Cape Crusader
WITH TANNED, LEATHERY FOREARMS and an afro hairstyle that made baggy green caps a tight fit, Mike Whitney was a peculiar sight in Australian cricket teams and an even odder one on the beaches of Cape Town. One day in 1984, clad in bathers and nothing else, he stepped past the ‘Whites Only’ sign and on to the sand. Trouble ran up to him. A bunch of local men, hectoring the stranger in Afrikaans.
‘Hey hey, whoa,’ said Whitney. ‘I’m Australian mate.’
‘What?’
‘Australian. On holiday.’
Whitney turned his back, tugged down his bathers and showed them the only part of his body that was lilywhite.
‘Happy?’ he asked.
‘Sorry. Sorry. So sorry, man.’
Temptation had been Whitney’s first instinct when Bruce Francis rang promising the dollars of daydreams. Curiosity followed close behind. Whitney wanted to see this land so mystical that it made cricket bosses’ wallets spring wide open. Also, there was a girl on a Contiki tour, Sandy, from Durban; he hadn’t seen her in eighteen months. A busted knee early in the 1983–84 season gave him his chance. A ravenous traveller was Whitney. South Africa fed him with little longing to return.
Regularly, entering buildings, Whitney provoked uproar. ‘Are you half-coloured? Or coloured? Or what are you? Man, you go in the other door.’
Always he answered the same way. ‘Australian. On holiday.’
His assailants would look at Sandy and her friends. They’d nod. ‘You feel alienated,’ says Whitney. ‘It’s demeaning. I might have some colour in me; my sister thinks we have some Aboriginal blood on my father’s side. I’d be quite proud if that was a fact. But I’m a white man as far as I know, and just because I was really suntanned and had this big curly mop I got a hard time.’
In the pretty seaside village of Fish Hoek he witnessed a cop whipping three black men. Their crime was to stand together on a street corner, talking. ‘I made my decision right then. I had a moral problem with it. I couldn’t go and earn money in a place where the blacks were so badly treated. After that I went to India, and it changed me forever. India’s a place that cleanses your soul. It doesn’t matter if they offer me a million dollars, I thought. I can’t go.’
A neat million was the sum Malcolm Marshall rejected over breakfast at a Wimpy’s grease joint in Southampton. That so astounded Marshall’s suitor, Ali Bacher, that he spilt coffee down his shirt. Other black-skinned cricketers, Michael Holding and Viv Richards, said no, not for whopping riches, would they flout governments’ wishes and tour a country where the black man was not ‘a free bird’. ‘I would rather die,’ decided Richards, ‘than lay down my dignity.’ Whitney’s troublesome knee ensured no formal offer ever came. His actions read now like the plainest horse sense. He was sounded out, took a look at the place and people, and thought better of it. What made Whitney’s actions extraordinary was that he was the only Australian cricketer who decided against going to South Africa on moral grounds.
Others stayed put for different reasons—desire to play Tests, fear of a life ban, or because they weren’t asked. Among the latter were Australian cricketing royalty. ‘I was on the farm one day when I got a call saying to sit near the phone,’ Geoff Marsh recalls. ‘I didn’t leave for about four days. Didn’t sleep for four days. Never got the phone call.’ Allan Border was presumed uninterested and never invited but has since confessed: ‘I’d have thought very hard about it . . . And the higher the offer, the longer I’d have thought.’
Batsman Peter Clifford decided he wouldn’t go out of respect for his dead father and the thousands of balls he’d devotedly tossed at his son. Dean Jones agreed to go but was cajoled out of it by his ropeable and very alive father Barney. Jeff Thomson’s astronomical asking price was rebuffed. David Hookes felt obliged to see out his jumbo deal with South Australia. The moral question was never answered. The moral question was never asked.
