Former West Indies cricketers Sir Garfield Sobers (left) and Jamaica's Maurice Foster take to the course during the ATL/Panasonic Golf tournament at Sandals Golf and Country Club in recent year. (right)Sir Garfield Sobers drives. F I HAD my life again I would be a professional golfer rather than a cricketer. That may surprise many people considering I have had so much from cricket. Don't get me wrong. Cricket is a wonderful sport and it opened many doors for me. I loved playing all over the world and enjoyed every minute of a long and exciting career.
But there were also disadvantages. When you start ageing, for instance, and are not performing quite as well as you used to, or more to the point as others are used to, the cricket media tear into you and rip you to pieces. You may bowl well all day but not take a wicket and immediately the critics are at your throat saying that you are finished, over the hill and should retire. They forget the catches that have been dropped and the chances that didn't go to hand. They just look at the result and think of their headlines.
In golf it's all so different. Look at Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman, Arnold Palmer and other veteran players. They still go out and play and the galleries follow them round to watch them for what they have been. Nobody dares to write them off. Everyone is glad to see them and if they don't play well, the critics and the public just shrug. They may have had their day but they are still enjoying their golf and giving so many people pleasure. The older players who have given the games so much receive tremendous ovations and have the respect of their fellow professionals, the crowd and even the media.
Players such as Nicklaus are revered and quite rightly so. At the British Open at St. Andrews he received an incredible ovation, and he's an American, not even playing in front of his own audience.
You don't see many cricketers being received like that at the end of their careers unless, like Courtney Walsh, you have broken some record or other. Maybe he was the wise one, getting out while he was still on top, like Mike Atherton who slipped quietly away at the end of the Ashes series against Australia in August 2001.
In cricket, the reporters do not make any allowances. They just look at your figures and assume the worst. It's the same with batting as it is with bowling. There is a fine line between success and failure. You can be batting well, hit a magnificent shot and suddenly from nowhere a fielder dives, sticks a hand out and takes a terrific catch and you are on your way back to the pavilion. The next batsman might come in, lob up a simple catch and the same fielder drops it. They don't write that you were unlucky with the brilliant catch. No, they write that you are past it and should give up the game.
I'm not just talking about myself here. It happens to a lot of players who have given so much and played so well before being jumped on and banished behind the boundary. Some of those critics are just waiting for something to go wrong. There is no sympathy in cricket, certainly not the sort of understanding that sportsmen receive in individual sports. They have a go at us when we are part of a team and rely on other people, not just on our own ability.
Much the same thing happened to Wes Hall. The media said that he was finished and the selectors listened and wanted to axe him from the team. When he went to Australia in 1968-69 he bowled really well but slip catches went down and when he returned all they noticed was that he had taken so few wickets.
If I had to live my life again, I would do something where the press weren't always waiting to criticise and write you off, not just the West Indian press but globally.
Unfortunately, I didn't have the choice between golf and cricket because there were no outlets for golf when I was growing up. I never even saw it until I went abroad and I didn't pick up a club until I was 25. I didn't know what par, a birdie or a bogey was because I knew nothing about the game.
Sonny Ramadhin tried to persuade me to play for four or five years before I finally took him up on his offer while we were playing in Australia in 1960-61. Up until then, I didn't have the time or the inclination to try it. It seemed an alien sport.
Sonny was a very keen golfer and, in fact, was a caddy in the Caribbean before he became a cricketer. He was a brilliant spin bowler, spotted as an unknown in the north of Trinidad. When they brought him south no one could read him; they couldn't tell which way the ball was going. He quickly made the West Indian team but he continued with his golf and eventually I played a lot with him.
Towards the end of the tour, he persuaded me and fellow Barbadians Peter Lashley, Seymour Nurse and Wes Hall to play at the nearby Royal Canberra course on a free day, for a bit of fun. Sonny had warned us that even though it was a stationary ball, we wouldn't hit it cleanly no matter how much cricketing ability we thought we had. We thought he was joking but he was right. I missed the ball by yards. Wes swung at the ball and took out a huge chunk of earth because he thought that was the only way he wasn't going to miss it after watching our efforts.
Much like my cricket, I was never coached and never received a lesson. I watched and learned all I could about the game and practised whenever I could. I felt I was making good progress until I went to England to play county cricket for Nottinghamshire in 1968. Then I lost it. I thought I would be able to play every Sunday but guess what happened - they brought in the John Player League and there went my Sundays and my golf. I was playing cricket for something like 20 days before I had a three-day break and then, rather than play golf, I felt that I needed the rest. Occasionally, I used to go down to the local course but only to knock the ball around without playing properly. For those even seven years on the English county circuit, I was not able to play much serious golf. I didn't know anyone who played and just had the odd round.
