Ringer Aids Brits in Cricket Match : Pro Shows Up for Southland Game Against the Aussies

Consider this delicious parallel: It’s weekend softball, a Sepulveda Conference title game, and Acme Plumbing & Heating (Proudly Serving the Valley Since February) fears naught from Leekfree Radiators. Then Leekfree announces a substitute leadoff batter. Pete Rose.

Or this: You’ve set up a $100 sucker bet. Men’s doubles at the Tennis Center, you and your dentist (who just happens to be an ex-collegiate player) against good ol’ Doug and Earl. Then Earl shows up without Doug and you recognize his replacement. John McEnroe.

So it was at Woodley Park on Sunday when Ian Botham flew in from London to play cricket and Lord High Executioner for the King’s Head XI.

Ian who? Playing what? For Whose XI? What, indeed, is an XI?

Ian Botham. He is considered, by peers, public and publications wherever cricket is known, to be England’s most prodigious all-round player since W. G. Grace (1848-1915), the bearded doctor who fathered the modern game. A precise comparison would be that Botham, today, hits like Babe Ruth, pitches like Cy Young and fields like Brooks Robinson. “A dazzling cricket career,” decided one British magazine. “An instinctive and exultant winner of cricket matches.”

Botham, 30, also lives like Errol Flynn (a public fistfight and one fine for possession of marijuana), a towering profile that has earned him antipathy and adulation depending on one’s view of personal freedoms, men with highlighted blond hair, and cardinal British traditions.

Language of Its Own

Cricket. That’s one of those cardinal British traditions. There will be no further explanation of this national game nor labored fun made of its maiden overs, popping creases, stumps and hooks to square leg. It’s been done. As with the Cockney accent, English summers and Marmite, the composition defies explanation and analysis.

The essential truth is that cricket is a bat-and-ball game and the winner is the team that scores the most runs and that’s no different than baseball.

King’s Head XI . A two-part answer here. An XI is an 11 and that’s how many players there are in a cricket team. As a cricket team always has 11 players and nowhere in the history of the game will you find mention of a Puddleford IX, it seems a little redundant to add a designation after the name. But that’s another one of cricket’s little mysteries.

The King’s Head is a pub-restaurant-embassy-hiring hall beside the seaside in Santa Monica. With the possible exception of Joan Collins, it’s the most visible monument to the 350,000-person British presence in Southern California.

A dozen years ago, Phil Elwell, the Birmingham-born owner and landlord of the King’s Head, decided to satisfy a local hunger (while increasing a local thirst, no fool he) by forming his own cricket team.

A chef. Three or four British journalists. A caterer. A doctor. Two photographers. A real estate man. A hardware salesman. Publican Elwell, of course. Somewhat older lads of distant and different summers but all ready to risk hernias and fingertips for Queen and egos as the King’s Head XI. They stood (slouched, actually) ready to play any team with a penchant for casual sports and drinking Watneys ale alfresco and in broad daylight.

And it followed--in secondary pursuit of a Commonwealth custom established when English cricketers played against Australia’s best in 1877--that Elwell’s team should be reformed once a year into a local English team to challenge a local Australian team.

Competing for the Ashes

In the real thing, England and Australia compete for the Ashes, a small wooden urn, a symbolic trophy containing the ashes of a piece of equipment. (OK, one stump.) It was ceremonially burned to mark a particularly disastrous defeat of England by Australia (ergo the funeral of English cricket and cremation of the corpse) in 1882.

In matches over here, however, even old equipment is at a premium. It most certainly isn’t available as trophy kindling. “So as a patriotic gesture we burned one of Tom Jones’ old shirts and put it in a biscuit barrel,” Elwell explained. “It was a polyester shirt so the ashes are more of a plastic blob, really.”

Nobody seems to knows the win-loss record in 11 years of local collisions between the England and Australia cricket XIs. “Some to them, some to us,” is Elwell’s diplomatic recall.

But competition certainly is intense. Emotions commonly follow the mood and results of the matches in England and Australia. Rivalries are further fomented over darts each Friday night at the King’s Head.

And this summer, when England humiliated Australia in a series played in England and a man called Ian Botham was the largest single factor in that defeat . . . well, Dave Heaney of Van Nuys, skipper of the local Australians, served notice.