As clearly as Whitney and Viv Richards viewed things, it was possible to think the opposite with equal clarity. Bacher had been captain of South Africa when the country was exiled in 1970. The way he saw it, whites-only cricket was the cause of their expulsion and multiracial cricket the prerequisite for their return. That, he believed, had been achieved. Of course he didn’t like his country’s politics. But how did continuing to block cricket help end apartheid? To keep the game ticking he arranged rebel tours by Englishmen, Sri Lankans, West Indians. Francis was a student of the country and a believer in Bacher’s strategy. He had long been convinced that he himself would be the orchestrator of an Australian rebel squad. The players Francis recruited felt they would be doing no harm and perhaps some good. And they were to be paid $200,000 for two tours. This detail was their first, last and overwhelming reason for saying yes.
When South Africa beckoned, Steve Smith was moonlighting as a Woolworths storeman. Graham Yallop ran indoor sports centres. Both would rather have been practising. The Rackemann family farm needed a new tractor. A $25,000 signing-on fee took care of that. Carl laced ribbon round the steering wheel, put a blindfold round his dad and led him over a hill to the new tractor’s hiding place.
Their $200,000 came tax-free and thus seemed all the more unknockbackable. But players had ways beyond their legitimate financial gripes of reassuring themselves that they were in the right. Smith had been pigeonholed as a limited-overs specialist and Rackemann as bung-hoofed. The future felt slight. Mike Haysman was overlooked for an under-25s trip to Zimbabwe. Wayne Phillips was a world-class batsman who the selectors were turning into a halfpenny wicketkeeper. Steve Rixon was a world-class keeper who wasn’t being turned to at all.
There were sixteen variations on these tales. Some players were seething. Most were at least mildly disgruntled. None felt any pang of loyalty to their employer. But the Australian Cricket Board was only their world. It was not the world. This distinction was never drawn by the players. The notion of a wider loyalty was barely contemplated. It was not until after he signed his contract that Haysman opened an atlas and looked up where South Africa sat on the world map.
Murray Bennett’s case was unique. A PE teacher in between cricket hours, he consulted his mentor, the old New South Wales opener Warren Saunders. Unknockbackable, they concluded. Upon signing, Bennett’s troubles began. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he recalls. ‘I went for about two weeks without sleep. I’d played all my cricket for nothing and suddenly I was making a decision based purely on money that was probably going to end my cricket career.’ Bennett telephoned his mentor.
‘I can’t go ahead with this. It’s just not me.’
‘Jeez I’m glad you rang,’ Saunders replied. ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.’
Bennett told Francis. A day later the mailman delivered a $25,000 cheque. Bennett rang Francis again. Francis said hang on to it. ‘I never put the cheque in my bank account,’ says Bennett. ‘For a long time it sat on the sideboard at home. I kept wanting instructions on where to send it.’ Most of his would-be rebel team-mates were furious. One out could lead to more out and ultimately all out. Then the media got wind of Bennett’s withdrawal. ‘I’m not a person who likes the limelight,’ he says quietly. ‘I don’t like having a birthday party for myself.’
All of this coincided with the fulfilment of Bennett’s lifelong dream: his first two Tests against West Indies. Did it cloud his thinking at the bowling crease? ‘Possibly it did,’ he concedes. ‘I know that by the time I started missing out on the one-day side I was actually quite relieved. I was mentally and physically drained.’ One Test on the 1985 Ashes tour and figures of 1–111 were the last international cricket saw of him.
The rebels stated with admirable honesty and frankness that they were going for the money. Some, as a secondary con- sideration, cited annoyance with their current paymasters; others, such as Trevor Hohns, suspected unofficial Tests in South Africa were the closest thing to real Tests they’d ever play. There was no other reason. This was almost unanimous. Almost.
‘I am going to South Africa with an open and, I hope, intelligent mind,’ announced Kim Hughes. ‘I believe I have the ability to judge right and wrong. I also believe I will be able to comment and suggest ways in which the situation can be improved.’ He said this at the press conference revealing his captaincy of the rebels, broadcast live on Channel Nine from Perth’s Sheraton boardroom. Outside demonstrators chanted ‘Shame, Kim, shame’. Inside were more microphones than he had ever seen. ‘When I stand up in front of schoolchildren and business groups I [will be] in a better position to let the people at home know how the rest of the world lives.’
