SPECTATOR SPORT
Cricket's e.e. cummings
Simon Barnes
THE FIRST task, on returning to your desk after a fortnight's absence, is to burrow down until you get to the wooden part of it. The dreaded post: start with a handbook of English lacrosse, and on to a letter from an angry West Ham supporter (tautology), and press-kit imploring me to take British basket- ball with proper seriousness. I nothing lack. My waste-paper basket overflows.
And a book. Rare thing. A book about a cricketer no longer actually playing. A book? No, a hagiography. Or no, a martyrology. David Gower — remember him? — A Man Out of Time, by Rob Steen. And a glorious and total lack of self-consciousness: To watch David Gower at the crease was to behold one of the wonders of the twentieth century . . . right alongside Citizen Kane, Soft Time, Astral Weeks, Penny Lane and just about anything by e.e. cummings.'
e.e. cummings? Perhaps we should con- sider the lack of punctuation and capital letters in Gower's cricket career. Some deep and dreadful force inhibited him from pressing the shift key of his cricketing tal- ents, sometimes to present a wonderful ambiguity, as often to make himself, almost wilfully, misunderstood.
When people present themselves to the world, they often choose a single character trait, something that suits their notion of what an admirable person should be. They pursue this doggedly, to the point of perversi- ty and beyond. A colleague might choose to be a martinet, a siren, a good fellow, a square peg, a ruthless sonofabitch, long after the role has become counter-productive.
Such rough and ready bits of self-casting are often striking for their perfect inappro- priateness. But Gower chose to be 'laid- back'. Some adolescent whim instilled in him the conviction that if he showed that he cared, much less tried, then he was less than himself. This was the crippling affectation of a cripplingly self-conscious man. Did Gower, I wonder, see that scene in Chariots of Fire in which the aristocratic athlete has his butler place on each hurdle a brimming goblet of champagne before running the course without disturbing a single bubble? Did he say, 'That is me?' And did he note that the aristocrat's medal was silver?
As Gower's career as captain and public figure progressed, his conversation became an increasingly impenetrable web of irony, litotes, quasi-jokes, flippancy and facetious- ness. Jokes lurked coyly behind jokes.
I managed to offend Gower twice in as many seconds last summer, which is not an easy thing to do. I asked him whether he worked harder at being a cricket commen- tator than he ever did as a batsman. I don't know which he resented more, the sugges- tion that he really didn't work at his cricket — the art is to conceal the art, don't you know — or the suggestion that he really did work at the craft of television.
Gower is, or rather was, a misunderstood genius, but perhaps that is the only kind of genius you can get. He seemed to have a need to be misunderstood. He almost begged for the misunderstanding of the Roundhead tendency in cricket. Graham Gooch and Micky Stewart both selected the opposite technique in the single-character- trait theory of life. They were the front and back legs of a pantomime horse, and the horse was called Boxer: 'I will work harder.'
Thus Gower — I may work a tiny bit and care really rather a lot, but I would die rather than show it — became a martyr on the altar of Boxerism. Thus misunderstood and then discarded, he provoked a tidal wave of righteous anger through cricket.
But amid all the nonsense talked and written and done throughout Gower's career, there remains the batting. Sport is sublime only on the peak of action. I remember a press-box debate on which English batters we would actually pay to watch. John Emburey. Devon Malcolm. Guess the third.
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