Grieving for Benaud is a cry for our lost youth
His voice recalls days when sport – and life – seemed so much simpler
WHEN we grieve for Richie Benaud, some of us grieve for ourselves, too. For what we have lost. For what is past and can never be recaptured. Mourning is often that way.
Benaud’s voice is my time machine. It carries me back to the Seventies and Eighties and the front room of our house 100 yards from the village cricket club, the school holidays and the golden summers of youth.
It takes me back to Doug Walters and Chris Old, to Lillee and Thomson, to Geoff Arnold and John Snow and my favourite batsman, Dennis Amiss, and his shuffle at the crease.
It carries me back to the sofa and the fresh A4 notepad on my knee and the simple thrill of the theme music to the BBC’s Test Match Cricket coverage beginning to play.
Peter West, whose pate is always impossibly bronzed in my recollection, making the introductions and then Benaud taking over.
‘Morning everyone,’ he would say. ‘Beautiful day here at Edgbaston.’
And that was it. Benaud had you straight away. It was the lilt in his voice, the cadence, the stress he put on certain syllables. There was magic in that voice and what I recognise now as understated wisdom.
He seemed to relish the language. He loved the pronunciation of his words.
And he had that gift that the great com- mentators have of being able to say an awful lot by not saying very much at all.
He had my undivided attention, too. I didn’t have a computer on my lap back then. I didn’t feel the need to punch stuff into Twitter while I was watching the Test and listening to Benaud. It was just me and him and the game.
And he had my youth, too. ‘I don’t love golf as much as when it was just pure joy to get on to the course to play,’ said Rory McIlroy last week. Sport is still beautiful and compelling as an adult but other stuff crowds in.
Back in the Seventies, it was just me and Richie. We have great commentators now, too, particularly in cricket. Men like Michael Atherton, David Lloyd and Nasser Hussain are bred in the tradition of Benaud. It is not their fault that our attention spans are shorter and that we flit from screen to screen, diluting their effect.
As I grew up, I loved Benaud more and more. I didn’t even know he had been a fine, fine cricketer in his own right until I was older. That made me admire him even more. The fact that he was Australian never occurred to me, either. He was always scrupulously impartial.
What an achievement to be cherished by both sides of the Ashes divide.
Benaud was not afraid to offer an opinion and to be trenchant but he was never sanctimonious. He never allowed self-aggrandisement to creep into his commentary. Never. He never suggested the game was not as good as it had been in his playing days.
He never gave the impression of saying anything for effect or for a gimmick. He did not have phrases stored up ready to trot out when an event occurred.
He prepared meticulously and his knowledge was the fount of his spontaneity.
Benaud’s delivery was so distinctive, so clever, so evocative that he was ripe for mimicry. It was always affectionate.
I remember simple things when I think back. ‘Bowled ’im’ or ‘Got ’im’.
Some of my friends had more complex, more reverential party pieces.
‘I once had the great pleasure of watching Clarrie Grimmett take seven for 40 on a sticky dog at Johannesburg,’ one used to say regularly, apropos of nothing.
HE ALSO remembered how Benaud’s voice used to rise a little when one of England’s great fielders exploded into action. ‘Randall’, he would say. Nothing more. He didn’t need to say anything more.
He had that in common with the great Dan Maskell, the best tennis commentator there has ever been. Neither was afraid of silence. They were happy to let the game speak when there was nothing to add.
Because of the mellifluousness of Benaud’s voice, because of the cadence, he could make ordinary phrases dance and sing. ‘Late in the day, he’s got a beauty through Kevin Pietersen,’ he observed of a Glenn McGrath ball in the 2005 Ashes series and his voice evoked the timelessness of a summer evening, a dying sun and a great bowler getting the better of a great batsman.
Since his death on Thursday night, many have repeated his gem from the 1981 Ashes series when Ian Botham hoisted a six into the crowd.
‘There is no point in looking for that, let alone chasing it,’ Benaud says. ‘It has gone straight into the confectionery stall and out again.’ Here’s one last snippet. I heard it for the first time yesterday amid the outpouring of tributes to him and found it intensely moving. It was a tribute of his own, to the young Australian batsmen Phillip Hughes, who was killed when he was struck on the head by a bouncer late last year.
‘A boy just beginning,’ Benaud says in the clip that he recorded while he was fighting his final illness. ‘Phillip Hughes, rest in peace, son.’
Benaud brought great joy to a lot of people. His voice is one of the reasons why many of us love the game. It is in my head every time I go to a cricket ground, every time I see a wicket fall or a six hit. Amid the grieving, that is a happy consolation.