All that glitters …

Donald Weekes was a dashing batsman, cross-channel swimmer and basketball captain. Or was he? Rob Steen investigates

Don Weekes surrounded by enough silverware to satisfy the average Manchester United fan for at least a century © The Cricketer

Donald Rudolph Weekes of Barbados. No relation to Everton but the name and birthplace still reek of rum punches and punched drives, of pedigree, of authenticity. One observer reportedly described him as "the three Ws, Sobers, Nurse, Kanhai all rolled into one". Walter Mitty, Baron von Munchausen and Billy Liar might be nearer the mark.

I was first alerted to Weekes as an impressionable teenager with a naïve trust in the printed word. In the Cricketer of June 1975, a rhapsodic tribute credited to one Norman Mortimore - headlined "The best batsman never to have played Test cricket?" - detailed his awesome triumphs and jaw-dropping versatility alongside a photo of an Afro-haired chap who could have passed for a member of the Black Panthers - or The Temptations. Resplendent in a jazzy kaftan, he was sitting on a sofa, surrounded by enough silverware to satisfy the average Manchester United fan for at least a century.

The intro baited me: "If Don Weekes is not the best batsman in the world he is perhaps the most exciting." The second paragraph reeled me in: "If you were to ask Sir Garfield Sobers to name five of the most outstanding batting masterpieces he has seen, he would name Weekes' among them without hesitation."

The shopping list of astounding feats would have kept you busy in Tesco for a week. At 15, in St Mathias, a mile from Sobers's launchpad in Bay Land, he made 60 and 80 in totals of 62 and 81. For Blackpool in 1967 he struck 309 not out in 150 minutes against Southgate, beating his late contemporary Collie Smith's Lancashire League record. Three summers later, the London Evening News reported a knock of 509. Playing for the University of California that same year, he hit three successive double-hundreds and missed a fourth by five runs. At Torbay, also in 1970, he hit "three different new balls out of sight in the first over".

He circumnavigated the globe, clubbing centuries in New Zealand, Australia and Africa, his speciality the six over point. Then there was his hundred in the 1972 USA-Canada match in Kentucky, the first for USA since 1898. Mortimore recalled him batting "with nine fielders on the boundary's edge throughout". The Santa Monica Corsair listed his tallest scores in America as 477, 316, 301, 216 (twice) and 211. The American Cricketer reported in 1972 that he'd made six consecutive hundreds in Los Angeles league games.

Then came the truly astonishing bit. Weekes, stated Mortimore, "was voted The Greatest All-Round Athlete in the World" in September 1974, by a New York-based body known as the International Sports Writers' Guild. He also captained Barbados at basketball and had won "a phenomenal 32 awards in a total of 38 different sports given by the [US] President's Counsel [sic] for Physical Fitness and Sports".

So why didn't the Windies snap him up? Impatience, asserted Mortimore, was his "undoing". This, after all, was the heyday of Kanhai, Sobers, Butcher and Nurse. When the call finally came, in 1969, he'd moved on, flying to Hollywood after each Lancashire League season to pursue a career as a screenwriter.

Modesty was not Weekes's forte. "I can see a lot of Don Weekes in that boy," he said of the young Viv Richards. When asked on the BBC's World Service if he was proposing to pop over to Jamaica for the deciding Test of the 1977 West Indies-Pakistan series, he demurred: "I'd love to but I've got to get to Moscow where I'm playing Shakespeare's Othello next week." For good measure, the amazing Mr Weekes added: "And then I've got to get to Paris for an exhibition of my paintings."

"He certainly had the gift of the gab," says Tony Cozier, who served his journalistic apprenticeship with Weekes. In that same World Service interview, he claimed to have scored 10,000 runs in an English season. He also boasted of sparring with Muhammad Ali in Tokyo, acting in Hollywood films and training for a swim across the Channel. Says Cozier: "He was so convincing that if he had told the interviewer he had already done it, each way, under water, with hands and feet tied, he would have got an appreciative nod."

Not everyone was convinced. Christopher Martin-Jenkins expressed scepticism as early as 1971. Four years later, in the issue of theCricketer following Mortimore's feature, Blackpool CC's Roger Harrison corrected his lavish claims regarding Weekes's performances for the club in 1967 - "I do not know where the rest of his `runs' came from, except perhaps in his dreams." P Granger of Ashtead, Surrey, who said he'd played against him in California for Epsom side Jack Frost, testified to his power, however. And Tony Butler, of Oldham, recalled a blistering two-hour double-hundred in Bolton, followed by a lengthy stint of rapid bowling.

Two years later, the respected statistician Robert Brooke rubbished all in a piece for Cricket News entitled, with no little accuracy, "The Incredible Donald Weekes". That there was no club in the Lancashire League by the name of Southgate was just the tip of Brooke's iceberg of complaints. He finished on a sardonic note: "Details of his swimming the English Channel in under nine and a half hours, his 2hrs 51.22 Marathon and all his other feats would also be appreciated." Readers amplified his doubts. The 781 he claimed to have scored for the University of California in India in 1969, pointed out Ernest Gross, was in fact his entire tally for the tour.

When I learned of Weekes's death last November, I began my own digging. Bruce Smith of the Santa Monica Journalism School, where Weekes studied, confirmed that the Corsair was the student newspaper. The International Sports Writers' Guild I have found no trace of whatsoever. Winning an award from the President's Council for Physical Fitness and Sports requires no more than an application stating that the candidate had fulfilled a minimum standard of competence: independent verification is unnecessary.

Earlier this year, David Frith, who published Mortimore's musings, admitted that they "must be viewed with suspicion". As editor, he was always on the lookout for "things different". It did not occur to him at the time that Mortimore might have been a nom de plume for Weekes himself, but he now sees the possibility.

In cricket, hoaxes are old hat. Wisden did not think twice before publishing Weekes's astonishing touring scores (for University of California and Prior CC of Philadelphia) in 1970. Whether they should be a source of amusement or scorn is a matter of perspective rather than taste or morals. How can you not admire the scale of his imagination, the sheer, unmitigated gall? The delight he must have derived from fooling some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, can be vicariously enjoyed.

Cozier vividly recalled one of their last meetings, at a party in Stockwell, south London, during the final Test of the 1984 "blackwash" series at The Oval. Weekes was wearing a red blazer bearing the United States Olympic crest with the word "Fencing" inscribed below. He had come hotfoot, he explained, from coaching the US fencing team at the Los Angeles Games. "It seemed yet another of Donald's far-fetched fables," muses Cozier. "But just how did he get an authentic US Olympic blazer at those security-sensitive Games?"

Read in App

Elevate your reading experience on ESPNcricinfo App.

Download App Now