UNFORGIVEN
They were the West Indies rebels who ended up on drugs or dead after being disowned by their own people for touring South Africa in 1983
The skeletal figure wandering the beaches of Barbados selling drugs was once described by Malcolm Marshall as the best wicketkeeper he ever saw. But at least David Murray, joint holder of the West Indian keeping record for most dismissals in a Test, is still alive.
his one-time team-mate Richard Austin is not so lucky. The former West Indies all-rounder died five years ago aged 60 in his native Jamaica, a destitute street beggar ravaged by his addictions to cocaine and rum.
What Murray, son of the great Sir everton Weekes, who died this week aged 95, and Austin have in common is not only a tragic tale of cricketers fallen on the hardest of times. They are the two biggest ‘victims’ of the most controversial and ill-fated tours in history. For they were West Indies ‘rebels’.
Twenty West Indian cricketers — one of them an england batsman, Monte Lynch, born in Guyana — took part in two tours to apartheid South Africa in 1983 that not only sent shockwaves through the Caribbean but had repercussions that, almost to a man, haunt them nearly 40 years later.
For if the england rebels who ventured to the outlawed republic at the start and end of the 1980s carried on with their careers and lives largely unaffected — Graham Gooch, Mike Gatting and David Graveney even rose to high office within the eCB — then the West Indians who played in South Africa were less fortunate.
The rebels, mostly fringe players at a time of West Indian world dominance, but boosted by big names including Lawrence Rowe, Alvin Kallicharran and Colin Croft, are indelibly tainted and most paid a huge price for succumbing to the lure of the krugerrand. Yet their story is more nuanced than the obvious conclusion that they were a group of black cricketers betraying their own people by taking blood money and given ‘honorary white status’ for playing cricket in an abnormal society.
And it is a story told brilliantly by Australian writer Ashley Gray in a new book The Unforgiven which looks at all 20 rebels and poses in its title the question: Mercenaries or Missionaries? The truth is far more complicated. ‘It started for me in 2003 when I was reporting on Australia playing in the West Indies,’ Gray tells Sportsmail of his fascination with the rebels.
‘After a game at Sabina Park I was talking to a taxi driver and he said: “have you heard about Richard Austin?” The name vaguely rang a bell. he told me Austin was begging on the streets and he could take me to him if I wanted.
‘The idea of a Test player in the gutter was astonishing and there he was swigging from a plastic coke bottle filled with rum. he was running with a gang and wanted money for his cocaine habit.
‘I asked him why he was on the street and he told me about going to South Africa and that people didn’t want to know him any more. he couldn’t cope with being ostracised and had gone off the rails. So I knew then there must have been a bigger story.
‘Over the years I felt it was a story still untold because these guys were in the shadows. The documentary Fire in Babylon touched on it, but they were like the evil brothers of the great icons of the all-conquering West Indies sides. I knew they had a story to tell and when Austin died in 2015 it was one that needed to be told. These guys have a right to take their place in history.’
Former South Africa captain Ali Bacher led the recruitment of international players to a country where apartheid had prompted the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement discouraging all sporting links.
But the impact made by english and Sri Lankan teams would be nothing compared to Bacher’s coup of attracting a West Indian squad that would take on a strong ‘Springbok’ side including Graeme Pollock, Barry Richards and Mike Procter, all denied the chance to play Test cricket by the repugnant policy of their government.
‘Calypso fever’ gripped South Africa when the West Indies — captained by Rowe, known as ‘Lawrence of Jamaica’ and a batsman good enough to be compared to the greats — took part in a series of matches over two tours in front of largely packed crowds. So the exercise was, to South African eyes, a success, but at the end of the second tour came the day of reckoning.
The players were banned for life from all Caribbean cricket (the ban was lifted in 1989) and many could not even live again in their own countries because of fears for their safety. The Unforgiven tells what happened next.
‘The aim was to see all of them,’ says Gray, who spent five weeks in the Caribbean and North America seeking out the rebels. ‘Obviously I couldn’t see Sylvester Clarke (whose death aged 44 was more to do with heavy drinking than South African demons) but I did see his wife and son.
‘Colin Croft was a phone call, as was ezra Moseley. herbert Chang was interesting because there were reports he was a psycho rampaging round Kingston, but the truth is he has schizophrenia and is on medication. So it was nice to tell the truth about the guys and correct the record for them.’
There seems little doubt the suffering in later life of Austin,
Murray and Chang in particular was in part a consequence of turning their backs on West Indies and their people.
Murray struggled to cope with being the son of one of the greatest of all Caribbean cricketers. Weekes, who died at home in Barbados on Wednesday, was said to have been nervous of his son’s visits in later life because he feared he would steal from him to subsidise his habit. ‘The tours acted as a trigger for certain players, who may have already had a tendency to go off the rails,’ says Gray.
Captain Rowe did not go off the rails but his story is an acutely sad one. Many feel he could have been the equal of Sir Viv Richards, Sir Clive Lloyd and Gordon Greenidge if fortune had favoured him and he had been given the chance to play more than 30 Tests. Now 71, he lives in exile in Florida, unfulfilled and largely unrecognised.
‘Lawrence Rowe was wrongly treated and deserves a place in the pantheon of West Indian batting greats,’ says Gray. ‘He’s been denied that by people he feels were jealous of him. He believes South Africa was a mission for the guys. They could have gone there and just taken the money but it was important they played well and showed a black side could perform as well as a white one. And they beat the Springboks which he’s very proud of. But his life was totally changed by South Africa.
‘He was a national hero in Jamaica and he could have retained that level of almost saintliness if he hadn’t gone. Instead his name was taken off a pavilion at Sabina Park in 2011 and that wouldn’t have happened but for South Africa.’
It would be wrong to say all the rebels have been irrevocably damaged by South Africa. Moseley played Test cricket against England in 1990 and has held various coaching posts in the Caribbean. Franklyn Stephenson runs a cricket academy in Barbados and Faoud Bacchus lives comfortably in Orlando. Yet the stigma of South Africa is forever with them all.
‘They have always wrestled with moral issues that are hard to resolve,’ says Gray. ‘On one hand there is an argument that guys taking money to go to apartheid South Africa was a betrayal of the Caribbean. They should have stuck up for their principles. But there is another point of view that West Indies were so strong, these guys couldn’t get into the team so they weren’t making much money.
‘Many came from impoverished backgrounds. Everton Mattis was offered $80,000 and that was 60 times more than the average Jamaican cricketer could earn in a year. You can understand why they decided to go.
‘They believed they had a right to ply their trade there in the same way as tennis and golf players were, and entertainers like Elton John. But there was a difference and that was the colour of their skin. Hopefully the book puts people in the players’ positions. What would you have done as a black person in that moment?’
Gray believes it is impossible to answer his own question. ‘I feel too close to the guys to say whether they are mercenaries or missionaries,’ he adds. ‘The moral questions are entwined with so many other variables that it makes it difficult to come down hard on one side or the other.
‘The idea that black people would go to South Africa and play cricket where a white regime practised racial discrimination was never going to be easy for people in the Caribbean to swallow. But some make the point that the white population of South Africa was changed by them going there. For the first time they saw elite black sportsmen playing against their own and beating them.
‘Someone like Collis King had an effect on the white guys who were there. But whether it was just for that moment in time or whether they changed these people is very hard to say.’
And that is why, as England and West Indies prepare to compete for the Wisden Trophy again, the 1983 rebels remain to so many the unforgiven.