Later Kim would call his men ‘ambassadors for sport, ambassadors for humanity’. He would tell TV interviewer Jana Wendt: ‘We are supporting those people who are fighting the government to end apartheid . . . We are fighting the South African government.’ On tour’s eve he would profess:
I honestly believe the athletes of the world do more to break down the barriers than anybody else. Maybe it’s for a split second. But during a sports event the world can forget about the Russians, the communists or whatever and just appreciate somebody’s God-given talent. The religious leaders and the political leaders of the world build barriers. I say to them, spare us your hypocrisy, your double-dealing, your discrimination.
Was he trying to persuade the world? Or himself?
•••••
KIM W ARLY THE LAST to say yes and the most likely to say no. This was the boy who wore his Australia Day birthdate as proof of his Australianness. Bruce Francis first mentioned South Africa to him in November 1982. Kim told the press about their conversation and thereafter Kim was told zilch. Of the twelve men he led into slaughter against West Indies on day one of summer 1984–85, nine had South African contracts signed on their behalf. The paperwork had been sorted in secrecy at seven o’clock that morning. Not until Sharjah, his Test career well and truly pitchforked, was Kim filled in by team-mates. In effect they were letting him know that they’d betrayed him. They had been betraying him since the 1983 World Cup, almost from the moment, in fact, that the captaincy became his and his only. Instead of decking them, Kim thought about joining them.
Everybody else’s disgruntlement with the board looked like mere pique beside Kim’s. He had been so confident of an Ashes spot that he booked a London flat and looked into a nanny for the kids. Selectors were Sawle, McCosker and Greg Chappell: Kim’s long-time champion, his first Test batting partner and his first skipper. ‘I spoke strongly,’ says Chappell, ‘in favour of leaving him out. I’d been witness to his mental state probably more than anyone.’
Chappell’s haste in accepting a selector’s job—six months after his final Test—bewildered fellow retirees Lillee and Marsh. Hadn’t Greg been pleading exhaustion? Unfinished business seems a plausible explanation. That Hilton breakfast with Kim. Australian cricket’s boils that required pinpricking. ‘There was an element of that,’ Chappell agrees. And he enjoyed the involvement, the sitting with players, identifying talent. England ’85 was the first Test touring squad he helped pick. He felt Kim needed time and Border space. ‘Kim could not have sat quietly in the corner and probably would still have had some supporters within the group. That would have made it very hard for Allan as captain. Kim wouldn’t have led anything, I can promise you. But to send him to England was going to destroy him as a player. He needed to regroup his emotions and his mental state.’
Before long, the freewheeler of old would come dancing back. Chappell says Kim was to be given exactly that assurance. Despair not of the now. Look to the future. Here, the mist turns to murk:
My understanding was that when we left that meeting Lawrie, being from Perth and knowing Kim well, was the man who was going to pass on the message to Kim that he was still in our vision in the big picture. I found out some time later—many years later, in fact—that Kim’s understanding was that no one passed that message on. But, you know, knowing the state of mind he was in, it may well have been another one of those discussions. As I say, we had a lot of them around that time that he wouldn’t recall.
Chappell describes the aftermath as ‘one of the tragedies of life . . . He got the shits, didn’t understand the decision—and understandably so—and took the first opportunity to say, well, stuff you.’ Sawle says he cannot recall. McCosker declined interview requests for this book. Was it a 2–1 vote, with Sawle backing Kim? Chappell remembers it as unanimous. Some observers point out that Chappell and McCosker were ex-World Series. Kim was Establishment. All those years later, two into one still would not go. The wound refused to scab.
