DAVID MURRAY HAD always wanted to play cricket for the West Indies. He had been born very close to the Kensington Oval in Barbados and while he was still a boy his talent was evident. He captained his school team and was chosen for the Barbados youth side, then the West Indies youth XI. Few were surprised by his skill because Murray was the son of a West Indian cricket king.
David’s dad was Everton Weekes – the middle batsman of the three Ws. Frank Worrell, Weekes and Clyde Walcott were the brilliant Barbadian triptych in the West Indian side that played such exciting cricket after the Second World War. Weekes, a working-class genius who would one day receive a knighthood for his talents, first scored runs for fun in the Thursday afternoon blue-collar Barbados Cricket League. Then he got to a thousand Test runs faster than Donald Bradman. The Ws had been born within a few-dollars-on-the-meter Bridgetown taxi fare of each other between the middle of 1924 and the end of 1926. They were a holy trinity, three consubstantial persons in one almighty side. Local people, almost without qualification, loved them.
The writer Ramachandra Guha tells the story of Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey visiting Bridgetown in 1969 to preach to the Anglican flock gathered in the pews of St Michael’s Cathedral. ‘He began by saying he had come to talk about the three Ws. A huge cheer went up, to become a collective groan when the prelate continued, “Yes, the three Ws – work, witness and worship!”’
David Murray knew the cathedral’s pews, its perfume and its prayers. He had been brought up in the Anglican faith and was a choirboy. He knew the wooden benches of the Kensington Oval just as well and had seen Nari Contractor hit by that infamous Charlie Griffith bouncer in 1962. ‘Just a schoolboy, but I still hear the conk of the ball on his head.’ Murray also knew the sands of Brownes Beach, Brandons Beach and Bayshore Beach.
‘I would get up early every morning and train at five o’clock,’ he says. ‘I knew every scavenger in Barbados at that time when I’m up on the road. I do a lot of road work myself. And beach work. For the team and for yourself as a wicket-keeper you should be fit. We had these fast bowlers coming – there was a whole heap of them at the time.’
Murray – whose famous father was batting at Cardiff Arms Park against Glamorgan when he was born on a Monday in May in 1950 – was touring England himself with the West Indians by the time he was 23. But the keeper’s job he wanted was held by another Murray – no relation – the vice-captain, Deryck. David would have to wait. He did not start a Test match until the Packer schism of 1978 offered him a place. Malcolm Marshall once said that David Murray was the best wicket-keeper he ever bowled to. But this Murray would play only 19 Test matches in his life. By the beginning of 1983 he was flying to a forbidden land and towards his final games of cricket.
* * *
In the first week of January 1983 a story appeared in the Jamaican newspaper the Daily Gleaner. The batsman Lawrence Rowe was denying having signed a contract to play cricket in South Africa. The newspaper’s source – thought to be another player – named 14 other West Indian cricketers who would be going. They were, said the source, to be paid at least US $90,000 each and would return for another tour at the end of 1983. In South Africa a club official in Pretoria had let slip that he had been told to make preparations for the arrival of an ‘international team’. Would there be more than one side? There could be players from Australia, New Zealand and England too, said the Star in Johannesburg.
To most readers of the Gleaner, this was extraordinary news. Black players travelling to a country ostracised by much of the world because it practised state-sanctioned racism? But the next day the mystery tour was called off. Cancelled by the South African Cricket Union. Its president, Joe Pamensky, said that the leaking of the story had put pressure on several players – whom he wouldn’t name – and they had withdrawn. The tour would now be scrapped because it was no longer of ‘true international standard’.
In the Caribbean the WICBC was mightily relieved. At a cricket lunch in Jamaica its president, Allan Rae, praised both Lawrence Rowe and Colin Croft – who were at the table with him – for not going to South Africa. ‘I believe the cricketing fraternity of the West Indies ought to say a big thank you,’ he told his audience. ‘The gentlemen have put temptation behind them.’
Except they hadn’t. There still was a tour. It would be made by West Indian players and, secretly, it was going ahead. Within a week, six cricketers from Barbados met at Grantley Adams International Airport heading for Miami. They had gathered at a house near the airport before leaving it as late as they could to check in. Collis King was there, covering his face with a straw hat to hide from a TV news crew that had picked up the story. As he strode past the camera with an Adidas sports bag on his shoulder, he walked into a pillar and the hat fell off.
Reports in South Africa now claimed that the idea of a tour had been conceived in London in the summer of 1982. Ali Bacher, a former South Africa captain and recruiter-in-chief of rebel cricketers, had tried to persuade the West Indian Sylvester Clarke, who was playing for Surrey, to become Vintcent van der Bijl’s opening bowling partner for Transvaal. Clarke said no but kept the business card he had been given. He passed it on to the former Barbados bowler Gregory Armstrong, and by October 1982 there was a fully formed plan to take an entire West Indies XI to South Africa. Code names were used for the players and contact between them was apparently maintained via public telephone boxes.
And now, at the beginning of 1983, they were about to depart. With King were Alvin Greenidge (no relation of Gordon), Emmerson Trotman, Ezra Moseley and Sylvester Clarke. Albert Padmore arrived at Adams airport 20 minutes late and caused the flight to be delayed. Derick Parry would fly from Antigua to join them in Miami. Lawrence Rowe was heading there too, from Kingston, but when he was asked why he was flying to Florida, Rowe assured reporters that he was due in Miami on business and would be back in Jamaica the following evening.
He didn’t return. He was heading to South Africa to captain a team of black men in a country where black people had few rights. He was heading into the heart of apartheid.
* * *
South Africa hadn’t played proper international cricket for 13 years. The last Test side to go to the republic had been Australia in 1970. At Port Elizabeth that March the visitors were beaten for the fourth time in four matches by a brilliantly talented – and entirely white – South African side. There would be no more Test cricket for nearly a quarter of a century. Most sporting nations refused to play South Africa because of apartheid. By law, black and white were forbidden to mix freely. Segregation was everywhere and people who challenged the iniquity were punished. By the mid-1960s those punishments ranged from the pettily bureaucratic to imprisonment, detention without trial, torture and extrajudicial killings.
One of apartheid’s chief architects was Hendrik Verwoerd, who was prime minister from 1958 until he was stabbed to death in the House of Assembly in Cape Town on a September afternoon in 1966. He was very concerned that sport must not undermine apartheid. In 1962 Verwoerd’s minister of the interior proclaimed, ‘The mixing of races in teams taking part in sports meetings in the republic and abroad must be prevented. The government cannot allow teams from the republic to be composed of whites and non-whites. Conversely, foreign teams which are so composed cannot be permitted to enter the republic.’
