There is a particularly interesting episode of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell’s often fascinating podcast, about Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in the NBA and the importance in achieving that historic record of underhand free throws.
Chamberlain was a phenomenal basketball player, but at the particular skill of free throws he was unusually weak. Indeed, only two people in the entire history of the NBA (counting only those with more than 1,200 attempts – not as many as it sounds) have been worse than him. Across his career Chamberlain had a 51.1% success rate – horribly bad compared with an NBA average of around 75%, and ludicrously inferior to the all-time top free-throw shooters, who average a shade over 90%.
But on the night of 2 March 1962 Chamberlain was a master. He made 28 of his 32 attempts that night, an 87.5% success rate, and it was not a one-off. Before that season the Philadelphia Warriors head coach, Frank McGuire, convinced Chamberlain to try throwing underhand, and across that season he made 61.3% of his free throws. At its end he abandoned the experiment and went back to throwing overhand. In six of the seasons that followed he averaged less than 45%, bottoming out at 38% in 1967-68, but there was no going back.
The reason for his decision was simple: the underhand method is widely and pejoratively known as a “granny shot”, seen as being the lame recourse of those not skilled enough to throw properly. “I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded,” Chamberlain wrote in his autobiography. “I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. I just couldn’t do it.”
In my early childhood games of cricket almost every player had a go at bowling, falling into one of three groups. There were those whose only hope of vaguely threatening the stumps was to bowl underarm, the youthful prodigies who could reliably sling down vaguely accurate overarm deliveries, and the most hapless bunch of them all, those whose ability was no better than the first group but who bowled overarm anyway. These were children who, for fear of making themselves look silly, made themselves look silly.
Neville Cardus, the Guardian’s venerable cricket writer and an advocate of underarm, or lob, bowling, addressed the issue of the style’s lack of credibility after the death of Sussex’s brilliant Walter Humphreys in 1924. “No doubt the man in the street will smile at the mere mention of lobs. ‘Grubs’, he calls them derisively,” he wrote. “But surely the success of Humphreys’ modest art, at a period great in batsmanship, cannot be dismissed with a smile of indulgence.”
Humphreys also helped George Simpson-Hayward, probably the greatest “modern” lob bowler, or lobster as they became known, to hone his art. He spent three years practicing lobs before he first used them in a match, with instant success. Pelham Warner reported that when he made his England debut in South Africa in 1910 “the crowd roared with laughter when he first went on”. He took six wickets for 42 runs.
The derision with which lob bowling was met was perhaps, Cardus wrote, actually an advantage, helping to tempt batsmen out of dull defensiveness. “A batsman cannot stonewall for long against a lob bowler without feeling, down in his heart, that he is making a fool of himself,” he wrote.
But there was more to lob bowling than attempting to humiliate batsmen into getting themselves out. Underarm bowling is inherently more accurate – “the quoit player does not trust an overarm action,” as Cardus notes – and allows greater and more varied spin to be applied to the ball. Plus by the 1920s lob bowling was so unusual that opponents no longer knew how best to play it. As Cardus saw it, “every county ought to encourage a likely lob bowler just because every other county doesn’t”.
It is also possible to bowl underarm and at pace. David Harris was the fastest bowler of his day (though his day was in the late 18th Century); Brighton’s George Brown, a tree-trunk-limbed father of 17 who played a century later, was so quick his teams had to deploy two long stops. According to legend on one occasion they both missed the ball, which even when it reached the boundary was going so fast that it struck and instantly killed a passing dog.
“We are all too apt to make of our pastimes pretty routine affairs, with too much hard professionalism spoiling the surprise and gusto which are the life and soul of sport,” Cardus opined in 1919. “Let us have back the lob then, and the batsman on his toes, the men in the outfield keen and palpitating just a little, the crowd buzzing anticipation.”
The world of cricket did not heed the cry. Indeed two years later when Trevor Molony made the first of three appearances for Surrey – taking the wicket of Jack Hobbs in a trial game – the Guardian noted that “lobs are such an unfamiliar sight in these days that his efforts were watched with much interest” (according to the Cricketer on one occasion the batters’ discomfort at his bowling “evinced much laughter from the crowd”). Approaching a century later Molony remains the last specialist lob bowler to play first class cricket.
“If we try to discover some explanation for the present universal neglect of lob bowling, we shall probably be right in suggesting as the first and greatest, fashion,” the Guardian wrote in 1931. “It does now require some moral courage for a boy to begin and continue bowling lobs in a society which regards them as a slightly fatuous jest.”
Would a great lobster have any chance of thriving in today’s game? It is impossible to say, as nobody alive has ever seen one, and it is unlikely now that they ever shall. The accuracy and unpredictability of Simpson-Hayward represent a test that can only be faced in the imagination. But, and this is the crux, did it die out because it was considered inferior, or because it was considered infantile?
• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
