“What are you drinking?” is Joel Garner’s greeting as I walk into Annie’s, his favourite fish joint in Oistins market, to meet for lunch.
Even aged 71, Garner is immediately recognisable, standing at 6ft 8in while draped in a maroon Cricket Legends of Barbados shirt. ‘Big Bird’ was his nickname during his cricket career but, to most locals, he is simply Joel or Joely.
Many travelling English fans know Oistins for its Friday-night revelry. Garner prefers coming here for lunch, a haunt to meet old pals. While chatting with friends he made when a pupil at Foundation Boys School, only half a mile away, he still playfully calls one who is a couple of years younger “Junior”. Garner was a prefect; few, you suspect, would have dared to cross him.
“I was one of the good fellas,” he tells Telegraph Sport with a chuckle. “I could not misbehave because of my grandmother.”
With his parents working in the United States and Canada, Garner was largely raised by his grandmother. She was the one person that Garner dared not cross.
“She raised me. I couldn’t get away with nothing! She was nothing but strict. You didn’t have room to do anything funny.”
After leaving school aged 18, Garner swiftly got a job at a telecommunications company. “I was enjoying the work and having fun playing cricket. If you were working at Cable and Wireless, you enjoyed life, all the people you played cricket with were your friends and your work-mates.
“When we played cricket on a Saturday, then we were serious. Then we had more than a few beers – you went back at one or two o’clock in the morning.”
He and his old team-mates from the Cable and Wireless side still meet up on the last Thursday of each month. “We have a drink and a laugh.”
Lancashire League move was a turning point
Aged 23, in January 1976, Garner was selected for Barbados for the first time. Then he made the critical decision in his career, taking up a contract offer to play for Littleborough in the Central Lancashire League.
“A fella said to me: ‘I’ve got a team in England looking for a pro.’ I said: ‘I ain’t interested. I’m enjoying my work. I’m enjoy my cricket, having fun.’ He said: ‘Come up with England.’
“This happened for about six months. He kept asking if I was interested. Eventually, I said: ‘I ain’t got nothing to lose.’ I took the vacation, and I had some fellas who used to work my shifts. If I didn’t like the cricket, I was going to come back to work. And then, after about two months, three months, I submitted the letter.”
Batsmen the world over would come to rue Garner’s choice. Within a year, he made his Test debut. Over the next decade, as he combined height with pace, seam movement and metronomic control, Garner took 259 wickets in Test cricket. Only one man to take so many Test wickets has a better average: Malcolm Marshall averages 20.94, Garner 20.97. Garner’s record was even more remarkable as he spent most of his career as first or second change. “I didn’t get nervous. I didn’t get nervous playing cricket – never did.”
‘Keep out the gym, son’
As our swordfish arrives, together with vegetables and peas and Garner’s favourite drink – rum and tonic – he explains how his attitude to cricket immediately changed once he had quit his old job. “I really got serious when I resigned from my work to play professional cricket. That was a change in me, because if you’re going to play professional cricket, you become a professional.”
Garner was particularly meticulous in how he honed his yorker. “Practise, practise. Just practise it.” When bowling to batsmen, whether in training or a game, he would eye up the base of the stumps. “I’d find the spot there.” Batsmen often knew exactly what to expect; doing something about it was an entirely different matter. “I wasn’t interested in how quick I was or anything like that. Just results.”
A fitness regime also underpinned Garner’s career. In the off-season, “I used to run and swim every day – every day”.
From his home in Christ Church, a couple of minutes from where we meet in Oistins, Garner ran for five miles each day. Then, he would swim a mile and a half up the jetty and back. Finally, he would go to practice in the evening and bowl in the nets. “I’ve never gone on a tour unfit. I never really lost fitness. Out of season, I just kept running.”
The only time that Garner encountered injury trouble was when he deviated from these methods.
“In 1982, I got injured. I had problems with my shoulder. I went to the gym and I learnt my lesson then. I was in the gym lifting weights, my trainer said to me: ‘Put them down. What you’re doing is madness. What you want to do is try to strengthen the muscles. You’re not trying to build muscle.’ He gave me 8lb of weight in both hands, and he showed me exercises that I was supposed to do.
“Repetition – he said: ‘That’s all I want you to do. I want you to get tired lifting this 8lb of weight.’ And I learnt my lesson – keep out the gym, son. If you’re going to the gym, you’re not building bulk, you’re just strengthening. But a lot of people now get carried away.”
The move to Somerset
During his first season with Littleborough, Garner trained with Lancashire. “They weren’t interested and never bothered me. Then, Somerset came calling.”
It was the start of a deep bond between Garner and the West Country. At Somerset, Garner took 338 first-class wickets at 18.1 to go with 206 one-day wickets at an absurd 15.2 apiece, which helped win five one-day trophies. Yet Garner initially only played part-time for Somerset, to honour his contract with Littleborough. Terrorising batsmen in the Central Lancashire League, Garner took 334 wickets at 9.3 in three seasons.
“I wouldn’t break the contract. I played midweek games for Somerset, weekend games for Littleborough.” He still regularly returns to both places to catch up with old friends, and sometimes watches live streams of Somerset games from his home in Barbados.
Even as he became one of the most feared quick bowlers in history, Garner’s home remained the same. Rather than move into a swankier place, instead he opted to do up the house.
“My family were in Canada and the States, and when they came home, the house couldn’t hold all of us. So I changed it in 1982. I lifted the roof, knocked some walls out, put another building on top. I never moved away from it. I’m still there!”
‘I have no complaints about cricket or my life’
Garner lives with his wife of 38 years; his daughter and her children are only a couple of minutes away. After retiring from administrative positions in Barbadian cricket, now Garner is simply ‘Grandad Joel’.
“I’ve always lived on the same spot. This is the best place in the world – it’s peaceful, everything works, no hassle, no problems. I’ve still got all the friends I grew up with.”
It has become a trope that West Indies legends express their sadness about the team’s current plight. But Garner’s perspective is refreshing.
“I think we gotta do a better job of selling cricket to the parents and to the local people. We went through a period where we had a lot of bad publicity, a lot of bad press.” Both the Barbados Cricket Association and Cricket West Indies, Garner says, have “got to mend some fences and get people to trust them again”.
“Now, there’s nothing wrong with what is happening. It is the perception of what is wrong, because we are still producing young cricketers. What we’ve got to do is encourage those young cricketers to stay. If people don’t feel like they’ve got to trust in you, you will always have that problem.”
To anyone who has been to the Caribbean in recent years, Garner’s observation is acute. Of course, the game in the region has problems – a lack of infrastructure and the financial chasm that has opened up with better-resourced nations.
Yet the love for cricket in nations such as Barbados remains profound. No matter the myth of the youth embracing US sports, the emergence of short-format franchise leagues means that a professional cricket career has never been more attractive for Caribbean children.
Garner’s cocktail of gifts would have made him an Indian Premier League millionaire today. Yet, looking across the fish market at Oistins, as he prepares to return home to his wife and grandchildren, Garner has only thanks. He smiles. “I have no complaints – no complaints about cricket or my life.”
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