Sellers could have cut him some slack. Instead he was confrontational, concerned as much about my dad’s appearance as his performances, a matter someone more supportive and more sympathetic might have let slide for a week or so. One morning he told my dad to get his hair cut. The next, seeing him again, he asked why it hadn’t been done. My dad made some wishy-washy excuse – based around the fact he didn’t have a car – in the unrealistic expectation that Sellers would forget all about it. He didn’t.
‘I’ve made an appointment for you,’ Sellers said, giving him the name of a barber’s. He paid the bill in advance. He also gave the barber ‘strict instructions’ not to spare the shears. My dad came out looking like a ginger billiard ball. Sellers checked up on him, growling his approval at what he saw. ‘Tha’ looks like a lad now,’ he said. It wasn’t so much what Sellers did – Yorkshire have always been strict about looking the part – but the way he did it, apparently never comprehending that his brusqueness could have been off-putting.
At the end of my dad’s maiden season, Sellers got rid of Close as skipper, giving him ten minutes to decide whether he wanted to resign or be sacked. His departure created yet more instability and turmoil. The beneficiaries were Somerset, who leant on the wisdom that Yorkshire wantonly gave up and his ability to make something happen in the field when nothing seemed likely. Close became one of Ian Botham’s early mentors rather than my dad’s. ‘Plain daft,’ was how my dad saw that, regretting his missed opportunity. Close was soon making a hundred against Yorkshire rather than for them. My dad remembered it as one of his own ‘worst moments’; he dropped him on 27.
Every anecdote about Brian Close enlarges him colourfully. He was in and out of the team – he didn’t play in my dad’s first match – because of an injury, sustained after diving into the crease. He and Richard Hutton had gone for the sharpest of singles, and Close lunged desperately for it, bringing up a cloudy billow of dust and yanking his shoulder out of its socket. Later in the season, fit again, he chased another quick single with Hutton. Once more he was left sprawling in the dirt to make his ground. Once more his shoulder popped in the slip and slide of making it home. ‘He was not very pleased,’ said my dad, laconically.
Close’s reputation for fearlessness and for absorbing pain was extraordinary; almost super-human, in fact. In that pre-helmet era, Close fielded as the shortest of short legs or the silliest of points, almost able to pick the batsman’s pocket, and also crouched lower than a limbo dancer in his stance. In one game a shot clipped the dome of his balding head before looping over the boundary for six. In another, mid-wicket is said to have taken a catch deflected off his left shoulder blade. Afterwards, as though his bones were made of titanium, Close didn’t bother to rub the welt. In a third, he got struck on the shin so hard that an enormous spread of blood soaked through his flannels, making it look as though he’d been hacked at with a machete. The Yorkshire team waited for him to wilt and fall over, but he stood his ground and gave the bowler, concerned for his health, a broadside of abuse for having not already bowled the next ball.
You’ll have seen the film of Close fending off the West Indies pace attack – Michael Holding in particular – with his upper body at Old Trafford in 1976, a sacrifice that left his torso purple-black and yellow with bruising. That’s the sort of man he was. Like Monty Python’s Black Knight, he’d have dismissed a hacked-off limb as nothing but a scratch. I’m guessing Close saw something of himself in my dad: a lad who didn’t mind a few knocks and didn’t complain or make a song and dance if a small bone got broken. He just got on with things. His plain speaking endeared him to Close too – even when he was the butt of it.
My dad remembered Close being out lbw. Close thought the decision was unfair – and that the umpire was either woefully short-sighted or blind. He came back into the dressing room and went on about it endlessly. The rest of the side, wanting a peaceful life, nodded silently or murmured in agreement with him or tried to ignore the tirade, the decibel level of which increased as his indignation grew. Dad looked uncomprehendingly until Close finally stared at him and asked: ‘And what does tha’ think of it, young ’un?’ He would not have passed the entrance exam for the diplomatic corps on this occasion. He looked at Close and said matter of factly: ‘I think tha’ goes on a bit.’ For once, Close had no reply. It was as though someone had just poured a bucket of cold water over his head, and the sudden shock of it had robbed him of the power of speech.
