'I didn't know how to do life anymore': Brendan Taylor's biggest battle

When Brendan Taylor walked out to play against Ireland in September 2021, he knew three things: his career was over, he had failed a drug test, and he had waited too long to report an approach to fix matches. The last of those earned him a three-and-a-half year ban from the game, but it was failing the drug test that changed his life in ways he could not imagine.

"The walls were closing in," Taylor says, talking about the consequences of his addiction to drugs and alcohol. "It was an absolute pressure cooker because I was dealing with the ICC and knew there was a ban looming, so the fact that I was retiring and I'd had a failed drugs test - I was just totally defeated."

Over the next four months, Taylor waited for confirmation of the ICC sanction and then began to tell his wife, Kelly, the extent of his indiscretions. She didn't believe him, not even when he told the world and then checked himself into rehab.

"I said to Kelly, 'Everything is coming to a head and I've really got to get some help.' And she was infuriated. She thought I was running away from the problem but only knew about 5-10% of what I was really getting up to."

Three days before the ICC announced Taylor's ban, he checked himself into a 90-day programme at a rehabilitation centre in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands, four hours away from Harare. For the first two weeks, he chose to give up access to his cell phone so he would have no outside noise as he started the 12-step recovery programme and discovered the depth of the work he had to do.

The first of the 12 steps is admission of a problem, which Taylor had already done publicly but still needed to explain to himself. It all started with alcohol. Like many people in a country where casual drinking is part of middle-class culture, Taylor had often a few drinks and didn't see much wrong with that. He subsequently discovered his grandmother was an alcoholic.

"Alcohol is so accepted and almost encouraged. Everything is geared towards it. It's like, 'Let's play golf and have a few drinks', or, 'Let's have a braai and have a few drinks', or, 'Come around this afternoon and we'll have a few.'

"I was convinced that if I only drank on the weekend, then I didn't have a problem, but I didn't know what two beers was. I could hide behind the binge-drinking culture, but the reality was that I couldn't actually predict how much I was going to drink."

With that, came drug use. Taylor first tried cocaine around 2007 or 2008, "quite heavily during periods out of international cricket," he says but stopped in 2010. When he met Kelly, he stayed off cocaine for six years, but still drank. Though he can't pinpoint the exact reason, he says he felt the rot starting to set in when he was on a Kolpak deal in England, away from the family and susceptible, playing for Nottinghamshire between 2015 and 2017.

"My wife and kids were at home and then Kelly fell pregnant with the twins. I saw the twins once for a week and then not again for seven months," he says. "I loved the club so much and I loved the people in the club, but I'd get to my home and I was surrounded by four walls. Just felt down in the dumps but I can't really tell you how I got back into it [drug use]. That's what the disease of alcohol and drug addiction does - it's cunning and baffling and it sneaks its way back in."

Taylor failed two drug tests while in England, where there was a three-strike policy before a player's records are made public. "The first one, the doctor came in and asked me if there was a problem, but I convinced him there wasn't. And then the second time, I failed, the punishment was that I lost 5% of my gross income and got a three-week ban." But no one knew because he'd split the webbing on his hand, and managed to hide the absence behind that. "I missed the pre-season tour in Barbados. The club protected me, but if I failed a third one, it would have been in the press. By then, I was already gearing up towards returning to Zimbabwe."

Back home, it was easier and cheaper to get his fix and he knew how to avoid being caught. "I was very careful and meticulous about who I did [drugs] around, who I could trust. I wasn't out there in nightclubs or pubs and bars, but I was living a double life. It's an exhausting way to be." And that exhaustion fuelled the need for more cocaine.

According to the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) Substances-of-Abuse guidelines, cocaine produces a "euphoric rush", which wears off fairly quickly, leading to "a depressed mood". Taylor experienced both ends of that spectrum and classified himself, around 2018-19, as an addict.

"Out of competition, cocaine is not a banned substance, so that was music to my ears," he says. The South African Institute of Drug-Free Sports, which is a signatory to WADA, confirmed this, and said that if an athlete tests positive for one of their four "substances of abuse" (cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy or heroin) on a non-match day, they receive only a reduced sanction (as was the case with Kagiso Rabada recently).

Taylor used that knowledge to manage his cocaine use. "I'd taper off before international games and try and figure out how best to flush my system, but certainly, I was living by the sword."

In October 2019, he travelled to India to meet a group of businessmen to discuss sponsorship and the setting up of a T20 tournament in Zimbabwe. They offered him cocaine and he accepted. The next day, they showed him that they had filmed him taking the drug and said they would release the video unless he agreed to fix. "I guess those people might have done their research, and they might have known [my history of drug use]. They must have thought, 'Okay, this is gonna be an easy guy to extort from."

At the time, Taylor accepted money from them for a future fix and left the country.

They then approached him to fix in February-March 2020, during Zimbabwe's tour of Bangladesh, at which point he reported it to the ICC, who began an investigation. In the time they took to complete it, Taylor played five Tests, 12 ODIs and seven T20Is, and maintains that despite the threat of his drug use being exposed, he never entertained the idea of fixing. "I've been a lot of things in life but being a cheat is not one of them, so I can sleep a bit better knowing that."

