A complex man with a brilliant mind
The tributes continue to pour in for Peter Roebuck, often touching on how hard it was to get to know the man behind the writer
Tariq Engineer
25-Feb-2013
The tributes continue to pour in for Peter Roebuck, often touching on how hard it was to get to know the man behind the writer. In the Guardian, Vic Marks writes movingly about a “complex man with a brilliant mind”.
To me, Roebuck was a passenger or driver on countless tortuous trips around the country looking hopefully and often haplessly for the team hotel; in the car he was impatient and garrulous. As a roommate, he was opinionated, usually very confident in the merit of those opinions and never dull, yet capable of self mockery and as prone to self-doubt as any other cricketer.
In the Telegraph, Derek Pringle says Roebuck ‘s complexities meant he was destined not to lead an easy life
Suicide is something Roebuck, 55 when he died, predicted would never take him, though those who had known him since his youth were less certain.
In his foreword for the reprint of David Frith’s book on cricket suicides, Silence of the Heart, he wrote: “Some people have predicted a gloomy end for this writer. One former colleague said so to my face in September 1986. It will not be so. The art is to find other things that matter just as much as cricket, which stretch you just as far.
Chloe Saltau, who worked with Roebuck, describes in the Sydney Morning Herald how generous he was to young writers.
Also in the Sydney Morning Herald, Time Lane recollects an instance when Roebuck was caught wrong-footed, but even then he wasn’t wrong.
Paul Newman, in the Daily Mail, says that Roebuck’s death is the “last great mystery of a complex and often tortured life that was full of questions and very few answers".
Siddhartha Vaidyanathan writes on his blog about meeting Roebuck as a young reporter covering his first Test match in Bangalore, and says that Roebuck's most enviable quality as a writer was his ability to capture the quintessence of a momentous event.
Neil Manthorp, on www.supersport.com, writes about being intimidated by Roebuck's eccentricities and falling out with him over the issue of Zimbabwe's return to Test cricket.
Tariq Engineer is a former senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo