'All I ask, did I entertain?': What it was like ghostwriting for Brian Lara

This piece is taken from issue 82 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, out now.

I mean, I’d ghosted columns before. Even the odd feature. I’d ‘worked up’ (as they say in the trade) loads of stuff, buffing up the insights of people who are much too famous to sit in front of a stark white screen and bash out the hard stuff themselves. Ghosting is part of the job. Disclosure No.1, Dear Reader: not everything that appears in these pages is as pure as the driven metaphor. Still, a whole book? All 75,000 words of it, in someone else’s voice? That’s a devilish trick to pull off.

The ghosted autobiography/memoir is the specialty of two subsects of fame: 1) the professionally vacuous (royalty, reality TV stars, rich people) and 2) sports stars. For the rest of fame – actors, musicians, comedians, politicians – the writing stuff is factored in as part of the package; though of course it doesn’t always play out like that. Some very talented people can’t write for toffee, let alone peanuts.

No one seriously expects sports stars to write their own books. Theirs, after all, is an elemental, rugged kind of genius, and thus they’re given a pass from all that strokey-beard stuff. Think of the Swede, the tousled high-school baseball star in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral: for whom the “human consolations” of irony and self-reflection were nothing more than a “hitch in the swing” for a kid who’s getting his way as a god.

It’s why when Michael Atherton decided a year after his retirement to sit down at his own desk to write his own book with his own fingers it was seen as such a watershed; then again, he always was a bit different. The inconvenient truth is that, in most cases, even the most shimmering icon needs a hunched scrawler by their side to get their story out.

Which is not to say that the arrangement always works. Far from it. Sure, we’ve all read some good ones – pitch-perfect collaborations where the central rhythms flow between star and scribe in seamless coalescence. But who hasn’t winced through a few rotters, where the mess on the page comes across like two voices shouting over each other, each of them hollering different things in different ways and from where the writer appears to be winning. And generally, when the writer wins, that’s a problem: veering the book into the realms of the literary – or worse, sportswriting – at the expense of the authentic.

So, anyway. I’d been encouraged to believe that something was afoot, and that it might even have legs. Certainly, the idea had become less ridiculous than it had first sounded back in February, when my boss, who heads up Fairfield Books, mentioned with studied nonchalance that he’d been talking to ‘Brian’ and that BCL might just be up for doing his story.

It pays at such moments to remember that this is an industry built on long shots, inklings and unrealised dreams, and especially so when I’m on an 8am phone call with ex-England and Warwickshire seamer Tim Munton, my boss, and the most gifted batter of my lifetime. And even when he and I start throwing ideas around on WhatsApp, his profile pic of him and Sachin popping up initially every few days, and then with increasing regularity until, almost imperceptibly, Brian Charles Lara (everyone calls him that) had moved from a figment to an idea to a hyperreal everyday presence, this continent-hopping mystic dropping hypnotic rambling voicemails and sudden fragments of creative writing into my phone in the dead of night. All the while, sizing me up.

***

Peter Hayter, the former Mail on Sunday cricket correspondent, has ghosted, among other things, three books with Ian Botham, Phil Tufnell’s surprisingly tender autobiography What Now? and most significantly, Coming Back to Me with Marcus Trescothick, which documents, with extraordinary humanity, the England opener’s mental health struggles across his outwardly garlanded, inwardly tormented double-life of a career.

It's a great privilege, Hayter says, and a big responsibility. To a large extent, their story is in your hands. Working with Botham on his infamously titled autobiography Don’t Tell Kath in the early Nineties was a useful lesson in story management. “You can tease out certain things and persuade people to go maybe a little bit further for the sake of honesty and credibility,” he says, “but you have to respect the fact that it’s their name on the front cover. You’re helping someone else tell their version of events. That’s the job.”

Coming Back to Me was a different book for a different time, emerging from friendship and shared struggle. In the early Noughties Trescothick was a star of English cricket, seen as a genial, rambunctious opening bat who loved sausages and the simple life. When the two men came to put Trescothick’s newspaper column together, Hayter was himself experiencing bouts of depression and anxiety; and over time, as the two grew closer, their conversations turned inward.

“I said to him, ‘There's no point in doing this book unless you're going to really be honest and open up’,” Hayter tells me. “It would be counterproductive, and no one would believe it. So, let’s have a blank piece of paper, and you tell me the truth of how you're feeling, and I’ll support you.”

At times they helped each other. “We shared something quite specific in terms of how the illness had affected us. So when we started talking about how he was feeling, I could sympathise immediately with that. But it’s still a huge thing to write these things down in a book that everyone can read, and open yourself up to some people who will say, ‘What on earth are you talking about? You're a brilliant sportsman, you’re earning all this money, what the hell is your problem?’”

They didn’t know how the book would be received until it came out. “You're putting your version of events out there, which is your truth, but other people can dispute it, right? Or just disregard it.”

The book was a sensation, taking the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, and it did that rarest of things: it shifted the dial.

Hayter knew it had landed right when letters started appearing in newspapers, one from the husband of a woman who, having read an extract from the book, put her newspaper down and said to her husband for the first time: That’s me. “And they immediately sought the help that may have saved her life. When you get a letter like that,” he says, “it just answers all the questions.”

***

Duncan Hamilton is another of the very best. A biographer primarily, whose book Harold Larwood is a masterpiece of the genre, for many years Hamilton ghost-wrote Brian Clough’s column for the Nottingham Evening Post, fine-tuning the form so when years later his agent asked him if he wanted to ghost Jonny Bairstow’s memoir, he was well qualified to get inside the mind of a complex man.