In Ireland with Zimbabwe in September 2021, still stressed, he had become progressively more reckless in his use of cocaine over the preceding six years. When he was called to do a dope test, he knew he was cooked. "The quantities I was engaging in were too much to flush out," he says. "I tried to detox but with 24 [hours] to go before the game, I was still feeling very dehydrated, very withdrawn and the anxiety and the depression were kicking in. I realised I didn't know how to do life anymore. I didn't have the courage to tell my family I had a problem, I didn't have the willingness to go to them. I was too proud and I was too ashamed, but I knew I'd failed that test."

So he did the only thing he thought he could, and instead of waiting for the test results to be made public, retired abruptly . Four months after that, he confessed to the world what he had kept hidden for so long and decided it was time to get help.

The next ten steps on the programme are a combination of building spirituality, surrendering to a higher power, and a process of constant self-reflection, to ensure you build the tools not to slip back. At rehab, Taylor did "a lot of meditation, a lot of running, cold-water plunges, reading, writing and being out in nature", he says.

"It was very beautiful and I had a lot of time to think and reflect, especially with the early sunrises and quiet, and to unpack the wreckage of my past.

"The disease of addiction is in the mind, so I had to really re-engineer my whole way of thinking. My old ideas were chaotic and catastrophic. I needed to implement a new way of thinking. You're dealing with something that's so damn strong on human beings, you need something a lot stronger than you to take that away. So you develop a faith. I was asleep to God for 36 years and once I woke into that, I really sort of tapped into that."

For three months, he spent time connecting with himself, the natural environment, and his faith, and then it was time to get back into the world, where things could get messy. "I had to be ready for the big, bad world, you know, because you're in bubble wrap at rehab and it feels manageable but then challenges and the hustle-bustle of life comes your way.

"I had to understand that I had a very toxic way of living, where I wallowed in self-centeredness, dishonesty, fear, resentment, and [I had to] unpack all that. I had to realise that I had a part to play in this and I am responsible for my actions and I need to be accountable. It was quite liberating, quite tough to sit through that, but when you are rigorously honest with yourself, you can feel the weight coming off your shoulders."

He left with a plan. The final step in the programme is to be of service. "Before I went into rehab, I had installed a two-lane cricket facility at home, and I had this thing in my head [about] wanting to do a bit of coaching, but it was more for my kids. It just worked out that when I came out of rehab and I was quite limited with where I could coach, because of the [ICC] sanction, that the requests for private coaching went through the roof. I was quite inundated.

"I loved that first [coaching] session. It was quite humbling, going from international cricket to trying to figure out a way to get the best out of the kid in front of me. It definitely ignited a passion for coaching. I've now spent thousands of hours doing it."

Over the last three years Taylor has made up for lost time with his wife and sons, and now happily spends his days as a "little bit of a hermit, being at home or in the nets, or helping Kelly at the hair salon".

Occasionally he gets called to help someone else embarking on the 12-step programme, and he has raised funds for his sponsor to open up another rehab centre on the Eastern Highlands property he was at, so there are now separate male and female facilities. He does talks at schools and in communities, doing his part to fight what he calls an "epidemic" of drug abuse in Zimbabwe. A recent study at the Walter Sisulu University said that 57% of Zimbabwean youth abuse drugs. As Taylor's ban approached its end, he hoped to become involved with Zimbabwe's support staff. But Zimbabwe Cricket had other plans.

They have asked him to continue playing as soon as he becomes available, and that's what he is readying for. His sanction ends on July 31, the second day of the first Test of Zimbabwe's series against New Zealand, in Bulawayo. That means Taylor can be selected from the second Test onwards, and for assignments such as the T20 World Cup Africa Regional Qualifier in September, and the home series against Afghanistan later in the year. Though he hasn't had any competitive game time, the 39-year-old says he feels better than ever mentally, is in the physical condition he was in when he made his debut 21 years ago, and is a lot lighter than he was for most of his international career.

"I'm living good, clean and healthy. I'm 85kg now, and I probably played my whole career around 105kgs. The phenomenon of craving left me long ago. Now it's just my behaviour I work on. If any of the old things pop up, which they occasionally do, I do an inventory on that. And you actually have to do it every day. Yesterday's shower will not keep me clean for today. Every 24 hours, it's about getting back onto my programme and having spiritual fitness."

But weight and his need for external validation are not the only things Taylor has lost. "My ego got absolutely smashed three-and-a-half years ago," he says. "I'm definitely not expecting to walk back into the team. It's about what I can do for Zimbabwe Cricket. If I come back and I do okay personally, that's a bonus, but for me, it's about impacting the group as best as I can. I just want to fly under the radar, put an arm around someone and say, 'I've got your back and I'm willing to help you.' That's the beautiful thing about your past becoming your greatest asset, because I can actually help someone."

And if that someone happens to be lured by substances like he was, Taylor promises to take a firm but gentle approach. "I have sympathy for people who turn to alcohol or drugs, because we don't know their background, family dynamics, their relationships or [what] they're dealing with [in] life," he says. "What people tend to do is use a substance to numb pain that they're dealing with. I will never judge."