Mike Proctor hits 70
‘IN GENERAL, I haven’t been much of a one for birthdays,” Mike Procter remarked this week, “but lately I’ve got to thinking that if you didn’t have them at all you’d be in a bit of trouble.”
Happily for cricket fans around the world, the evergreen “Proccie”, one of South Africa’s greatest all-rounders, is alive and well and will be celebrating the big Seven-Oh tomorrow.
The Kingsmead Mynahs will be marking the occasion at Kingsmead on Friday with a slap-up lunch that will include a Q&A with his namesake, commentator Brett Proctor.
His former Test captain, Ali Bacher, said that if Procter had been able to play a normal number of Tests, he would have been second only to the greatest all-rounder of them all, Sir Gary Sobers.
Sobers himself said of him: “There have been few better all-round cricketers in the world in my time.
“As a bowler he is fast, hostile and aggressive. I would put him in the same class as Charlie Griffith and Roy Gilchrist for bowling a bouncer no batsman likes receiving.”
Right now Procter, who lives with his wife, former international tennis player Maryna, in Umhlanga Ridge, is currently looking both forwards and backwards in his busy life.
Looking backwards, he is currently collaborating on a book about his life that is being written by Sunday Tribune cricket correspondent Lungani Zama.
The book is scheduled to be launched in England next year during South Africa’s tour.
The reason for the overseas launch is that Procter is better known and certainly more revered in England than he is in his home country.
He played only seven Tests (all against Australia in the 1966/7 and 1969/1970 series) before the country was isolated as a result of apartheid.
Since the country’s return to the world stage in 1991, Procter and his teammates in the famous 1970 team have largely been ignored by Cricket South Africa, which prefers to focus its attention on the game during the post-democracy era.
Procter is no political dinosaur, however. For the last five years he has been working with former Natal bowler Rodney Malamba at the Ottowa Primary School in Mount Edgecombe.
There are more than a thousand pupils at the school, and Malamba and Procter – with little help from CSA – offer regular coaching to the children through his Mike Procter Foundation.
Local sponsorship is hard to find, and Procter remarked that sometimes he’s better served by outsiders.
Last season, for example, he received a generous donation of £2 000 (R37 980) from touring England fans, which enabled him and Malamba to feed the children for a couple of weeks after local funding temporarily ran out.
It’s a tough gig for the two men, but enormously rewarding.
“The best thing for me is to see kids responding to being the centre of attention, whether they’re batting or bowling, for one of the few occasions in their lives. As a result I see many of them growing up as more confident people,” Procter noted.
From a coaching point of view, Procter is not interested in siphoning off the cream of the crop and sending them off to play at traditional cricket schools.
Instead, he wants the kids to stay together as a group.
“We want to create a club at the school, so that the kids can keep playing together after they leave.
“As you can imagine, there are money considerations involved, and it’s obviously a long-term plan, but that’s where we are at the moment.”
Procter isn’t wildly interested in dipping his toes into the choppy waters of cricket politics, but when pressed he admits that he’s not a big supporter of the current quotas policy in the national team.
“I don’t care what the racial make-up of the team is – I’d be happy if it was composed of 11 African players – so long as whoever is selected is the best man for the job.”
Procter’s cricketing life is well-trodden territory, with those seven Tests and his 13 famous years with English county Gloucestershire (196881) two of his most cherished memories.
This week he recalled another event, the now largely forgotten series that replaced the cancelled England tour of South Africa in 1970 when he played five Tests against the host nation for a Rest of the World side.
“The Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB) promised that the five matches would be officially recognised as Test matches, and that was important for all the players. Unfortunately, they later reneged on that promise, which was disappointing.”
The team for the final Test in the series gives an idea of the quality of the Rest of the World team.
The team, in batting order, was: Eddie Barlow, Barry Richards, Rohan Kanhai, Graeme Pollock, Mushtaq Mohammad, Gary Sobers (capt), Clive Lloyd, Mike Procter, Derek Murray (w/k), Intikhab Alam, Graeme McKenzie.
Not surprisingly, the Rest of the World won the series 4-1 and Procter distinguished himself by scoring 292 runs at 48.66 and taking 15 wickets at 23.93.