CROWE_SPEAKS_OUT_DOUST_31MAY94

Crowe flies in face of adversity Dudley Doust on a straight bat that has prevailed though injury, loneliness and malicious gossip

By Dudley Doust

Martin Crowe has scored a few runs in his time - 4,850 of them in 67 Tests - so you might ask him how it actually feels to play a shot sweetly. The 31-year-old New Zealander considered the question over lunch. "There is a feeling of stillness around you, a sense of slowmotion, as you watch the ball come out of the bowler's hand," he said, warming to the task of recall. "You're holding the bat gently and you're aware that your heart-beat is slowing down. At the very last moment, when the ball is below your eyes, you come down on it and it leaves the bat so softly you hardly can feel it." He relished the thought of the faint, palpable thunk and, as though to fetch it from memory, he rehearsed a tiny stroke between the orange juice and the plate of ravioli and spinach. "I never look at a bowler's face when he turns to walk back to his mark," continued the hard-framed, sixfoot Kiwi. "I'm not confrontational. I don't hit many sixes." He prefers the head-down, beautifully-timed, straight-bat drive, his follow-through frozen briefly as the ball goes to ground and gallops to the boundary through mid-wicket. It's Crowe's signature shot, a classic which will be on display in the Test series that begins on Thursday at Nottingham. Crowe's straight-bat drive - thereby hangs a tale. "When I was about eight in Auckland, I played every Saturday for a kid's team called Hogan's Heroes," he explained. "I got three ducks in a row one summer, all caughtand-bowled, all bottom-handed shots. So I asked my Dad how to hit a ball along the ground. He coached me for a week. 'Don't reach for the ball,' he said, over and over. 'Hit it when it's just below your eyes.' The next Saturday I went out and scored 80. Which is like a double century for a kid of that age." Crowe laughed. "But then, my Dad was scorekeeper," he said. "He also was umpire." Crowe slid his fork under a square of ravioli. His hands are noticeably small - indeed, size "small" in men's gloves - and, even more noticeably, his knuckles are so lumpy - all but two have been broken - that his bat-handles are made especially slender for comfortable gripping. Still, they get the job done. Crowe is considered the greatest, if not yet the highest-scoring, New Zealand batsman in history. At 47.08 his Test average is by far the highest among Kiwis. His runs, despite missing seven Tests in the past 12 months through a knee injury, are only 484 short of the retired John Wright's record 5,334 and, best, Crowe's 15 Test 100s provide a platform for the goal he most covets: membership in the 20 Centuries Club, now populated by a dozen all-time greats. "Three more years, 15 more Tests," he calculated. "That's my budget for five more Test centuries." Given a fit knee and a few 50s, he's likely to get there, for his rate of converting Test half-centuries into centuries is high; nearly 50 per cent. Of the 31 occasions Crowe's reached his halfcentury, 15 times he's gone on to his 100. "Since I was a kid, I never let 90 be a milestone," he explained. He recalled his first, frustrating 99. He was 19, playing for Auckland, and was one run away from his maiden first-class 100. "I remember thinking, 'this is easy, just push on'," he said. "And, of course, I lost my concentration and edged it to slip." The Auckland miscue was a lesson well-learnt. Crowe reckons that since then he's been out in the 90s only five times in his entire first-class career. Sadly, his 299 against Sri Lanka at Wellington in 1991-92 was one of them. "Same thing," Crowe recalled. "I didn't concentrate on the ball leaving the bowler's hand. All I thought about was the glory. Then came the blur of the ball - and I nicked it straight to the strokemaker-blazer," he said. "I hate to bat out of control. It makes me uneasy." Crowe's fear of flair is a paradox. Away from the crease, he's an emotional man - and happy to say so. When I first met him, in 1984, he was playing his first season for Somerset. He was 21 and lonely. He wrote often to his parents of his unhappiness. His letters were thematic and, under the headline Emotional Breakdown, one read: "I am going in soon and I want to bat well. But I don't know how to do it." He went in, was out for five and returned to the dressing room. "I went into the shower, held on to the pipe and started screaming," he told me at the time. "I started crying. I wanted someone to hold me. I wanted to go home." While a forthright, personal observation, it was nothing like as personal as his recent interview with Michael Parkinson in The Daily Telegraph. Crowe spoke to Parkinson of the gossip, stoked by New Zealand tabloids, that he was homosexual, a rumour rooted in the fact that early in his career his business manager had been gay. He spoke of suggestions that he suffered from Aids whereas, in fact, Crowe's loss of weight and skin tone was due to the homeopathic medicine he took for a back problem. "The crap," he now continued over lunch, "was rampant all over New Zealand." He had suffered, he reckoned, from the Tall-Poppy Syndrome. From what? Crowe laughed. "It's a disease peculiar to New Zealand. We're a tiny nation, 3.5 million people, and we tend to pull ourselves down. A person is not allowed to stand out above the crowd, especially in sport." The Press attacks on Crowe peaked early in 1993 when the Kiwis lost the first Test to visiting Australia. Crowe's wife, Simone, was dragged into the muck. "I went to the convenor of selectors and, in confidence, offered to resign the captaincy. I hoped it might get the team into focus." The offer, while declined, was leaked to the Press. Finally Crowe confronted the most abusive journalists. "I asked them, 'Do you actually think I'm gay?' That shut down the knocking machine. But I felt empty. I walked for four days in the South Island. I went to South Africa, played some golf, drank some beer, and when I got home I said to Simone, 'Let's go to Italy for two months'." In Florence, Crowe coached the Italian national team, which came fourth in the European championship in Berlin and developed his taste for ravioli di spinach. "And for the Italians," he added. Italy, Simone's grandmother's home, may indeed figure in the Crowes' plans. But now, willingly unburdened of the New Zealand captaincy, Crowe's mind was on more pressing matters. A session in the gym for his aches and pains. A good series this summer. Five future Test centuries and a family in perhaps two or three years. Would he wish Test fame on a son? Crowe flexed his creaky right knee. The question plainly was awkward. "I would want him to be great at whatever he does, certainly, and cricket's a great game," he said.

(Thanks : The Sunday Telegraph)