In 1964 South Africa’s invitation to appear at the Olympic games was withdrawn. Later the same year the governing body of international football, Fifa, suspended South Africa. Neither of these decisions was straightforward; there were many within the football and Olympic worlds who had argued it was right and acceptable to include the apartheid republic.
In the years that followed, South Africa’s governing National Party tried a little window-dressing to present the republic as a nation of multiracial sport, but nothing meaningful had changed. Black sports unions may have been given some leeway, but rigid racial separation remained. Black, coloured and Indian spectators – if they were allowed in at all – still had to enter sports stadiums by different gates, sit in different seats and use different lavatories. In 1968, when Verwoerd’s successor B. J. Vorster refused to allow the England cricket team into the country because one of its players was Basil D’Oliveira – a ‘Cape Coloured’ batsman who had left South Africa to play for England – the worldwide reaction against the republic helped to accelerate its full sporting isolation.
And so for many nations – not least, independent post-colonial black nations – the idea of their athletes taking their skills to South Africa was all but inconceivable. The anti-apartheid struggle was both principled and visceral, wrote Michael Manley. ‘To the members of the black diaspora, the oppression which continues unabated in South Africa has become the symbol of more than a tyranny to be overthrown. Apartheid points like a dagger to the throat of black self-worth in every corner occupied by the descendants of Africa.’
* * *
On Wednesday 14 January 1983 Lawrence Rowe and most of his side touched down at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg.
‘The last five minutes of that flight,’ he would recall,
I can remember it vividly. There was total silence. I think everybody was more or less thinking the same thing: We are now getting ready to land in South Africa. Whoever was thinking about a career for the West Indies again, it is now gone. It hit everybody now that, Hey, this is it. This is the moment of truth now. We are here, we’re coming down. What are we to expect when we get down there? What would the black people be feeling when we walk off the plane? This was the thinking of most of the guys.
At the airport they were served beer by black waiters with bottle openers and protected by white policeman with guns. Lawrence Rowe told reporters, ‘We are professionals. We are here to do a job. Obviously we are feeling a bit jittery.’ A hundred or so people had cheered and clapped as the players arrived. Three black people stood silently holding a poster: FREEDOM FIRST – CRICKET LATER.
Other West Indian team members flew in during the next few days. The South African Cricket Union arranged with the Department of Internal Affairs for their passports not to be stamped to indicate that they had visited South Africa, as it might cause the cricketers problems in later life. A few other players were expected to join the rebels but never arrived. Alvin Kallicharran was already there, playing for Transvaal. He was no longer part of the West Indies Test team. In 1981 he had signed a contract for the provincial side, a decision which ended his international career. Now he would play county cricket for Warwickshire in the English summer and for Transvaal in the English winter.
When all the players eventually gathered, there were the Jamaicans Rowe, Richard Austin, Everton Mattis, Ray Wynter and Herbert Chang. Barbados was best represented – by Alvin Greenidge, Emmerson Trotman, Collis King, Ezra Moseley, David Murray, Franklyn Stephenson and Sylvester Clarke. The manager and his assistant – Albert Padmore and Gregory Armstrong – were from Barbados too. Derick Parry was from Nevis, Bernard Julien from Trinidad. Colin Croft and Kallicharran were Guyanese.
Back in the West Indies the official reaction was forthright. ‘They had better not come here,’ warned Trinidad’s national security minister. ‘I wouldn’t be able to guarantee their safety if they did.’ Michael Manley – now the opposition leader in Jamaica – said the players’ decision amounted to ‘selling out their patrimony, humiliating their race and country for a mess of pottage’. They should get nothing less than life bans from cricket, he said.
Another Jamaican politician said the players had ‘deceived the nation up to the very last moment that they began their blood-money mission to racist South Africa. The dignity of man and in particular the fight of the black man in South Africa for his normal, basic, God-given rights cannot be quantified in terms of money – not even the fortune of Croesus or the gold at Fort Knox.’ The minister concluded that Lawrence Rowe and Colin Croft’s deception of WICBC president Allan Rae as they sat next to him at the lunch table was ‘especially vicious and heinous as they caused Mr Rae to make an embarrassing and premature expression of gratitude’.
Rae later recalled how he had passed Rowe a note before speaking. ‘I wrote, “I have to make a speech before this luncheon is finished. Is it true you’re going to South Africa?” He wrote at the bottom of the paper, “I’m staying,” and I got up and praised him to the highest heavens.’
Secrecy – and in consequence deception – had been critical if the rebels were to make it to South Africa unmolested. In The Times some days before the tour’s beginning Alvin Kallicharran had let it be known that he was considering legal action because his name was being ‘tarnished’ in connection with the enterprise. ‘How is it possible for me to arrange such a tour when I’m currently playing for Transvaal?’ However, eight days later in the same newspaper Joe Pamensky commended the Guyanese batsman for his role in the planning of the trip: ‘Alvin Kallicharran has proved to be one of South Africa’s greatest ambassadors.’
The Barbadian cricket journalist Tony Cozier wrote at the time that the revelation of the tour was a ‘shattering blow to the collective morale of the governments of the region, who in common with other black, third world countries, have waged a steadfast campaign against South Africa’. The barriers that these governments had sought to erect around the republic and had strenuously sought to maintain ‘were being trampled over by their own cricketers’. A black team had been lured to a country that despised black people. ‘It was a major accomplishment by South Africans both political and cricketing,’ he said.
But not everybody condemned the rebels. On Caribbean phone-in radio shows and on the letters pages of the region’s newspapers there was regular support for the cricketers. They were praised for trying to better themselves financially. Al Gilkes went on tour with the side to report for the Nation newspaper in Barbados, the only black journalist to do so. As the trip went on he formed the belief that ‘Rowe and his rebel team had become not the mercenaries they were being labelled outside South Africa but black missionaries converting and baptising thousands and thousands of whites into a religion of black acceptance and respect from Cape Town to Johannesburg, to Durban and right into the throne room of Afrikanerdom itself, Pretoria.’
The WICBC was of course wounded by the deception. It had been betrayed by those it least expected to breach the sanction. But in fact there had been several warnings. In 1982 Clive Lloyd had even submitted a paper to West Indian governments predicting that a tour by a renegade West Indies XI was likely. ‘If members of what might be considered the West Indies first and second XIs were to give in to the considerable temptations that could be offered, the implications for both West Indies and world cricket could be grave,’ he wrote. ‘The problem is a political and economic one and requires a political and economic solution … It would be idle to pretend that the Caribbean could hope to match the scale of the South African offers … but if an attractive offer of alternative employment is provided, cricketers would then be put on the spot if they were to take up offers to go to South Africa.’
Lloyd’s plan – which would have meant a stipend for certain players – wasn’t seriously entertained.
* * *
David Murray had made the journey to South Africa by himself. He arrived in Johannesburg from Australia, where he had been playing club cricket for Glenelg in Adelaide. ‘I was booked in at the Carlton hotel,’ he remembers ‘and as soon as I walked in I got a lot of looks: This man is a black man. I got to the desk to sign in and they looked at me. I didn’t sleep that night. I just wanted to get to the guys. You could feel the segregation between black and white and coloured. It was in the air. It was frightening.’
Murray had left his pregnant Australian wife behind him. Kerry Murray said that her husband was trembling when he made the final decision to go. Within a fortnight she had given birth to their child, a daughter called Ebony. The SACU sent Murray champagne to celebrate, but very quickly he was threatened with never being able to see his daughter in Australia. The Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser let it be known that no West Indians who played in South Africa would be allowed back into the country. The plan would prove politically unworkable, but for a while it unsettled Murray still further. ‘It’s hard to play cricket with all the stories coming out,’ he said at the time. ‘Of course I don’t support apartheid, but I don’t get involved in the political side. I just know how to keep wicket and bat a bit.’
The South African cricket authorities needed this tour to work because previous visits had failed. The West Indies were not the first rebel team to be lured to the republic, but it was hoped they would be the most exciting. An English team captained by Graham Gooch had been easily beaten by South Africa the season before, but not as easily as a pitifully lame Sri Lanka side that hadn’t won a single match in late 1982. South African cricket watchers wanted to believe that their side, despite its years of banishment, was still capable of beating a classy opponent. Nothing had been proved by the visits of the English and Sri Lankan mercenaries.
The West Indies’ arrival also coincided with substantial changes within South Africa, which were making the white population uneasy. While there was plenty of cash available to turn some black athletes’ heads (‘We have all the money we need to induce the best cricketers in the world,’ boasted the SACU), the country had been experiencing a sharp recession. Many white people were becoming poorer. Moreover, the extraordinarily elaborate bureaucracy set up to administer apartheid had never been more costly. White professionals were leaving South Africa to find work and to escape what was fast becoming the world’s number one pariah nation, and notable divisions, previously unthinkable, were opening between working-class and middle-class Afrikaners.
South Africa had never felt so estranged. ‘Instead of being at the southern end of a continent controlled by Europeans, in a world dominated by Europeans and North Americans, South Africa had become an isolated anomaly,’ wrote Leonard Thompson, a scholar of the republic’s history and politics. ‘Whereas the structure of Southern African society had been compatible with the structure of the societies in tropical Africa, the Caribbean, much of Asia and the United States before World War II, that was no longer the case. Since 1948, systematic racism had become the bedrock of South Africa’s law and practice. The ways had parted between South Africa and the rest of the world.’
Of all the measures taken against South Africa, the sporting boycott appeared to be particularly effective. By the late 1970s white sports administrators were pleading with the government to authorise mixed events in the hope that they might just prove to be the beginning of the republic’s reintegration into international sport. Cricket was one of the first games to experiment with mixing, but according to Sam Ramsamy, who ran the South African non-racial Olympic committee, mixed cricket in the apartheid republic was a trick and a failure.
Writing in The Cricketer at the time of the rebel West Indian tour, he revealed,
black clubs – on innocently affiliating to the previously all-white provincial leagues – discovered that they could only play in fixtures that were approved by the white government. Blacks were not allowed to join white clubs or vice versa. Blacks discovered that they were not allowed to use shelters where food or drinks were served. Blacks were told that the clubhouses and changing rooms were for whites only. Black players were forced to change in their cars while whites enjoyed the luxury of the clubhouses. During lunch breaks blacks had to leave the ground for their meals while the whites could eat in the clubhouse. Blacks quickly discovered that they were being used to create a showpiece of propaganda for the outside world so that white South Africa could again enjoy international participation.
Joe Pamensky insisted that there had never been any question of conning black cricketers. Naturally, he said, there were some teething problems in bringing about such important changes, ‘but these happily were isolated incidents and quickly settled’. There was, he said, no place in the SACU’s set-up for clubs that practised racial discrimination.
And so South Africa desperately needed a distracting sporting success – and was prepared to pay for it. Even after Lawrence Rowe’s team arrived, the recruitment of black cricketers to add to the West Indian squad continued. Michael Holding, who was playing for the Australian state of Tasmania, was telephoned in bed by the rebel captain, who offered him US $250,000 to join the gang. ‘I made it plain to Lawrence that I wasn’t interested. I know it’s a lot of money but the principle of the thing is far more important,’ said the fast bowler to a newspaper at the time.
Now he can elaborate.
My reaction when I heard about the team that went down to South Africa was that they were traitors. They were selling out the region. I could not understand why anyone would want to play cricket there with the apartheid regime still in force. That was my immediate reaction. Having watched what had taken place in the townships with the killing of the black people there, the way black people were treated. I just could not understand why any West Indian cricketer would want to go down there, and I was disgusted.
Others had been asked too. Their decision to reject the South African money took them a little longer. Several early press reports about which players had decided to take part in the tour named Malcolm Marshall, Desmond Haynes and Hartley Alleyne. Certainly they were tempted, and when the rebels returned for a second tour at the end of the year Alleyne would be with them. Like David Murray, all three had been in Australia at the end of 1982.
Marshall recalled that Ali Bacher had somehow got hold of the number of the flat where he was staying in Melbourne and in the strictest secrecy called to offer him $50,000 to join up. Tickets in his name were ready at the airport. Marshall told Bacher that he was intrigued and flattered by the offer. Bacher told him not to mention it to a soul. Marshall agreed but went straight round to see Haynes and Alleyne to tell them.
The three men discovered that they had all been made similarly secret offers by Bacher but of very different amounts. They were conflicted. Marshall was only 24 but knew that the money would be enough to set up a business in Barbados – if he was allowed to return there. However, he was interested to learn that Colin Croft had signed up for the tour. If Croft was banned from the Test team, it was very likely that Marshall would be his replacement. Like Haynes, he immediately thought about how he would be treated back home if he took apartheid money. ‘I was plagued by the idea that I could become an outcast among my own people for helping to add succour to a political system which openly denigrated blacks,’ he wrote in his autobiography.