He lost it again when, during a game, my dad – shedding his cap and gloves – beat him in a sprint from the stumps to the boundary to cut off a four when Close had a 30-yard start on him. He also once called him ‘a prat’ and somehow escaped censure. Close dismissed it as a laudable display of feistiness. Retribution of sorts came later, however. Apart from his bravery, which was taken for granted, Close was well known for four things. The first was his liking of a drink. The second was his liking for a fag. The third was his liking of a bet on the gee-gees, a copy of the Sporting Life his usual breakfast reading. In the morning, after checking the form, he’d draw a note out of his wallet and surreptitiously hand it to whoever was 12th man, dispatching him to the bookmakers in Headingley with the instruction about what nag in which race the cash should be placed. In the afternoon Close would send the 12th man back to discover whether the horse had won, collecting any money he was owed. The fourth – and my dad could testify to this – was his liking for driving faster than a fire engine on the way to a fire.
The fixture planners weren’t always kind to cricketers. You could find yourself shunted from the top of the country to the bottom of it in the same day, a fresh game awaiting you the morning after a long trip. Yorkshire were forced to go from Scarborough to Bristol – a total of 252 miles. My dad wasn’t expecting to travel with Close, who commandeered him as a passenger at the last moment. Like the perk of being able to use the 12th man as a bookie’s runner, Close could choose who accompanied him to matches. Saying no wasn’t an option. Not everyone wore seat belts back then, but my dad was aware of Close’s reputation for slamming his foot down on the accelerator and then leaving it there. Stuffed into the boot and across the back seat of the brown Ford Capri were about two tonnes of cricket gear. My dad strapped himself in … and then he prayed.
Close drove as if the highways and byways of North Yorkshire were as empty as the roads of Monaco for the Grand Prix. Everything whizzed by for ten untroubled minutes or so – until, with the coast well behind them, Close got further down the Driffield Road. He came to a sharp left-hand bend and then a fairly steep incline. The Capri began to tilt as Close took the bend too quickly, the weight of the cricket gear unbalancing it. Gripping the wheel with all his strength, Close fought to steady the car as a big wagon came towards them. A head-on collision was certain unless one of them managed to zag out of the path of the other. ‘I honestly thought my end had come,’ said my dad, who began praying again. Somehow Close managed to steer the car off the road, away from the wagon, and bump it along a grass verge. He slammed on the brakes less than a foot from a dry-stone cemetery wall. ‘All I could see were gravestones,’ my dad added.
An outraged passer-by made a beeline for my dad, bizarrely choosing to scold him instead of the perpetrator. ‘You should have more bloody sense than to drive like that,’ he complained. Afterwards, Close turned to my dad, who was still recovering from the fright, and said to him: ‘I’m glad he came to you. He might have recognised me.’
My dad survived Brian Close’s manic driving to add another five Championship appearances to the fourteen he’d already made that summer. He also survived his first season, taking 43 catches and six stumpings, and making almost 400 runs. Yorkshire finished fourth in the table, which was smartly respectable for anyone else but unremarkable for a county so used to coming first that even second place would have been regarded as a failure.
The beginning of something can be beautiful. So it proved for my dad. His career was off and running and about to gather
momentum. Wisden not only identified him as the ‘schoolboy wicketkeeper … growing in confidence and stature’ who was already ‘highly regarded’, but also used his photograph, a slightly blurry shot with his serge cap askew across his new short haircut, emphasising his rascally charm. He said everything had been ‘so sudden’ that he didn’t ‘think I’ve woken up yet’. That he failed his English exam, which had started his story, soon became irrelevant and forgotten. The following summer was calamitous for Yorkshire – it was ranked then as the worst in their history – but celebratory for him. At 19, my dad claimed more victims – 64 catches, six stumpings – than anyone else in the country, the first evidence that a new wicketkeeping era had arrived at Headingley. The rest is in the Yorkshire record books.
