I never had more fun on tours than the ones on which Dicky Rutnagur was around. As a drinking companion, I dreaded keeping up with him in the evenings. But those long evenings were so instructive, so fascinating in its detail of cricket and cricketers past, that I never missed one.
I also had the pleasure of sharing rooms with Dicky on the county circuit when India were playing. There was always a place for me in his car. Sometimes, we were so raving mad as to get a ferry car from Sydney to Brisbane and drive it all the way, sharing the driving between us on a seemingly endless journey.
Dicky spoke long and lovingly of the game and its characters. I could write a book just on what Dicky had to say of Colonel C.K. Nayudu. Some of his memories of early Indian cricket are worth preserving — if only a historian would get down to it, it would be just great. If I was ever short of a feature to write, all I had to do was buy a few rounds at the bar on an evening and an authentic piece would soon have gone into print on some great cricket topic, unfortunately with my byline and not his.
We had a number of nicknames for him, including ‘Kores’ for the days in which he would serve so many newspapers in a day we would be wicked enough to suggest he get the carbon copy people to sponsor his trip. To his credit, Dicky always took the jokes on him very well.
A few may have suffered at the hands of the press box joker that he was reputed to be. You were not initiated into cricket journalism until you had been doused by his water pistol. Mercifully, he carried it in days when security was not the watchword it is, otherwise he may have had a tough time explaining what a gun was doing amidst the paraphernalia. Dicky had such a witty comment for every situation it was impossible to be cross with him. There was a cricket official from whom he had borrowed money to tide over some small shortfall on tour. Since the pesky official kept pressing for repayment, Dicky came up with the classic line — ‘You keep bothering me like this, I will never borrow from you again.’
Walking into the Indian dressing room with him on the morning of the first ever Test match in Ahmedabad, Dicky came up with the best joke on the Indian team I had heard in a long time. Looking at all the Sardars sitting around — Sidhu, Sandhu, Maninder, Gursharan —Dicky came up with —Sorry, I thought this was the Indian dressing room, not the Motibagh taxi stand.’ I narrated the joke to skipper Kapil and I had never heard him laugh so much.
I last spent an evening with him at his Thames side apartment in Pimlico in 1999, during the World Cup, and given the spirit of the occasion, it was another long evening while we sat there amidst his books and his memorabilia.
As I left to go back to my apartment in the Docklands, I knew I would be touring much less after that and we kept in touch by email.
Dicky Rutnagur, a sports journalist and commentator, passed away in London aged 82. Rutnagur covered 300 Tests in a fabulous career lasting half-a-century.