Leo McKinstry - Geoff Boycott - A Cricketing Hero

Achievement with Boycott has usually been accompanied by setbacks, and his teenage years were no exception. Just as he had to cope in childhood with his father’s disability and the loss of his spleen, so, when he was about 17, he was faced with a serious threat to his sporting ambitions, that of poor eyesight. When Boycott was told that he would have to wear glasses, he feared it was an end to his hopes of becoming a professional cricketer. In a BBC interview he explained: ‘I suddenly found when I was doing my schooling in the classroom that I could not see the blackboard very well. My friends kept pulling my leg about this and said that I needed glasses. It had never struck me at first because I was playing cricket fairly well at school but in the end it got under my skin so much that I had to go and see an optician.’ Unfortunately the other boys were right. Boycott was told he would have to wear glasses. He was plunged into the blackest despair.

Uncle Algy takes up the story: ‘Geoff would just not accept it. He said that if he had to wear glasses, his future was finished. For three or four days he cried, he were that upset.’ At the request of Boycott’s mother, Algy went to see his nephew and gave him a stern lecture. ‘I told him that other people with glasses had made names for themselves in cricket, like Roy Marshall of Hampshire and M.J.K. Smith of Warwickshire. I said to him, “If you say you’re finished, you’re finished. But if you fight, you can go on.”’

Invigorated by his uncle’s talk, Boycott wrote to M.J.K. Smith. The future England captain, who was to be Boycott’s first skipper on an MCC tour, still recalls the schoolboy contacting him. ‘Fellows used to write to me quite a lot because I was one of those wearing spectacles. I had a standard letter saying that it was not a problem at all. I always used to suggest that they had their eyes tested every year so they knew their eyesight was 100 per cent, which was probably better than some blokes who didn’t wear glasses.’ Smith further explained that he wore rimless spectacles with shatter-proof plastic lenses, so glass would not go into the eye if they were hit.

Boycott was later to claim that glasses had made him more introverted, more of a loner. After he exchanged his spectacles for contact lenses in 1969, he told a reporter from the Sun : ‘I started wearing glasses when I was seventeen and my personality changed dramatically. From a carefree youngster, I turned into a withdrawn character who just couldn’t go out and meet people. I cut myself off and everyone began to think I was hostile.’ This, to say the least, is something of an exaggeration. Not even the most excitable observer would have ever called the young Boycott ‘carefree’. Few teenagers can have been more consumed with such a ruthless sense of purpose. His close friend George Hepworth remembers him as ‘very intense, almost an introvert’ in his early days at Ackworth, long before he found he needed glasses.

Still, having acquired a pair, Boycott was more optimistic about the future. There was now no reason why he should not return to the playing arena with renewed confidence. But not everyone was so sure. His schoolfriend Eddie Hambleton, who played in the Hemsworth School First XI and also drove Boycott to Barnsley games on the back of his Triumph motorcycle – ‘two bags in his hands and no crash helmet’ – remembers the first time Boycott wore glasses in a match: ‘We were playing at the village of Wath. I was sitting about to watch the cricket as Geoff went out to open. The groundsman, Mr Mansfield, whom I knew well, turned to me and said, “Is Boycott wearing glasses?”

‘“Ay, I think he is.”

‘“Well, that’s the end of his career, then, isn’t it?”’

Mr Mansfield, like many others before and since, was to be proved hopelessly wrong.

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