Smiles all around Photo: JEFF PUE TELEGRAPH
Barnsley Cricket Club in the late 1950s was a very different place. The old pavilion was demolished at the turn of this century, new nets were built, and the ground is a sports complex with a rugby and bowling green and a gym.
The new pavilion, a low-rise orange-brick building, is elegant but unremarkable: its main hall sells tickets for An Evening with Neil Diamondo in early July, and no one seems to be overly concerned about it. is making a fuss about its three most famous alumni.
It's certainly a far cry from the club where Parkinson and Byrd opened batting in the 1950s and the bespectacled teen Boycott struggled to break into the first team.
In those days, Bird was a Yorkshire county player who moved up to the cricket league, scored fifty points and earned a few shillings from a collector's plate that was handed out in Shaw Lane. Parkinson was a journalist making his way into local newspapers before becoming the king of television talk shows. Boycott, an elementary school student, was obsessed with trying to score points.
Michael Parkinson in his heyday chat show, talking with Muhammad Ali and Freddie Starr. Photo: BBC
Bird and Parkinson have a genuine affection, they help each other up the steps to the clubhouse, and they subtly lead Mickey out of the Boycott, who knows what to expect.
Parkinson, a former Telegraph columnist, was brought over from Berkshire by his son Michael Jr. and, knowing conditions in his hometown, wears a thick cardigan. He has lost weight and his voice is softer than before in TV pomp, but he still coordinates events with the skill of a seasoned professional.
The bird has just been afraid for his health, but after he was given the all-clear, he is cheerful, and later leads me to see his statue in the center of Barnsley; locked, of course, in his characteristic officiating posture, index finger raised to the unseen unlucky batsman. A few years ago, he was lifted five feet because local pranksters put a condom or bra and panties on his finger (Dickey never took offense). «This city has been good to me,» he says.
Dickie Bird and Prince Charles visit the statue of the former judge in Barnsley in 2012. Photo: AFP via Getty Images
Before dinner, the three of them sit in a corner of the club, surrounded by photographs from Barnsley's past, a bat that once belonged to Padgett, and numbers from an old scoreboard that records the runs of all three.
Parkinson for a while was good enough to keep Boycott out of the first team, a moment the latter remembers all too well.
«We played against Monk Bretton once, but we didn't knock them out that many times,» Boycott says, looking at Parkinson. “Because you were a first team player, they decided you needed a bat. So I got kicked out of the booking and I didn't get the bat because you took the bowling alley, you jerk. Yes you did. I checked everything.
Jeffrey Boycott, pictured in his pompous match against India in Edgbaston, was dropped from the Barnsley squad by Michael Parkinson. Photo: Shutterstock
Parkinson wrote brilliantly about the characters who inhabited Yorkshire League cricket in his book Mad Cricket, published in 1969. the memoir also recalled his father's influence on his game, and Parkinson recalls his father standing behind the bowler's hand, watching him hit, imitating the way he shakes his fist, and mimicking forward defense when he did anything as bizarre as a cut game.
The boycott reminds him of the time he made a hundred against Harrogate. “That was the only time in my life I got to 100 and 6,” Parkinson says. “I hit the toilet with the ball and my father came out holding the ball. He couldn't bear to look at me on '96 and stayed in the toilet until the ball went through the roof!»
«Yes,» Boycott says. “You scored three sixes and five fours. I know. I looked it up when I was writing my autobiography.”
“If I had known that, I would have hired you. You could be a journalist,” says Parkinson.
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Parkinson and Byrd are among the select few who witnessed the rise of the Boycott from the start. Photo: JEFF PUGH FOR THE TELEGRAPH
Bird, one of the most restless people — and known to everyone early — once scored over 200 with Parkinson for the first wicket.
“Dickie tore me to death. He was a star player,” Boycott says. «Every time he got 50 didn't he Dicky and he yelled at us on the balcony when he got to 40+ to 'pull the buckets' [club cricketers would get a collection if they hit 50 or took five wickets ] . He knew that some of them would run home so they wouldn't have to put a dime in the bucket. I remember, Dicky, before you hit, you were so nervous that you would come up to me and say, «Gerald, put on my gloves.» I said, «My name is Geoffrey.» “Okay, Gerald put on my gloves. He was shaking with nerves. I thought: «Screams, he plays for Yorkshire and is so nervous.» Is this what it looks like?»
“Even before, he was nervous,” adds Parkinson. “One day, after we had changed upstairs and put on the pads, he [Bird] got up and fell down because he fastened the right pad to the left.”
Bird appreciated Parkinson as a batsman and was there at Headingley when he was on trial in Yorkshire under the intimidating gaze of Arthur «Ticker» Mitchell; a tough old-school coach of the day who asked Truman to «take off his sweater» and give it to any young guy he thought had a chance. network, and Arthur Mitchell asked, «Who's that guy, Dicky?» I said, «Well, his name is Michael Parkinson and he's a journalist from Barnsley.» I said, «I think he can.» Arthur said: «Well, I'll see if he can play or not.»
«So Michael hit the net. Then Arthur said, «What did you say he did for a living?» I said, «He's a journalist.» Arthur replied: “Well, tell him from me to do journalism.”
All three laugh. “Well, he was right,” says Parkinson. “I was a decent club cricketer, nothing more. I was slow, defensive. I didn't really like fast things. I liked the game, but not enough, and I knew from the very beginning that seeing these guys — he points to his old colleagues — this was the standard, and I knew that I would never get to it.