459 first-class matches
10 centuries, 73 fifties, a total of 13,951 runs
961 catches, 138 stumpings
He also appeared in 429 List A games, which brought 4,439 runs, 411 catches and 36 stumpings. And there were four Tests and 21 one-day internationals for England. He once claimed 11 dismissals in a match against Derbyshire, equalling the world record. In one Roses game he took nine catches, equalling the county record. In total, he got six or more victims in an innings five times. He passed 1,000 runs in a season three times. He’s the only Yorkshire player to have scored more than 10,000 first-class runs and claimed more than 1,000 first-class dismissals. He won the John Player League and the Benson & Hedges Cup. He was the county’s 25th captain, during a period of upheaval so wretched and severe that it made what had gone before look like a bit of playground squabbling.
My dad and the county became indivisible from one another. He was said to be the personification of Yorkshireness, a term defined as never contemplating defeat and never giving ‘a toss’ for anyone else’s reputation.
He was some man, and he had some career, but figures and pencil marks in the scorebook tell you only what was achieved – not how. My dad’s appeal lay in his pugnacious approach to the game, and the swashbuckling derring-do he demonstrated. Personality seeps through in performance, and he’s a prime example of that. To realise what he was like on the field, you have to realise what he was like off it too.
He once plunged into the Caribbean Sea and split his foot on a razory piece of coral. The locals were astonished – and I mean astonished – that the accident hadn’t taken half of his foot clean off. Blood gushed everywhere, but my dad simply bandaged up the wound and carried on with his day, as though he’d suffered nothing more serious than a nick while shaving. Also in the West Indies, he and Uncle Ted swam to a luxury boat to sample some lunchtime hospitality. They may have drunk the odd ginger beer. On the swim back, caught in a riptide, Uncle Ted found himself in difficulties. My dad, hearing him shout, remained calm, getting them both back to the beach. When Uncle Ted had a problem with an overhead power cable at his farm – the electricity company spoke gravely about health and safety and fetching a cherry-picker to remedy the fault – my dad simply said: ‘I’ll sort it.’ He persuaded Uncle Ted to stick a wooden palette on to a forklift truck. My dad stood on it, without as much as a yellow hard hat or harness, while Uncle Ted gradually raised the thing 25 feet in the air. He fixed the damage, impervious to the danger.
I mention this because I’m sure it explains why my dad was so robust – and also how he became renowned for being as ‘muck and nettles’ combative as it’s possible to be, an indomitable sod if you happened to need his wicket. Someone unperturbed by the sight of his own blood, dangerous sea currents and working precariously at height isn’t going to be bothered by sledging, bouncers or general intimidation. What’s been said of me – that I’m good in a crisis – was also said of him long before.
I know this can be said of so many players, but in a lot of respects my dad was born too early. Twenty20, with its cheek and razzmatazz and also the requirement to entertain, would have suited his gung-ho approach. He’d have liked the pulse of it – the run chase especially if it meant going up the order – and the pressure of knowing that something was expected of him. For my dad was the patron saint of lost causes – the more lost, the better. He flourished in them. He found himself in one of those circle-the-wagon stands during a 50-over day-nighter for England against Australia at Sydney in 1980. Chasing 163, England looked doomed. The six batsmen before my dad had eked out only 13 between them. When fellow Yorkshireman Graham Stevenson, making his international debut, came out to join him against Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, England were on the precipice – 129 for eight. Most players in that position would have muttered a few reassuring platitudes to Stevenson about sticking in there and making an okay fist of it. ‘Evening, lad,’ my dad said to him as if the two of them were about to nip down to the pub for a pint. ‘We can piss this.’ They did. England won with seven balls to spare and both of them were unbeaten at the end, much to Australia’s bewilderment. The Hill was in a daze.
At one point, with the visibility even under lights rather murky, my dad bellowed to Stevenson, ‘Can thee see it?’
Stevenson bellowed back, ‘I’m alreet lad,’ and proceeded to bang Thomson for six.
That comeback, however spectacular, looks merely implausible beside the small task of achieving the impossible, which my dad accomplished against Derbyshire 18 months later in the Benson & Hedges Cup. He didn’t so much go into bat as go into battle, coming out like a flaming arrow. You read the over-by-over breakdown of the climax of Yorkshire’s innings and come away convinced there must be a misprint in the text. Surely my dad couldn’t have done what he did? Yorkshire were 123 for nine in the 46th over, chasing a total of 202. That’s 80 runs off 54 balls. At the other end Mark Johnson, a seam bowler, was playing in his first match. Tongue pressed firmly into cheek, my dad claimed later that he saw the outcome as a formality; there was no way Yorkshire could possibly lose. He went berserk, a flurry of hitting seldom seen before or since – even now when the climax of a Twenty20 match can constantly surprise us.
