The
director of coaching for the Chiang Mai Schools Cricket
Association is a man who has lived for cricket all his life.
“That little red ball’s got a lot to answer for,” says
David Buck, before launching into a string of Monty Pythonesque
monologues. However, when you look at his life, cricket really
has dominated it. That he admitted, fielding my questions
without batting an eyelid. (Sorry about that, but an hour with
David Buck does these sort of things to you!)
He was born in Southampton, Hampshire, a well
known cricketing county, so the influence began early. David’s
father inherited the local cinemas and I suggested that as a
youngster, David must have had a wonderful life sitting in the
back row of the stalls watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster
Keaton and the Keystone cops, but David told me sadly that his
father leased them out and ran a car sales business instead.
“I had to work washing cars!”
When he wasn’t shampooing fenders, he was
playing cricket, and at an early age showed great promise,
playing county representative level. In those days, there were
no large salaries for sportsmen, so David had to look at doing
real work to keep himself in laundry powder (whiter than white,
whites are mandatory for cricketers).
He first thought about being a journalist and
went off to learn the Pitman shorthand system and typing. He
also found that reporting on the village fete was not as
exciting as reporting on the Cup Final at Wembley, and the
newspaper business lost another cub reporter (however, he will
be welcomed back by the Chiangmai Mail if he ever changes his
mind).
He was at a loose end, but one of his
cricketing mates said he could get him an interview with British
Airways, so he went along, coming out with a plane ticket to see
the world as a “BA Trolley Dolly” said David, using the
aviation title for an airline steward.
The sky wasn’t quite the limit, but ten
years of it was. “I did it, flew it, saw it and threw it
away.” The innate humour of the man was certainly coming
through by this far into the interview when he recalled being
asked by an American what David thought of the US as they came
into Los Angeles on one flight. “You’ve got a very nice
country,” said David. “It’ll be lovely when it’s
finished!”
Apart from lightening up people’s lives
when he was with BA, I presumed that he would have had to give
up his beloved cricket, but not at all, David assured me. “I
played in the Duke of Norfolk’s side. I was captain for five
years,” he said proudly. This happened because flight
scheduling sometimes meant that he could be in the UK for some
weeks at a time.
When he left BA, he was approached by a
cricket enthusiast who knew David through the game and the Duke
of Norfolk’s side and offered him a sales position in his
company. This enterprise sold industrial boilers, about which
David freely admitted he knew nothing. His sales pitch (sorry
again) went as follows, “I’m the man from the boiler
company. Do you like cricket? Would you like a couple of tickets
to the test match at Lords next Saturday?” He would then ring
a couple of cricketing mates and scrounge three tickets, using
the Old Chums Act of 1908, and had signed up the customer for
new boilers by the end of the second over.
He continued to play the game himself, while
coaching the local Colts side and flogging the odd boiler, but
after five years he wanted to become more involved in the sport
itself. He went into sports marketing and met another sports
marketer, a lady who later became Mrs. Linda Buck. It was Linda
who pushed him into getting recognised coaching qualifications,
which are issued through the English Cricket Board, and this he
did.
The next change of ends (sorry) was something
totally different. They took on a derelict hotel in the New
Forest. David had this idea that they could cater for cricketing
tours, but they didn’t have a cricket pitch, so he pitched in
and built his own. “I worked for 10 months, day and night. I
think I was mentally deranged!” Mentally deranged or
otherwise, he put up stumps, put an advert in the Cricketer
magazine and had 30 bookings in the first week.
They worked the hotel for 12 years. “In the
summer I was captain, groundsman and night bar attendant. In the
winter I became head coach for Dorset (another English county),
and specialist coach for Somerset and Hampshire.” I asked
David whether his hotel had any similarities to Fawlty Towers?
“Fawlty Towers? We were known as Basil and Sybil when we had
the hotel,” and he branched out into a Basil Fawlty/John
Cleese monologue. All devotees to the John Cleese classic series
Fawlty Towers will know what is meant. (If you haven’t seen an
episode, borrow one, and you’ll see what we mean!)
The coaching began to take on an even greater
significance, with short overseas courses to places such as
India, a country that has the correct sort of karma for cricket,
according to David. The hotel was beginning to impinge on his
coaching cricket lifestyle, and he was rung and offered a
coaching job in Thailand, in a place called Chiang Mai. He and
Linda came, inspected the pitch and pulled up stumps in the UK,
to come here and introduce some youngsters to the game that has
held David in its sway for 50 years.
Producing international cricketers is his
brief, which he fully intends will happen, unlike his turn at
the Cresta Run “a nutter toboggan race on a tea tray” a
lifetime ambition that did not.
In between batting, bowling and coaching,
David enjoys good food, good wine and music, especially
Brahm’s 7th Symphony - but that’s another story for another
day!