Kim’s world was shrinking and becoming a more brutish place. Word reached Sharjah that Rod Marsh was challenging for a selector’s gig in Perth. Frank Parry, sixty years old and his zeal unquenchable, wrote the WACA a letter: ‘In the event that Marsh is elected a WA selector then Kim Hughes will continue his playing career over my dead body.’ A year ago Kim had been speaking of freedom and a life without the big three. And here they were again. One had him by the big toe and another was grabbing at his ankle. It was like he was being pincered. ‘I wonder,’ mused Ian Brayshaw, ‘if Hughes would make such a dramatic response over such an issue, however abhorrent the prospect of working in tandem with his old adversary.’ Where Kim’s own trepidation ended and the extended family’s influence began was no easy thing to pinpoint.
On 9 April 1985 the Daily News front page had Rob Parry seeking a $30,000 guarantee—$12,000 was the standard Sheffield Shield player’s income—or else Kim would flee interstate. Officials from four states greeted that idea with reactions varying between reluctance and squeamishness. Even import-friendly Tasmania, their players as likely to hail from Boggabri as Burnie, said they wanted a bowler not a batsman. Owen-Conway’s people contacted the News’s people and a retraction of sorts was printed. There had been no ultimatum, merely a request to talk, and their client was embarrassed.
Dollars were certainly being discussed—with Francis. He thought Kim desperate still to play for Australia and the unlikeliest of rebels. On 11 April the tour became public knowledge. Kim knew that those who’d signed were forfeiting their Ashes spots. Replacements—himself, say—would be required. Of this he was certain. He was England-bound after all. On 20 April he turned down Francis, politely. The next day Bacher rang. ‘You can always leave the door open,’ said Kim. ‘But, mate, I’m not going.’
Francis chatted regularly with myriad cranky cricketers clutching grudges. Any tawdry anti-board or anti-Packer scraps he fed to Kim. On 22 April one journalist supposedly overheard a selector tell another journalist that Kim was disruptive and past it. Francis informed Kim. He sounded dismayed, Francis thought. Kim was down all right. But his well was deep. On 25 April, Anzac Day, he resolved to return to the Test XI and ‘stick it up a few people’.
Around this time Kim phoned Border at home to pledge wholehearted loyalty. But Border was out and his wife Jane picked up the phone. Kim’s mind was swinging between extremes. The day after Anzac Day he discussed with Merriman and Richards the bid by Packer, protective of his investments, to entice various signed-up rebels back. They talked about why, how and how much. Shattered, Kim turned to Jenny: ‘I’ve had a gutful.’ And then he called Ali Bacher.
Steve Smith was on Packer’s shopping list. ‘I was in the shower when Francis rang. He told Jo that Tony Greig was going to ring our house and try to get me to change my mind, so don’t answer the phone. And that’s what happened. I was a man of my word.’ Packer’s minions did track down Wellham, Phillips and Wood. Wellham cheerfully recalls his brief meeting with Packer and Lynton Taylor.
‘What do you need?’
A job was the issue. Options were canvassed.
‘What about sales at PBL?’
‘Yep, fine.’
Wellham’s title was sales manager and his job description broad: on-ground sponsorships, magazine production, organising patches on grand prix jackets. Hours were nine to five at Park Street HQ, then off to the SCG for training. ‘I remember Kerry Packer getting in the lift occasionally and the lift going deathly quiet,’ says Wellham. ‘And Kerry Packer knew of course that everybody was deathly quiet because he was in there. It was quite funny, an interesting place. The Christmas hamper everybody got was a wonderful gesture.’
Tony Greig will confirm only that he was involved. Was Kim ever on Packer’s shopping list? ‘No comment.’ Almost certainly, Kim was not.
Kim was feeling disillusioned, nauseous, ashamed of officialdom. But he hadn’t yet told Bacher yes. Nor had he surrendered his dream, as Merriman reveals:
Kim rang me the morning before we were due to leave. ‘Listen, Bob,’ he said, ‘I still want to go on the Ashes tour. If there is a vacancy make sure people know I want to go.’