Haynes’s biographer Rob Steen recorded similar thoughts. The temptation for the batsman was great, no question of that. ‘I was very nervous and confused about the whole thing. I had to look at the whole situation in the long run, at the prospect of securing my future … I felt that what was going on in South Africa was wrong but by the same token I did not believe that going there would change anything. There is so much hypocrisy in the world.’
The decision they took to refuse South Africa was a late one; up until the departure of the rebels there was some uncertainty about where Haynes, Marshall and Alleyne actually were. Some reports said that they had left Australia for Johannesburg. David Murray says that he spoke to them about meeting in Perth to fly together to South Africa. Desmond Haynes solved the mystery when he rang officials in Barbados on 13 January to let them know that he and his two friends would be flying back to the island via San Francisco. When they arrived at Grantley Adams airport they were slightly embarrassed to see cheering crowds and the chairman of the national sports council. ‘I am so glad you boys have had the good sense to turn down the offer and to come home to your own people,’ the politician told them. ‘You will not regret this. You will be able to live with yourselves – which may not be the case for some of your countrymen.’
He wasn’t joking. The same day the WICBC banned the rebels from any sort of cricket sanctioned by the board. Life bans.
* * *
Less than two days after landing in South Africa the West Indians were playing cricket – a 50-over game against Western Province at Newlands in Cape Town. Richard Austin in a sun hat and Alvin Greenidge in a maroon helmet walked out to open the West Indian batting. They had crossed the line. In the press box one mischievous reporter asked, ‘I wonder what John Vorster is doing right now?’ There were to be provincial matches and two ‘Test’ matches against South Africa plus six one-day games.
The second fixture of the tour, against Border, was David Murray’s first. As he stood behind the wicket, the enormity of his decision was now inescapable. ‘Yeah. The first ball I received in South Africa was a dismissal. A Sylvester Clarke first-ball catch, and the guys ran from first slip and all over the field. All I was thinking was You can’t play for the West Indies again once the umpire said “Play.” So, first ball of my tour and my career was finished. I shed a tear, I remember that very much. Water came down the eyes as if to say, You can’t play for your country again. I was solemn. Very.’
* * *
Robin Buckley is sipping a beer in the back room of his house in Pretoria. The two family dogs are sniffing the air for the scent of snacks. In his day Robin was a fine club cricketer. Some of his trophies sit on the shelf above him. ‘Just Mickey Mouse stuff,’ he chuckles.
Robin saw the West Indies team play in the second ‘Test’ match of their first tour in Johannesburg. He couldn’t wait. He watched Collis King make a hundred and smiles when describing the way King could drive a yorker off the back foot through the covers.
‘We were starved,’ he says. ‘We’d missed out on the West Indies of course. I remember asking friends from England, “What is Andy Roberts like? What does he look like? What is his style? How does he bowl?” We didn’t see any of it. So when these guys came out, we were off like a shot to go and see them. People couldn’t get enough of them here.’
Like a lot of white middle-class cricket lovers in South Africa, Robin Buckley was less interested in politics than he was in sport. He had a university friend who had been imprisoned for his beliefs by the regime, but his view is that meddling politicians – for and against apartheid – wrecked people’s enjoyment of sport. ‘These black cricketers were ambassadors. The crowds realised that they were putting their lives on the line and taking a chance, so there was support and respect for that. As for the situation we were in, that was just the law. My family was brought up to respect people; we worked with black people; I sat next to a black guy in my car every day. But that was the law. Sitting watching it all happen, there was not much you could do about it.’
He also knew that however mild the transgression, the authorities’ reach – and memory – was long. As a student at Natal University he had once illegally played cricket against a local Indian XI.
After the game one of the players said, ‘Did you see the police there? They were taking photographs of us all.’ ‘You must be kidding,’ we answered. Well, 15 years later I was working as a surveyor and had a job looking at a government building in Pretoria – the Special Branch police offices or something. They assigned a chap to walk with me to make sure I didn’t go anywhere I shouldn’t. Along the way he showed me the room with all the files of the naughty people in it. So I gave him my card and said, ‘See if you can find anything on me.’ A little while later he came back and said, ‘There was a photo of you when you were younger in cricket whites.’ It had been taken at that game in 1971.
Politicians mess it up for the sportsmen – just let them get on and play. It made me sad that people like Viv Richards and Clive Lloyd would say, ‘I will never come to your country because of what it represents.’ But I also think that they didn’t actually understand that there were people here who didn’t think like the government. I would say that most English-speaking people here would give you roughly the same answer. If you spoke to Afrikaners, well, you’d perhaps get a different answer. I think we probably all knew that the tour was a trick, but I wasn’t going to turn around and say, ‘This is a government ploy; I’m not going to go and watch.’ Here was an opportunity to see these guys, and we knew the people playing against them and we wanted to see cricket. It might come with a bit of a taint to it but we weren’t going to miss it. What you have to understand is that nobody could foresee when apartheid would end, you know?
* * *
Essop Pahad is sitting in the shade on the back deck of his house in Johannesburg. At his feet are some of his grandchildren’s toys. On the wall by the front door are two framed pictures, one of Muhammad Ali and one of Nelson Mandela looking on while Chris Hani, once the leader of the South African Communist Party, gives a speech.
‘What you must understand’, Essop insists,
is that white South Africans would say of these black cricketers, ‘Ah, but they are different. They aren’t like the black people who cut our lawns. Our blacks can’t play cricket, they aren’t any good.’ Because if they admitted that we were all the same and that we had skills which were as good as theirs, then you were admitting there had to be a change. And they were refusing to change. No one could turn a blind eye like a white South African could in those days. Liberals and others.
Pahad is a cricket-lover, a sports lover born in the Transvaal just before the Second World War. As a teenaged member of the Indian Youth Congress he campaigned against Frank Worrell bringing a cricket side to South Africa. He became a communist and later, an African National Congress politician. He didn’t see much cricket in the 1980s though, because he was exiled in Iron Curtain Czechoslovakia. After apartheid had been dismantled, he served in the government of his student friend, President Thabo Mbeki.
The pair studied at the University of Sussex together, where Pahad combined his academic life with political agitation. In 1965, he went to Lord’s to meet the MCC Secretary, ‘Billy’ Griffith. ‘Wow. We’re sitting in the Long Room,’ said his companion, Dennis Brutus. Brutus was a poet and anti-apartheid sporting activist. They were hoping to persuade MCC not to let the South Africa side tour England that summer. Griffith granted them an audience in the famous pavilion where women were not yet allowed (even though the wedding reception of Griffith’s own daughter had been held there) to listen to the pair’s arguments in favour of sporting boycotts.