Hamilton did all the homework he would normally do for a biography, reading everything, going through all the old cuttings of Jonny’s father, David, whose story and tragic death would form the core of the book. And then they would meet, for a series of three-hour sessions, and a few more conversations at Headingley whenever Bairstow was free. On their first morning, Bairstow said that he wanted them to start the story in South Africa in 2016, at the moment when he makes his first Test hundred. Hamilton had thought exactly the same. “I knew then that he was going to give it everything he’d got.”

The result, A Clear Blue Sky, is the exception to the rule, a collaboration with a conspicuously literary touch, so much so that Hamilton’s name appears on the front cover alongside Bairstow’s. Had it been buried in the acknowledgements, as is often the case, then the references in the text to, say, the smoke-clogged tenements of North Yorkshire evoking the work of JB Priestley may have sounded a little off. As it is, Hamilton’s pen adds flourish to Bairstow’s story, in turn elevating the whole. Perhaps it shouldn’t work, but it does. The book represents the apogee of the writer as a thrumming presence at the heart of the endeavour, as much a personality as the subject himself.

***

So, the breakthrough came at my mum’s, where I’d gone back for a few days to get away from London. There was less than a month to deadline.

We’d had a little under two months of on-off Zooming. I’d stay agile, never being entirely sure when or from where he’d emerge; one week he’d be in India, then Dubai, then Trinidad, all different timezones, all negotiated with a vampiric disregard for sleep. One time, after an elusive fortnight, BCL had materialised at a villa in the Maldives, suddenly ready to talk, and we’d swiftly got a dozen good hours in the can.

Each chapter required about three-to-four hours of conversation. I would have my prompts – scorecards, quotes, snippets, recollections – and off he would go. The recall was ridiculous. As Jimmy Adams would later tell me: “The thing with Brian, he has the memory of an elephant. His mind, I find it amazing.”

He would talk, and I would record. Then I’d try to weave his WhatsApp-written flurries into our conversations, blending the rhythms of language across his writings and speech. Then I would write, and rewrite, and send; and he would add, and direct, and amend. Though nothing happened without his say-so, the structure of the narrative would tend to fall to me. He seemed to respect the notion that this was my bit.

It seemed to be working. We’d become mates, of a sort, albeit in the most confusing way: we’d never met in person, and though he was the king of Trinidad and I was a writer from Essex, day by day he was telling me things he’d probably not told anyone for decades, if at all. I’d started to like him. I looked forward to our conversations. Yet still something was missing. And it stayed like that. Until, one morning over Zoom, at my mum’s, we had a row.

***

Lara’s relationship with his career, what it all means and amounts to, is conflicted. He was the genius who watched a once great team fall in on itself, the man synonymous with individual feats and collective collapse. At times it kind of consumes him, and that morning it was all he could think about. He said to me, angrily, “Stick NAME REDACTED and NAME REDACTED in a room and ask them to describe Lara’s legacy and they’ll say ‘What f***ing legacy? We lost when he was playing!’”

At that point I flipped. Perhaps it was tiredness, or maybe desperation. I felt we needed an ending that wouldn’t fall flat. (BCL was less convinced: “Why? In movies the star sometimes dies. So don’t be afraid to let me die at the end…”)

Either way, I found myself loudly coaxing Brian Charles Lara to get a grip ffs, to recognise the beauty in his story, to see that when he was good, which was often, he elevated the art of batting to another plane, that he brought joy and hope to his people, that he thrilled and beguiled the rest of us, and that his legacy lay not in results or even in those monolithic scores at the top of those lists but in the way he made people feel. I pulled up that famous Maya Angelou quote and read it to him. (Tell my 14-year-old self, watching some dodgy TV feed from Antigua at a mate’s house, that one day I’d be reading poetry to Brian Lara on a thing called Zoom.) There was a pause. And then he said: “Yeah OK, you’ve made your point there.”

Our conversations were different after that. Freer. More sanguine. And more philosophical. We spoke about style and grace, and the isolating loneliness of genius, and mental health, and nightmares, and the essence of what it is to entertain. We based the final chapter around an off-the-cuff line that came from his poignant interview with Atherton on the pitch in Barbados after his international career was over (run out by his partner Marlon Samuels for 18 in a dead World Cup game in 2007). “All I ask,” he had said back then, looking out across the heaving stands, “did I entertain?” That line became the title of the final chapter.

When finally we did meet, in London a few times, in the week before deadline, papers strewn everywhere, Chardonnay, caffeine, it was a proper laugh.

***

One day before we absolutely had to send the final manuscript to the printers, Brian Charles Lara called to tell me that he’d written a new chapter overnight, just like that. OK, I said. Send it over, Brian, old son. And I put the phone down. And some time after I’d stopped swearing, I started to read it. It was unforgivably good. Lyrical and sensuous, drenched in colour and atmosphere: the smells of his mother’s cooking, his brothers fishing for the family supper, his father and eldest sister driving him down from their village to Port of Spain for the first time to sign him up for the cricket club, Lara dressed all in white and wearing a floppy sunhat like his hero Roy Fredericks, the cool morning breeze playing across his face as he looked out wide-eyed from the backseat at the unexplored world revealing itself. And it struck me while reading it that if Lara had chosen to be a writer instead of the best batter I’d ever seen, he’d have made a damn good fist of that too.

We dropped that chapter in right at the death, with hours to go. And it reads beautifully. It took a little bit of working up, mind.

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