Tribute (for the Guardian) to Eammon Casey who died March 13 March 18th, 2017 Eamonn Casey was my loyal and supportive chairman when I was director of Shelter in the Sixties. A passionate advocate for the homeless, he pioneered the concept of housing aid centres that still form the basis of Shelter's work today. Above all, he was an inspirational leader, loved by my Shelter team and revered by the whole voluntary housing movement. He worked incredibly hard for at least 18 hours a day (this led to him falling asleep in meetings but he had an amazing capacity to suddenly wake and pick up the discussion as if he had heard every word). His devotion to his Catholicism - one I did not share - was beyond doubt; as we travelled together all over the country we could not pass a church without him stopping the car and popping in to pray. But he was also fun-loving and sociable. He loved to laugh, to sing, and have a glass of whisky. Truth be told, he should never have become a Bishop, he was too much of a human being, and I doubt he was ever as happy as he was with us. When it all fell apart, I begged him to let me balance the bad publicity by broadcasting all the good he had done, but he wouldn't hear of it. No-one could save him - the Church was determined to bury him and he let it happen without complaint. From being a powerful Bishop, he learned Spanish and became a humble missionary in a rural parish in South America, travelling miles in difficult conditions to say mass to a mere handful of people. His would be a tragic story if he had allowed it to be; instead his lack of self pity and continued, unpublicised service to others made it heroic. Des Wilson Speech by Des Wilson to MCC members Lords pavilion December 9, 2015 Chairman: President of the MCC, Roger Knight I have before me a cricket scrapbook, 60 years old - needless to say, torn and tattered... ...(actually, its only a relatively few pages of it ... the whole book is too heavy for one man to carry)... It was compiled over only three years by a small boy ...12 when he started, 14 when he stopped - living in a small town in a small country...1950's New Zealand. The book begins at the end of 1953 - the year Hutton's team recovered the Ashes at he Oval - and ends in 1956...and in a way its historic, because it may be the only comprehensive, day-by-day report, as it happened, record of cricket at that time at every level - school, club, county, provincial, and international, based on clippings reverently taken from newspapers and magazines every day for over 1000 days... every item lovingly pasted down without discrimination, so that school games appear beside county cricket, club games beside tests. It even includes a record of the boy's own humble efforts - after one match he recorded: first innings, bowled Williamson 0; second innings, bowled Williamson 0. And beside this the commentary: 'Batted well' !!! But it is my contention that were it not for some special days over those three years - and for the exceptional exploits of two special players - there would today be no New Zealand team, let alone the one that thrilled crowds with its brand of cricket this year. Without them, New Zealand, as a test-playing country, could easily have disappeared forever in the mid 1950s. In a moment I will draw from three pages of the scrapbook to tell three stories that will for all time be at the heart of histories of New Zealand cricket, but first let's meet the two players: They are Bert Sutcliffe and John Reid. They couldn't have differed more. Sutcliffe, a slim, fair-haired figure, humble, self-effacing (unless playing the piano for team sing-songs), temperamentally sunny, universally liked. Reid, a physically powerful man, charismatic, with boundless energy and unlimited confidence, aggressive on the field and a demanding leader on and off it. Sutcliffe was a left-handed artist with the bat, a caresser of the ball, all finesse and timing. Think David Gower. Reid (an all-rounder), said Ted Dexter, hit the ball as consistently powerfully as anyone he had ever seen. No caresser he...this was a beater of the ball, a prolific hitter of sixes, an hostile bowler of pace and, as he became older, of spin. Think Ian Botham. Sutcliffe first came to notice of English cricketers in 1947 when Wally Hammond's MCC team, came to NZ after the first post-war Ashes series. In one match Sutcliffe scored a century in each innings, 197 and 124. On the 1949 NZ tour of this country he scored 2627 runs and was named one of Wisden's five cricketers of the year. On that tour he hit two centuries in a match with Essex 243 and 100 not out, and a succession of fifties and a century in the tests. He may have been a stroke-maker rather than a big hitter, but he was still a heavy scorer, making two triple centres in first class games, 355 and 385. On the 1955-56 tour of India he in one test innings scored 230. You may ask, why do Sutcliffe and Reid not appear on the list of top run-scorers or wicket-takers in the history of he game ? It is for three reasons: First, their opportunities to develop and parade their skills, to score runs and take wickets in first class and test cricket, were strictly limited by the number of games NZ played. For instance after a West Indian tour of NZ in 1956, NZ didn't play a test for 27 months. There was no coherence in the national game, no chance to develop experience or skills. Second, these two were out there on their own...the only two Kiwi test players of real test quality, and thus were burdened with responsibilities that opponents never knew. Hutton could fail knowing that following him to the wicket were Edrich, Compton, May, Cowdrey, Graveney, and other great names of the game; Sutcliffe and Reid knew if they were out, the team was out. In a typical performance, John Reid once scored a first class century while the remaining 10 players contributed 39 between them. It is hard to make huge scores consistently without partnerships, without support. Like Ian Botham (and Keith Miller before him), Reid scored runs when they were most needed and took wickets or a blinding catch at just the right time. He was that kind of cricketer - he made things happen. A NZ cricket writer said he was "never more dangerous than when his back was to the wall, he breathed life into a game by his very presence." For 10 years he carried the burden of leading a sub standard test team. When he eventually retired he had played in 58 of the 86 tests New Zealand had played in its entire history and led it in 36 of them. His best performances were reserved for South Africa, especially 1961-62, when he led the team to two away test wins and hit seven tour centuries in nine innings, two in tests, topping the tour batting and bowling averages. Sprinkled throughout that time there are some amazing moments: in 1952 he hit 283 for his province including a century before lunch; in 1957-58 there was an innings of 201 with five 6's and 22 four's; In l958-59, having taken 7 for 38, he it 191 not out of the 330 required in 277 minutes to win. And in 1962-63 he struck a stunning 296 with a world record 15 sixes . But the third factor that made both of them far greater test players than statistics reveal is that, unlike their peers in Ashes cricket, they were really just Saturday afternoon club cricketers. Sutcliffe worked as a PE teacher. Reid ran a local petrol depot. Instead of playing other professionals in 30 county games a season, as the England players then did, they faced third-rate amateur bowlers on Tuesday and Thursday evenings in the nets and then turned out for four hours on Saturday, often not even getting a bat. In my scrapbook there is a cutting that when it appeared at the time caused my small boy's heart to stop. It announced that Reid was to come to live in my home town of Oamaru. There the New Zealand captain played for a club that could not even field 11 men; most Saturdays I would ride my bike to the game with every chance, at 14, of making up the team, fielding at long leg and batting at No 11. Sutcliffe and Reid would literally go from playing with some local yokels on the local park on Saturdays to playing 5 day tests at Lords. To appreciate this you have to imagine Botham with no Somerset, Worcestershire or Durham to play for, only the village team on a Saturday afternoon, unpaid and with no commercial contracts, with no proper practice wickets and minimal first class cricket, much of that mediocre, combining at one point the captaincy of his country with running a local business. Neville Cardus once described Reid as "a club cricketer in excelsis" and that's what he was: a club cricketer who from time to time slipped away to do what club cricketers dream of. One story from the scrapbook sums up this extraordinary man. Shortly after he came to Oamaru, I was one of a handful who gathered one frosty Saturday morning to bowl at him in the nets so that he could prepare for the New Zealand tour of India and Pakistan. As he politely patted back my full tosses and long hops he must have wondered how on earth this could be described as "preparing" for test cricket. Yet, a few days later, in the very first match of that tour, in Karachi, coming from the chill of a South island winter and that hopeless net in Oamaru to unaccustomed steamy heat, he took for 7 for 28 and then scored 150 not out. I defy you to name any international cricketer today who could make that transition with that result. On a difficult tour, he hit 1024 runs, averaging more than 50, and took 39 wickets. He made 493 runs, averaging 70, in the tests. So I argue that their contribution to New Zealand cricket was greater than any of the famous names that were to come later - because, without the chance to properly prepare, without pay, without professional talent around them, they alone held the fort when the Kiwi game was its most testing moment. As we will come to see, in 1955 New Zealand was close to being ruled out of test cricket altogether. Only Sutcliffe and Reid kept them in the game at that level. Their acceptance without complaint of the unpaid burdens thrust upon him, their modesty, their courage and their skill kept New Zealand on the cricketing map, and built the foundations that Hadlee, Crowe, Turner, Williamson, and McCullum and others were later to build upon, as NZ finally developed competitive teams and some individuals began to make personal fortunes. Compare their wealth with Reid, who into his 80s was earning a living by running with his wife a B and B in Taupo. (He is, incidentally, NZ's oldest surviving test cricketer.) That they were there at a pivotal time, three pages of my scrapbook vividly show. Let's start in South Africa 1953-54: the second test. Its Boxing Day and New Zealand were being destroyed in every sense by the fast bowler Adcock aided by a viciously unpredictable pitch. Sutcliffe after two balls was led from the ground and rushed to hospital, bleeding profusely after being hit on the ear. It was assumed he would take no further part in the game. NZ were down to 10 men. Reid survived five sickening blows before being dismissed. Another batsman, Miller, was also hit and left the field coughing blood, also on his way to hospital. He too was advised by the doctors not to return. NZ were down to 9 men. And there was disaster of another sort. On Christmas Day NZ had suffered its worst-ever train crash, 149 dead. Now on this Boxing Day the NZ fast bowler Bob Blair learned that his fiance was one of those killed. To suffer physical blows was one thing; to have one's whole world fall apart was another. It was assumed he too would play no further part. NZ were down to 8 men. When they had lost their seventh wicket, the South Africans began to leave the field, but to loud applause Miller came back to resume his innings, obviously in pain. He didn't last long, but heroically had edged NZ a little nearer to saving the follow-on. As the South Africans began to leave for a second time, there now emerged from the pavilion Bert Sutcliffe - his head covered in bandages - applauded all the way to the wicket by both the SA crowd and players. Alas, his partner quickly went and for a third time the South Africans turned to the pavilion, but for a third time were stopped in their tracks, for walking slowly out from the pavilion, head bowed, was Bob Blair. The scene is described by a cricket writer who was there: The whole vast crowd became as one at this moment, a moment the New Zealanders will recall with vivid clarity all of their lives…he walked out into the sunshine finding it pathetically difficult to put on his gloves and the whole crowd stood for him, silent, as he went. New Zealanders on the balcony wept openly and without shame; the South Africans were in little better state. Sutcliffe, walking out to meet his partner, was obviously distressed. but now the left-hander produced the most thrilling batting of the series. hitting seven sixes and making 80 not out in an hour and a half., and with Blair saving the follow-[on. As they left the field Sutcliffe was entitled to receive the tumult of cheering as a tribute to his skill and daring, but he stood aside allowing Blair to precede him; they went arms about each other into the darkness of the tunnel but behind them they left a light and inspiration that several thousand lectures on how to play the forward defensive stroke could never kindle. Had that been in an Ashes test, it would be talked about in this pavilion to this day. Onwards a year now, to 1955. Hutton's team, having beaten Australia in an Ashes series thanks to the pace of Frank Tyson, came to NZ. I saw my first test match - just in time - for they were all near the end of their careers - to see famous names like Len Hutton and, Godfrey Evans Sutcliffe in that match scored 74 out of 125. Just a typically Sutcliffe one-man stand, moving from hapless club cricket to face world class bowlers ...Tyson, Statham, Bailey and Wardle. But its the second test that saw a record broken - one NZ would have much preferred not to have - and one the country holds to this day. Their second innings was beginning when I left school to cycle home. I rode as fast as I could. But when I got there, it was all over - NZ were already out - for 26, the lowest test match score ever. It was NZ cricket's worst hour. Serious questions were raised: should NZ be playing test cricket at all ? The country's place in international cricket hung in the balance. The team was becoming a joke in its own country. So to the following year, 1956, the last year of the scrapbook, and what a year. Reid was now captain, and only one year after that defeat, on the same ground, he led New Zealand to their first test victory, over the West Indies, Gary Sobers, Everton Weekes, Ramadhin, Valentine and all. This time. too, I had to race home on my bike to hear the end - this time the race was worthwhile. I have in front of me the scrapbook page: The headlines: NZ breaks its test duck - first win in 25 year history and NZ cricket test victory crushing answer to Jeremaids Wrote the first paper: Thousands of spectators charged across the ground, desperate to touch one of the victorious. The players were engulfed in a mass of handshaking and back thumping. An elderly gentleman on the terraces rose solemnly and broke his umbrella across his knee. Wrote the second paper: When John Reid led the NZ cricket team to our first test victory he did more than put a new record on the books. He produced a convincing and crushing answer to the jeramiads who have been complaining that NZ could not field a team of international status. Tributes came from across the world. One of the more unintentionally amusing from Peter May, saying: 'The NZ cricketers have been magnificent losers and they richly deserve their success.' Alas Sutcliffe was injured and couldn't play in that game; he was never to play in a winning NZ team. So...there it is...three years of NZ cricket involving a day of glory in South Africa, a day of humiliation in Auckland, and then a day of triumph in the same city - three days that deserve to be remembered as they swung from courage to catastrophe, and - at last - triumph... three years out of ten or so when a country's cricket was held together and inspired to survive and later to succeed by two men who would have been seen as great players in any country at any time... Sutcliffe and Reid. What greatness would they have achieved in a major cricketing country or in a later era ?. So, Roger, I thank you. I thank you for allowing that 14 year old to bring his scrapbook to the home of cricket. But above all I thank you for allowing me to record the careers of Sutcliffe and Reid in this famous old pavilion. ...for outside, this famous place is still and dark No speed, no spin, no ones, twos, threes to run, Instead, inside, we have just food and