So I spoke to Greg Chappell. ‘We’ve got this terrible mess. How’s it going to unfold? And,’ I said, ‘I’ve had a call from Kim.’
The result was that the three players did go to England and Kim went to South Africa. And I, quite frankly, don’t blame him. That phone call was the last time I spoke to Kim for a couple of years. That was my fault as much as his. I could have rung. I just felt so bad. I couldn’t deliver for him. Couldn’t help him. I wasn’t a selector. Here I had a great friend and good colleague asking for help at his moment of heartbreak. I didn’t enjoy it. And I still don’t enjoy it.
Later that fateful day the board met in Melbourne. The players’ unanimous verdict was that Wellham, Phillips and Wood were not welcome on the plane to England. The board’s advice was that any attempt to exclude them was legally doomed. The players lost. Three streets away at the Hilton, agitated team-mates interrogated the tainted trio. ‘Does Packer own the Australian team?’ was one missile Wellham recalls dead-batting. It’s a rancid memory: ‘I was sat down in a chair and grilled by eighteen adults in a small room.’ The plane left next day with Wellham, Phillips and Wood all aboard.
A little of Kim’s hope died. His instinctive disgust knew no bounds. Now another instinct surfaced: self-preservation. Packer was paying five additional youngsters $15,000 a year to keep out of temptation’s way. They were five more Packer investments which Kim guessed would need safeguarding. About the time the Australian team’s plane was commencing its descent, Bert Rigg invited Kim for a late-afternoon drink at Yokine Bowling Club, 9000 miles from Heathrow and a million metaphorically. The drink lasted three hours. Kim heard Rigg grouch about Packer gluttony and cricket’s pollution by politics. When Kim got home David Richards rang. According to Kim, Richards predicted a ‘shitty tour’ to England and agreed the game stank. The most telling words uttered were Kim’s own: ‘Kerry Packer runs the game. He’s not going to be doing me any favours. Who’s going to be looking after me? What assurances have I got?’
Long and mazy were the notes Kim was scrawling at this time after conversations with officials. Excerpts went to South African Cricket Union lawyers and materialised in Guilty: Bob Hawke or Kim Hughes?, Francis’s take-no-prisoners book. One of Kim’s jottings went:
I can remember sitting down and thinking that throughout the whole of my cricketing career I seemed to have been opposing people. Because of my stand against World Series Cricket there were axes to grind and the situation just went from bad to worse. Later as captain of Australia I was involved in opposition to the administration in my attempts to improve the lot of players. All I seem to have done is oppose people. Gradually it had eaten away my confidence. In the end I did not know who to trust.
He could see past and present clearly now. As David Frith has observed, the idea of South Africa ‘took on the guise of rehabilitation’. ‘He was not a happy chappie at the end, not at all,’ confirms Richards. Without telling Kim, and going beyond his CEO’s remit, Richards phoned a selector—probably chairman Sawle, he thinks—and floated Kim’s possible appointment as guest captain of Australia’s under-25s to Zimbabwe. ‘Yeah,’ says Richards, ‘I’d own up to that call. I felt strongly that Kim still had something to contribute.’
The suggestion fell flat. Rod Marsh became a WA selector on 6 May and Kim reached Johannesburg on the 12th, accompanied by Rob Parry and Jenny. They travelled under a false name—the Smiths—and savoured the delights of Sun City resort. A dry three-paragraph letter announced Kim’s unavailability for Australian selection. To the last, Kim’s knack of innocently rubbing his elders up the wrong way remained intact. The letter, signed by Stephen Owen-Conway and bound for board chairman Frederick William Cecil Bennett, was addressed to the attention of Mr T.W.C. Bennett.
