by Arunabha Sengupta
Auckland, 1983-84. Drunk on tequila orange, with gin added to the mix, he tottered and fell backwards. He crashed through a glass-topped coffee table, smashing it to pieces, including the framework. As people got busy clearing the shards and debris, the inebriated Graeme Fowler propped himself between the party host Elton John and Renate, Elton’s wife at that time. And then, for some unknown reason, he turned sideways and bit Renate on her upper arm.
Some years later, while entertaining him regally in the White Horse Yacht Club at Perth, Elton confided to Fowler, “I thought cricketers were quite boring until I came across you in Auckland. You were the best entertainment we’ve ever had.”
Fowler did not drink much in his early days. But then Ian Botham put him in a headlock, and asked him to drink whiskey. When he refused and remained in that headlock for 20 minutes, Botham sensed an impasse and poured the whiskey over his head.
But, Fowler could bat. He was scoring heavily for Lancashire in 1982, including two hundreds against Warwickshire in the same match. During a home game, the habitual Manchester rain had sent the players scurrying indoors. Fowler was playing cards with the lads in the Second XI dressing room, where he felt comfortable. The dressing toom attendant Ron Spriggs came in to say that he was wanted on the phone by Bob Willis. Fowler was convinced it was a joke.
“Hello,” he said, and it was indeed Willis at the other end. “We’d like you to play next week at Headingley [against Pakistan]”
“Why?” asked Fowler. It flummoxed the England captain.
“Erm… we want you to open the batting.”
“Oh, right. Okay.”
Willis named him Foxy, after the notorious Foxy Fowler, prison escapee from the 1950s. Everyone proceeded to call him Foxy after that, only Willis himself stuck to Graeme.
It was not a very great show of confidence when Peter May, chairman of selectors, casually told them that it was the best team they could manage at that time. Indeed, Boycott and Gooch were playing in the Rebel Tour of South Africa. But May’s words did not really work wonders for morale. Neither did Alec Bedser throwing the parcel with his shirts and jumpers, and then his cap … as a way of welcoming him.
However, when he got 86 in the second innings of his debut and England squeezed a victory by three wickets, Bedser, in his three-piece suit, walked into the shower room and shook his hand while Fowler stood completely naked, his head foaming with shampoo.
They thought he could not play real pace. At Lord’s Joel Garner’s thunderbolt crashed into his box, and split it in the middle. It was one of the early baseball boxes, with curves around, which kept everything in place. As it came back together after being split, the box had trapped Fowler’s things in its returning bite. After batting through to lunch, he waited for the dressing room to empty before taking his trousers off . It looked like he had been given a love-bite by a Rottweiler. Fowler went on to score 106 in that innings.
Because he was the joker in the dressing room and lived his life to the full, they also thought he had no brain. That was until he started to write for Sunday Telegraph and working on Test Match Special
The preconceived impressions were also due to way that he stood up to the Lancashire committee — more of a private gentleman’s club at that time. With Cedric Rhoades the chairman, Fowler got 120-odd in a match and that night he walked into the committee room. It was hot so he had no blazer on. He had a pair of silver trousers, white shoes, white belt, green checked shirt and white leather tie. (It was the 1980s after all) The next day Peter Lever, the Lancashire coach, informed him, “The chairman asked me to tell you that you’re not to come dressed like that again.” Fowler replied, “If the chairman wants to talk to me about my dress, tell him to come to see me, not send a monkey. If he doesn’t like how I dress, I don’t particularly like how he dresses.”
Fowler could write quite well. And while jotting down notes in his diary, he was forthcoming to a degree that could perhaps make his colleagues and rivals uncomfortable on perusal.
Published as Fox on the Run, it includes his comments on the West Indian bowling attack “I don’t know why they bother to put the stumps up, because none of those buggers are trying to hit them.”
On completing the ODI series 4-1 in India, 1984-85, with a 7-run win in the 15-over final match, he noted , “[Ravi] Shastri threw it away for them, though, 50-odd in a 15-over slog was pitiful. He was awarded Man of the Series, but he helped us win the series.”
After scoring a double hundred at Madras on that same tour, he spent the Rest Day somewhere you won’t find too many modern day cricketers or even ‘cricket writers’—a book shop. He purchased books by Wilbur Smith and PG Wodehouse.
His greyhound like chases down to the cover boundary, and flinging himself on those barren abrasive Indian outfields remain etched in the memory. He was one of the finest cover fielders of his era.
Fowler played 21 Tests for England, in an era when apart from a few individuals every English cricketer was on trial in every Test match. After his playing career he founded the centre of excellence scheme at Durham MCCU based at Durham University in 1996. It was expanded under the MCC banner and the blueprint for five centres at Cambridge, Oxford, Loughborough, Leeds and Cardiff. From his coaching, in which life skills played as big a part as those of the game, emerged 60 county cricketers, six of whom became captains with a half-dozen representing England.
However, his greatest challenge came a decade after his retirement. In 2004, he was diagnosed with clinical depression. The saga of his continuous struggle with this mental health problem is now depicted in the excellent autobiography Absolutely Foxed.
Thereafter, he has delivered seminars on his experience. He has put together a checklist to help players keep a note of their mental health, suggested a checklist of indicators for team-mates. It is not shameful to have mental health issues, he has stressed.
Perhaps his greatest contribution to cricket has been breaking the taboo of mental health issues among sportspeople.
Graeme ‘Foxy’ Fowler was born on April 20, 1957. In spite of his mental health issues, he still does what he is best at, loving life and living it.