Cricket: Courage under fire from Viv

News of a defamation action against Mike Atherton brings back memories for JAMES LAWTON of the day in the Caribbean when Viv Richards threatened to whack him.

LONDON - It was a base thought, I know, but it couldn't be suppressed when the news came in that Pakistani journalist Ashgar Ali was suing England cricket captain Mike Atherton for £150,000 ($508,900) as a result of being dismissed as a "buffoon."

What then would be the value of a lengthy eyeball-to-eyeball harangue, redolent with physical threat, conducted in a packed press box, not by the mild-mannered Atherton but the ferociously warlike Viv Richards, who at the time should have been leading his West Indian team out on the field in Antigua?

Shyster lawyers need not apply, because the incident happened 10 years ago, and anyway, my marriage, unlike poor Ashgar Ali's engagement, survived, and far from my getting the sack, my then employer, the Daily Express, actually wrote a leader saying that I should be given some award for resilience under fire.

Disappointingly, this cry went unheard at Lord's and wherever they draw up the honours list.

There were some personal benefits, however.

Complete strangers still occasionally shout cheerily "How's Viv?" - and in the course of time the great man has withdrawn, one by one, his list of his threats.

His most wounding remark, after announcing that I had "made Viv very angry," and that he would be watching my activities very closely for the duration of my stay on his island, was that if I had been a "younger man" he would have settled the matter there and then.

You may wonder what I had done to so provoke one of the greatest cricketers the world is ever likely to know.

I had asked him, admittedly on a rest day, if he cared to use the columns of my newspaper to rebut widespread charges back home that he was generally behaving not like an elder statesman of the game but a power-crazed despot.

Viv, as he would say, was not amused and one of his more outspoken phrases was that I was in serious danger of getting "whacked," which, of course, for the nervously disposed can, in certain parts of the world, mean something rather more than a brisk right-hander.

In the course of duty, this was all duly reported home, with the result that on a slow news day it appeared as the front-page splash in the Express under the banner headline "King Viv blows his top."

In much smaller type, at the bottom of the page, was a relatively negligible news item from a summit peace conference in Iceland headed "Gorby warns Bush - back off!"

Naturally, when Richards' English agent unhelpfully faxed the offending page to Antigua, Viv became further annoyed.

If you have any sense of a cynically heartless plot to exploit the hair-trigger emotions of a distinguished sportsman, you are wrong, and that, I'm told, was quite evident from my expression when Richards charged into the press box with my name on his lips.

Certainly, I would have settled for dismissal as a buffoon and much less than £150,000.