•••••
HIS TIME as the golden boy was up. ‘So long, Kim, it’s been good to know you,’ mocked the Sunday Times editorial. ‘Presumably South Africa may even launch its own version of the Ashes. Steve Biko’s, perhaps.’ Desire for a guaranteed game, not megabucks, swayed Kim, in Francis’s opinion. And it was true that $200,000 felt thinner than it might have thanks to lost superannuation entitlements, airfares for family members, months away from Town & Country and a gruelling court action over his right to play club cricket. But mega it was when piled beside a scrapheaped cricketer’s lot. Kim was a dad under pressure. ‘He was our biggest problem, always asking for money, even when the tours were over,’ South African Cricket Union president Geoff Dakin would later reminisce. Money anxieties can be shameful to own up to, even to yourself, which perhaps explains why Kim preferred talking about humanity.
People who had never entertained a thought about Kim Hughes monstered him. Hypocrite, hollered Archbishop Des-mond Tutu. Has-been, reckoned Gough Whitlam. Comforter of racists, lamented Bob Hawke.
Other critics were as familiar as sunburn. No black person was allowed into Berea Park, Pretoria, when Ian Chappell hit a hundred there in 1969–70. Fifteen years on Chappell disagreed with Australians playing in South Africa and interpreted as pro-government propaganda a picture of Kim and Bacher pointing thumbs up. Francis couldn’t help but highlight Chappell’s two Test trips, his subsequent Wanderers and double-wicket forays to South Africa, and his enthusiasm for South Africa’s reinstatement in books he’d written. With Ian and Kim, contradictions did tend to abound. Chappell roved amiably among Australia’s Test tourists in England, where scatological visions were borne out and the Ashes squandered 3–1. Batsman Greg Ritchie, an eager inhaler of Chappellian wisdom, exclaimed: ‘It is one of the biggest tragedies ever for Australian cricket that people like Ian Chappell have not been called in to help us.’
The knockers rattled Kim. Not being liked always had. ‘People think I’m a racist,’ friends heard him mutter disbelievingly. When Clive Lloyd voiced gentle support for cricketers’ right to choose, Kim called him ‘the black Jesus’, which just sounded batty, especially when Lloyd had been the opposite of Kim’s saviour in the summer just gone. Respect, reverence actually, was only continents away. Journalist Les Carlyon visited a land where Kim was ‘a hero, larger than a Reagan . . . our most exotic African export since Breaker Morant . . . a cult figure’. And that was before the rebels got there.
It became known as the Hughes tour of South Africa. (‘It wasn’t his tour; he came with us,’ team-mates half joke.) It began under three hundred chandeliers at Johannesburg’s Carlton Hotel, where bigwigs gathered for the welcoming banquet. Kim gave his Australian Test blazer to South Africa’s captain Clive Rice—a gifted salesman’s first masterstroke. His effervescence and quotability seldom waned, his lustre taking some of the potential shabbiness out of proceedings. Talkative, relaxed, jolly: team-mates recognised the old Kim, and then some. He showed author Chris Harte his back. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘no knives.’ Never before could Kim remember having a room to himself on tour. Jenny came for Christmas. So did Jenny’s mum, Kim’s mum, Sean, Simon, Bradley and Rob Parry.
A billboard advocated the players’ murder. Security tarzans hovered. In nearly every other respect it could have been any other tour. ‘You were going from airport to five-star hotel to cricket ground,’ recalls ‘Sheff’ Shiell, whose ten weeks away ranked among his most pleasurable. ‘The hotels were very good, the food was very good, the beer was just like ours. If you shut your eyes you could be completely oblivious to what was happening in the country.’
Soweto was a daytrip for some. Game parks were a more common excursion.
Any other tour meant the same old uncontrollables. ‘Kim still had the same problem,’ observes the thoughtful Maguire, Australia’s last full-bearded fast bowler. ‘Blokes were trying to white-ant him.’ Kim found Yallop a listless, largely runless deputy. Wessels’s inclusion for the second season was reportedly opposed 14–0 by the players but insisted on by Bacher. ‘So that’s how they vote in South Africa,’ quipped one anonymous quick.
