My friend, the voice of summer
As Richie Benaud dies at 84, we reprint a heartfelt tribute from the late legendary Mail sports
GLOWING tributes were paid yesterday to cricketing legend Richie Benaud, after his death at 84 from skin cancer. At Lord’s, MCC flags were lowered, and the Australian government offered a state funeral for the man who never lost a Test series as his country’s captain, then became a commentator. David Cameron said he had ‘grown up listening to Richie Benaud’s wonderful cricket commentary’, while his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott called it ‘a sad day for Australia’. Retiring as a player in 1964, Benaud’s masterful analysis was universally revered. Here, we reproduce a tribute paid by the Mail’s brilliant sports columnist IAN WOOLDRIDGE — which he wrote in 2005 after coverage of live international cricket in England switched from terrestrial to satellite TV, depriving cricket fans of Benaud’s voice . . .
SO IT is farewell, then, to the Master of Measured Words. Richie Benaud will not be returning to England next summer to sustain his pre-eminence as cricket’s finest commentator. That is not merely my judgment. A recent poll by The Wisden Cricketer magazine attracted an astonishing 12,000 votes. Precisely 10,128 of them nominated Benaud as the best.
Fortunately, he does not leave us without a word or several of advice to those who seek to emulate his success, particularly retired players whose agents deem them instantly equipped to pick up a microphone and irritate us with an effluent of Tower of Babel verbiage.
He does so in a valedictory book which is an encyclopaedia of broadcasting wisdom.
He names no names. He is too polite for that. Nor is there a hint of the tetchiness that occasionally afflicts icons in their pensionable years.
At 74, Benaud is still as fit as a flea, the result of a lifestyle as measured as his commentating. Yes, there are rare occasions when he will let down his hair with the rest of us, but when serious business is afoot he will rise from an increasingly raucous dinner party, check his watch that it is exactly 10pm and announce: ‘Thank you very much. We’re off.’
At sunrise next morning, he and Daphne, his elegant and unfailingly supportive English wife, will be striding out on their three-mile constitutional.
He is meticulous in all things. On TV commentary days, even Daphne is not allowed to iron his shirts. He presses them himself. He is a food faddist, preparing his Test match lunch boxes at home to be certain of what he is eating. Once, he took a week-long course in Italy to learn how to cook pasta to perfection.
His desks at his homes in London, South of France and Sydney are polished plateaux of precision, his reference-book shelves indexed for instant reach.
It is this unrelenting selfdiscipline, instilled by a schoolmaster and great club cricketer father and a lovely mother — there is a gorgeous picture of her celebrating her 100th birthday with Richie and his Test cricketer brother John in the book — that launched him into his dual career life.
The first, of course, was in cricket, where to haul oneself from school, to club, to State, the Australian team and then its captaincy was a classic climb. Benaud led his country in 28 of his 63 Tests and never lost a series. Such was his cunning as a wrist-spinner that his batsmanship was often overlooked.
In fact, he became the first, in an era when far fewer Tests were played, to scale the double of 200 wickets and 2,000 runs.
But what next? All of seven years before he retired from cricket, Benaud wondered if there could be a distant future in the communication industry. There was little doubt about that since he had been a young crime reporter on a Sydney newspaper, where sub- editors ruthlessly deleted from his copy any flowery phrases which he thought rather good but were irrelevant to the story. It was an important lesson.
Then a curious opportunity, which couldn’t happen in today’s schedules, presented itself. At the end of Australia’s 1956 tour to England, all their players were given three weeks off to enjoy such fleshpots of relaxation as they could discover in the British Isles. Benaud proceeded otherwise. At his own expense he moved from the Kensington Palace Hotel into a cramped lower ground room in the RAC club in Pall Mall and took a BBC television training course, alongside directors, commentators, even audiences, to learn how television worked.
He trailed Peter O’Sullevan at Newbury and he studied the commentating techniques of Henry Longhurst on golf and Dan Maskell on tennis. All three had their idiosyncrasies, but one thing they had in common. O’Sullevan, voice rising to overdrive at the climax of a horse race, was circumspect about collateral chatter, just as Longhurst and ‘Oh I say’ Maskell knew the value of golden silence. Indeed, one of Longhurst’s silences was so long that his director asked over the private intercom: ‘Excuse me, Henry, but are you still alive?’
Benaud now says: ‘I didn’t know if I had a future in broadcasting. If I hadn’t done that BBC course my life would have been very different, even though I had to wait for seven years for my chance.
‘The key feature it taught me was the economy of words. Never insult the viewers by telling them what they have seen perfectly clearly themselves. Only add to it if you had something pertinent to say.’ These days if only. Has he ever made a bloomer? Of course, like all of us, he has. On one celebrated occasion, handing over from a Test match for a news update from Moira Stuart, he called her Moira Shearer, the celebrated ballerina who had starred in an acclaimed film.
When Moira Stuart handed back he said: ‘Thanks, Moira, our newsreader wearing Red Shoes.’
Many, who had not heard his initial blunder, wondered what on earth he was on about.
‘At the time,’ he recalls, ‘I thought it was a pretty clever remark, but many tuning in at that moment had no idea what it meant. It taught me never to be such a smart-arse again.’
Laconic, economic, massively instructive and with a dry impartial wit about whoever is getting the upper hand in a Test match, I wonder if we shall ever hear his like again on television?
Many are called and surprisingly many are given the opportunity behind the microphone. Very few have served the slogging apprenticeship that makes a master cricket commentator.
Always meticulous, he’d insist on ironing his own shirts ‘Never insult viewers by saying too much’