Dickie Bird, Jeffrey Boycott and Michael Parkinson together in 2014
“One of my best cricket moments was playing with Peter May. I once played against his village team in a charity match. I pushed the maiden of an acceptable off-spin to him. He said, «He played well.» I thought, «Great.» After I quit, it was six, four, four, six, four, four. He walked through the gate and said to me, «Thank you, old man.» Parkinson was in crisis when Boycott, at the age of 16 and a half, played his first opportunity for Barnsley. “I remember when you took the field against some chatty team like Sheffield. higher beings. You were wearing glasses then. One of their bowlers said, «Look, they're sending in a ghostly bespectacled man now.»
«This guy threw the ball at you, almost hitting the stump. You came back and played a beautiful back drive. I said, «Not bad for a bespectacled man.» He said to me, «Who is this guy?» I said, «Boycott, Jeffrey, boycott.» You had great talent. It was obvious. You liked to hit. And that hasn't changed, has it?”
Boycott chuckles. «That didn't change until my last inning.»
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Gray skies over Barnsley Credit & Copyright: JEFF PUE TELEGRAPH
Inevitably, when you bring together three Yorkshiremen of a particular crop, Fred's name doesn't come up right away. Just Fred, not Fred Truman or Truman. This is a person who needs no further introduction and the conversation flows as it should.
Parkinson: We thought you might have met Fred in the league in those days. We all knew from a very young age what a fantastic bowler he is. You have described the beauty of his actions, Geoffrey. This is a good word. Because he was a miner with a hairy ass, no one would ever call his beauty a bowler, but his game was excellent.”
Boycott: “He was the best. It almost never broke. That's the problem with English bowlers, they're all injured right now. Fred had wonderful shoulders, a large ass that gave him strength, and a narrow waist. You need a narrow waist so you can get the spin to swing the bowl because the swing is by far the most dangerous ball for us batsmen.»
Bird: «Did you know with Fred on April 1st he starts bowling. . On April 2, he poured some more and increased it every day, so that by the end of April he was ready. Now I think bowlers use the wrong muscles.”
Boycott: “Fred never went to the gym. Brian Statham, the great bowler, just played every week and got better. Practice what you are doing. This is what the Stathams and the Trumans did. They trained for what they did.”
Bird: “I wanted to ask you both something. This guy Fisher is from Yorkshire (Matt Fisher, who made his Test debut in March and was sidelined for the summer with a stress fracture in his back). He has been in Yorkshire since the age of 15 and has only played 23 games for Yorkshire. He's always injured.»
Yorkshire fast bowler Fred Truman crashes into Somerset at the County Championship in 1965 Photo: Getty Images
It's a funny conversation, but Parkinson, the journalist, knows they need to turn to today, deftly turning the conversation to the aftermath of Azim Rafik.
«I think our dear county the problems are much deeper than the physical preparation of the players,” he notes. “This is an issue that needs to be resolved through diplomacy because the latest headlines about Yorkshire have been horrendous. In fact, it is.
“People will argue about whether what the boy said is true or if they overreacted, but the fact is that you both know this is a very strange setup in Yorkshire. It's made, almost made for confrontation.”
“It's a failure again,” agrees Boycott. “Because the chairman has decided that the board can only have two members, and the board appoints the rest. They are all non-cricket people. It's all about political correctness.
Parkinson politely asks if Boycott — as a man who has never backed down in his dealings with Yorkshire influencers — thinks the old damned attitude is to blame for the current mess. Boycott nods solemnly, the only pause in the conversation when they think.
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I think it's time to ask them what they think about Teenage Boycott. Did they really think the kid that those Sheffield players derided as «four-eyed» would hit 151 first-class hundreds, 48,426 first-class runs and become a Yorkshire batting legend?
“I have never met anyone in my life who has such a strong character to put their ambitions into practice as you do,” said Parkinson. «You were a great player.»
«You're good at playing in the backyard,» Bird says, and his analytical mind kicks into gear. “You let the ball fly towards you. This is a challenge. You chose the line and length so quickly. When I saw you, I thought, «He's got something.»
The trio joked. Photo: GEOFF PUGH FOR THE TELEGRAPH
Byrd recounts how Boycott convinced the County Testing and Cricket Committee to give his friend two tests in his first summer as an international referee in 1973. “I never forgot it,” Byrd says. «I was very grateful for that.»
Boycott believes refereeing gave Byrd a positive outlet for that nervous energy, instead focusing on enjoying the game and getting others to have fun. «You made other people enjoy it,» remarks Parkinson.
Bird agrees, but notes that it's harder for today's generation to take the same approach. “Today there are no characters,” he says rather sadly.
«Well, that's not the case in life, because people are afraid to say something,» Boycott snorts.
This is not something that has applied to him over the years. Boycott was twice a guest on Parkinson's primetime talk show, and YouTube has footage of him from a 1977 episode in which he appears with Hollywood legend James Stewart.
«After that, he told me in the green room that he liked our chatter about cricket,» says Boycott.
“Yes, he was a wonderful man, James Stewart,” says Parkinson. This is a small reminder of the wonderful lives of these three men.
“We are all very lucky. We had dreams and we grew up to make them come true,” Parkinson says as we come to the end.
“I look at you, Dicky, and I just remember how you tied your pillows together and fell. And I see you, Geoffrey, as this little figure, a wonderful player, an amazing cricketer, restless, full of vitality and leaving behind a dusty trail, as if you mowed down the city. But, God bless you, you could play, that's for sure.
“I'm not nostalgic about missing out because I didn't. I'm just overjoyed to get together and chat with you like before. We made the right choice.”
“I have loved cricket all my life,” Boycott says. «It's just a holiday for me.»
«Wonderful memories,» Bird says with a final smile. And with that, it's time for lunch. And see the statue.
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