Hogg describes them as unpressurised tours. ‘You’ve got a contract for two years,’ he says. ‘You can sit back and relax, or you can have half a go, but at the end of two years you’re not striving to still be in a side.’ It was noticeable that if some players sat back and relaxed any further they might fall out of their chairs. No media manager went: another familiar scenario. Little, avoidable aggravations weren’t avoided, such as Kim’s unasked-for dissertations on local umpires and batting techniques, or his two-day fishing trip to Namibia, a diamond-dusted war zone whose South African-run status defied Australia’s pro-independence foreign policy.
In his farewell hook at Australian cricket, Kim had savaged a culture at big business’s mercy. Big business, he avowed, drove him out: ‘The commercial interests have been successful.’ He thought he could escape them in South Africa. But there he was, arms round two Yellow Pages babes, the babes in skimpy shorts, all posing for sponsors’ photos. Was it the sun making Kim’s eyes crinkle? Or embarrassment? For one-day games the rebels dressed in mustard yellow and mismatched headgear. Stumps were orange and umpires Adidas blue. ‘The South Africans,’ reported the Guardian’s Matthew Engel, ‘have out-Packered Channel Nine.’
When the rebels played Transvaal, Engel sized up the 29,000 Wanderers cricket-goers: ‘A homogeneous crowd, speaking English, rather than Afrikaans; emphatically white, not black, mostly I would guess old boys from the local colleges that still model themselves on the English public schools of twenty and thirty years ago, with whackings and prefects and initiation rites.’ The day before, 40,000 attended a funeral of slain blacks in Mamelodi. ‘Except for the odd journalist,’ wrote Engel, ‘it seemed most improbable that anyone was present at both events.’
If the knives were out of Kim’s back, the scars still smarted. His after-dinner speeches—and these were plentiful—arrowed in on the shambles back home, the faceless board egotists, the all-powerful marketing men, the paucity of bat-wielding Aboriginal people. Between tours, addressing Sturt Football Club, Kim added:
I have a tremendous gift to please people. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to walk back on to the WACA Ground. I want my three boys to see me play for WA and Australia . . . I just happen to work for a different boss at the moment. Greg Chappell and Rod Marsh worked for Kerry Packer during World Series Cricket. Now Greg is a national selector and Marsh is a WA selector. Maybe I might end up chairman of the ACB.
One last characteristic distinguished the rebel expeditions as typical Australian cricket tours of the 1980s: the result. The unofficial Australians, as they called themselves, lost both ‘Test’ series 1–0 and their mustard outings more comprehensively, a match for but never masters of ageing men clawing back time stolen: Jimmy Cook, Ken McEwan, Peter Kirsten, Clive Rice, Garth le Roux. And Graeme Pollock, forty-two. One Pollock wallop seemed comfortably fielded by boundary rider Mick Taylor, only for the might of the blow to buffet Taylor over the rope. ‘Pollock played like a busted arse till he got about 30,’ Maguire remembers. ‘Then, once he started seeing the ball, he was scary.’
Pyrotechnics and perversity were hallmarks of Kim’s batting. So there was no change there either. Poised in Cape Town to add an unofficial Test hundred to his nine regulation ones, Kim scavenged five runs in the last fifteen overs to maroon himself on 97. In Johannesburg he made the seemingly impossible—three first-ball ducks—as simple as falling lbw, caught-behind and then appointing himself runner for an incapacitated Hogg, who was dismissed instantly. Kim averaged 45 the first season, 42 the next, and when he was good he was scintillating. The worriless backstreets of youth were roamed in a Port Elizabeth one-dayer. Cover drives erupted off one knee and both heels, as Kim stepped away and smashed, the rebels running down 316. He donated his wicket with victory a breath away and they lost eight for 12, another road he had wandered before.
Kim was among the quickest to offer congratulations when South Africa picked a non-white spinner. ‘The pioneer, the pathfinder,’ Omar Henry joyously anointed himself. Death threats ensued. A guard monitored Henry’s mother’s home for five days. Bacher now admits he misunderstood the anti-apartheid campaign. Bacher thought apartheid would outlive him.