It was only when I came home to Barbados in 1974-75 that I became deeply involved in the game. The only two courses on the island at the time were Sandy Lane and Rockley and it was there that I put in the hours you need to spend on such a technical sport. Eventually I played off scratch, which I did for a long time, and then off two.
When I first went to Australia to live I played quite a lot, although not as much as I would have liked. but then I lost the game and drifted away again. It took another return to Barbados to get me back into the sport in a serious way. I had more time to play and I took advantage and enjoyed it immensely.
For someone who travels the world a lot, golf, particularly if you played it well, is the ideal social sport. You can generally find someone with whom to go round. Otherwise you can play against the course. All you need is a good caddy and a set of clubs. There is no other game in the world where you can do that. There is terrific satisfaction in shooting a below-par score, even if you are playing on your own and just taking on the course. If you are good, the word quickly gets around and soon there are people who want to play. You make friends and your holiday is a success. That was what made me realise what a wonderful game golf is.
It's a sport that brings out the true character in a person. I can always tell what a person is like when I play them at golf. Michael Simmons comes to mind. He was a very good friend who had never played golf but came to watch me playing with another friend, Dennis Bailey. Dennis hit a terrible shot and let loose with a volley of abusive language. Michael had a go at him and told him how unnecessary the bad language was. A year later Michael took up the game and his language was as bad when he played a bad shot. I reminded him and he admitted that he never realised how the game could get to you.
Others say, 'Golf - that silly game. I'm not old enough to take that up yet'. All of a sudden they take it up and tell you that they never realised what a good game it was. They admit that they left it too late. So did I.
I wish I had started earlier, but I was in the prime of my cricket career. I had something fulfilling and I wasn't searching for another sport at the time. I was doing well and didn't need a substitute.
The moral is never criticise another man's sport until you have tried it. Top sportsmen in every sport admire and respect other sportsmen and women who are on top of their game because they understand.
Although cricket dominated my professional life, it did not take up every waking moment and as a child and a young man growing up on the beautiful island of Barbados, I enjoyed a lot of other sports. When I was 16, I played in goal for Barbados at football, despite being so small. I began as a left-wing for Notre Dame, our top team. I didn't play in goal because we had a brilliant goalkeeper named Harcourt Wilkinson.
I was in the Barbados team that beat Guyana 4-1, but soon afterwards the cricket association asked me to stop playing football because of the danger of injury. The Barbados Cricket Association thought I was more valuable for them at cricket than I was at football, and the Barbados Football Association agreed.
In those days, cricket was by far and away the dominant sport. The only international football played was the Inter Colonial Cup between the islands.
Unlike today, there was no future in the game as a professional because it was so low profile. The closest we came to top-quality football was when a team came over from Martinique or an English club such as Southhampton paid a visit at the end of their season for a little rest and recreation.
When I was in England in 1960 playing league cricket, I was friendly with Frank Taylor, a football writer for the Daily Mirror who had survived the Munich air disaster a couple of years before. We used to meet in a club in Manchester owned by Paddy McGrath.
I liked to go there to listen to Danny Blanchflower's wife sing, as well as a crooner named Gerry Dorsey who later became somewhat better known as Englebert Humperdinck. One night I happened to mention to Frank that I had kept goal for Barbados. His ears immediately pricked up and before I knew it Everton invited me for a trial at Goodison Park.
Frank had spotted a good story in the making but I said, 'Frank, how could you? Me, in England in the winter! You have to be joking. I have trouble coping with the summer, never mind wearing a pair of shorts in the winter on Merseyside! What's more, I hope I will be going with the West Indies to play a series in Australia.' There was no point in even going for the trial. I was not going to leave a certainty for an uncertainty.
Another sport I excelled at was basketball. I was in a decent team and I went on to play for Barbados at that as well. I had an opportunity to play table tennis for my country but I turned it down. The Barbados team was short of a man for an international in Trinidad when they asked me, but I hadn't played for nearly two years and I feared that they wanted me to make up the numbers. I was going nowhere unless I had a chance of winning, or at least of putting up a good performance. So I never did become an international table-tennis player but, much later, I represented the island at golf, making me an international in four sports.
Goalie Cumberbatch taught me to play dominoes when I was around 12 and by the time I was 15 I was as good as anyone on the island. I loved it and would play morning, noon and night, when I wasn't playing cricket. During the holidays we would sometimes play from Saturday through to Monday with no sleep or eating while we played.
Yes, I have enjoyed all the sports I've taken part in, including, of course, my life as a professional cricketer. But, if I were starting over and the opportunities presented themselves again, maybe I would have gone for life as a touring professional golfer. Don't they say that the grass is always greener on the other side?
Extracted from GARRY SOBERS: MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY published in hardback by Headline Book Publishing and available from all good bookshops. Copyright (C) 2002 Sir Garfield Sobers.
Taken from the SUNDAY GLEANER