‘He gave us a typical conservative English answer about politics and sport not being mixed,’ remembers Pahad. Before long the student was arrested on St John’s Wood Road for putting up stickers protesting against the tour. He laughs. ‘“Don’t worry,” a friend told me as I was being taken away. “They’re not like the South African police.”
‘I think it is fair to say’, he goes on,
that the anti-apartheid movement had its origins in England, and it became the most powerful solidarity movement the world has ever seen. We had spent 18 years building this organisation up, and by 1983, when nobody wanted to touch apartheid South Africa, you get these black cricketers coming here, a huge, huge disappointment. For the regime it was a great success. They had broken the boycott, or so they thought.
I regarded these black men as traitors. Traitors to the cause. Because it was treachery of the highest order – and treachery for what? They didn’t come here to develop cricket, they came here because they were offered a lot of money. It’s understandable of course because most cricketers in the West Indies weren’t being paid very much at all. But they were making a fast buck on the back of somebody else’s oppression. They gave respectability to a pariah state. Giving solace and comfort to the fountainhead of world racism.
Of course those who went to South Africa disagreed – publicly, at least. They had a variety of reasons for going. Some were unemployed; others recognised that, given the strength of the 1980s West Indies side, they would never play Test cricket; some who had played Test cricket before knew they never would again. Sylvester Clarke, for instance, was a superbly destructive fast bowler but probably sixth or seventh in line to take the new ball for Clive Lloyd’s side. Lawrence Rowe and Alvin Kallicharran knew exactly what it took to play Test cricket – they had 96 caps between them – but were distressed by the way their careers had ended. Both thought they had been unfairly dropped from the side, and in a manner that was disrespectful of their service. Professionally at least, they felt they had nothing to lose by playing cricket in South Africa.
For Colin Croft the decision was also about where he had come from and where he wanted to go. ‘I had hopes and aspirations of getting a degree in engineering. I had hopes and aspirations of becoming an airline pilot way back in 1979 when I was an air traffic controller. So the possibility presented itself during WSC to get some money.’
And now, five years later, another opportunity had arisen.
I can recall some names that I know from when I was in high school – Basil Butcher, Joe Solomon, Roy Fredericks. They all played for Guyana and the West Indies and they got nothing out of it, absolutely nothing. I’d had a tough life so anything I have accumulated since I played cricket for the West Indies is a bonus. I came from a very poor background, so for me to put on a suit like this or to be dressed up or driving a car is, to use a modern circumstance, ‘elevation’.
You say to a man, ‘Well, you mustn’t go to South Africa.’ But you don’t provide anything else for him, so what is he supposed to do? How is he supposed to feed his kids? Is he supposed to go to the grocer and say, ‘My name is Colin Croft; I played for the West Indies. I need two baskets full of groceries.’ It doesn’t work that way.
When Collis King was interviewed by the CNN journalist Don Riddell for a 2013 documentary called Branded a Rebel, he said it was dissatisfaction with the West Indies’ cricket authorities that helped him make his decision. ‘I wasn’t getting treated right as far as the West Indies were concerned. I was still scoring runs yet I wasn’t on the team. And I said to myself, Well, cricket is my job. You’re not picking me; I’ll go to play cricket someplace where people will see proper cricket. And that’s why I went.’
And there was the cash. ‘It’s true to say’, mentioned one of the squad once he had arrived in South Africa, ‘that I’m getting more money from this short tour than I can earn in Jamaica in a year. I’m just trying to secure my financial future.’
‘Well, money is everybody’s god, let’s be honest,’ is how Colin Croft puts it.
An official programme recorded that ‘for the majority of the players the principal motive for making the tour has been the financial angle. The words of one of the players – Richard Austin – may well be echoed by all. “I cannot feed myself and my family on principles.” The lot of the West Indian cricket professional who is not counted among the few top stars is far from easy.’
‘How do you become a mercenary?’ asks Croft. ‘Simply because you are paid to play the same sport that you’ve been paid to play before? I had played for the West Indies and had been paid. Was I not a mercenary then? When I played World Series Cricket was I not a mercenary? But if I go to South Africa and I’m being paid, I’m a mercenary now? I’m not sure I know what the difference is.’
A decade after the tour, speaking to Michelle McDonald from the website caribbeancricket.com, Lawrence Rowe explained why he had accepted the captaincy of rebel team: ‘By going I didn’t believe we could have made it any worse for the [non-white] South Africans. The second thing was, by going, there was just a possibility that we might have a little opening, and especially if I went and we won, it would have been a victory for the black people. Number three, money was involved.’ The money was about 60 times as much as he was getting paid for playing for Jamaica. ‘And most of the guys were pissed off with the West Indies board.’
Rowe believed that after the runs he scored against England in 1980–81 he should have been selected for the tour to Australia. Instead, he and Alvin Kallicharran were ‘thrown through the window’ and dropped.
So here is an offer, 60 times more. You have your family, and for some people like Everton Mattis these people didn’t own a car, had four or five children, didn’t have a house, didn’t have anything. The people of influence would have passed them on the road. If you were leaving a Jamaica match you had to go get the bus carrying your own bag. How do you tell a man in a position like that not to accept $100,000 to go play five months of cricket over the two tours?
Rowe’s notion that a West Indian side playing cricket in apartheid South Africa was ‘a victory for the black people’ which could bring hope for the future irritates Essop Pahad.
This idea – that sport during that time in South Africa could bring people together – it’s absolute rubbish. There is not one single black person in South Africa, except the ones that were already sell-outs, who would make that argument. It didn’t prove anything. We already knew that Sobers, Richards, Roberts, Kanhai were some of the best cricketers the world had seen. We didn’t need to discover that blacks could play cricket too. The whole thing was designed to placate the whites in South Africa that all was not lost. They were being herded into their laager and fed the illusion that actually We are in control of the situation.
Neither does the former politician think that West Indian cricketers were historically ignorant of apartheid.
