Second Innings by Andrew Flintoff

Second Innings by Andrew Flintoff

Author:Andrew Flintoff [Andrew Flintoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2015-10-07T04:00:00+00:00


9

THE PERFORMER

IT might look as though my career after cricket – one minute a professional boxer, the next presenting on TV and doing theatre gigs – has taken one surprising turn after another. And it’s true that I am always tackling new things. But there is also a common thread: the need to perform, to find new challenges, to push myself and find my limits. I’ve always had a desire – perhaps ‘need’ is a better term than ‘desire’ – to throw myself in at the deep end.

There is that line: ‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.’ That’s dead right.

I was much the same as a young kid. Maybe it comes from my time at school, when I’d just try to get through the day with my teeth intact. From the schoolyard onwards, I’ve always put myself in situations I’m not sure I can get through.

I don’t like people telling me I can’t do things. That’s when I’m at my most dangerous, when people write me off. I like the fear it gives me. I like being on the edge, or as close to it as I can get. Just knowing that I’m taking something on. I’d always sooner be the person in the middle of something who is an open target to the critics. I’ve always hated people on the sidelines who take potshots at the ones who have a go.

The first TV show I made was a series for ITV, just after I retired from Tests in 2009. It was called Flintoff Versus the World. The idea was that I would attempt a series of extreme sports – rodeo riding, jumping out of aeroplanes, paragliding, cliff diving. I thought, ‘Yeah, it looks fun. It’s six weeks having a laugh.’

We started out in Acapulco, then made our way across America and Canada. The plan was to put me into the most terrifying situations the production team could dream up. The good thing was that I wouldn’t be doing it alone. For each episode there would be someone else to share the suffering. So for the first episode in Mexico – lucha libre wrestling and a dive off the cliffs in Acapulco – I thought who better than my old cricketing pal Darren Gough. I also made some good friends in the crew – Paul ‘Mungo’ Mungeam, the cameraman, is one of my best mates. I needed them, to be honest, as the central theme of the programme, in each day’s filming, was to come as close to killing someone as possible!

The oddest part of the experience was how quickly I became acclimatised to this as a normal professional state of affairs. At breakfast, planning the day ahead, the conversation would go like this: ‘Oh, what are we doing this week?’ And they’d reply, ‘Well,



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