It was said of my dad that he believed ‘he could intimidate the bowling simply by announcing that he was going to smack the ball over the bowler’s head’, and that ‘often enough he kept his promise’. He did that at Derby. My dad took charge of the strike (Johnson scored only four) and dominated the bowlers with a lot of crash, bang and even more wallop. As Dickie Bird, umpiring that day, said: ‘He hit it so high and so hard that I kept losing track of the ball. At one point I thought we’d lost it for ever.’ He finished on 103, striking nine sixes. His last 50 was scored in under a quarter of an hour. One over from David Steele, who bowled slow left arm well enough to take over 600 Championship wickets, went for 26. Yorkshire won with eight balls to spare.
He also took a century off Leicestershire before lunch at Park Avenue – 94 minutes, 119 balls, 14 fours and 2 sixes. And his highest score – 145 – came against Middlesex and, notably, the lethal Wayne Daniel; he was memorably described as someone who ‘did not know how to bowl slow’ and who regularly hit a nasty length that ‘tickled the ribs’. That is the polite way of saying that the ‘wrong’ ball from Daniel could have caved in the bone structure of your chest. My dad hit one six off Daniel that split some tiles apart on the pavilion roof.
I was too young to know all this when he died, just as I’d been too young to appreciate the titbits and threads of things that came out during those pub conversations with strangers who asked about his performances. I didn’t fully realise his accomplishments, the extent of his relative fame, his efforts on Yorkshire’s behalf or what it meant. And I didn’t necessarily recognise any of the names he dropped naturally into his reminiscences – even though I’d already been in the company of a lot of them, especially the Yorkshire side of his vintage. My dad wasn’t the sort to build a shrine to his career at home. He didn’t put much of what he’d won on display. When I did see his medals and caps, his blazers with embroidered badges, the stumps and wicketkeeping gloves, they held little meaning for me. They were simply there and so taken for grant
ed, not much more significant than the furniture. He was my dad. I loved him and he made me feel safe and wanted: nothing else mattered. Who he’d been, and also the scale of what he’d done, sunk in only later – when it was far too late to ask him about.
But a couple of years after his death, my mum took me to Headingley to watch a match there properly for the first time. I remember it was a one-dayer; Yorkshire wore a shade of flame orange, the unflattering colour of a Belisha beacon that glowed even on the murkiest of mornings. I don’t remember paying too much attention to the match. I can’t even tell you who Yorkshire were playing, never mind the result. I was seldom still in a seat long enough to find out. I raced about as boys do – from the rickety football stand to the open expanse of the Western Terrace and on to the Kirstall Lane end. I’d taken an autograph book with me, determined to fill as many pages of it as I could. I also had an ulterior motive. Even though I wasn’t aware of everything my dad had achieved for Yorkshire, I was nonetheless as proud of him then as I am now. I wanted everyone to know it – and to know, too, that I was his son. I also wanted to collect any small piece of him that anyone else was willing to share.
So, when the chance came, I’d patiently get in line, pushing the autograph book towards the player who was next to sign. No sooner was the pen in his hand, hovering over the paper, than I’d say to him: ‘I think you used to play with my dad.’
CHAPTER 3
THE PERFECT 10
No one during my dad’s day went into the County Championship to strike gold. You didn’t get rich playing for Yorkshire or anyone else.
Today you have the England and Wales Cricket Board’s central contracts. You can, if you’re considered valuable enough, earn a few hundred thousand pounds or even a million-plus from only a few weeks in the Indian Premier League and also become a paid freelance in the other Twenty20 tournaments strategically dotted across the calendar and around the globe. The cricketers of the 1970s and 1980s had nothing like that to aim for. Their salaries, irrespective of Kerry Packer’s ‘revolution’, didn’t noticeably climb to match inflation. They made a living, but it wasn’t necessarily a prosperous one and it didn’t guarantee long-term financial security.
A Clear Blue Sky Page 6