Botham having a charity ball (22 Nov 1997)

22 November 1997

Botham having a charity ball

By Martin Johnson

THURSDAY night at the Harare South Golf Club, and Ian Botham knows he has to make his speech early. Botham plays golf off a five handicap, and as a drinker would be giving shots away to Oliver Reed, but compared to the white tobacco farmers of Zimbabwe, he is almost a teetotaller. This is not exactly Sunningdale, and it's going to get rowdy.

"Let me tell you," says Botham, as a waiter pushes past him with another shipping order of 'cane and Coke', "let me tell you about the finest moment of my cricketing career. The absolute pinnacle. It was the day . . . " he says, pausing to prepare his audience for a reprise of Headingley 1981, " . . . when I deliberately ran out Geoffrey Boycott in a Test match." Cue raucous guffawing and banging of tables.

The repertoire is not quite as expansive as his waistline, and it is the same story he has been telling all week at different golf clubs. Typically, there is no mention of his own great cricketing exploits. He continues with the way he persuaded Allan Lamb to hand a mobile phone to Dickie Bird during a one-day international against Pakistan and then rang it during the middle of Waqar Younis's run-up.

Botham's sense of humour has always been of the water-pistol, flour-bomb variety, and this is his kind of audience. He has his subtle moments, though. "How was your golf, Roddy?" he says, spotting one of the local characters he's met on previous visits.

"Ah, ah, the greens buggered me up, man," replies Roddy.

"The last time the greens buggered you up it cost you four years in Wandsworth," chuckles Botham, a reference to Roddy's former business of importing cannabis disguised as tinned asparagus. Botham's own association with grass has not been totally confined to the stuff that cricket is played on (Ian Chappell once said: "The only thing Botham can teach England's cricket team is how to roll a spliff") and they dissolve into gales of laughter.

Amid all the frivolity, however, Botham is here on a serious mission. The golf day - one of five - is to raise money for seriously ill children, and in less than a week he has helped to bring in around £20,000 for the Zimbabwean Children's Heart Foundation. There is no national health service here, nor the facilities for major surgery. Thanks to Botham, another couple of kids will be able to travel to South Africa for life-saving treatment, rather than die here in Zimbabwe. This is his second visit, after meeting a former Zimbabwean cricketer in a bar in Worcester. Kevin Murphy's child had a heart problem, and after hearing how tough it was for poor black children to get treatment, Botham promptly offered his services.

He has walked around 6,000 miles and raised more than £5 million for leukaemia research, and here he is spending more of his time raising money for others when he has lost £70,000 in unpaid wages for a travelling roadshow, and even more on his libel action against Imran Khan. His generosity is legendary, and it rubs off on other people. Before coming here he made a phone call to Noel Hunt, a former tour golf professional who now commands large fees for trick-shot exhibitions, and Hunt has flown in from Singapore to put on a series of free shows.

On his flight from London, Botham also bumped into Bruce Grobbelaar - who was intending to spend only a day here negotiating a contract to take over as national football coach - but who ended up staying the full week to lend his name to the fund-raising. Grobbelaar spent most of his time taking good-natured ribbing from his fellow countrymen along the lines of whether he will be coaching young Zimbabwean goalkeepers how to dive the wrong way, and he is also in for a hard time from his wife when he gets home several days late.

Botham's own wife, Kath, is not so much resigned to him getting home late as not getting home at all. So she's decided to fly out and join him and his eldest daughter Sarah, who is teaching PE at a Harare girls' school. Kath keeps a diary and has logged the number of days Botham has spent at home - in North Yorkshire - during 1997. Thirty-two.

"I'm just grateful he managed to make it home for Liam's wedding," she said. His son plays rugby for Cardiff, and is about to make a dent in his father's ageless image by making him a grandfather.

Out on the golf course Botham plays every bit as hard and aggressively as he did on the cricket field. Playing at the Chapman Golf Club in Harare, Botham's ball was lying in the trees, 220 yards from a green protected by a large expanse of water. "Play safe, sir," urged his caddie, unaware that safety and Botham are not two words which sit happily in the same sentence. His boss gave him a dark look, plucked out a two-iron, and thrashed his ball through the trees, over the water and into another set of trees.

