William Gilbert Grace

views updated

William Gilbert Grace

1848-1915

Cricket player

National Sports Star William Gilbert Grace, a country doctor from Gloucestershire, England, dominated the game of cricket from 1862 until his retirement in 1899 at the age of fifty-one. He was the first English national sports star.

Early Years Unlike most of his contemporaries, Grace did not come out of the elite British “public” school system, where the ideal of the gentleman sportsman was nurtured. Born in 1848, Grace began playing cricket with his brothers under the tutelage of his father and a cricket-playing uncle. Grace’s father, a rural physician, had connections to the Duke of Beaufort that secured the young prodigy entry into the country-house matches of the rural squierarchy. Grace played his first county match against first-rate adult competition at the age of fourteen. His reputation was made when at fifteen he scored his first of many “centuries” (batting for more than one hundred runs) against the Gentlemen of Sussex.

Career. During his cricket career Grace managed to score more than fifty-four thousand first-class runs and is still fifth on the all-time list of cricket batsmen. Nick-named “the Doctor,” Grace was primarily a cricket player, although during the winter off-season he did work as a physician. He devoted hours to training for matches and traveling to sporting venues. Hardly an amateur athlete, he was known to accept large sums of money to endorse commercial products. In the genteel sport of cricket, Grace was an anomaly. Aggressive on the field, he verbally assaulted opponents and often upbraided officials. His personality, his unusually large stature, and his prodigious exploits as a batsman combined to secure his lasting reputation as a larger-than-life sportsman.

A Superstar Grace’s presence in a game was guaranteed to draw large crowds of spectators. Sometimes the usual three-pence admission price was doubled when Grace played. In July 1873 thirty thousand fans attended a threeday match to watch Grace play.One Saturday in July 1878, between fifteen and twenty thousand spectators went to the Old Trafford ground in Manchester to see Grace at bat. The large crowd overwhelmed the gatekeepers and, once inside, spread onto the playing field. At his death in 1915 Grace was described as “the best known of all Englishmen.” Perhaps only Queen Victoria herself was better known. Still one of the most successful batsmen in English cricket history, Grace was a charismatic sports idol whose renown has been compared with that of later athletes such as Pele, Babe Ruth, and Joe Louis.