The games went off hitch-free. Protests by blacks were illegal, and so there were none. President F.W. de Klerk changed that law in time for Mike Gatting’s 1990 English rebels. Only then did Bacher see the offence caused, the anger harboured, the damage done. He told the ABC’s Warwick Hadfield in 2004: ‘Had I known in retrospect their [black people’s] abhorrence of these tours, I believe we would have thought twice about entertaining those tours.’ Little was black and white about the happiness Kim’s men spread. Most of it was white.
‘It’s a bit of a grey area,’ says Rackemann, who nonetheless regrets nothing. The cricket was fierce and bowling to Pollock a thrill. Yallop felt ill-informed once he got there. ‘But we couldn’t get out of the decision. We were under contract and it was something I had to complete,’ he confessed to Wisden Australia on the rebels’ twentieth anniversary. ‘After we returned that made for some difficult moments of conscience.’ For Maguire, two productive stints with Eastern Province meant four seasons in South Africa overall, ample time for rumination:
My conscience tells me one thing—now—but at the time I probably didn’t have all the information. I think I have a better understanding of what really happened there after spending that time there. I don’t know. It’s a hard one. Sometimes I think: I shouldn’t have gone. I should have had more principles and that sort of thing and not gone. But then other times I think, well, I owed it to myself and my family to make the best of the profession I was pursuing.
The uncertainties of Bacher, Yallop and Maguire are minority ones. When contemplating the moral question, most think now as then that perhaps they helped. ‘I believed through my discussions with Ali Bacher that I would be involved in some way in the political discussions,’ says Wellham, ‘which really appealed to me, because I thought I could maybe assist.’ That was probably naive, Wellham says now. Kim, too, believed he could assist. Kim believes he did assist. In mid-2007 he said: ‘Cricket was at the forefront of trying to break down barriers, and when you look at how cricket has developed in South Africa I was very pleased to be involved.’
Kim found a lot to like in South Africa. Children and frisbees were welcome on fields at lunchbreaks. Young men underwent compulsory military training. ‘They come back desperate, very disciplined, very proud and very patriotic.’ Black cricket was making progress. But soccer was their passion. Seeing Bacher give township children fruit, drinks and a fare home was touching. Sporting sanctions were not. ‘People sell their coal, wheat, sheep . . . But because a cricketer goes you’re a bad cat.’
Once exile was over, Kepler Wessels brought an official South African fourteen to Australia for the 1992 World Cup. Kim wore his rebel tour blazer to the team’s cocktail reception. In the WACA press box he encountered Mike Coward for the first time in years.
‘Maaate, glad to see you.’
‘Oh. Hi Kim.’
Coward, no fan of the rebel tours, was bewildered. ‘It was as though nothing had happened—that we would resume the matey, casual relationship we had in 1978.’
In the Caribbean, visiting reporters with a day off between matches sometimes enquire after the damnation of the 1983 West Indian rebels—blacks who were reckoned to be shafting fellow blacks. Lawrence Rowe and others moved to America. Among those who stayed, Richard Austin is said to beg, sleep and do drugs on Kingston’s streets. David Murray and Herbert Chang have found money short and friendships elusive. All received life bans. Sri Lanka’s rebels got twenty-five years. As the unofficial Australians’ homecoming flight neared Perth, the South African Airways captain offered thanks for touring his beautiful country. ‘Good luck for the future,’ he proposed, ‘and God bless.’
And blessed, it seemed, they were. Two seasons out of Sheffield Shield cricket—the terms of an out-of-court settlement—merely covered their time in South Africa. They had to do a year’s penance before playing Tests. And, presto. Alderman flashed back into the XI. Rackemann followed. Hohns won a Test debut and his country’s thanks as a steel-nerved chairman of selectors. Jobs as state coaches or in commentary boxes seemed almost effortlessly attained. Three coached foreign Test teams. As for Kim, well, what happened next was another improbable tale.