Fat people are good people. No one ever saw a fat terrorist.
Most sport discriminates against fat people. One of the virtues of cricket, however, is that is accommodates the fat. Indeed many fatsos excel at the game. Colin Cowdrey was never seen to warm up by running round the ground, but he batted with an exquisite plump elegance. The rest of the day he spent at first slip or the lunch table. The current obsession with thin, ostensibly fit cricketers is misguided. It has produced a crop of frail prima donnas devoid of style, stamina and character.
I used to play cricket with Tony Lyne. Tony was fat. Being an imaginative bunch we christened him Fatty.
Fatty was a bowler. He came off two paces and bowled slow left arm round his stomach. He took a hundred good club wickets a season and claimed never to have spun a ball in his life. His bowling was an expression of philosophy.
Basing his beliefs on his own nature, Fatty judged that people were blinded by greed. In cricketing terms he knew that batsmen loved nothing more than runs and when they saw what appeared to be easy runs floating down the pitch toward them their passion overrode their sense. Thus even if he came on at 40 for 7, Fatty would post fielders at long on, cow corner, deep midwicket, anywhere as far as possible from the bat. Then he threw the ball up. Even the most retentive of wizened bespectacled bank clerks would struggle to resist the lure of the long fence. If they struck him for six Fatty would watch the ball soar then turn to the batsman and praise the shot with an expression of reverence that would seduce even the meanest. When two balls later they holed out in the deep, Fatty would look at them with an expression of such surprise and woe that even the batsman would walk to the pavilion with the belief in his heart that he had been deeply unlucky. Thus Fatty set him up for the following season. Fatty, you see, was a thinker.
Fatty only took wickets. He took no interest in batting and less in fielding. Cricket meant bowling and beer. When the bar opened at four Fatty would retire to the third man boundary, buy a pint between overs and place it on the ground between his feet. If the ball threatened his beer he would stop it with his foot then toss it underarm to the nearest fielder. If it didn’t threaten his pint he let it go for four and waited for someone else to go and fetch it from the fence.
When I was small and keen I went on tour with Fatty. The team ran a sweepstake on how much beer Fatty actually drank in the course of one day. Being the youngest I was deputed to shadow Fatty all day and keep a tally. At 2am when the landlord drew down the shutters of the hotel bar Fatty had drunk 17 and half pints. He then ordered two green plastic buckets of the stuff to take to his room as a night cap. He drank one and washed his feet in the second.