fun. Time, too, to reminisce over many a deed great names of old - Grace, Hobbs, Bradman, Mead ...but who remembers Sutcliffe and Reid ? As the decades have passed, each their own stars. its never easy to pick a team to play Mars, As our World X1 grows - someone even mentions Bill Bowes - Nine players, from Bradman to Botham, clearly meet the need But two are still needed to help do the deed Is it not time to call on Sutcliffe and Reid ? So, as we enjoy our food and wine You'll have your view and I' have mine But this I know, and this I say, If its courage, skill, beauty and power you need, You'll give those last places to Sutcliffe and Reid Yes...this I pray, and this I plead, Please... in this of all places... let's pay tribute to Sutcliffe and Reid • Des Wilson was born in Oamaru and played cricket there as a boy. He went on to become a member of the English Cricket Board and Public Affairs Advisor to the MCC. Dave 'Devilfish' Ulliott died on April 7 and DW wrote his obituary for The Independent ( copied below) If this obituary is not placed in a prominent position on the page, then Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott will come back from the dead to complain, and he will do it in language that would be unprintable. Because two of Ulliott's three most notable characteristics were a monstrous ego and his frequent use of the F word. The third thing is that on his day he was an extraordinary poker player. For many years, he was the UK's top money-winner, with over $6m in prize money earned in the years when poker did not offer the astronomic rewards it does today. He was also the first winner of the now-famous televised Late Night Poker – and one of a tiny number to have won both a World Series of Poker gold bracelet and a World Poker Tour title. For a decade, from about 1996 to 2006, Ulliott, universally known in the poker world as "the Devilfish" (when he phoned you, he would begin, "Devilfish here..."), was "the man" in British poker, one of the first to give meaning to the maxim "you play the man, not the cards", defying the odds with a fierce, uncompromising, have-to-prevail pride. He played aggressively, had a gambler's capacity for bluff and risk-taking, and above all a remarkable feel for what was happening in any given hand. Often he would throw away an outstanding hand that anyone else – the very best – would play, because somehow he knew that the other player had the better cards. Then he would bluff them out of the next hand with complete rubbish. "He has an amazing instinct for where people are," Marcel Luske, one of Europe's top players, said of Ulliott. "He'll put them on the edge and, if he doesn't think they really want to go all the way, he strikes, either pushing them over the top or frightening them into folding their hand. He gets in and out of situations and people look at each other, as if to say, 'Well, what happened?' But by then he has the money..." But then Ulliott had been getting in and out of situations all of his life. Born the son of a Hull truck-driver in a house he said was "so small we had to paint the furniture on the walls" (he had a fair-sized repertoire of one-liners), he left school at 15 and drifted into petty crime, mainly to pay for the money he lost on the horses. He became a member of a gang that specialised in robbing tobacconists and off licences and spent his nights in the Hull clubs frequented by a community of hustlers, gamblers and small-time criminals. His fate was inevitable and he spent his 21st birthday alone in a prison cell. Once released, he became involved in a fight outside a nightclub and back behind bars he went. His twenties slipped away, but just when it appeared that his life was to be a write-off, he met Mandy – and, in love, he decided to end his life of crime and win her over by running an honest business. The couple married and opened a pawn shop. It was then that Ulliott found poker and realised that by bullying and bluffing weaker players he could win at it. For a while he spent every night travelling around the Midlands and the North, often playing in illegal and dangerous gambling dens where his aura of aggression protected him from serious trouble. He ended up in London, where he did not do particularly well – but this did not deter him from going to Las Vegas in 1997. There he lost his bankroll of $15,000 immediately, but borrowed the entry fee for an event at the Four Queens, where he won the first prize of $90,000. The following year he went back to Las Vegas for the World Series, but lost all the money he had and could borrow – well over $250,000 – before the World Series itself even began. Somehow he persuaded someone to lend him $2000 to enter a World Series event – and he won it, taking away $180,000. He increased this in high-stake cash games on the trip and returned to the UK with $750,000 in two duty-free carrier bags. His impact on Late Night Poker was immediate. He now wore a pin-striped suit and tie, tinted glasses, and on each hand was an enormous gold "ring": one said "Devil" and the other said "Fish". He never spoke, but occasionally growled. And he wiped the floor with the country's best players. He went on to some other big wins on both sides of the Atlantic, but over the years he gambled away a lot of his money – and lost at the poker table because everyone had seen on television the way he played and called his bluffs. But he was at his best when he was in trouble, and he could still pull off a big result to keep himself near the top of the money-winners' list. Unfortunately, fame went to his head – or maybe it's fairer to say that he wasn't educated enough or well-advised enough to handle it. He abandoned Mandy for younger women, took to wearing T-shirts and jeans and a teenager's hairstyle that made him look ridiculous, and complained incessantly about his "bad luck" as his place at the top of the game was taken by a new generation of brilliant young players. Just the same, there will be much sadness in the world's poker rooms at the passing of one of the game's legends. Maybe his career had ended badly, but poker has only been a really popular game for a short time – and everyone in the game still remembers. They will remember where Ulliott came from; they will remember the prison cells and the bright lights of Las Vegas, and they will remember his bravado and his bullying brilliance at a game that calls for exceptional skill and nerve to reach the top. Dave 'The Devilfish' Ulliott, poker player: born Kingston upon Hull 4 April 1954; married twice (seven children); died 6 April 2015. Speech at the 30th anniversary Campaign for F.O.I (London January 15, 2015.) I was 43 when the campaign was launched...so I'm now 73... and life has become a series of anniversaries... THIRTY years since we won lead-free petrol... ... THIRTY years since we launched the fight for F.O.I and, NEXT year... a special one for me... FIFTY years since the launch of Shelter. But for me this campaign is special because it has been a campaigner's campaign. Campaigns are not made in factories... ...they're conceived in the hearts and developed in the minds of special people ...some in this room ... people who don't silence the call of conscience by complaining they can't make a difference... ...who will make sacrifices - and stay resolute in the face of resistence and ridicule. ... who know that if they do nothing, say nothing, risk nothing, and wait for someone else...they'll wait in vain... people who heed Edmund Burke's warning that 'the only thing necesary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing'... and who create campaigns in response to Burke's other words: 'When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one...' Over the years I've been honoured to work with many such people ... ....no-where more than in this campaign. Neil rightly named three key players... ...Godfrey Bradman, who provided the resources that in the early days were crucial ...James Cornford, whose service to the cause was monumental ...and who we greatly miss tonight ...and, of course, Maurice Frankel... Maurice and I worked, side by side, every day for six years...without a cross word. There were two reasons for that: First, I was the boss. Second, Maurice was a genius at making me think I was the boss. Maurice, I know a bit about campaigning...as you know... so I believe I speak with authority when I say that your command of the cause... your dedication... ... patience...persistence... ...judgement... skill... and above all your achievements... make you the greatest campaigner of our generation. For well over a century much of the social change in this country ...and many of the freedoms won... ...came about by people pressure...by the work of pioneers in the voluntary sector or the efforts of campaigners like many in this room... ...and many had to battle without the weapons that campaigners have today... ...and THAT is the reason I said this has been a campaigner's campaign - it is because we knew if we won this one every campaign that followed would be easier to fight... ...because they would be fought on a more even playing field. We knew if we won the cover-ups we faced campaigning in our day would become more difficult... ... the misinformation we had to counter would be harder to sustain... ...and the truth we demanded would be easier to extract. That's why we went to every other campaign and called the best and the brightest to unite behind this cause. But the public needed FOI too... From the start we saw that secrecy was not a disease that infected the citadels of power in Whitehall and Westminster alone... ...Yes, the OSA would have embarrassed a banana republic. But the habit of secrecy had spread from the centre to envelop not just national authorities but local councils, water, health and education authorities - in fact every kind of organisation. Secrecy was a disease that weakened our democracy... ...it had had become the enemy of accountability ...it weakened decision-making , covered up errors, and helped suppress dissenting views. The sources of power and influence were obscured. Justice was either obstructed or not seen to be done. Inefficiency and error and waste were made more likely. We were even denied access to our own files - not only did we not know what was in them, but we didn't know who had seen them or what decisions were taken on the basis of them. In a nutshell, mindless secrecy and control of information had become part of the British way of life...insidious, all-embracing, crippling the individual in his or her relationship with the state. And it was dangerous. I learned from the Clear campaign that secrecy protected the polluter... deliberate misinformation, aided by secrecy, allowed poisonous lead to be kept in petrol much longer than it should have. And Maurice's research uncovered manifold threats to health and safety. I could keep you for hours with stories of how secrecy put people at risk. Let me quote just one case: Shortly after the campaign was launched, one Saturday afternoon the grandstand at a Bradford football match suddenly exploded into flames, the fire spreading at such phenomenal speed that many could not escape. 56 people died. And this is the thing: ...the club had been officially warned twice that the stand was a fire hazard... - in effect, a death trap - but the letters from the authorities had been sent in confidence (i.e. secret) and were kept from the public and even some club officials. Had the warnings been publicised, as they should have been, there would have been an outcry and the risk eliminated. Those 56 people were not only killed by the fire - they were also killed by secrecy. So we developed a three-part strategy. First, we would make FOI a people's issue, not one restricted to the elite, the inner circle... Second, we would build a coalition of campaigners - over 50 campaigning organisations who knew FOI would make them more effective - a coalition with reach and real influence. Third, with no chance while the then Tories were in office, we would lock in the other parties, so as to make victory inevitable in the longer-term... ...while introducing FOI by the back door - with a series of private members bills, more than achieved by any campaign in history. That was the plan. And it all worked. It took 20 years - but we won. Or...did we...? There is a final point I have to make: An FOI Act does not end secrecy... ...it no more eliminates the desire for, and the practice of secrecy, than the criminal law eliminates crime. The FoI Act creates a right to know - not a guarantee. That guarantee has to be our surveillance and vigilance. That's the answer to the question: why does the campaign continue ? It continues because the cause endures. With freedom of speech and the freedom to oppose and resist, freedom of information is one of the three pillars that underpin a genuine democracy - - and, of course,. those in power pay lip service to them...but they will never rejoice in them or voluntarily strengthen them... they will never cease to try to chip away at them and undermine them... ...because each threatens what they treasure - the ability to control and dictate... and to hold on to and protect the power they have somehow won. Politicians and civil servants in the main particularly resent the FOI Act , some bitterly, their claim being that it makes government more difficult...but - be in no doubt - we still need a powerful voice to argue that government should be difficult... because a country easy to govern, will have become compliant and trusting and exposed itself to the inevitable abuse of power. Over the past decade there have been repeated attempts to weaken the FOI Act. Even as we gather, they are making another attempt, citing cost as their concern. Of course an FOI Act is an achievement... of course the campaign has every reason to be proud tonight. Maurice Frankel has every reason to be proud. And I am immensely proud. So, yes, let's celebrate tonight, but from tomorrow the campaign must be refreshed and revived by the resolution of everyone in this room to see it resume its work... ...let us resolve to keep this campaign's drums beating ... and its banners flying... For - in the words of the poet - 'To this thought I hold with firm persistence: The last result of wisdom stamps it true... 