Sport
Sport - Jason Cowley meets Tuffers, a parody of himself
Published 30 June 2003
Tuffers has become a prisoner of his newly found, thin-spun celebrity
I spent most of the recent one-day cricket international between England and Pakistan at the Oval in the company of Phil Tufnell. Since he was crowned King of the Jungle, following his engaging, cheeky-chappie performance in ITV's I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, Tuffers has been on a never-ending publicity tour.
There is nothing, it seems, he will not do for a quick pay day - from dressing up as a character from The Matrix to inviting cameras into his small, two-bedroomed terraced house in Sutton to film him at rest. After all, following two difficult divorces, he hasn't, as he told me, "got a pot to piss in" - and in these uncertain times, a man has "to nick a few quid" while he can. "So if a bloke wants me to stand on his stall for ten grand, I'll stand on his stall."
Tuffers has only one thing to promote - himself, which he does largely without guile or calculation. His life is one big circus now, with the former cricketer occupying the role of ringmaster and performing seal. At the Oval, he spent the day wandering between the BBC Radio 5 commentary box and various corporate hospitality boxes, where he amused the assorted accountants and management consultants with his cockney banter.
When I asked him the secret of his success, he said: "I just like having a laugh, mate. I'm really a normal bloke, like anyone else." Tufnell may be a normal bloke, as he says, but he was an abnormal cricketer. A talented left-arm spinner, he played 42 Tests for England, taking 121 wickets at a disappointing average of 37. "He had a lot of natural ability, but he never worked hard enough at his game," complains his former Middlesex captain Mike Gatting.
But it was more what happened to him off the pitch - in various nightclubs and bars and in his various disturbed relationships with women - that set him apart from his peers on the county circuit and turned him into popular tabloid fodder.
The world of international cricket is peculiar. It is unlike any other sport. Small groups of men, not all of whom like each other, are condemned (because the game continues to adhere to rituals and patterns of behaviour established long before the age of commercial jet travel) to spend long periods away from home together in a closed, artificial environment. If a cricketer is out of form on tour, when there is so little chance for him to escape the intensity of the daily routine, he can easily become isolated, frustrated and depressed, as Tufnell was on numerous occasions - on one tour of Australia, he ended up visiting a psychiatrist.
If Tufnell rebelled against the uniformity and general weirdness of life on tour, it was because he is very much a free spirit, unable and unwilling to conform to a monotonous routine. "He was very much a character of extremes," his former team-mate Angus Fraser told me. "He could be engaging, but he could also be unpleasant. At the heart of everything was his basic insecurity, as a man and a cricketer."
Tufnell may, since returning from his fortnight in an Australian jungle, have become something of a parody of himself - a latter-day Artful Dodger, with his own wised-up, street-smart idiom - but he seemed genuine enough to me all the same. In many ways, he is even more of a prisoner now than he ever was as an international cricketer - a prisoner of his new-found, thin-spun celebrity.
But watching Tuffers in action, as he wisecracks his way through a long, hot day, you begin to wonder if he has any stable sense of self at all. The former players whom he meets at the media centre - David Gower, Ian Botham, Gatting, Mark Nicholas, Dermot Reeve - greet him with a mixture of bewilderment and, in certain cases, disdain.
However, he seems oblivious to most of what is happening around him and, instead, continues bantering on and on and on, increasingly intelligible to no one but himself.
Jason Cowley is the editor of the Observer Sports Monthly
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