No quarter. No prisoners. Australia’s national honor lost in England, vowed Heaney, would be salvaged on the playing fields of Woodley Park and the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. And no more shrimps on the barbie until vengeance was theirs.

Determination Overheard

Unfortunately, his determination was overheard. It reached the ears of Tim Hudson. He’s a former California disc jockey and King’s Head XI member who currently travels between Los Angeles and London with diamond studs in his ears, a pony tail, impossible dreams, wild claims and a collection of nebulous careers. Cricket promoter. Career management. Publicist. Clothing marketeer.

“A rich old hippie who talks too much,” was Hudson’s description by one British magazine. “Not so much an eccentric as a queer left-over,” another said.

Be that as it may, one thing is certain. Hudson does indeed manage the career and business affairs of Ian Botham. A scheduled Botham visit to California to explore any Hollywood interest in his reputation and sex-appeal, Hudson said, could easily coincide with the annual cricket joust against Australia.

And of course Botham would turn out for the England side.

So it came to pass. So did all the secrecy when British tabloids picked up word of the ultimate ringer and told all with their typical devotion to drama. Botham, in blood lust, they reported, was coming to California to stamp out any pockets of pride in Australian cricket that might have survived his summer offensive. Rambo Botham, as it were.

That left Australian skipper Heaney with only one pre-match tactic to handle the threatened annihilation: “We could kill him.”

Arrived by Limousine

In fashion befitting the sporting star-hero image (or maybe the image a promoter thinks his client should have if he intends to go Hollywood), Botham arrived at Woodley Park in a black Cadillac limousine. Smoked windows. Television. Wine in the trunk.

In a manner a little more appropriate to the customs of Sunday sportsmen, Botham accepted an offer of late breakfast. Budweiser.

And with that (Budweiser is sold in England, you know) the scene became more Ealing Common than Woodley Park, more village green than city playing field.

The affair was catered. Beer from the keg and, of course, by Watneys. Lunch supplied by the King’s Head with all the British and Australian traditionals. Scotch eggs. Salmon and cucumber sandwiches. Pickled onions.

Most of Fleet Street was represented. The News of the World. The Star. The Daily Mail. Alistair Ross of the London Sun (yes, mother, that’s the one with frontal nudity on Page 3) had flown in with Botham. He is his ghost columnist.

The crowd was estimated to be about 20 times larger than normal attendance. “Normal,” Elwell said, “is about 10 people watching.”

Signing Autographs

Botham signed autographs. Botham talked to Sam Mills of San Marco whose father had played for UCLA against a touring Australian team in 1932. Botham remembered coming to Los Angeles in 1979 and playing a pro-celebrity cricket match at the Rose Bowl. Botham posed for photographs.

Then Botham, with the England team starting to struggle, and very early in the match, padded up for his turn at bat.

Here it comes. Watch out. Demolition ahead.

Poor Carl McGinn, once of Sydney, now a BMW parts importer at El Toro, was the pitcher charged with doing something about Botham. Without an Uzi.

McGinn bowled. Botham stroked the ball to the right, the leg side. Effortlessly.

McGinn bowled. Botham blocked the ball to the left, the off side. Elegantly.

McGinn bowled. Botham drove the ball forward. Where McGinn caught it. Exquisitely. For the out. No runs, no more Botham, but one more of those delicious parallels: George Brett had just been struck out by a Little League pitcher.

‘A Friendly Game’

“I thought this was going to be a friendly game and the bloke goes full length (for the catch),” Botham said, grinning. He returned borrowed batting gloves to their owner. “I don’t think they’re sweaty.”

Did Botham want a fresh beer? “No thanks. The old one hasn’t had a chance to get warm.”

McGinn, of course, had just played David to this Goliath.

What a story to tell grandchildren. What an elation.

“I’m kind of disappointed,” McGinn said. He genuinely was. “I was looking forward to watching Botham bat.”

P.S.: Australia scored 70 runs in this annual classic.

England scored 137 runs for victory and a 12-month lease on the blob in the biscuit barrel.

“I was not completely satisfied by Botham’s performance with our team,” King’s Head captain John Hiscock deadpanned. “We may seriously consider sending some of our King’s Head players over to help out his team and England next year.”