'He only earns his freedom and existence 'Who daily conquers them anew.' The Guardian 2006 What a triumph for the buffoons at the top of the ECB and the charlatans running the ICC. Our test team - the pride and joy of the English game - finds itself for the second time in two years unhappily adrift in a foreign country, not knowing where it will be tomorrow. Some of the world's most-respected sports writers are insultingly told they can't be trusted to practise their most innocent of professions…reporting cricket.. The Foreign Office is appalled (despite being partly to blame) and the public are rightly astonished that English cricket, having already been humiliated by the Zimbabwe row at the time of the World Cup, and having this time been properly warned what could happen and advised what to do, have blundered into the most foreseeable of disasters. Whatever happens now, it should be clear that this tour should have been called off a year back. In a paper I wrote for the ECB at the beginning of the year I identified six justifications for abandoning an international sporting tour and at least five of the six have come to pass. In that paper I identified one justification as denial of freedom of movement and expression "especially as it applies to the media's ability to report what it sees and hears." I pointed out that the cricket writers were an integral part of the cricket family that if their freedoms were denied "the integrity of the tour is challenged." The ECB did not even discuss my paper. The ICC rubbished it. The ICC, an organisation that makes the Mafia appear saint-like, then bullied the ECB by threatening draconian penalties if it cancelled the Zimbabwe tour, before then clearing Zimbabwe cricket of racism despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists. Maybe there'll be another sordid little fix now and the tour will happen. But if it does not, it won't be acceptable for either the ECB or the ICC to complain about Mugabe's treatment of the cricketing media. Mugabe is not the villain in this latest drama. Mugabe is merely being Mugabe, doing what Mugabe has to do. If we were murdering our citizens, denying human rights, impoverishing our people, and generally operating one of the most oppressive and ruthless dictatorships on the world, we wouldn't let the media in either. At least he deserves credit for consistency; denying UK journalists their rights to report is exactly what he's done to the whole Zimbabwean media. The culprits in this fiasco are the ECB and the ICC. The ECB had a chance to avoid all this. It had a well-argued and well-supported strategy for withdrawing from the tour presented to it, and all it had to do was call the ICC's bluff; unfortunately there were financial vested interests on the Board who prevailed and a Chairman whose main concerns was being re-elected for a second term and being acceptable at the international dinner table. As for the ICC, its failure to accept the legitimate concerns raised about the tour, and its inability to see that in ruling out moral considerations it was itself adopting a deeply immoral stance, will surprise no-one who meets the self-serving nonentities on its Board. And both organisations simply would not accept what was obvious to almost anyone else - that the chances of the tour proceeding without some outrage were virtually nil. They may be "shocked" at the ban on the reporters; the rest of us take it for granted. What did they expect ? I spent an evening with the England team earlier this year. They're not just quality cricketers, they really are a thoughtful and decent bunch. They did not want to go to Zimbabwe. They knew it was wrong and they knew it was a mistake. (The pressure later applied to Michael Vaughan was unforgivable.) They and the whole game have been let down by administrators who claim their only desire is to maintain the innocence of the sport and to preserve political neutrality, but, as Peter Oborne's recent book on the D'Olivera affair shows, cricket has never been politically neutral; apartheid thrived for years with the tacit support of English cricket. At their best, sportsmen and women are fair and honest, free spirits, international…they don't even see racial or religious differences, only rival competitors. On the whole ethical standards are high. Why ? Because sport does exercise moral judgement - over its own affairs. That's why drugs offences or bribe-taking cause such anger. But its hypocritical, even totally schizophrenic, to take pride in sportsmanship and in the case of cricket in the civility, courage, decency, integrity of the game, and then abandon it beyond the field of play. We're not talking about ignorance, we're taking about declining to care…a deliberate decision to decline to care. This is not being neutral, because its effect is to strengthen the wrong-doer. What kind of man is Mr Malcom Speed of the ICC who came back from Zimbabwe furious…but why ? Because the Zimbabwe Cricket Union refused to meet him. Note, he was not angry at the men and women being raped and tortured and murdered by the Mugabe regime…not angry at the denial of human rights…not angry at the millions starving while their despotic President refused to seek international aid. Oh no. Why should he be ? Because he and the ICC have proclaimed independence from moral judgement. The do not believe this is their business. They have deliberately chosen not to care. These people have no place in any form of public administration. There were five reasons why this tour should never have been contemplated: " Zimbabwe cricket is heavily politically-influenced and riddled with racism; its behaviour and its ethics are inconsistent with the values of cricket. " It is deeply dividing the game, with the players unenthusiastic (to put it mildly), cricket-lovers discomforted, the sponsors embarrassed, and the cricket media almost unanimously opposed Sky television even refusing to cover it.) Cricket's stakeholders are being betrayed. " It is deeply damaging to the image of the game at a time when it is competing with so many other calls on the public's attention and loyalty. " The freedom of expression and movement of a key part of the cricketing community, its reporters, is being denied. " It is inconsistent with the foreign policy of the country, the UK having helped force Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth and encouraged EU sanctions. " Most importantly, the behaviour of the Mugabe regime is contrary to all that sport, and cricket in particular, stands for, in terms of the way human beings should behave towards one another. This not a dictator we should be bolstering, not a regime we should be endorsing, not a place where we should be playing games. That the ECB and the ICC cannot see all this, or don't care, is a scandal beyond acceptability. Willie Tann I’m low on chips at the £100 hold’em table at the Vic. A grey-haired Chinaman – in his sixties, I guess – is alone with me in a hand. He’s pre-occupied, eating a stir-fry with a fork and studying a racing paper. There’s no way he’s paying attention. I don’t think he’s looked at his cards. I decide to bluff and raise all I can. Without looking up he throws a pile of chips onto the table. He’s re-raised - bet the pot. I stare at him for a while. He never stops eating; his eyes never leave the racing paper. I’ll swear he hasn’t looked at his cards. Or has he ? Can this be for real ? What’s going on here ? I’m tempted to re-raise but warning bells are clanging in my head. I no longer know who’s bluffing who. I fold. Still without looking up, he puts down the fork, scoops up the chips, then resumes eating and reading. Two things have happened. I’ve just lost half my already-small stack. And I’ve met Willie Tann. I next see him at the World Series in Las Vegas. Apart from the climatic $10,000 main event to come, we’ve reached the last day of six weeks of poker and 758 players, including some of the world’s best , are contesting the remaining gold bracelet. And here he is, on the final table. He’s not eating or reading now…he’s fully-focused and fighting like a tiger. I remember what I’ve read somewhere…. that he builds his game around five Ps: practice, then patience, perseverance, psychology, and position. Its all on show here. He may have come into the event looking beaten after a disappointing few weeks, but he’s not beaten. Willie is never beaten, not till the last chip’s gone. Now, calling on 40 years of experience and on the courage, the inner strength, the tenacity that have enabled him to bounce back from countless gambling disasters, he wins the coveted gold bracelet and the money… this fantastic pile of $100 dollar bills, $188,135, now all his. The strain disappears from his face. He’s beaming, revelling in the enthusiasm of scores of jubilant Brits. He’s ringing his beloved wife Sally on the mobile. He’s a happy, happy, happy man. There’s just one problem: we have to get him out of the Rio with the money. Because, as I’ve written elsewhere, “Willie Tann’s story is one of triumph and tragedy, endlessly repeated, often on the same night.” A lot of poker players have leaks. A lot are gamblers. But with Willy it’s extreme. It’s sad, because he’s a poker player of legendary skill and a lovely man, yet because of an obsession with the dice and the horses he’s often under-resourced and thus dangerously exposed, often reduced to borrowing to scrape together buy-ins. One day he’s a giant of the game, the next day a beggar. But let’s look at the positives. He’s won where it counts…not just the WSOP gold bracelet but in 2004 the UK Open (just under $100,000), plus wins at the Irish and French Opens. That year he made 13 final tables to become European Number One. In 2005 he came back from the World Series win and immediately came 6th in the London Open and picked up another $75,000. He won a further $53,000 in a pot limit Omaha event at the Australian championships this January. When I last spoke to him – in May – he had just “decimated the field” (according to one observer) to win a hold-em event at Luton. He’s always a contender, and when he’s not playing tournaments you’ll find him in cash games at the Vic or The Sportsman, and he’s more often than not winning there too. What makes him a winner ? Ironically, one factor is the same gambler’s instinct that’s done him so much damage...because, he says, he has no fear of losing. He’s not afraid of big bets, not afraid to shove the chips in. When a gambler stands his ground, puts every cent he’s got on the line, is it courage, or is it madness ? Men like Willie Tann say it isn’t either, its just what they do. It’s just the business they’re in. But it helps to have been there before. Willie has been ‘there’ so many times – hanging on the throw of a dice, his finances hingeing on the speed of a horse – that the size of the bet doesn’t factor in the equation…only whether the odds justify the call. Another factor is an extraordinary combination of patience and aggression. Willie knows when to throw cards away. He’s a very rationale poker player. He can wait a long time for the right hand if he has to. But he’s also got an exceptional eye for weakness and profits from it without mercy. If you want to play for fun, don’t play Willie. Then there’s experience, not only as a player but as a dealer. That’s how many of the London poker veterans first knew Willie – as a dealer, and sometimes in some fairly shady places…in spielers, with criminals and conmen mixed in with the more honest-to-God poker players. Willie has seen it all. He is deeply embedded into the fabric of British poker, has been for 40 years, before most of those he now faces at the table were even born. Of course gambling was not in Willie’s parents’ plan for him. When they moved from China to Singapore, where Willie was born in 1941, they had high hopes for him. They sent him to London when he was 20 to study at Lincoln’s Inn to be a lawyer. But he already had the gambling bug. He tried changing sides and becoming a book maker. He owned a Chinese restaurant in Soho for a couple of years in the Seventies, and ran a company supplying hot towels to Chinese restaurants all over London. But Willie is, was, and always will be a gambler. Fortunately, so prolific have been his poker winnings, that he’s been able to buy a lovely home in the country and support his son as he progressed to Westminster School, Oxford, and the bar. And he’s very proud of that. As for the gambling and the borrowing, he openly acknowledges it. “Of course I go broke now and then. If you show me a gambler who has never gone broke then you will be showing me a gambler who must be lying.” But he’s trying to control it all. He’s trying to change his name from “the diceman” to Mr Miyagi. As one site says “Miyagi is the wise old master who speaks in a truncated oriental voice full of deep philosophical mutterings whilst also maintaining a low and humble profile.” Actually that’s not too far off the mark… …except that the mutterings at the dice table and the race track sound more like fxxx than philosophical ! Tuan Lam It’s Day One-A of the main event at the 2007 World Series and I’m at Table 48, Seat Nine, and nervous. I’m one of the first here of the 1,300 or so playing today, because I want time to size up the others at the table. There are no famous names. They all look ordinary, apart from the man in Seat Seven. About 40, Asian in appearance, with thick, black hair sticking up at the front, his eyes are hidden behind wrap-around shades and from the start he concentrates so intently that he appears to be playing in a game of his own. My first hand is 7-4. No decision called for. I fold…and relax. This isn’t too bad. Just like poker, really. I can do this. But can I do it for 16 hours ? Because that is what lies ahead. It will be a hard day. Tuan Lam is used to hard days. He was born on New Year’s Day 1966 and for the first eight years of his life he lived at the heart of a war… in South Vietnam. A typical day ? “I remember when I was five, my grandma sent me out to buy some cooking oil and, as I walked down the street - it was really a muddy lane between ramshackle wooden houses - bombs began dropping around me. I remember the shock and that I was running…” I make the mistake of over-playing A-J. When a Jack comes on the flop, I raise Seat Seven’s 1500 bet by a further 1500, thinking I can scare him off. Instead he calls, then when a Queen comes on the turn, he bets 3000. So I fold and retreat into self-pity. There was never any time for self-pity in Tuan’s life. His family were farmers, living in the village of Bao Trinh. “We had a very poor, very bad house. It was made of leaf trees and stuff like that. We had beds made of wood; we'd cut a tree down and chop it up to make them. We were supposed to eat rice but we couldn't afford to buy it, so we would eat a corn-like vegetable every day, and a kind of potato. I left school when I was about 12 years old and then I took care of the cows and helped with the farming.” It’s after 4 pm now and we’ve already played two levels. I still have my 20,000 chips. There’s a lot of chat at the other end of the table, but Seat Seven is just quietly accumulating an impressive stack. I have identified him as the man to beware of. I don’t really know what kind of cards he is getting, because he times his bets beautifully, playing position well, and he is rarely called. It was a hard life and as his brothers and sisters all married, Tuan, the baby of the family, started to think about escaping to a better life. “My family knew the owner of the boat and persuaded me to cross the ocean from Vietnam to Indonesia. It was just a small boat, 10.5 metres long and 2 metres wide. It took about three days and four nights. The weather was really bad for the first day and we were thrown about the boat in a terrible sea…people were sick and we were cold…it was the hardest day I have ever known … but after that it was better, then a big oil tanker picked us up and it took us to Indonesia. I spent two years in a refugee camp there.” Level Three, and I take a few steps forward, then a few steps back…always around the 20,000 mark. Then I call with 9-10 and get J-Q on the flop. Seat Seven checks and I think, now’s the time to be aggressive, so I semi-bluff with a bet of 5000. To my horror he calls. This should not be happening; if he checked, why is he calling such a big bet ? The last card is no help to me and he appears to instinctively know that, because he now seizes the initiative and bets and I have to fold. Who is this man ? He could have slipped away into the slums and possibly a life of crime, but Tuan was made of stronger stuff. He dreamed of going to the West and applied to the Canadians “but they didn't accept me because I was young and I couldn't speak English, so after I got rejected I decided to put all my effort into school and after that I went to school day and night for two years.” He had virtually no income and became thin for lack of food. But when he was 19 he applied for a second time and was accepted. So he went to Canada where he knew no-one, had no money, and for a while became a form of slave labour. “The first job I was looking for was as a dishwasher and I went all over the city and people kept asking me if I had experience doing dishes and I said no and they didn't hire me. I mowed lawns for $5 an hour and I ended up in a lumber company where they paid me $6.50 an hour. I then worked in a factory for only $10 an hour and I made so little that I couldn't help my family back in Vietnam with that kind of money so I used to work two jobs a day and around 16 hours a day, one to feed myself and one for money to send to Vietnam.” Level Four, and I’ve had a miracle double-up to get back to 20,000. Seat Seven is now disappearing behind a mountain of chips. Over 180 players fell in Level Four and now they’re dropping fast, and with them some of the biggest names in poker. But I’m still there – and so is Seat Seven. Tuan was now 24 years old. “I had a very tough life when I first came to Canada because I wanted to help my family but I couldn't do it and live…then one day the owner of this casino asked me to deal for him one day, dealing cards in a social club, and the first day I dealt for 16 hours and made $600 and I was so happy. Now I could help my family and myself. “But it was not that easy. In order to work in that club you had to play cards too; you had to support the game, and at that time when I first started out I didn't know how to play poker; I had no clue at all. I kept losing any money I made; I'd lose half of it. For a long time I didn't make any money at all. Then I read some books about poker. I improved from there.” Level Five comes and goes. I get A-A but no-one calls and then I get 10-10 and win a hand. After 10 hours play I am up from 20,000 to 21,000. I am tired and disappointed at my cards; I am tempted to go for a desperate all-in and either double-up or die, but somehow I maintain my discipline. Seat Seven looks as calm as ever, his stack now towering over the table. Tuan had met and married a beautiful girl called Kim, 12 years his junior (they now have a five-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son). He combined poker-dealing and playing with being a labourer with a metal company until he