Lewis promises common touch on elevation to Lord's (3 October 1998)
MEMBERS of Marylebone Cricket Club may care to ponder the fact that their incoming president has been at work in a Cardiff gym recently, learning to throw punches
03-Oct-1998
3 October 1998
Lewis promises common touch on elevation to Lord's
Interview by Giles Smith
MEMBERS of Marylebone Cricket Club may care to ponder the fact
that their incoming president has been at work in a Cardiff gym
recently, learning to throw punches. For his 60th birthday, Tony
Lewis's wife bought him a series of sessions with a personal
trainer. These work-outs have brought Lewis into contact with
fitness activities of which, as an ex-professional cricketer, he
had no previous experience - rowing, weight-lifting and boxing.
His trainer puts the pads on, and Lewis thumps them, paying
particular attention to the follow-through.
"Two sharp lefts and a right. It's a whole new culture," Lewis
said with delight this week, though also with a hint of regret
that the fight world had only now, after a lifetime in cricket,
opened up to him. "I could have hit Ian Chappell years ago," he
said.
At the MCC, the prime opportunity for a punch-up may have passed.
Last Monday evening, this most extraordinary of sporting
institutions finally voted to admit women - not only as a
concept, but also as members. The nature and duration of this
debate, which seems to have been on-going for the best part of
our lifetimes, cannot be said to have done the public perception
of the MCC many favours. It made them look the way the Vatican
sometimes does: slowly groping towards a position on matters
about which the rest of the world made up its mind years ago.
Finally, however, more than two-thirds of the membership were in
favour, but 4,072 members were not and the evening did not pass
without what Lewis referred to, with a wince, as "several sharp
speeches".
Lewis took over at the top, as planned, four days later. The
battle was over but the potentially tricky business of coping
with the victory was in his hands. There was, by the way, no
arcane swearing-in ceremony for the new president: no kissing of
old cricket balls, no dropping of trousers or hopping on the
spot; just a dinner at Boodle's for committee members and former
presidents, and a speech from the outgoing president telling
everyone who Lewis is. "Which should be interesting to hear,"
Lewis said when we spoke, the day before it happened. Touchingly,
he was unaware at this point whether or not the new job came with
its own desk, but he thought it probably didn't.
Lewis talks quietly and fluidly, smiling apparently at random and
drawing occasionally from those twin fonts of poetic wisdom,
Dylan Thomas and John Arlott. ("Go when they can ask why, not
when they can ask why not," he said at one point, quoting, I
think, the latter). The sweetness of his Welsh accent will be
familiar to anyone who listened to him during his 10 years on
Sport on Four or, more recently, watched him present cricket for
the BBC.
Indeed, Lewis embodies a mysterious phenomenon whereby, though a
television personality, he continues to go unrecognised until he
opens his mouth. "I mean, they look at my face and probably think
I was in The Avengers or whatever. They seem to recognise me:
'Oh, you're the guy from the darts'. But when I sit in a taxi,
the driver might say, 'I know your voice'." Now that's all he
will know: Lewis has decided he would be compromised by his new
MCC role, so is standing down from television work.
We met at a club to which Lewis belongs in Cardiff - one that
insists on the wearing of ties and which, curiously enough,
refuses women admission except (if I understood Lewis correctly)
to the basement. An irony here, then - though perhaps not one to
be pushed too hard. Lewis never hid where he stood on the MCC
women's issue: he was pro-women. One of his two daughters plays
cricket. He offered a small piece of autobiography to illustrate
his contention that he "has no problem with women": he was raised
by his mother because his father was away in the war. In fact,
Lewis did not meet his father until, at the age of eight, he was
introduced to a Major Lewis on the platform at Neath General
Railway Station.
It is probably more relevant that Lewis thinks women play the
game too well to be ignored. He said that a lot of the arguments
he heard to the contrary on Monday were founded on the belief
that the MCC are a private club. "And clearly we're not," he
said. "We're a club that is a world brand. The potency of the MCC
is incredible. It's a bit old empire, but it's not a gin and
tonic in a hammock in a far distant part."