In 1966 I was in Brighton with Thabo Mbeki. One day he would become president of South Africa. We’re doing our masters degrees together at Sussex University and the West Indies were touring. They came to play Sussex at Hove. I had a nice little house in Spring Street and Thabo said, ‘Let’s invite the team there.’ And so they all came and spent the evening – Hall, Griffith, Kanhai, Sobers. A lot of drinks, a lot of food. We talked about apartheid and the hope of a boycott. There was cricket conversation, talk about the sanctions, about the importance of isolating apartheid South Africa. So they were not unaware. I remember that we spoke to them about the importance of demonstrating the capacity of blacks. And for us, those West Indies cricketers were the epitome of that. So for those of us who loved cricket, this tour in ’83 was especially crushing because we thought the West Indies were the greatest team.
* * *
‘We made these decisions in our life, rightly or wrongly,’ says Alvin Kallicharran. ‘But we weren’t involved with the whites alone. We went into townships. We went into Soweto, we went into Coloured and Indian areas. What people were seeing for the first time was blacks against whites, and that opened up lots of avenues for black cricketers in South Africa. People have to look at the plusses too.’
Kallicharran’s supporters at the time wrote that by playing in South Africa he would help to break down barriers between black and white a lot faster than politicians could. Some black sports administrators inside South Africa were less sure. Krish Mackerdhuj, who would later become the first non-white president of a South Africa cricket board, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1982, ‘Sure, there will be certain black sportsmen who would welcome Kallicharran. But the majority detest his presence because he is non-committal to their struggle for non-racialism in sport.’
Kallicharran was disgusted by spectators who heckled him and said that if they carried on he would not be able to sympathise with their cause. ‘I will play the game, regardless of what any person or organisation has to say about me or my choice,’ quoted the Herald. ‘I am a professional cricketer. Like a doctor or a teacher trained to do a particular job, I am best at cricket. I earn my living from playing and coaching cricket, and I don’t think anybody has the right to stop me from doing this.’
What was obvious was that almost all of Transvaal’s cricket supporters – that is their white fans – adored Kallicharran. The warmth of the applause he received when he scored his first hundred for the side made him cry.
‘The loudest cheer I ever heard for any cricketer at the Wanderers was for Alvin Kallicharran in his last innings there,’ remembers Robin Buckley. ‘These guys left their mark here. People shouting anti-apartheid things at sport is stupid, absolutely crazy, because that’s where you get to influence people – you get inside the laager mentality and have a chance to make people change. The best thing was to play sport together. Let these South Africans see what the rest of the world is all about.’
* * *
To see what South Africa was about, the rebel side of 1983 had to go through a curious transformation. They had to become ‘honorary whites’. This was less a process of signing documents or carrying a piece of paper than an existential change of status. The argument was that any black person invited to South Africa automatically became an honorary white. Practically, this allowed Rowe and his team to go to places – restaurants, hotels – or to travel in taxis forbidden to black South Africans by law.
‘I remember thinking, These guys have sold out,’ says Michael Holding, ‘and I suppose having now accepted the term ‘honorary white’, if they paid them enough money they would even accept chains on their ankles. I remember saying that. Now, looking back on it, perhaps that was a little bit harsh, but that is just the way I felt at the time.’ The insult of being granted such a status was too much for Vivian Richards. It was ‘as low as you can get in selling your soul’. He says he would rather have died than lost his dignity in such a way. ‘How can a black man be a honorary white man?’ he asks. ‘No money in this world would get me to go to South Africa if I had to give them my natural status. I was going to sit anywhere on a train I wanted to sit. I was going to go anywhere that I wanted to go. That is the privilege of human beings.’
‘What is wrong with the colour of my skin?’ wonders Holding. ‘What is wrong with my ethnicity? Why should anyone tell me that I should be an honorary anything apart from what I am? If I am black, I am black – I am proud of it. Why would a white man want to go to a black country or where black people rule and say that he is an honorary black? That is absolute rubbish. There is no way I would accept that.’
Lawrence Rowe is sure he never signed a piece of paper to become an honorary white. Colin Croft is certain he didn’t either. ‘This story where they said we were given white status or some crap like that, that was very, very wrong. You see, it was not so. None of us were given white status – that’s crap. But politically it was expedient for them to say that.’
When Croft returned to South Africa later in the year to fulfil his contract, he took a train journey. The conductor of the train certainly saw him as nothing other than black.
I was asked to remove myself from a train carriage because it was for whites only. It became an international incident because people wanted to make a big thing out of probably what was a big thing. The conductor told me I was sitting in the wrong carriage. Fine, I was prepared to move. Politically you’re saying to me, ‘Because my skin is black I can’t sit in this carriage.’ That’s not fine but that’s what the law says. Another man in the carriage made a noise about it. I managed eventually to get to Cape Town without moving. Again the newspapers had it wrong because they said we’d moved and we didn’t.
The man who had ‘made the noise’ was called Raymond Roos. He recalled that his Christian duty had prevented him from watching Croft being harangued by the conductor. In his version of the story he and Croft went and sat on the benches in an inferior carriage together with black passengers. Whatever took place, it was deeply awkward for the promoters of the tour.
‘It’s such a pity in this day and age’, lamented Joe Pamensky, ‘that such an embarrassing situation should arise and that one of our esteemed international visitors should be the victim of a system that so many of us in South Africa are attempting to change.’
‘I couldn’t have handled that,’ says Clive Lloyd,
and I would never have put myself in that position. It’s ludicrous. But that’s what these boys had to do in South Africa; they were made honorary whites for the duration. It was demeaning. Think about the things we experienced in England in the 1950s – NO DOGS, NO BLACKS, NO IRISH on the guest-house doors. We experienced bad things in America, prejudices that we had to overcome. The worst thing is for someone to tell you that you are a lesser person because of your colour. I can’t accept that.
A decade before the West Indians flew in, the black Guyanese novelist E. R. Braithwaite had visited South Africa. He had been given a visa and granted honorary white status. Honorary White became the title of his next book. After the sanitised sightseeing trips, which had been carefully provided by the Ministry of Information to show South Africa at its best, he managed to unravel a conflicting story. Black acquaintances among the urban poor explained the misery of their lives in the Johannesburg townships of Soweto and Alexandra. They also impressed upon him the preposterous reality of his own temporary privileged status.
Braithwaite concluded, ‘the “Honorary White” thing was no better than a kick in the ass. The intention was the same. To humiliate the black visitor; to deny him the dignity of his blackness; to remind him in that society he had no identity except that which they, the Whites, chose to let him have. As a Black I was invisible, not there, not to them. To be seen and heard, I needed an overlay on my invisibility.’