began to play and win on-line, and then to win big-time. Over four years he won a million dollars, playing mainly $200-$400 limit hold’em. He not only purchased a house for his family but five other homes for family members back in Vietnam. Apart from cash games in the place where he worked, he had never played live, but he decided it was time he did. So he and Kim set off for Las Vegas and the World Series. In 2005 he came 78th in a preliminary event and in 2006 he came 46th in another. In 2007 he had greater ambitions. The last level, it’s after two in the morning and still two hours to play. The blinds and antes are taking 1700 chips a round. But as the minutes pass I begin to realise that I am going to get through. And I do. At five minutes to four, play ends. I’M THROUGH. Elated, I turn to Seat Seven and shake hands. “Well done,” I say, looking enviously at his massive pile of chips. “My name is Des.” “Thanks,” he replies. “I’m Tuan. Tuan Lam.” I depart the main event after 35 minutes on Day Two. As I leave the packed poker room I spot Tuan. He’s still there, still impassive behind his shades, still with plenty of chips. As the days pass I watch the field become smaller and smaller but always he is there. Until it comes to the final day, the final table. And he’s still there. Then it comes to the heads-up. And he’s still there. He eventually comes second and picks up 4.8 million dollars. By then he’s built up a small fan club of Canadians who have cheered him on. At the end he waves a Canadian flag. And then, when it’s all over, he walks quietly away with his wife and a few friends. No-one wants to talk to the guy who come second. Life at the Rio this night is all about the winner. But the following day I phone him on his cell-phone. I tell him I am a British journalist and ask for an interview. We meet up after dinner that evening and he recognises me. He tells me I was a tight player “but every time you were in a hand I knew you had a hand.” I think about this. I think he’s telling me I am predictable. But he is not being critical deliberately. He is not that kind of guy. I ask him how he has done so well. “I play the other players more than the cards. I work at getting to know the other players at the table, and I try as much as possible to play from late position.” When did he think he could make the final table. “Well, I found myself playing with some famous players. I played Gus Hansen, Kenny Tran, Scotty Nguyen and I found I could take care of myself. That was when I felt I could go a long way. “I only had one really bad hand. I lost a million chips. I had pocket Queens and Gus Hansen had pocket tens and he tried to go over the top of me so I went all-in. He thought for a very long time and then decided to call me, and he got a ten on the flop.” He perhaps did not play the heads-up as well as he would have liked, but that was inexperience. He simply had not been there before. But he will be again. He now plans to travel and play in more events. And be in no doubt, this was not about luck. I played with Tuan Lam for 16 hours with no idea who he was or how far he was about to go, but throughout that time he looked a class act. This is a very good player. But also a very good person. What will he do with the money ? “First of all I'm going to go back to Vietnam to my village and I'm going to help the poor people there because there are a lot of families that don't have food and they don't have jobs and they don't have land and they don't have houses and maybe I can go back there and help them a little bit. Another goal of mine is I want to build a temple there so I can store food there and people can come and get it when there are floods and storms…there are floods and storms every year.” After I left him, I had a thought. Thanks to him some of my chips made the final table. Thanks to him, some of my money will help a Vietnam village. Not a bad result for my relatively short time in the main event. So my thanks to Tuan Lam…or as he is better-known to me, Seat Seven. Roy Brindley’s memoir “Life’s a Gamble”. (published by Bantam Press, February 26, £11.99) At 40, Roy Brindley falls between two generations. Before he came to the table the old-style gambler poker players, the Mickey Wernicks and the Willie Tanns, were already there (and still are) and a few years after Roy’s arrival came the host of talented younger pros from Scandanavia, Ireland and the UK, the Peter Eastgates and Nic Pausauds. For the older one’s, poker was, at least initially, just another way to gamble…for the latter, poker is invariably the thing, an obsession, pursued relentlessly from their late teens probably to the grave. Roy isn’t an old hand, nor is he a young gun. Instead he combines the experience and instincts of the former with the ambition, determination and professionalism of the latter. But there’s a difference between Roy and all of them. Roy can write about it, at least in a way the others can’t. Roy can write about it, firstly, because he CAN write – his memoir is exceptionally readable – but, secondly, because his is not a happy-go-lucky ‘win some, lose some’ mentality. He cares and feels…to excess. Wins are celebrated with exhilaration; defeat marked by deep mourning…sometimes depression and near self-destruction. Every detail is stored in a memory that both hurts and heals. Now it is shared with us. Jesse May, in his foreword, says ‘this a blasting, naked account of what it is to be a gambler…he’s coming at you with nothing left out.’ I chuckled at what I assumed to be hyperbole until I read the book – then I discovered it was exactly so. This is a confession. Sometimes painful to read. It appears to end happily, because at the time he writes ‘the end’ he is happily living with his partner Mags, in love too with his two kids, and winning. But it can’t really be described as having a happy ending because, as Roy writes, life, at least for him, is a gamble, not a destination. There is more to come. Some of it will be good, but some of it will be bad. However, if we don’t fear for him much, it is probably because of Mags, because this is also a love story. Her extraordinary contribution is movingly revealed, not least when he describes how, when she was running the card room at the Merion in Dublin and he couldn’t raise the money to enter a major event, she quietly slipped off to her own bank manager and borrowed the money to fund him – without ever telling him where it came from. Above all, it is blisteringly honest. And because it is, Roy emerges as hard to live with, even on the page. Jesse May is right to say that we repeatedly want to cry out ‘stop’…we want to shake him, and say ‘No, no. no…not this time, not this bet… Because of the pressure he puts on himself, he has breakdowns. Because of his extreme sensitivity, he over-reacts and does silly, self-destructive things. Because he lives life with such intensity, he takes us on rides to places we don’t want to go at a pace that scares the hell out of us. Places like the prison cell. And even the gutter. And yet, you never lose the sense that he knows where he is and why, and you come to admire the way he fights back from every disaster, always aware that he may be a gambler but he has to make the money to gamble with and that means working. And you have to admire how, when he discovers poker, he sets out to master it and becomes a quality player and a top-class commentator. So, fasten your seatbelts and come on the ride… It begins with family. His was a family of gamblers, led by the grandfather, a compulsive gambler, and then by his parents, who actually met in a betting shop. He loved his grandmother in particular and describes graphically his last call on her and how he could not find the inner strength to even speak to her and how he left with that on his conscience forever. Given that the whole family was into gambling, it is hardly surprising that by the time he was 11, Roy was a gambler too and by the time he was 15 he too was a familiar face at betting shops. The story from then on is full of wins (even these often turned to disaster – one lot of winnings was stolen from his pocket, another lot went flying out of the window of his car on a motorway) and crushing setbacks. He was driven out of casinos because he became known as a blackjack counter. Then he became fascinated by greyhound racing, worked in kennels, and went to America to make his fortune greyhound racing there. I will leave him to tell the dark story of this period…suffice to say it all ended in tears. Back in the UK he fell apart, at one point on the run from the police, and then he broke down completely, ended up begging on the streets. He tells the sorry tale without self-pity and there is one beautiful line: ‘…the one thing you do when living and sleeping rough is contemplate life…and you come to absolutely no conclusions.’ Somehow he clawed his way back and began to earn a few quid writing for greyhound magazines and supplying bits and pieces for television programmes on racing. Eventually he established his own greyhound magazine and it began to make money. Then in 2001 he found poker and his life changed forever (if the remaining eight years can be called forever…as if any time in a gambler’s life can be called forever.) He was now living in Ireland and like many there he was captivated by a television film achievement of Noel Furlong winning the World Series main event. About the same time he saw the film Rounders. Memories were revived of the highly competitive family card games when he was a kid – and of the black jack. He remembered how much he liked playing cards. So he went to the Jackpot Club in Dublin and who was playing in their small tournament but Noel Furlong. By September of 2001 he was winning 13 out of 17 consecutive tournaments. In early 2002 he was one of 21 players chosen to play in a big Paddy Power-sponsored televised tournament and won it. He went on to win six European ranking tournaments, come second in the World Heads-up championship, and land a sponsorship with Ladbrokes, one of the first poker sponsorship deals. Add to this being taken on by Sky Sports as a television commentator on poker, and he had arrived – he really was Roy the Boy ! About this time I interviewed him for my book Swimming with the Devilfish. He told me two stories that are particularly revealing and that are told in more detail in his book. The first concerns the world heads-up tournament. He won 40,000 euros but the money was no consolation because he had not won. What he wanted was to be world champion. Up to then he had in his eyes been a nobody,, but the title - not the money - would tell his family that he had made it, earn him the respect he desperately wanted. It would say ‘goodbye gutter, goodbye prison, goodbye critics and doubters and enemies. It would say ‘I’m the champion. World champion. I’m the man.’ So instead of celebrating is E40,000 win he went back to his hotel room and sobbed like a child. He went to throw the money out the window, but, fortunately for him, it wouldn’t open. Even now he looks back on second place as failure. If that was the desperately determined Roy, then the second story is about the occasionally feckless Roy…it tells of the night he was at home playing on-line and drinking heavily. It became a kind of on-line mayhem but he just kept winning. He won $20,000 and was already trying to book a holiday when Chandlers telephoned to say, ‘sorry mate, you can’t take the cash out - you were playing on the play money table, not for real money.’ There are some in the poker world who don’t really rate Roy, but they’re wrong. No-one can win often these days; there is just too much competition. But he wins here and there …often enough. As recently as 2007 I watched him play Phil Laak and Ram Vaswani in the finale of the William Hill Grand Prix and he was superb that night, knocked out by a bad beat and winning £65,000 in third place. And that same year he knocked out Vaswani and Tony G. and other big names to win the televised Poker Masters of Europe tournament and $120,000. What he has not been able to do is score in the US. Truth is he’s not really comfortable there and he’s had bad luck too, being turned back by the immigration authorities in 2007 and then having to fly back before the main event in 2008 for the birth of his second child. But Ladbrokes have not stuck with him as their top sponsored player all these years without good reason; he gives them value for money. Somewhere on the way he has cut back on the other gambling, but just before he won that Poker Masters event he had a spectacular run on the horses and ended up with £300,000. He had won back all the money he had lost over 20 years. Maybe at last this is a gambler who can stop. He appears to think so. That big win has, he clearly feels, given him a chance. And if he takes the chance, it will be because of poker. It has, he says, been his redemption. He’s been able to combine his love of a gamble and an innate talent for maths with a self-discipline that you may think could not possibly be innate in a gambler but actually is vital in poker – and also explains why he kept fighting back from setbacks. That self-discipline does not include paying into a pension scheme. ‘Some people put every spare penny into a pension scheme without considering that they are only 8/13 to reach pensionable age and long odds-against to enjoy 10 years retirement thereafter,’ he says. He says he does not intend taking those odds. And you can bet on that. Mickey Wernick If anyone in British poker has been there, done it all, seen it all, it’s Mickey Wernick. He’s the nearest we have to one of the old Texas road gamblers. When I was writing my book “Swimming with the Devilfish” I wanted to interview Mickey, and Mickey wanted to be interviewed – I could just never pin him down. If I went to Walsall (where he said he would be) he would be in Brighton; down to Brighton, only to find he’s now in Walsall. To Luton, only he’s in Blackpool. To Leeds only he’s in London. Once I phoned his partner Dawn to ask where he was. She roared with laughter. “How would I know, I’m a poker widow.” You can’t help taking to Mickey. He is what’s known as a “character.” This is the man who used to play with Brunson, Chan and co in Vegas in the 1980’s, and when he couldn’t afford the buy-in he would slip a lot of one dollar bills into his wad of $100’s so that it looked as if he had the $20,000 he needed. He’s short, he’s a bit tubby, he’s got a face that looks as if its taken a punch from time to time (which it has, because in earlier days he was a boxer, good enough to be the Midlands lightweight champion). But he’s immensely likeable, always friendly, always fun...the kind of guy even the pro’s are pleased to see winning. And winning is what he’s been doing, because he’s a fantastically good poker player who finally, after years and years of being around and scratching out a living, has finally reached the top of European poker. Mickey’s life breaks into two stories: there are the first 60 years, and there are the last two. Born in Wolverhampton, from the start his life was woven around the activities of his father Solly, firstly in the family sectional building business, and then in bookmaking and a poker club they ran in the upstairs room of the city’s old Victoria Hotel. Mickey was the dealer, sometimes working for 20 hours at a time, often dealing to Solly, who was a hopeless player. “I would be watching him lose and thinking ‘For God’s sake, fold, but what could I do ?” They also worked as bookmakers, Mickey becoming a familiar figure on his box at the dogs. It was their love of boxing that led them to Las Vegas, to see some of the big fights, and it was there that Mickey began to centre his life around playing poker. He was not a big winner. In fact, Mickey has been broke more times than he can tell, has often had to pawn his ring and more than once even had to sell his house. Often he would set off down the M1 to London knowing he had to win, because there was no food left for his family of six, no money for the rent. You could say he was irresponsible – well, I guess all gamblers are – and yet in his relentless pursuit of winnings, wherever they could be found, he showed he knew what his responsibility was and somehow he always managed to meet it. As the tournament scene grew throughout the 1990’s Mickey’s name would appear in the prize lists, but he was rarely a winner. It was in 1993 that he first won, £6,000 in a pot limit Omaha event in Sheffield. Internationally, he cashed in a no limit hold’em event at the 2003 World Series, and then cashed twice more in Las Vegas in 2004. He was always there or thereabouts, but still rarely a winner. And then last year, at 60, began the second stage of his poker life. He was flat broke and driving down the motorway to a festival at the Vic knowing he would have to borrow to buy-in, and…well, let Mickey tell it, because he loves to: “I came down to London with £700. It was all I had left. I was feeling a bit desperate. I thought it's £1000 for the tournament, so I’’ have to sell myself out. And I did. The first day I got a result, second place; I got £7000. Now I don't need to sell percentages so I buy-in to Tuesday’s event and I come 8th and I get another chunk; and I had only gone down for the day. So I come back on the Wednesday and get to the final of that event. I come second. I've gone down there with £700 and suddenly I've got over £20k. “And from that moment it all changed for me. From then on I’m in contention everywhere. “I never look at the European rankings but I happen to glance at them and it's Wernick moving to number nine, and I thought, what's this? Well, I discover there’s £10k to the winner and I thought that would be useful … then it becomes a kind of dream to be European Champion. I've gambled all my life and everyone knows me, probably anyone who is on the circuit. And I want to show I’m one of the best. Also, I think if I can win this I'll have a chance of sponsorship. So everywhere there’s a festival, I go and I finally win the Luton Christmas Cracker and get £27,000 and find myself at the top… So he ended 2005 as European champion and is still there or thereabouts this year. He’s also found a sponsor, Blue Square. After all these years this relatively humble hustler has gained a new confidence. He’s discovered he can compete with anyone around and that discovery has made all the difference. Now he goes into these events expecting to win. But what is his strength ? His fellow Midlander Mark Goodwin is in no doubt: “Mickey may be a gambler but he’s also an extraordinarily disciplined card player. He's unbelievably good at putting down hands when he knows he's behind. A lot of people can't do that. If you see Mickey out of position and he has two Queens, then he has no hesitation… straight in the bin. Most of us would think, ‘come on then, I'm going to re-raise and see if you’ve got it’ and then, when you play as if you have, we end up thinking, ‘well I can't pass.’ Mickey doesn’t get into those situations.” Mickey confirms that being ready to put a hand down, no matter how attractive it may seem, is a key ingredient of his game. “ If you're 90% sure you're in front and although the hand looks good…say a pair of Queens… and you raise and somebody re-raises...I mean what can you beat? You can only beat a pair of Jacks. They're not going to be re-raising on two Jacks. You may be looking at a re-raise with Ace-King and then your pair of Queens are in a coin flip and I don't like playing coin flips. “If someone who’s a top player calls or raises you, the chances are they’re ahead. They don’t risk their chips unless they’re ahead. So pick a better opportunity – wait for a better situation.” He puffs on yet another of innumerable cigarettes (well, he’s a gambler, and that includes with his health) and says: “Listen, I’ve been around a long time and I have a view about poker, and it’s that it all comes down to common sense. You have to use simple common sense. Don’t do silly things. Understand what a call and a raise means. It means the other guy thinks he’s got you beat. And he probably has. Play sensibly.” Michael Craig It is Day One A of the 2008 World Series of Poker and a typically amiable Michael Craig finds himself at the same table as a correspondingly typically irascible Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott. Within 10 minutes Craig picks up pocket Aces and raises the big blind from 100 to 300. The Devilfish calls. The flop comes T-8-8, Craig bets 450, and the Devilfish folds. The former safe-cracker is not pleased. The Devilfish then calls each of Craig’s next four raises and each time he’s forced to fold. He is now seriously displeased. He’s not getting any respect here – and, worse, the offender is not – in Devilfish’s estimate – even a poker player. He is a writer, for God’s sake. Having learned that Craig is a “scribbler”, he tells the table “He’s writing in his book how he bluffed the Fish with a shit hand…we’ll see who’s around at the end of the day.” Craig smiles. “It’s a career highlight, David.” The Devilfish grimaces. “I’d much rather play good players than the likes of you. I do well at a table with Phil Hellmuth, John Juanda, people who know how to play the game. The monkeys aren’t all in the trees anymore; they’re at this table…play well and get punished for it by a bunch of lousy players. Everybody plays like shit…well I’m going to play like shit too…bunch of fucking scribblers.” A few minutes later Devilfish was all-in with 9-9 facing Q-Q. As Craig noted on his Fult Tilt blog later: “He flushed himself down the toilet. He was good as his word. He promised to play like shit and he did. It’s actually kind of disappointing really: I knew he’d be stranded in a parking lot in a battle of wits with me. But I didn’t expect him to declare war and fall on his sword before sunrise.” Now there are two points about this story: firstly these uncompromisingly revealing accounts of everything that happens to him make Michael Craig’s blog a must-read; more importantly, it classically illustrates the key to his success: everyone under-estimates him. He is, of course, first and foremost a writer – the author of the compelling book on the battle between Andy Beal and the Doyle Brunson-led “corporation” – “The Professor, The Banker and the Suicide King”, the editor (and main writer) of the “Full Tilt Strategy Guide” and that site’s main blogger, and contributor to poker magazines. Ask the “corporation” members – Brunson, Lederer, Harman, Ivey, and the rest – or ask Beal how he managed to persuade them all he could be trusted and thus be allowed inside the big game – confidant to all the players, witness to every major encounter, recipient of all the secrets – and none of them seem to know. It was just that he looked serious and trustworthy and he was persistent. He just didn’t let up and gradually they got used to him being around. He was clever at what he calls ‘boot-strapping’…he would inveigle his way into the life of one and then another and slowly he would become part of the group. “I would take what little connections I could make and build on them. For instance, the first player I spoke to was Barry Greenstein and it turned out he was my wife’s friend’s cousin’s high school class mate. We had a polite telephone conversation and I told him I was working on a book and he was friendly and while he did not tell me much about the Beal game at that time, I was able to say to others that I had spoken to Barry and that helped. I approached Howard Lederer about a possible magazine profile and that led to me sitting down in his house and talking about the Beal game. I was able with his help to contact Doyle Brunson and Jennifer Harman and so it went on…” He ended up travelling to Dallas and playing endless one-to-one games with Beal – sometimes for real money. They played in a poker room the Dallas multi-millionaire banker had created out of a conference room at his office and then played at the home of his friend of his. The study of Craig’s home in Scottsdale, Arizona, is packed with note books containing transcripts of lengthy and stunningly-revealing phone conversations with everyone involved. Sometimes they got cross with him, sometimes they were downright furious, but always they came back – and talked and talked and talked. They told him the lot. And even after the book was published they kept talking. He was the only one allowed in to watch the follow-up games. He ended up winning the confidence and writing a series of huge magazine profiles of Ted Forrest, Chris Ferguson, Andy Bloch and Mike Matusow. The man has a gift and it is to win confidence and get poker players to talk. And if you could see into those notebooks you know WHY they trust him – there’s stuff in all of them that’s dynamite. If Craig had published it all – the comments about one another - the world of top cash game poker would have fallen apart. But he didn’t…he knew what they INTENDED he could use and what he couldn’t and he had the integrity to respect it. Once Lederer and company persuaded him to help them create the Full Tilt strategy guide he got even closer to some of them, helping people like Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson, Lederer, Andy Bloch and others put together one of the best instructional books ever. They poured out their knowledge; he turned it into chapters. As a result he got a blog on their site (Michael Craigs’s Full Tilt Poker Blog) and compulsively unveils his whole life on it. His wife becomes ill; we are made to worry with him. His daughter runs away from home; we’re on his side as he chases her. He has trouble with the condo he’s hired in Las Vegas (the lights go out, the toilet breaks down, the water is turned off, the television set is taken by the bailiffs, the landlord disappears) and we sympathise. Thus (Autumn 2008): “I’m also supposed to cover the WSOP final table in November but I don’t have credentials. I got a call from Valerie’s school that she’s missing two of her immunizations and they won’t let her in school on Monday unless she has them. I gave them my wife’s cell number - I was playing the noon tournament. I haven’t called my dad since I got back from London. I’ve got a message to call my brother that I haven’t returned. My mom is e-mailing to ask why I haven’t been posting on the blog. “As I am undoubtedly a biological adult - my fiftieth birthday is in December, - I should be handling things better. Yet my extension to file my 2007 taxes expired yesterday and I didn’t even start working with the accountant on them until last week. Despite having $30,000 in the bank, I’ve paid my personal bills in such a manner the last few months that I’ve had threatened or actual cancellations of the cable (twice), electricity, gas, and my MasterCard.” But, and this is the thing, during all of this – the Beal saga, the writing of the Full Tilt book – Craig has been learning about poker from the best. He watched the “corporation” play hand after hand. He has meticulously extracted the wisdom of the best of the Full Tilt Team. And he did not just put it in books; he has filed it away in his brain. The result: he quietly began making a sound living as a poker player. Balding, rotund (as a result of a medical condition – he barely nibbles at his food), cautious-looking and relatively self-effacing despite having the conversational style of a machine-gun, he arrives at the table carrying a rucksack full of notebooks and other stuff, sticks to his own game, and quietly accumulates chips. In 2007. without anyone really noticing, he cashed in the biggest $1,500 Hold-em event at the World Series of Poker and then made two final tables, coming seventh in a HORSE event (illustrating his all-round skills) and seventh in a mixed Hold’em event. Now that is not bad going. But mainly he plays on line-on. The official poker rankings show he has won nearly $500,000 in the past two years, mostly at buy-ins of between $100 and $200. For instance, in August on this year he won $47,500 first place in a Sunday Full Tilt $200 buy-in event, and he has numerous other wins on the site. (All this by a guy who says he is generally unlucky – “my luck is so bad that if I opened a funeral parlour, no-one would ever die.”) This may not be the stuff of poker magazine headlines but it shows that this brilliant writer and reporter and poker-mad enthusiast knows his game. Add to his unequalled contacts at the highest level and his ever-presence at the big poker events and you’re looking at a real poker personality. Michael Craig is a very clever former lawyer. He was born in Michigan in 1958, went to the state university, and in his first week there he met Jo Anne with whom he has been ever since. They got married after he got his history degree and he went to law school. In Chicago he and a partner started a law firm under-taking plaintiffs’ class actions; they began with no money, using someone else’s offices, borrowing equipment, but quickly built up a highly profitable highly rated litigation practice firm largely thanks to the use of two pieces of computer software they used on their one computer; one was a data base programme called Q and A that could be used to log all the exhibits, and the other was the then young programme Microsoft Word. (Many years later after he had moved west and taken up poker he actually met the principal software writers – no other than Barry Greenstein and one of the contributors to the Full Tilt book, Richard Brodie.) By the 1990’s, now a multi-millionaire, he decided that it was time for a lifestyle change. So the family (they had three children by now) moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he has an imaginatively designed house and also a condo where he sometimes goes to write. He played a bit of golf but also took up poker and began driving to Las Vegas to play on the fringes. He has since made that six-hour journey hundreds of times. He probably now has as sound a technical grasp of the game as anyone. But he says “I believe you have to keep learning in poker. I think I’m reaching the part of my education where most of the lessons are about temperament. Things like honestly evaluating my play when I’m losing, focusing on decisions over results, steering clear of being angry when bad players and bad plays succeed, reminding myself that I am playing for ME and not critics on the rail or players who do better than me or to prove my ability to anyone else….these are hard lessons and contrary to human nature.” It is this not-stop self-analysis and revelation that make him my favourite blogger. I recommend him. If little else, he’ll put your own problems in perspective. Neil Channing – the day the bad beats stopped “When I was a kid I wanted to be a ticket tout. That was just about my only ambition apart from on-course bookmaker or actor. I kept this a secret from the careers advisor …it didn’t seem as respectable as the other two.” “Anyone with the wealth of experience that I have couldn’t possibly get themselves into trouble on a week like this unless they were a complete moron… I did my bollocks.” “I told Sky TV that tournament poker is all about pain, misery, suffering, dashed hopes, anti-climax and stupid, stupid luck. I’m off to Blackpool this week to get some more of it.” “I’m playing in Cardiff and we’re having a lot of fun. Roland (de Wolfe) and Joe (Beevers) are talking about major events they’ve won. ‘What is the biggest title you have won Neil,’ Roland asks me. I had to point out that the tournaments I’ve won don’t really have titles apart from ‘the Tuesday comp’ or the ’30 quid re-buy’. How we laughed.” Well, no-one is a laughing any more. Because , Neil ‘Bad Beat’ Channing, who wrote the above in the revealing and self-deprecating diary he posts on the Hendon Mob website, now has a title…2008 Irish Open champion, a title worth $1,250,000 (plus another $100,000 in bets on himself) and won in Dublin at Easter with a commanding performance that wiped out a field of 667, including Doyle and Todd Brunson, Andy Black, last year’s winner Marty Smyth, Roland de Wolfe, Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott, Padraig Parkinson, Liam Flood, and a host of other top British and Irish poker stars. Some of us had seen it coming. We knew he had developed over the past three or four years into one of the country’s top cash game players. We knew he had cashed in the World Series main event three times (131st last year out of 6,358 competitors, winning $58,570) and you have to be able to play to do that. But we had particularly noticed his form over the past few months, including in a period of 14 days his final table appearance at the climax of the Great British Poker Tour and three final tables on the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour, including a win on home territory – at the Vic. Neil, we said to each other, is on the verge of the big one. So, his Irish Open win was well-deserved, yes…but also hugely popular. The poker world was smiling the week Neil won. And the following Friday the Vic card room was temporarily deserted as its most familiar names, from the veterans Charalambos ‘Bambos’ Xanthos and Willie Tann, to the young guns, Roland de Wolfe and Praz Bansi, crowded into an Italian restaurant Neil hired for the night to celebrate. Everyone was saying the same three things. (l) It could not have happened to a nicer bloke. (2) For a player of his quality it was overdue. (3) There was more to come. Bambo was one who had seen it coming: “I’ve watched his game improve hugely over the past three or