The accusation that the MCC committee were merely playing a
political game to secure funding was, he said, sourceless. "We
never thought about any political intervention, we never thought
about the Lottery, we never thought about anything other than
what was the right thing to do. It wasn't even about escaping
opprobrium. If you want to be the best club in the world, you've
got to have a women's team because they play so well." He said
there was "no doubt at all" that women would figure in the next
annual election of honorary members. He thought the first MCC
women's team would be playing next year, at the end of the
summer, following the World Cup.
It is Lewis's contention that he has done everything there is to
do in the game of cricket, but none of it particularly well.
"I've played, I've been chairman of a professional county, I've
been on MCC committees since the Sixties," he said. "I've got a
hundred in a Test match, won a County Championship, I've written
for a hundred years in The Sunday Telegraph, and I've
commentated. So I've had a good view of the game."
For the MCC, he has what he called his 'mission statement' ("We
have to be the greatest cricket club in the world") but that
would have to survive alongside his own scepticism ("We think we
run the best ground in the world at Lord's, but do we? You've got
to examine that by the day"). "The biggest mistake," Lewis said,
"is to go in saying 'I want my presidency to be remembered for. .
.' You set yourself a hurdle too high. And I've got an act I
can't follow, anyway."
He meant the outgoing president Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie. Lewis
and his predecessor played cricket against each other. Lewis says
they were the same kind of player. "We tended to go down the
pitch and work it out when we got there. And probably
'under-performed', as Boycott would say."
But Ingleby-Mackenzie will forever be known as the president who
steered through the women's admission issue. Certainly from the
point of view of the 4,072 members who voted 'no', there would be
nothing Lewis could do to leave a mark as bold and deep as that,
short of concreting Lord's over and turning it into a skateboard
park and ten-pin bowling arena.
He has, for the moment, less radical plans. "It's hard to
communicate with a membership of 17,000 plus. It's a massive
business. At the meeting on Monday, what came through very
clearly to me was that a section of the membership was
disaffected because of its failure to communicate with the
committee and vice versa." So there will be a new communications
and corporate affairs department. Lewis denied that this was just
a fancy name for a spin-unit. "No, I'm definitely anti-spin," he
said. "Spin spins back in your face."
Lewis will be the first MCC president to embrace the information
age. He lives "in the foothills of the Rhonnda with three million
sheep. But communications are such that you can do a lot from
there." So, though he realises he needs to have a presence at
Lord's, he proposes largely to tele-commute. Not long ago the
club asked him for 1,000 words to be published in the first
newsletter of his reign. Lewis surprised the staff by ringing
back two hours later to say the article was ready and asking for
an e-mail address so he could send it through directly.
Apparently there was a silence at the other end: the MCC does
have an e-mail address, it was just never before thought that it
was something the president would be interested in knowing about.
"I want the MCC to be so good that people ask us to be involved,"
Lewis said. "I sat on the Test and County Cricket Board for five
years, four of them as chairman. The debate at the MCC is
stratospheres above it in perception and wisdom. It's fuelled by
people who know stuff and have no axe to grind. They're a very
bright lot."
For his efforts, Lewis will receive no money - just like in his
other role as chairman of the Welsh Tourist Board, where he was
elected to a third term this week. "I've been brilliant at
getting unpaid jobs," he said. Even before taking up office, he
had a pile of letters inviting him to speak. "There will be
glossy occasions, I guess, where I'll tell the same stories,"
Lewis said. "But I don't want to trot up and down Park Lane. I'd
rather appear in places like Neath Cricket Club, where the MCC
sent a team down for the 150th anniversary and where it was
massively appreciated.
"I learnt cricket on the street in Neath," he went on, "and we
learned naturally. We stopped play on the Bracken Road only when
Arthur the Oil came with his horse and cart to sell paraffin or
when Hopkins the Milk came with a delivery."
Lewis then raised his right arm and, flicking his wrist, talked
me through the catalogue of bowling tricks he mastered as a young
boy, using a tennis ball dipped in a puddle: the leg-spinner that
would "drift in the air . . . the skidder that went straight
through".
It is worth noting that presidents of the MCC get to nominate
their successors. So in the case of Ingleby-Mackenzie and Lewis,
an Old Etonian nominated a Neath Grammar School boy. Also, in the
chain of MCC presidents (former incumbents include the Duke of
Edinburgh, twice), Lewis must be one of the first to come from
west of Watford. In a week of change, this, too, looked like an
emblematic shift of emphasis.
Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)