by Arunabha Sengupta
“Be not afraid of greatness: some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” It seems the fashion nowadays to have someone else write one’s cricket autobiography. I admit openly that Shakespeare ‘ghosted’ my opening sentence, but my indebtedness to any ghost ends there, for mine is a personal message which I want to deliver myself. It is hard to shake the habit of quotation and, moreover, I was taught that a dictum is an appropriate way to begin any literary effort.
Beginning his autobiography in this incredible fashion, Frank Tyson goes on to write that the Shakespeare quote was ‘quite apposite’ in his case, because greatness was indeed thrust upon him. One night I went to sleep an ordinary fast bowler who enjoyed playing cricket, only to wake up the next day dubbed a violent hurricane, frequenting the coasts of China and Japan—a Typhoon.
That was Tyson through and through. A fast bowler who wrecked Australia almost single-handedly, and at the same time the poetically inclined academic. John Snow wrote poetry (At least what looked like poetry from a distant glance). Tyson, however, had the true soul of a poet.
Scholarly stoop, receding hairline, corrugated brow—Tyson looked more like a pre-occupied scientist. Without a cricket ball in his hand he wouldn’t cause a ripple in a bird bath. He studied English literature at Hatfield College in the University of Durham. On tours he preferred Chaucer, Shaw and Adeline Woolf rather than painting the town red. On the field, his tongue moved not to sledge but to quote Wordsworth — repeating his favourite lines to himself while walking back to the bowling mark. With the journalists, he seemed more comfortable discussing the nuances of classical literature than dwelling on his fast bowling feats.
Len Hutton is reputed to have once tossed the ball to him with the words, “England hath need of thee” — as Wordsworth wrote of John Milton.
For several post-War decades Lancashire CCC management was a saga of stupidity. From making Sonny Ramadhin unwelcome to rejecting talents like Basil D’Oliveira and Joel Garner, the sins were plentiful. Tyson fitted the mould of greatness that eluded them. Hence, the Tyson-Statham combination that vanquished Australia could not operate at Old Trafford. He had to bowl for the lowly Northamptonshire, on their slow cabbage-patch of a wicket.
Perhaps that compromised his career. Yet, for a few years he was by far the fastest in the world. He rose to his peak almost as fast as his bowling, and sadly proportionally quick was his descent downhill. Yet, 76 Test wickets at 18.56 is quite a feat, as is a strike rate of 45.
Tyson resented being a Typhoon to the world at large because the geography was wrong. And then he accepted it in all modesty: in the years of declining pace, I was finally glad of the consolation of the title.
In his autobiography, he lamented that achievements born too early is but the premature crisis of the plot, and instead of climax is an anti-climax. Would Romeo and Juliet have been a masterpiece of human tragedy if the curtain of the second act had revealed the star-crossed lovers already lying dead on the stage?
Yes, literary allusions are aplenty in the work in the book, and, in spite of his early promises, so are the quotes.
“Lord Byron once coined the thought ‘High mountains are a feeling.’ Had I not known his background, I should have suspected him of being a fast bowler.”
Describing a phase of bowling without rhythm, he wondered on Wordsworth-ian lines
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
In Brisbane, suburban houses perched high on stilts, looked to him like HG Wells’s monsters of The War of the Worlds.
In the midst of all was the reflection, Fast bowling, like Ben Ezra, should have this advice for the younger generation:
Grow old along with me,
The best has yet to be.
The book starts, as we have seen, with a Shakespearean quote. It ends with the paraphrasing of Robert Browning
How good is man’s life, the mere fast bowling,
How fit to enjoy, all the heart and the soul,
And the senses for ever in joy.
A Typhoon called Tyson is a literary delight of an autobiography. Something cricket writing can seldom aspire to.
Of course, after retirement, Tyson gravitated to writing on the game—while at the same time, at the Carey Baptist Grammar School in Melbourne, he taught English, French and History.
His cricketing credentials and literary depths would have suited romantic mishmash that so often masquerade as analysis, substance submerged in style and stature. Only Tyson’s was much too evolved a mind for that. He became one of the best analysts of the game.
Frank Tyson was born on 6 June 1930.