four years; he is highly intelligent and he plays an intelligent game.” Barny Boatman had also seen it coming: “He’s been a very, very good cash player for a long time. He is an aggressive and fabulously instinctive cash player. In my view he had been tightening up too much in tournaments, but now he’s got it right… he’s pulled his tournament game out of the bag.” Roland de Wolfe, whose emergence as a star has been as spectacular as Neil’s has been steady, had seen it coming too: “He’s been knocking at the door for a long time and in Dublin he finally used his experience to get over the line…I don’t think there’s any tournament in the world where he can’t make it happen now.” So, a tough, thoughtful poker player, yes. But Neil is also an entertainer. To start with, he is probably the most talkative of all British poker’s better-known players. You can’t stop him. When I called him to fix an interview, it took him as long to explain he didn’t have time to do it there and then as it would have taken to do the actual interview ! Fortunately he is never boring. If the Neil is at the table, there’s lots of good-natured banter. You can walk into a card room with your eyes shut and know where he’s playing by the sound of laughter. If he’s not playing, he’s always surrounded by others, often younger players, seeking advice, borrowing money…Neil is a bit of a soft touch for kids on a bad streak. Sometimes he is playing in events where six or seven of those around him are playing with his money. But, of course, his amiability and his generosity are the reason why he is one of poker’s most loved characters. However, and it’s a big however, don’t let this lead you astray. This is also a ruthless poker player. He has that Chip Reese quality of making players feel comfortable while he takes their money. His oldest friend Keith ‘The Camel’ Hawkins says “he has the gift of making people feel relaxed in the game – and even relaxed about losing their money. And he’s good at putting people on tilt without them realising they’re on tilt.” Neil has no qualms about this: “Look, when I’m at the Vic, I’m there to earn my living. That’s how I live – by poker. Anyone who comes into the Vic should know that it is the toughest poker room in the world; they shouldn’t be there unless they either believe they have a chance of holding their own or, alternatively, they’re ready to lose their money.” In my book “Swimming with the Devilfish” I wrote this: “At their worst…the cash game professionals can be exploitive and ruthless predators, seeking out and preying on the weak, enticing them into the game, with only one thing in mind – to strip them bare, of money, usually of dignity too. They don’t care what damage they’re inflicting; their defence is that if they don’t get you, you will get them, except you rarely stand a chance. There’s no middle ground. They’re without mercy….you came, you had money, you took them on – it’s not for them to reason how, who or why. But they will argue that this is, after all, their world. They pay the dues in downs as well as ups, they take the risks, not once a week or once a year, but every day. It’s their place – enter it at your peril.” Neil would subscribe to that unapologetically. And the Vic is Neil’s place. Boyish-looking, wearing what have become his trademark wire-framed glasses, usually wearing the same jumper he has worn for the past seven days, he turns up a little later than most of the regulars and, while waiting for a seat, spends time wandering around, talking to Jeff Leigh and the staff who are more like his family, or exchanging recent experiences with others… talking, talking, always talking. They’re a colourful, albeit cynical crowd at the Vic, often playing each other while waiting for their victims to arrive. As Neil once wrote, “one of my favourite scenes in the film ‘Rounders’ is where the New York crowd all end up on the same table in Atlantic City, playing each other on a holiday weekend, while waiting for the fish to turn up. It’s been a bit like that at the Vic lately… you know things are getting bad when the cannibals start eating each other.” Typical of the place is this Neil story: “A while back we had a rather confident young guy sit in the Vic game one afternoon. He seemed to handle his cards and chips with experience. He won a few pots…he was also able to analyse and critique the plays by various people. Nothing was said, but we all knew. We looked round the table and we knew. None of us really liked the cocky so-and-so, but it was ok, as we were going to send him home skint. Up to this point no-one had spoken to him. It was Frank who broke the silence. “Where are you from son ? “Blackpool,” was the reply. Frank paused for a second before slowly and definitely declaring: “I feel sorry for you son. That is, without doubt, the biggest piss hole on the planet. I went there once. Eight quid for bed and breakfast. What a place.” “The kid didn’t reply…after a while he did his money and left. We never saw him again.” Once in the big game (and the games have got big at the Vic over the past year or so), Neil is usually winning (he is rumoured to take between £100,000 and £150,000 out of the Vic every year), and he is winning by concentrating on the weaker players. He admits it: “I try to avoid confrontations with the guys who know what they’re doing. I try to isolate the weaker players. Get heads-up with them.” I have experienced all of this: when I was writing my first poker book I decided I had to actually play with the pro’s to understand their world. How they loved me, no-one more than Neil who one night took me apart at the Vic. Yet we became friends; that is his special talent. While his capacity for friendship has its professional virtues, his many friends have been won by countless little acts of goodwill and generosity. For instance, one night during the World Series, Neil and I went to play in the 7 pm tournament in Caesar’s Palace. For once Neil was knocked out quickly but I survived and flourished and for time it looked as if I was about to win my first tournament. Neil had a wide range of options: hundreds and hundreds of poker games all over town, scores of terrific restaurants, and all the fun of the non-stop fiesta that is Las Vegas. Instead he stayed with me for four hours, advising and encouraging me in the breaks and providing me with the company I needed in a room-full of sharks and strangers. He didn’t have to do that, but he did, and I loved him for it. There are contradictions in Neil Channing. He is both ruthless exploiter and good-natured and generous friend. He is funny and great company but can be moody and capable of depression…or as he put it in his diary, “filled with gloom and despondency – totally overwhelmed by melancholia.” And he is an instinctive, life-long gambler but not a sick gambler; there’s control there too. Just how he became a gambler is a mystery. It does not come from his parents. His mother was an English teacher and his father a milkman who worked hard enough to end up as marketing director of the company before retiring to run a pub and finally, with the whole family, take over a small farm in Devon. Neil went to a school near Ascot racecourse and it was there he met his friend Keith Hawkins, himself now one of the best poker players in the country. By the time they were 11, Keith and he were the school bookmakers, taking bets on the Grand National but also on school sports and inter-house football. The two of them became committed gamblers before Neil left school to attend the City of London Polytechnic where he picked up a degree in economics. But he had just one dream: to be a bookmaker. Not just any bookmaker, but THE bookmaker, King of the bookmakers. In those days you had to pay a fortune to buy a pitch on a racecourse, £35,000 for the flat season and £20,000 for the jumping season, but such was Neil’s skill that with a partner he built up hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of these and was making a small fortune. Once his father told him that he was being offered a prohibitive rate to borrow £50,000 for his business. Neil said: “Why didn’t you ask me ?” His father was amazed: “You have £50,000 to spare ?” Neil replied: “I’ve got more than that in a drawer by my bed.” Then disaster struck: the on-course book making business ran into trouble almost overnight. Betting in High Street shops was no longer to be taxed. Races were now televised and punters could watch them at home, placing their bets by phone. Or they could bet on the internet. Neil had invested about £300,000 of borrowings and gambling winnings on pitches that were now worth about £30,000. He went broke, borrowed, lost more and before he knew what was happening to him he had gone from having about £600,000 lying around the place to being £360,000 in the red. He was saved by Kelvin Richardson, one of the country’s biggest gamblers, who had faith in the boyish-looking, usually cheerful, but now deeply-depressed ex-racecourse bookmaker, and put £10,000 in a betting account for him and told him if he needed more, it would be there. Neil was at it every day; dogs, horses, football …if it moved he had money on it. He began winning big-time. Sometimes he would have as much as £120,000 out there in as many as 100 bets. He even hired someone to help him place the bets, the pace was so hectic. All the money went into repaying his debts. . But then a second disaster struck. With £120,000 still to pay off he became seriously ill, lost four stone, and nearly died. By the time he had more-or-less recovered he had decided to sideline most of his sports betting and other gambling and concentrate on poker. He began going to the Vic every day. Over the last six months he has finally paid off all his debts and begun to look like a man with serious money in the bank. Most of it comes from the cash games at the Vic. But his tournament winnings have been picking up for some time, and he has been helped by the backing of Poker Verdict, his sponsor. The Irish Open is one of the most enjoyable events on the poker calendar. All the old Irish names were there this year, including all three of those who made it to the final table of the World series main event in 1999 – Noel Furlong, George McKeever, and Padraig Parkinson – plus a smattering of top English players. Early on the penultimate night Neil was low in chips, but then he dramatically turned it round and by the end of play was set to take a huge chip lead to the final table. No-one doubted he had the ability and experience to take that lead to the finishing line, and he duely did, beating the young Irish player Donal Norton in the heads-up. The word quickly spread through the British poker world and it is not exaggerating to say there was widespread rejoicing. One of the game’s most popular characters had done what we all knew he could do. But what lies ahead . Undoubtedly his dreams are concentrated on Las Vegas, the Rio, and the World Series. Neil has been a familiar figure in Las Vegas for nearly half his life, usually staying at the cheap and cheerful Gold Rush (though recently more likely at the Wynn where he trades a good deal with the hotel for guaranteed hours in the poker room). “The first games I played in the early days were $4-8 limit hold’em at the Horseshoe and a win of $100 would be a terrific result. I remember playing Telly Savalas in that game and, even more memorably, stepping up to the $10-$20 game to take a shot at an elderly Johnny Moss. He was definitely past his prime but I was proud to hold my own. My first WSOP was 1997 and I was pleased to see Stu Ungar play the final table in Fremont Street.” As I’ve said, Neil has already cashed in the World Series main event three times. He has the patience, the intellect, and the skill to go further. He knew that before gaining the added confidence that comes with a major win. When he was knocked out within sight of the final table at the Rio last year he was deeply disappointed. “I’ve often thought that people who say the bracelet means more than money are full of shit,” he wrote in his diary. “I don’t think that way anymore. On Day Four of this main event. I played thinking only of the bracelet and with a complete disregard for the money. I don’t even know that I even want $8.25 million, and the $58,700 I won seemed scant compensation for the emotion and energy I’d invested.” You don’t get disappointed at getting so close and winning over $50,000 in the main event unless in your heart you know you can do even better. So they won’t be laughing when he comes to their table in the main event this year. Because this is a man with more than a World Series track record – this is now a man with a title. And a man with a philosophy. In a recent diary he wrote: “I was feeling burnt out; I wasn’t really enjoying it. ..was 300 days a year at the Vic for the next 30 years all I had to look forward to?...Luckily, I snapped out of it, realising that my angst and melancholy were just self-absorbed pity. My problems are fairly minor really. I have a good life, the freedom to do what I want and go where I want, whenever I want. I have lovely friends who care for me, and a family I don’t see enough of. Certainly all of these things are more important than any amount of money.” New Statesman 2005 Earlier this year the outspoken former England spin bowler, now chairman of Middlesex cricket, Phil Edmonds, attended his first meeting of the England and Wales Cricket Board (the ECB). On the planned tour to Zimbabwe, he was uncompromising. It should be "cancelled forthwith". The Board was "obsessed with money"; it was time to make a moral stand. One Board member, he said, "sounded like a Nazi". It was gloriously over the top, but welcome to me, at that time one of the few Board members openly opposed to the tour. I looked forward to Phil's support when the debate was renewed at the following meeting. As I entered the gates of Lord's for that meeting I saw Phil climbing into a car and disappearing at speed in the opposite direction. At the meeting all was explained: Phil had discovered a business interest in Zimbabwe and was, therefore, withdrawing from the Board until the Zimbabwe matter was resolved. I haven't seen him since. The ease with which he was dispatched - or dispatched himself - intensified my fear that the ECB was now hell-bent on repeating the debacle of England's World Cup campaign a year earlier, when the players forced the Board to cancel the Zimbabwe fixture after days of chaos and confusion. Three factors contributed to that fiasco. First, ever since it kept trying to play South Africa in the apartheid era, English cricket had never moved from mindless adherence to the doctrine that "there's no place for politics in sport". Yet - and this is the second factor - the International Cricket Council (the ICC) is in fact riven with politics, much of it motivated by dislike of England. Concerns about Zimbabwe were interpreted as reflecting old Colonial attitudes and superiorities. Rather than being sympathetic to England's difficulties, some countries could barely-disguise their glee. Third, English cricket had become totally dependent upon its earnings from international cricket. Without that money most of the 18 counties would be bankrupt. Without a moral dimension to their thinking, those who ran English cricket allowed money to dictate every decision. When I joined the Board I was asked to advise it on the "Zimbabwe problem" and to explore ways whereby the tour could be avoided without too high a price, financial and diplomatic. I believed it could be - and stlll believe it could have - but it called for a principled stand by both the ECB and the Foreign Office. Alas, that was beyond them both. The strategy had two parts, one dependent on Jack Straw. While the ICC rules did not allow tours to be cancelled on "political or moral considerations", it did allow force majeure. This mean't a tour could be cancelled if the Government issued a clear instruction to that effect. It was, therefore, vital that we received from the Foreign Secretary, if not a firm instruction, at least powerful advice that could be interpreted as one. Second, the ECB needed what it had lacked for over 30 years, an intellectual and moral basis for taking decisions on controversial tours. The plan was to publish a "framework paper" and then a follow-up paper applying its principles and policy to the Zimbabwe tour. This we hoped would win support from politicians, the public, and cricket's stakeholders and give the ECB the moral high ground. For that reason we were particularly keen to publish it before any Straw intervention so that we didn't appear to be forced to do the right thing. The framework paper argued that "to seek to isolate sport as an activity that stands alone in human affairs, untouched