Cullinan a diamond role model
IN cricket’s past, players who hid the symptoms Jonathan Trott has shown to the world would see out their careers in silent misery. Then they would retire and kill themselves.
That past is not long gone. “He gets homesick walking to the front gate to fetch the post,” Duncan Fletcher, then England’s coach, said about Steve Harmison during a press conference in East London in January, 1996. Everyone present laughed.
“I know what Jonathan Trott is going through because I have been through it as well,” Harmison wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald this week. “I wish I had said more, but I was scared of the reaction.
“Nobody knows more than me what it is like to be depressed while you are on a cricket tour, because I spent 10 years hiding it as homesickness. I said I was homesick and that was actually used as a stick to beat me with.”
None of us who do not know firsthand how Trott feels should suppose that we do. Stress or depression is not caused by chasing a deadline, however feverishly, or feeling down in the dumps. Our ignorance is a mercy we should treasure and never flaunt.
The list of cricket’s suicides is long enough to have inspired at least two books — By Their Own Hand and
Silence of the Heart, by David Frith.
The foreword of the first contained these sentences: “Cricketers are supposed to be simple, even gung-ho, in sexual matters as in everything else. And yet cricket — and most cricketers — has its dark secrets, its skeletons.”
These words were written by Peter Roebuck, who jumped to his death from his hotel room window in Cape Town on November 12, 2011 when police wanted to question him about allegations of sexual assault.
Aubrey Faulkner gassed himself in his cricket school in London. Before he turned on the tap and settled back, presumably eyes closed, he penned a startlingly chipper note: “Dear Mackenzie, I am off to another sphere via the small bat-drying room. Better call in a policeman to do investigating.”
RC Robertson-Glasgow, a real writer who chose to write about cricket and did so beautifully in lines such as, “Poetry and murder lived in him together”, about Donald Bradman, was driven to suicide by the gloom of a snowstorm. Lorrie Wilmot was staring down the twin barrels of a conviction for the rape of a 13-year-old girl and his own dread disease when he squeezed the trigger of his shotgun and ended it all.
Depression and DIY death does not stalk cricket exclusively, but the game continues to provide sport with a disproportionately high number of tortured souls.
Daryll Cullinan never crumbled like Trott, but he spoke this week of “knowing what it feels like to be the laughing stock of world cricket” because of his struggle with Shane Warne. Craig Smith, the SA team’s physiotherapist on that 1993-1994 tour, remembers Cullinan’s experience differently: “He took it to the Aussies and they took it back to him, and he withstood it.”
Now, Cullinan is among the most perceptive and articulate of cricket analysts. In an environment of overexposed, hopelessly conflicted punditry, he sticks out.
No doubt Cullinan was as pampered as any other elite player, and the real world has probably held as many shocks for him as it has for all of them. But he is alive and well, and Trott should know that.