Lawrence Rowe’s side were certainly seen and heard by plenty of people. Much of the cricket they played was broadcast live on television, and during the first tour the grounds were full. Some of the matches were undoubtedly exciting. For South Africa their stunted Test greats – Richards, Pollock, Procter – all showed the skills that had never come to full bloom in international cricket. For the West Indies XI Sylvester Clarke in particular announced himself as a bowler of frightening power. He won the second ‘Test’ almost by himself. Collis King made thrilling runs. The crowds were delighted by the contests. But who was watching?
‘The first thing is all of the venues were sold out. All of the venues were sold out,’ stresses Colin Croft. ‘I remember the first day we played at Cape Town they had so many people they had to bring in the boundary to 60 meters, and not keep it at 75 or they couldn’t get the people in the ground. At least one third, I would say, maybe a half of the patrons were black.’
Lewis Manthata is a teacher and historian of black cricket. He was born and brought up in Soweto. He was living there as a young boy when the rebel cricketers came. In his neighbourhood at least he says there was little interest in cricket.
The first thing you have to know is that you cannot even quantify in percentages the number of black people in Soweto in the 1980s who would have played and enjoyed cricket. It was tiny. Absolutely tiny. You’re talking about possibly 20 people who played cricket at the time in Soweto. I can name those families if you like, because cricket was not a community-based sport. It was known largely as an elitist sport played by English-speaking people from the Eastern Cape. Soccer was the game. To play soccer was almost to take part in a political act. It was seen as the sport which allowed people to relieve their frustrations against the apartheid system.
If there were hardly any black cricketers in the townships, does it follow that there would be hardly any black spectators at the games?
I wonder. It’s unlikely that in Johannesburg for example many black people at the time would freely have watched these matches. If they did, it’s very likely that they would have been mine workers put under pressure by mine owners to be there. But the sight of buses and buses full of black people turning up to watch cricket at the Wanderers in 1983 would be surprising. Those days were the height of organised oppression. We lived more or less in a police state. P. W. Botha was in power.
Yet David Murray tells the story of Ali Bacher coming into the dressing room at Berea Park in Pretoria and weeping with joy at the sight of the sold-out stadium. ‘So many black people came to watch the game, and Ali Bacher said, you know, “We turned away thousands more – in the heart of Pretoria.” He cried and said, “You have made it here.”’
* * *
The first Caribbean tour of South Africa lasted just a month. It was over by the middle of February 1983. The second tour at the end of the year was twice as long. It began in November and lasted until the end of January 1984. The novelty that had been part of the first series was missing the second time around. There were rows between the players and the organisers about money, and on some occasions there were fewer spectators in the stands.
Someone who did want to see the cricket was the husband of Margaret Thatcher – the British prime minister. Dennis Thatcher had business interests in South Africa connected to his directorship of the motor parts firm Quinton Hazell. In January 1984 he planned to visit the Ford and Volkswagen factories in Port Elizabeth and the Toyota plant in Durban. At the invitation of the Transvaal Cricket Council, he also hoped to catch a couple of days of the game against the West Indians. It was a nice thought, but attending the match could cause difficulties.
‘Mr Thatcher has told me’, wrote the prime minister’s private secretary in a confidential letter to the Foreign Office at the beginning of January 1984, ‘that he is conscious that, if the press show interest in his visit, he is likely to be questioned about the wages paid to black employees of his company in South Africa – he is therefore setting in hand some research on this matter.’
The invitation caused a flutter at the Foreign Office. Within days, the foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe had set out reasons why the kindness of the Transvaal Cricket Council should be rejected. His reservations were passed back to Downing Street, where it was left to the private secretary to break the regrettable news to Mr Thatcher’s wife.
‘Prime Minister,’ he wrote in a briefing note at the end of the week, ‘I am awfully sorry to raise this point, but I think it would be better if Mr Thatcher did not attend the cricket matches between South Africa and the West Indian touring team … I can well see some British newspapers and the Opposition in Parliament setting out to embarrass you if Mr Thatcher does go to these events.
‘You may like to discuss this with Mr Thatcher over the weekend,’ he suggested gently.
Graeme Pollock would make 41 on the first day at the Wanderers, and Ezra Moseley and Hartley Alleyne would get four wickets each, but Dennis Thatcher wasn’t there to see them. On this occasion at least the prime minister took her foreign secretary’s advice.
* * *
Ali Bacher wanted the 1983–84 West Indian tourists to be as attractive a team as possible, and so there were changes from the first squad. Three men were told they were no longer needed – Richard Austin, Herbert Chang and Ray Wynter – they were replaced by Hartley Alleyne, Faoud Bacchus and the Surrey batsman Monte Lynch. Bacher had tried to get even better-known players to join the side. He had sensed how close Malcolm Marshall had appeared to be to signing for him the first time, and he was apparently also interested in Gordon Greenidge, Vivian Richards and Joel Garner.
Marshall had agreed to meet Bacher again during the English county season of 1983; he was curious about how the rebels had been received in South Africa. Among those who he spoke to when they got back the general view seemed to be that they had been very well looked after and had enjoyed the honorary white lifestyle, but few would contemplate returning by choice. Marshall’s final meeting with Ali Bacher was at a cheap cafe on the London Road in Southampton early one morning. Around them sat dockers from the night shift tucking into fried breakfasts and slurping large mugs of tea.
By now there was only one question that Marshall needed answering, and that was ‘How much?’ Quietly Bacher responded with a figure that he thought the bowler would have to yield to: one million US dollars.
A million dollars for a two-month tour plus a contract with Transvaal? Marshall was only temporarily dumbfounded. ‘I looked him straight in the eye,’ he wrote. ‘“No thanks,” I told him. Now it was his turn to be staggered. He spilled his coffee down his shirtfront in shock. Recovering his poise and wiping down his shirt, he could scarcely contain his disbelief at my audacity. “Malcolm Marshall,” he said. “You are a very good cricketer but a foolish young man.” With that he excused himself and we left the dock workers to their breakfasts.’
That morning shaped the rest of Marshall’s career. By saying no to Ali Bacher, he would go on to play another 64 Test matches for the West Indies, becoming probably the best fast bowler the side had ever had. That was not a possibility for Sylvester Clarke or Franklyn Stephenson. For them big cricket ended in the apartheid republic. Only one rebel – Ezra Moseley – would wear a real maroon cap again. After the players’ life bans were lifted in 1989, he would be chosen to play against England in two Tests the following year.