by 'politics' or 'moral considerations' and unconcerned for the fate of those deprived of human rights, is as unrealistic as it is (self-destructively) self-serving…" It identified five factors that could lead to abandoning a tour: a threat to the safety and security of the players, impacts on the integrity of a tour (racism, or restrictions of freedom of expression), relationship with British foreign policy, the views of stakeholders, and moral considerations - in particular, whether the tour would give succour to a despotic dictator. At every point in preparing the paper and the strategy I worked closely with the two men who had involved me in the first place - ECB chairman David Morgan and the then chief executive Tim Lamb. Assuring me that they both believed a majority of the Board were opposed to the tour, they not only contributed to, and approved the framework paper, but also approved the date and the manner chosen for its release. So, with work on the papers under way, I approached Jack Straw's office. Since the UK had been instrumental in forcing Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth and had been pressing both the EU and \iMF to impose punitive sanctions, we were optimistic, and were at first encouraged. We were "all on the same side"; the FO would do "all in its power to help". While it would not actually instruct the ECB not to tour - Straw didn't want to set a precedent and was afraid of having to pay financial compensation - it was sympathetic to an alternative idea: the ECB would ask for advice, and Straw would reply offering the "strongest possible" advice not to go. Hopefully we could convince the ICC that this was the nearest to an instruction you could achieve in a democracy. Then I was shown a draft of his letter. It was pitiful. Far from offering the "strongest possible" advice, it offered no advice at all. All it did was spell out what we all knew about the horrors of the Mugabe regime and stated that the UK was taking "a leading role" in mobilising international pressure for change. All I could achieve was a concluding sentence. Following the claim that the UK was "taking a leading role" internationally, it would say: "You may wish to consider whether a high profile England cricket tour at this time is consistent with that approach." This sentence was in all honesty small consolation, for while the media could possibly be persuaded to read it as advising the ECB not to go, there was no chance the ICC would. Subsequently Straw was repeatedly pressed to take a stronger line, especially in answer to Commons, but while he made his disapproval of the tour clear, he wouldn't do so. When push came to shove, the Foreign Secretary was not going to help. He didn't have the power, he said, to order sportsmen and women around, even when they were begging to be so-ordered…this from a Government that had no problem finding powers to invade Iraq ! This was not the limit of Straw's betrayal. The plan called for careful timing, with the publication of the letters in February, but, in January, Straw, under pressure from the Conservative Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram, found it politically expedient to publish the exchange early. What began as a plan to help the ECB was now to be used to help Straw. His office were indifferent to our protests. This led to the inevitable mistakes that accompany haste, including a bad one by me - the publication of the paper before all of the Board had an opportunity to see it. This error played into the hands of the pro-tour element on the Board who were able to claim they were being unfairly pressured. The result was a row about process instead of a calm debate about the actual paper. Under the same pressure. Morgan also made a bad mistake, taking the paper, prepared for an English audience, and personally delivering it to the ICC whose members went ballistic. International pressure on the ECB included a letter from the Zimbabwe Cricket Union's chairman to every county with warnings of heavy financial penalties and other punitive action aimed at the English game. Morgan was now under pressure from two directions, internationally and domestically, with the vulnerability of a game so dependent on test match cricket was now only too apparent. Rod Bransgrove, self-made multi-millionaire and chairman of Hampshire, a county with a huge vested interest in maintaining relationships with the ICC because its Rose Bowl was about to achieve international status, hosting ICC Champion Trophy games later in the year, tried to isolate me within the Board, circulating a memo accusing me of deliberately forcing the Board into a corner (all this was, of course, ignoring Morgan and Lamb's involvement.) Then at a pre-Board dinner he brutally accused me of "doing the whole thing for personal publicity." I said that if these charges were fair then I was unfit for office and challenged him to move a vote of censure the next day. Instead, when the time came, he sat, silent , while a resolution was recorded accepting that I had acted in good faith. Undeterred by further Bransgrove attacks, I now tabled the tabled the followup paper, in the form of a lengthy letter to Morgan. It argued that the tour could only strengthen Mugabe's appalling regime by allowing Mugabe to claim international respectability; that it would undermine our country's foreign policy in the region; that it would be contrary to the wishes of the game's stakeholders and deeply damaging to the image of cricket in the UK; and that it was just plain morally wrong to play cricket on an oasis within a country suffering from such repression and hunger. Alas, to Morgan and his first class county constituency this was now all irrelevant. Morgan had by now abandoned the original strategy, partly under the influence of the Bransgrove element, but mainly because of the pressures from overseas. Never-the-less he did go to Auckland and make the force majeure case to the ICC. The ICC now makes much of the fact that Morgan didn't argue the moral case there, but it was understandable; even I accepted that moral arguments were wasted on men without a moral bone in their bodies. The Straw letter, when added to letters from the other political parties, and the position of the Commonwealth, was our only hope. Some hope ! The ICC dismissed it out of hand. The evening before the meeting Morgan and Bob Merriman, head of Australian cricket, and their wives had a jolly dinner together. Morgan found this encouraging. Yet the following day it was same Merriman who took up the attack, raising the stakes even further by proposing an additional penalty for abandoning a tour - suspension of the offending country from the international game. Morgan was aghast; suspension could cost England tens of millions if enforced for just one season. And inevitably, when he reported back, the English game was panic-stricken. In vain, some argued the ICC would never do it. Others argued that it would never survive legal challenge. But were Morgan and the ECB Board to be blamed for running scared ? I don't think so. A malign and morally-bankrupt ICC, an organisation that could insist on ruling out moral considerations from the game's deliberations and back that up with draconian measures, was capable of almost any injustice. The ICC's role in this affair has been unforgiveable. England's case should have been sympathetically listened to, its difficulties as the founder member of the cricketing family recognised, and some compromise - a postponement with financial compensation for Zimbabwe cricket - properly negotiated. There refusal to even consider moral issues is beyond belief - a least until you meet them. I still shudder at the memory of being introduced to the head of West Indies cricket in Barbados - "Ah," he sneered, "so this is Mr Morality !" I told him he should look the word up in a dictionary; it could widen his horizons. Morgan, who loves socialising at cricket's top table, hated the atmosphere and hostility he experienced in Auckland. Now, with the Board being told it had to consider its fiduciary responsibilities, and the counties who put him in post worried about their share of the test match money, Morgan committed himself wholeheartedly to the tour (and has stuck rigidly to his guns ever since). Realising that I had lost the battle, and desperate to try to save the game from the fury I knew this would engender, I suggested a compromise to the Management Board …a tour under protest. "Let's make clear we've been blackmailed into the tour by the threat of bankruptcy," I argued, "let's place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the ICC, and then do the minimum necessary to meet our contractual obligations. Let's publicly advise supporters not to travel. Let the team wear plain whites, no ECB logo. Let the team go out into the community and be pictured talking to the hungry and the oppressed." But the will was not there. It was to be business as usual. So, only about a year after joining the Board, I resigned. (Contrary to Bransgrove's claims about my hunger for publicity, I turned down over 100 requests for radio and tv interviews, doing one radio interview only.) Straw's betrayal of our earlier endeavours was even now not complete. He and culture secretary Tessa Jowell hosted an appalling press conference to acknowledge that the ECB was in an impossible situation and give the tour his blessing. Then he sat benignly by while Morgan said the ECB accepted it should not allow "moral considerations" to influence its decisions. (Morgan strengthened his stand last week, saying "Our business, our trade is cricket. If we want to trade in international cricket, then we have to do so by the rules of the ICC. Its crystal clear that members of the ICC are not permitted to pull out of tours for political or moral reasons.") The rest is history. Assuming it survives this week without further disaster, it will be the ECB's hope that memories of this scandalous tour will quickly fade. It will have "toughed it out." What it has actually done is diminished the game. Let down by a weak Foreign Secretary, betrayed by the international cricket family, dominated by the financial vested interests of the first class counties, it responded with cowardice and indifference to the fate of others or for the feelings and views of its fellow citizens. Morgan says he hopes the tour will end a "running sore" but it won't, because the sore of Zimbabwe is actually only the symptom of a deeper disease - a moral vacuum at the heart of the game - that unless eradicated will ultimately kill it. How wise were the words of C.L.R.James: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know ?" John Reid Oamaru on the South Island of New Zealand is base camp for a farming community. Fifty years back, In 1955, it had no pubs; the sale of alcohol was prohibited. You "dined out" at the local pie cart. There was an "Opera House", a milk bar, and a weekly dance. There were four cricket clubs, none of them able to guarantee 11 players every Saturday afternoon. And there was John Reid, who, had he played for one of the Ashes countries, would now be a cricketing legend. When Shell appointed him its local manager, the New Zealand captain could have chosen to drive to the nearest city to play more appropriately competitive cricket. Instead he joined the worst of the four Oamaru clubs. He practised on an uneven concrete wicket on the local park and on Saturdays faced players unable to challenge the power of his batting and the pace of his bowling. To appreciate Reid's achievements you have to imagine Botham with no Somerset or Worcestershire to play for, only the village team on a Saturday afternoon, unpaid and with no commercial contracts, with no proper practice wickets and minimal first class cricket, much of that mediocre, combining the captaincy of his country with running a local Shell depot, and, finally, having no world class team mates to share the burden of his country's reputation, so that, for years Reid stood alone between New Zealand cricket and humiliation. Neville Cardus once described Reid as "a club cricketer in excelsis" and that's what he was: a club cricketer who from time to time slipped away to do what club cricketers dream of. His greatness is not fully reflected by the statistics, impressive as they are: he averaged over 40 in 246 first class games and took 466 wickets, and played in 58 tests averaging 33 and taking 85 wickets. What those figures don't reveal is how many momentous performances were produced in desperate circumstances or when he was virtually without support (in 1951, for instance, he scored a century for Wellington while the remaining 10 players contributed 39 between them.) Like Botham (and Keith Miller), Reid habitually scored runs when they were most needed and took wickets or a blinding catch at just the right time. He was that kind of cricketer - an aggressive all-rounder who made things happen. The best of all NZ cricket writers RT Brittenden wrote that Reid was "never more dangerous than when his back was to the wall, he breathed life into a game by his very presence." Shortly after he came to Oamaru, I was one of a handful who gathered one Saturday morning to bowl at him so that he could prepare for the New Zealand tour of India and Pakistan. As he politely and sensitively patted back this 14-year-old's innocuous slow medium-pacers he must have wondered how on earth this could be described as "preparing." Yet in the first match of that tour, in Karachi, coming from the chill of a South island winter to steamy heat, he took for 7 for 28 and then scored 150 not out. It was a difficult tour, yet he hit 1024 runs, averaging more than 50, and took 39 wickets. He made 493 runs, averaging 70, in the tests. The following year, while still in Oamaru, he led New Zealand to its first-ever test win - over the West Indies in Auckland in 1956. What a moment that was for Kiwi cricket. Reid performed well on his first two England tours. He was 21 when he was chosen to tour England as a reserve wicket-keeper in 1949. He scored nearly 1,500 runs and forced his way into the test team; he scored another 1500 on the 1958 tour. But his best performances were reserved for South Africa, especially 1961-62, when he led the team to two away test wins and hit seven tour centuries in nine innings, two in tests, topping the tour batting and bowling averages. For 10 years he carried the burden of leading a sub standard test team. When he eventually retired he had played in 58 of the 86 tests New Zealand had played in its entire history and led it in 36 of them. Sprinkled throughout that time there are some particularly memorable Plunkett Shield moments: in 1952 he hit 283 for Wellington including a century before lunch; in 1957-58 there was an innings of 201 with five 6's and 22 four's; In l958-59, having taken 7 for 38, he it 191 not out of the 330 required in 277 for Wellington to beat Canterbury; and in 1962-63 struck a stunning 296 with a world record 15 sixes against Northern Districts. His acceptance without complaint of the burdens thrust upon him, his modesty, his courage and his skill built the foundations that Hadlee, Crowe, Turner and others were later to build upon. Now in his 70's, having been for a while a respected international referee, he lives quietly on the North island. Does he ever wonder what he could have achieved at a different time or in a different place ? The answer must be much more. But thank God for New Zealand cricket that John Reid was a New Zealander. One last memory of John Reid: as he walked without celebrity down the main street of Oamaru, a 14-year-old approached him with a piece of paper containing his "selection" of the New Zealand team for an upcoming test. Reid solemnly studied it and made one or two comments, before assuring the boy his suggestions would be fully considered by he and the other selectors. I have never forgotten the thrill of that moment. And I for one will never forget John Reid. John Reid Review The scowl behind the smile - Cyril Smith, political monster by Des Wilson * The book 'Smile for the Camera' compellingly and convincingly exposes the late Cyril Smith, for more than 20 years the MP for Rochdale, as a serial sexual abuser of small boys. And it contains further damning evidence that those in power in this country - whether it be in politics , the church, the police, or the BBC - have until recently - and possibly still - been only too willing to turn a blind eye, or even deliberately cover up, any scandal that affects one of their own. What the book does less well is show that Smith was more than a sexual monster - he was a political monster too, licensed to bully and bluster by a weakly-led and self-serving parliamentary party that in the 1980s reached rock bottom in Liberal history (and, coming after the Thorpe murder trial years, that is saying something). The current Liberal leader and deputy Prime Minister's letter to Smith on his 80th birthday...a letter as naive as it was enthusiastic...was unintentionally ironic: 'You were a beacon for our party in the 1970s and 1980s,' it said - and he was too, but only by the dictionary definition of beacon... 