Beverley Agnew: Who would marry a sportsman?
As the former Mrs Jonathan Agnew opens up about her life with cricket's 'Aggers', why do athletes’ marriages have such a bad track record?
Beverley Agnew had no interest in dredging up the details of her divorce, which happened just over 20 years ago. The 56-year-old is a private woman who quietly runs a child care centre in Leicester, and she has other things to be getting on with than dwelling on the details of a marriage that broke up in 1992. But then Beverley’s ex-husband happens to be Jonathan “Aggers” Agnew, former fast bowler, now the BBC’s Mr Cricket, and even two decades after their union ended, she continues to reap the disadvantages of having ever been married to a sportsman.
Just who would marry an athlete? There are no end of hurdles to jump when it comes to taking up with a professional sportsman. Time apart and endless temptations make for uncomfortable marital bedfellows. And so it is that football pitches, golf courses, tennis courts and cricket outfields across the globe are littered with the graves of once-happy relationships, their histories often chronicled over several hundred pages of Hello!.
Over there, you will find what we have lovingly begun to refer to as Cricketer’s Corner, featuring, as it does, the dead marriages of Graham Thorpe, Mark Ramprakash, Dominic Cork and Shane Warne. And we have just completed construction of a new graveyard – roughly the size of two football pitches – to deal with the volume of relationship strife emanating from the Premiership; Ray and Karen Parlour, Thierry Henry and Claire Merry, Frank Lampard and Elen Rives.
In 2004, it was estimated that there was a 70 per cent divorce rate within marriages involving professional sportsmen. Even those that stand the test of time endure stresses few of us could ever imagine, let alone tolerate. Tania Nell, the wife of Mo Farah, should really have been at home putting her feet up when her husband took gold in the 10,000 metres at last year’s Olympics – she was, after all, heavily pregnant with twins. Instead, she stood on the sidelines of the Olympic Stadium, no doubt hoping she wouldn’t go into labour.
Maggie Rae, a divorce lawyer at Clintons who has acted for numerous professional sportsmen over the course of her career, says that only bankers score higher when it comes to tales of marital woe. “I recently had a client who was a Premiership footballer,” she says. “We went to mediation with his girlfriend [with whom he had a child] and we had to do it on a Sunday because every other day he was too busy playing or training. His life was run like a bootcamp – he was wedded to his training regime as so many sportspeople are.
Beverley Agnew, still picking up the pieces of her broken marriage after all these years, would no doubt agree.