summer series against Australia when, with our first innings total on 140 for four, a moment when the state of the match dictated that a modicum of discretion was required, I aimed a wild swing at the spinner Trevor Hohns in an attempt to hit him out of the ground and missed. That must be classed as one of my most embarrassing moments on the cricket field, alongside the time I went out to bat against Western Australia in Perth on the 1986/87 tour with a throbbing hangover and no bat.

‘Sorry about that, lads,’ I said, as I slid back into the dressing-room. ‘My bleedin’ bat got stuck behind my pads.’

‘I didn’t notice they were strapped to your bleedin’ head,’ replied John Emburey.

The bottom line was immaturity. For me, the slightest admission of failure or inadequacy was out of the question, and it was the same whatever I did. When, at the age of fifteen I returned home from a school cruise on the Mediterranean having shot up in height on the trip to over six foot, my behaviour was quite extraordinary. Dale and I used to measure ourselves against the kitchen door and it annoyed me intensely that she had always been taller. This time I insisted that Mum measure me and when I discovered how much I had grown, I ran into the garden to find my sister, shouting ‘Dale! Come here now. I want to measure you!’ You wouldn’t have believed my reaction upon discovering that I had finally outgrown her. FA Cup winners have celebrated less. It was pathetic.