'a warning of danger'...because Smith will stand forever as a warning of what can happen if you allow a parliamentary party to lose its moral compass and descend to the depths of the one led by David Steel at that time. These MPs I observed closely, because I was not only at the centre of the party in the country at that time but, for a crucial General Election year, the party's President, allowed to attend the weekly parliamentary party meetings. In their innocence, party members may have assumed these meetings on Wednesday evenings throbbed with passionate political debate as the issues of the day were hammered out by men whose lives were devoted to the common good. Instead, week after week, I listened with mounting dismay and recoiled at the spectacle of this self-serving, self-pitying bunch (with, I should emphatically add, half a dozen honourable exceptions, MPs like Archy Kirkwood, Alan Beith, and Matthew Taylor), spending an hour or more whining and whinging as parliamentary chores were handed out, and endlessly complaining about the behaviour of the party's so-called 'activists' , i.e. members whose hard work and sacrifices helped them win their seats. The 'activists', committed to a campaigning party, looked to the parliamentary party for leadership and action. By concentrating on a few activities, they argued, and using all of the opportunities the House provided, the MPs could have more effectively promoted Liberal causes and been a constant thorn in the side of the two old parties. But that assumed that the MPs saw themselves as the frontline force of a campaigning party, whereas they were a semi-detached pack, disloyal and disunited, self-regarding and self-seeking promoters of their own cause. That cause was simple: their own re-election. On those Wednesday evenings there was minimal discussion of policy, and when there was, decisions were taken almost entirely on the basis of members' constituency interests. I never left those meetings without a sense of shame. Week after week I went home thinking 'thank God, the rest of the party don't see this lot in action.' To understand all this fully you need to appreciate that for decades the party had survived with only a handful of MPs, at one point the whole parliamentary party being packed into a London taxi. Slowly in the Eighties it increased to nearly 20 members. Most were elected at by-elections, and many represented faraway corners of the country, from the very north to the very south. They were not even necessarily the best candidates to be MPs. After all, some were selected in circumstances where beggars couldn't be choosers...the only one's able and willing to give the time in unlikely circumstances. Then they struck it lucky: they were, after all, in the right place at the right time because the sitting MP died between General Elections and the locals were itching to cast a protest vote. For instance, while I never became an MP, I did fight a famous by-election; my selection meeting consisted of three people, all under 25: a student who the following day left for university and disappeared from the constituency forever; a woman who was on the point of moving to South Africa, and soon did; she also left forever. That left a young unemployed man who was the only one who remained for the campaign. That was it. That was the local party. When the by-election was called it had a hapless candidate and ONE member before the outside troops came in. Once elected, the MPs had only one thing in common - a desperate desire to hold their seats at all costs. Policies were decided at parliamentary meetings entirely on the basis of what would help an MP in his individual constituency. There was no sense of idealism, of political mission or purpose, other than the pursuit of their own objectives. It did not help that because there were so few MPs, they tended to be lionised by the membership as a whole. In a party desperate for success, packed with frustrated members who dreamed of becoming MPs themselves one day, these were the few who had 'made it'. To the ambitious, the dreamers of political power and glory, these MPs represented hope. Thus they were pursued as speakers for constituency dinners and conference fringe meetings. They were treated as celebrities. Their views were given disproportionate respect. They never had to buy a drink at the bar. They were huge fish in the smallest of ponds...and it all went to their heads. Those who, like myself, saw this from the inside hoped that at least David Steel, who as a youthful MP had come to Westminster with genuine idealism and no little courage, would pull them together into some kind of effective parliamentary force, but Steel's idealism had itself been eroded by too many years as a party manipulator, first as Chief Whip then leader. He too had lost all concern for the actual issues (this most dramatically in the famous 'Dead Parrot' policy document that nearly derailed the merger with the Social Democrats, published with devastating repercussions because he had not bothered to even read it.) He loved playing the leader, meeting and greeting new Ambassadors, carrying a wreath at the Cenotaph, making the Leaders' speech at conference where he dined nightly with journalists but otherwise hid away in his hotel room, keeping well away from ordinary party members. By the time I became President he had lost any real connection with the party workers. In London, his office became known as the 'bunker'. (This non-relationship with the members who were the heart and soul of the party was the real reason why he could not become leader of the newly-formed Liberal Democrats in the late 1980's...it was the reason I, as party President, and others, had to advise him not to stand - he simply would not be elected, so unpopular and isolated had he become.) Steel's one remaining strength was his belief in the creation of a larger political force by merger with social democrats in the Labour Party. The formation of the Liberal Democrats was, above all, his achievement and a considerable one. But as Liberal leader he hated confrontation; that's why he didn't force his parliamentary party to come to the campaigning plate - and why he didn't want to hear about the nocturnal behaviour of some of those round that table, because, devoid of any need to actually 'campaign' for worthwhile causes (heavens, they hated the word 'campaign') they had plenty of time for extra-mural activities. And herein lies part of the answer to the question: 'why was Smith not questioned about the rumours beginning to emerge from his political fortress of Rochdale. ...rumours that at the time were publicly referred to in Private Eye ? The truth is that, apart from the fact that no-one would have had the courage to confront the Rochdale bully, at least 20 per cent of the parliamentary party at that time had a guilty secret of one sort or another; they had no desire for questions to be raised about what MPs did in their ample spare time. Smith was protected as much by the culture within the parliamentary party as Saville was by the culture within the BBC. Oh, I remember them all. There was the MP who virtually sustained the whole Scotch whisky industry on his own. If you lit a match too close to his breath you could have made Guy Fawkes Night look like a back-garden barbecue. Many a bar would have been bankrupted without his presence. As for affairs, Paddy Ashdown was not the only member of the parliamentary party whose secretary was valued for more than her typing skills. Then there was the local party leader who had to be woken from his bed on many a Friday and Saturday night to attend a local police station and rescue his MP from trouble after he had been picked up in one dubious circumstance or another. This MP once asked me to travel for three hours or more to speak to his local party one Friday evening; when I arrived at his house he was just welcoming two attractive 'boys' who had also travelled from London on the same train. My reward for devoting an evening to helping him was to be put in a taxi and sent to the meeting without even the offer of dinner while the MP headed off to some dodgy backstreet club with his much younger friends. And, then, there was Cyril Smith. 'Smile for the Camera' deals devastatingly with the behaviour of Smith as an evil sexual predator who somehow survived over 140 complaints to the police (how could that possibly happen ?) but he was a political monster too. You could not deny his skills - he was a charismatic public speaker, a consummate television performer, a skilled glad-hander. So effective was his manufactured persona that the Liberal News took to describing him as 'big hearted Cyril' and party members cheered him whenever he appeared on the conference platform. Good old, loveable, speak-my-mind, call-a-spade-a-spade, man-of-the-people, salt-of-the-earth Cyril. Except he wasn't. He was a viciously mean bully, his every action and decision predicated on what was good for him. He may have greeted the world with a smile and but all he offered the Wednesday night meetings was a scowl. He used his grotesque physical size as a form of intimidation. I was once walking down a hotel corridor and found myself faced with Cyril and his equally grotesquely huge brother Norman walking towards me side by side, not an inch between them. So enormous were they that they cast a shadow over the corridor. The only way past was to squeeze between them. Having recently had a set-to with Smith, I literally felt a chill run down my spine as I envisaged myself being crushed by two steam-rollers who, glancing menacingly at each other, clearly had no intention of enabling me to pass. Not easily intimidated, I'm ashamed to say I turned and fled. As I've said, by now word was beginning to reach London of the goings-on in his constituency (after all the Private Eye hints were there for all to take), but who was going to raise it with him ? Steel just didn't want to know. The chief whip, a sanctimonious little creep called David Alton, whose parliamentary career later self-destructed, was Smith's only genuine friend, and would never have challenged the giant thug. Was there a deliberate, cynical cover-up by the Liberal leadership ? I am a believer in the cock-up theory of politics rather than the conspiracy one. There were two questions: (1) Should Smith be confronted with the rumours ? I doubt anyone had the appetite for that. Personally it was a frightening prospect. (2) Should there be a formal inquiry ? Coming so soon after the Jeremy Thorpe fiasco, politically it was potentially catastrophic. So I think what happened was that they got the biggest spade they could find, dug the biggest hole in the sand they could manage, and buried their collective heads in it, hoping the rumours were unfounded or that it would all go away. In other words, it was cowardice rather than conspiracy. By now parliamentary party meetings were dominated by Smith who had a permanent grievance that he was under-valued as a national campaigner and complete confidence that he, and he alone, was the voice of the man in the street. His main political tactic whenever his gargantuan ego was pricked (as it was only too easily) was the threat of public dissent or resignation. Of course it would never be accepted; he correctly judged that in such a small parliamentary party the resignation of someone of his celebrity would be seriously damaging. He and the disloyalty and constant carping of some of the other petty, whinging members of that particular parliamentary party so drove Steel to distraction that at one point he privately announced he was resigning as leader and had to be persuaded to draw back from the decision. Smith, who yearned to be leader, in 1983 disrupted the party conference complaining he had not been effectively involved in the General Election. He proposed a deputy leader be appointed (this, obviously was to be him) and when this was rejected he picked up his ball and went home, saying he would no longer play a full part within the parliamentary party and would not take a policy portfolio. He sulked for three years, threatening also not to stand for Rochdale at the 1987 election. Steel eventually caved in, one of the promises being that Smith would have his own 15 minute slot at the 1986 conference. I had my own experience of Smith when I was party President. The 1986 conference was dominated by a defence debate. I recorded it in a book at the time: 'Choosing the defence debate when the hall was packed and the tension greater than it would be at any other point of the week, Smith proceeded to make a spectacular entrance from the hall. Everybody else on the platform simply went to the back, climbed a few stairs, and unobtrusively slipped into their chair. The Rochdale giant lumbered slowly across the front of the hall like a giant rogue elephant, surrounded by photographers, temporarily reducing the defence debate to a sideshow.' In response to the book, Smith, supported by Alton, launched a ferocious attack on me at the following Wednesday night meeting. This was the first after the 1987 General Election. You would have expected it would be devoted to a review of the campaign and a look-ahead to the parliamentary year. Instead an hour was lost while Smith ranted and raved. What the one or two new MPs must have thought, I cannot imagine. Smith's fires of indignation were still smouldering no less than five years later when Ashdown decided to ask me to run the first Liberal Democrat General Election campaign. He received a letter from Smith: 'Dear Paddy, I wish to register the STRONGEST POSSIBLE OBJECTIONS to Des Wilson heading the General Election team and I will NOT be prepared to assist nationally if he does so, yours sincerely Sir Cyril Smith MBE. p.s. Count me out !...I'm disgusted and will say so publicly.' He then added in his own handwriting: ''I'll wait for the book.' This was a typical Smith communication to his party leaders; you could have published a book of them. But by then he was an anachronism in national politics, brooding in his house in Rochdale, bitter that the passing of time and ill-health meant he could no longer be in the spotlight, venturing out only occasionally, no doubt to beat a few bottoms. When he died he received generous obituaries. The world , we were told, would miss 'big-hearted Cyril'. In fact he was to join Jimmy Saville as the second man to be exposed as being, instead of a heroic personality, a shocking serial child abuser, protected by many in a position to know the details. He was devastating proof that behind the facade of a bully lies an even more vicious bully. And behind that bully lies the self-serving cynicism and cowardice of those who know and won't speak out. Cyril Smith was one of the most horrible human beings I ever met...the tragedy is that he did not live to have his colossal ego publicly punctured and his behaviour suitably punished. As for the parliamentary party, that generation has fortunately largely moved on (most of them knighted or sent to the Lords of course, and several of them dead) to be replaced by a generation who, whatever your view of the relevance of the Lib Dems, are a world apart from the Eighties lot - both more connected with their party and more politically effective. I do not tell this story, now nearly 30 years old, to create sensation. I tell it because we have to learn from what happened at the BBC, what has happened within the Catholic Church, and what happened in Rochdale. Cyril Smith survived for years as a sexual predator because he was allowed to - not just by the local police, but because he felt no accountability to a parliamentary party that in the Eighties had neither the guts or the moral authority to stand up to him. Nick Clegg, already under criticism for his handling of the Rennard affair, was more than naive to write a glowing reference to Smith when he should have had some minimal awareness of the stories about him. It really does appear that the party needs some mechanism that responds more speedily and sensitively when potential scandals emerge. It must never be allowed to happen again. • Des Wilson was President of the Liberal Party 1986-87 and one of the founders of the Liberal Democrats, running their first General Election campaign in 1992. • The book reviewed is 'Smile for the Camera' by Simon Daqnczek and Matthew Baker (Biteback (£18.99) (first published in the Mail on Sunday)