* * *
The last game the rebels played together ended on 31 January 1984. The West Indian side beat South Africa by six wickets at St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth. Alvin Kallicharran and Collis King were there, not out at the end. Kallicharran would continue to play cricket in South Africa with Transvaal, then Orange Free State. King had a deal to play with Natal, as did Alleyne. Bacchus, Moseley and Clarke also took part in South Africa’s regional tournament, the Currie Cup. The contracts were welcome because going back to the Caribbean after visiting South Africa was not straightforward. Colin Croft and Lawrence Rowe both headed for the USA and settled in Florida.
‘I suppose in retrospect it was not a good decision,’ says Croft.
Maybe from naivety, maybe from singularity I may have made a mistake there, I could understand that. I take whatever comes with it. A lot people will say, ‘Well look, in some sense he might have embarrassed the Caribbean.’ I would agree with that perhaps, I might just agree with that. But you see the West Indies is a very small place and the minds are small. Very small-minded. I went to the US. I lived there for a while and I’ve come back to the Caribbean, and life goes on. It was a mistake. It happened. Done.
Others who ended up back in the West Indies found life there very difficult. After spending time in Australia, David Murray went home to Barbados to live with his grandmother.
Woah! I came back here, and I’m telling you it was like you were outcast. The government got very drastic and said, ‘Hey, you can’t play when you return home on local pastures.’ It was a life ban – it was not nice at all. People looking scornful that you’re not a Barbadian, you’re alien. It was amazing. Barbados is a very serious society; they don’t give you a second chance. It was demoralising, sad at the time. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy at all. I don’t know how to describe it. I still feel it up to now, you know, and this was more than 30 years ago.
Murray was now without his wife and his child, who had stayed in Australia. The money he had earned from playing in South Africa was gone. Drugs, which had been a part of his life for many years, now took him over. For months at a time he was homeless. He resembled one of the Bridgetown scavengers he had seen on those early-morning training runs when he had been working to become the best cricketer he could.
‘Their reception back in the Caribbean varied from island to island,’ says Michael Holding. ‘In Jamaica they were total outcasts. When they came back here they were in shock because they did not believe that they would be treated as poorly as they were. A lot of them got affected mentally. Some of those guys right now at this moment are not stable mentally. I’ll call names. Richard Austin walked the streets of Jamaica. Very unfortunate, very sad. Herbert Chang, another one. Very unfortunate, very sad. They just were, as everyone will say, naive.’
Austin was known locally in Kingston as Danny Germs. He ended up living on the streets around New Kingston and Cross Roads and sleeping in a bus shelter. A quarter of a century after the tour he was still homeless, often high on crack and living under a bush in a hotel car park. Despite the efforts of his family and his local cricket club, Kensington, which had allowed him to play in the Senior Cup competition after the life ban was lifted, he always seemed to slip back into drugs and crime. ‘I made the street my friend and my home,’ he once said. He died aged 60 in 2015.
‘My greatest innings,’ says Vivian Richards,
rather than the ones at Lord’s or at the Rec in Antigua, was having said no to the apartheid regime. Not going. That to me is worth more than any triple century, double century, the fastest century, whatever. It was a crucial decision in my life. There was little temptation for me. It wasn’t hard to make the decision. Why should I be paid all this money that could be used to uplift people elsewhere just for a game of cricket? I couldn’t see myself being part of that. I would have let a lot of people down, but that wasn’t the point. It was about me. I couldn’t be part of something that was so obviously discriminatory. No. To me that was selling out in a big way. Everyone had their own explanation for why they went. I’m not going to judge them one bit. They took the decision and they have to live with it.
When a BBC documentary crew found Herbert Chang several years after he returned from South Africa, he was sleeping in a shed near the wharves in the Greenwich Town area of Kingston. He was barefoot, incoherent and taking food handouts from people who lived in the yard with him. His job as Jamaica’s youth cricket coach had long gone. His wife and children had left him. ‘He is emotionally disturbed,’ his brother told the documentary team, ‘withdrawn and unable to relate to other people. You can’t get to him no more.’
Sympathy for Chang and Austin was very limited, at least from the cricket authorities in Jamaica. Rex Fennell, the island’s board president at the time, said going on the rebel tour was like ‘murdering your brother. It was like putting a knife into the back of the South African people.’
‘I’m sorry to hear they’re not well,’ said the former WICBC president Allan Rae when asked about the health of Austin and Chang in 1991. ‘To use a loose and unpleasant phrase, I wouldn’t like to see any of them in the gutter. But apart from that, I would say that’s where my interest would end.’
‘I talked to some of the West Indians who went on that tour,’ says Vivian Richards, ‘and some not only felt humiliated but were also utterly ashamed of themselves.’
‘I think that any judgement made on these men must be tempered by some understanding of the dilemma they faced,’ reflects Ronald Austin.
On one hand, they made a fundamental error in believing that a visiting cricketing team could have any major impact on the internal dynamics of the apartheid system or soften the hearts of those who governed it. On the other hand, it is clear that they felt excluded and forgotten. Yet again the Caribbean had neglected to create the institutions necessary to support our cricketers and to afford them a reasonable standard of living. C. L. R. James once said that if we cannot take care of our cricketers, we do not deserve them. This is still true. But the real tragedy of the whole episode is the realisation of what we lost. Sylvester Clarke was a fast bowler of unique skills; Ezra Moseley could swerve a cricket ball like no other bowler in international cricket. There has always been a poverty of ideas in the region that played a role in the eventual loss of our eminence in the game. That came because of a failure to appreciate the true value of a West Indian cricketer.
* * *
Nowadays, David Murray says he is no longer a drug addict. Depending on who he is talking to, he either regrets going to South Africa or he doesn’t. He either expected to be banned for life or it was a shock. When he tells of his rise and fall, few lines from Caribbean literature seem so well matched to his experience as these from The Middle Passage by V. S. Naipaul: ‘Unless the cricketer had heroic qualities, we did not want to see him, however valuable he might be. And that is why, of those stories of failure, that of the ruined cricketer was the most terrible.’
‘I try to live day to day,’ Murray says. ‘Give things some praises and do my little exercises and try to be as spiritual as possible. I had my little lull – a few little hiccups – but I am over them now, you know what I mean?’
But when he talks, hope is often followed by sorrow.
‘It’s amazing how with cricket you come from love to hate. You still conscious of the cricket going on, but I think from that tour I lost a bit of love for the game, you know? Can happen, you know what I mean? It was heavy, very heavy, very heavy. Your own people look down on you like you’ve just murdered a dozen people. It was harsh. Eyes, cross eyes, people look on you, you know, bad looks. It heavy. They still do, up to today, I’m telling you, up to today. It’s not easy.’