Botham's profile remains so high that his entire range of golf gear is sponsored, and he is currently using a set of Wilson irons known as Fat Shafts. "Easy on the jokes," he says, patting a midriff as generous as his own nature. The shafts are not quite as wide as he is, but alongside a normal set, it is like comparing a drainpipe to a hypodermic needle. Like most new designs, these clubs are trumpeted as revolutionary and bound to make a difference to your scoring. So they do. The Fat Shafts cost me five shots in the first five holes.

These things fly so far that a good shot covering the pin will produce a cry of delight from your caddie, only for the ball to sail majestically on, over the back of the green and into some impenetrable jungle. The caddie then checks to make sure that it really was an eight-iron you struck, before shaking his head in disbelief. Botham, who propels the ball so far anyway that he doesn't need the extra length, has had Wilson change his club heads to "quieten them down a bit".

In another game, Botham's partner against two Zimbabwean chums is Hunt, who is a user not so much of fat shafts as ones that are made out of rubber hosepipe. He uses all manner of bizarre equipment in the trick-shot shows, but he is short of practice at the serious stuff, and he and Botham are beaten four and two.

Back at the clubhouse the locals joke: "Zimbabwe stuff England again, eh?", a reference to last winter's cricket tour, which was both a cricketing and a PR disaster. One of the golfers who has paid to play in the charity golf day lives in Melbourne, and tells Botham that the biggest sporting headline in his newspaper last winter was 'Bunch of farmers beat the Poms!' Botham raises an eyebrow, probably wondering why the Australians opted for as subtle a word as 'beat'.

However, Botham is not slow to condemn England's wretched approach to that Zimbabwe tour. "It's a bloody good job they got hammered in the one-dayers here, because it gave them a big wake-up. I'm pleased we lost. There was so much arrogance, it was almost a case of 'what are we doing here?', and the improvement in New Zealand was down to the players finally realising that if they didn't pull their fingers out they might be out of a job."

Alastair Campbell, the Zimbabwean cricket captain, nods in agreement. He accused England of having a "superiority complex" last winter, and of spurning the local hospitality, despite the fact that Zimbabwean hospitality is geared towards turning you into a stretcher case. Campbell said: "We only asked them to show their faces for short periods, and to say that the people here were disappointed with them is putting it kindly."

Botham himself is rarely at the back of the queue when it comes to socialising, and there is no danger of him upsetting anyone here as he once did in Bournemouth. He was appearing in Jack and the Beanstalk (only just out-acting the beanstalk) and told a local reporter that it was a "quietish" sort of town. He woke up next morning to a front-page headline 'Botham in boring Bournemouth slur'.

This sort of thing, however, has not made him too wary about speaking his mind, and though he has been advising people here (they like a bet almost as much as a drink) to back England to win in the West Indies, he is still railing against the way the English game is run.

"They [the English Cricket Board] elect a chairman [Lord MacLaurin] to make decisions, and the first time he makes one they vote against it. I only hope he doesn't get fed up with some of the idiots who run our cricket, people who think that the game is run purely for their own benefit. It's not. It's for the country."

He is also dubious about the modern accent on fitness charts and diet sheets. "It has a place in modern sport, but you've got to be careful not to get robotic. This is where we got it wrong in Graham Gooch's era. His fanatical approach to fitness didn't take individual characters into account, and it made no sense to me. We argued about it all the time."

Botham enjoys getting involved in the England set-up - advising mainly on the mental aspect of Test cricket - but does not have time to offer more than a part-time, unpaid involvement. He has already begun organising another fund-raising trip to Zimbabwe next year (this time with his old chum Viv Richards) and after returning from his media stint in the West Indies, he plans to make an eighth leukaemia walk.

He is also receiving regular invitations to play in 'Golden Oldies' tournaments, but says: "I've not picked up a bat or a ball since the day I retired, and I never will." Ah, yes, he will. Someone has only to pick up the phone and tell him he's organising a cricket match for a children's charity and, trouser waist-buttons permitting, he'll be there.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)