Simon Hughes: Mind games that prove so deadly (8 Aug 1998)

8th August

Mind games that prove so deadly

By Simon Hughes

DAVID Bairstow was very much at large during last year's Headingley Test, putting heart and soul into a campaign for Yorkshire CCC to remain at their old home. The campaign continues but Bluey is just one huge memory having tragically taken his own life in January.

Arguably the best wicketkeeper-batsman to play for Yorkshire, certainly the loudest, he ultimately felt shunned by his beloved county. Having been released in 1990, he was financially insecure - much of his benefit proceeds had gone on an acrimonious divorce from his first wife - surviving on a bit of this and a bit of that. He couldn't stomach life out of the cricketing limelight but sadly was too proud to admit it.

Suicides happen. It does seem in cricket, however, that they happen alarmingly often. At least 100 reputable cricketers worldwide have given themselves out, so to speak, including 24 Test players - over one per cent of the total (2,142) who have represented their country.

Britain's suicide rate is 0.007 per cent, and in other major sports it is equally negligible. Golf, tennis, rugby, boxing and horse racing have six between them, and there are only a handful of cases in football. The best known was the Scottish centre-forward Hughie Gallagher, who threw himself under a train in 1957, the most bizarre the Crystal Palace goalkeeper Billy Callender, who hanged himself on the crossbar.

Yet there are enough cricket suicides to write a book and one actually exists, By His Own Hand, a 250-page tome with a macabre black cover by the cricket historian David Frith which is due to be updated next year. There are tales of players who shot themselves, took overdoses, strung themselves up from the banisters, some as recently as three years ago when the extrovert Surrey medium-pacer Danny Kelleher was found dead at his home with a note beside his body.

Wayne Larkins, a close friend of Bairstow's and the batsman who once intoxicated middle England with his swashbuckling strokeplay, is now scratching a living on club grounds and at northern racecourses. He earns barely £3,000 turning out for Bedfordshire and in darker moments has talked of suicidal thoughts. "I'd love to get into coaching but nothing's turned up," he said. "It's sad, it's a waste of my experience. People don't realise how desperate it can become."

The all-embracing nature of cricket definitely contributes to these people's predicaments. As a long, absorbing game of mind as well as matter, of practice and preparation and performance, of blow-by-blow post mortems and unglamorous nights sharing rooms in anonymous motorway-side hotels, it is to many a way of life. It becomes your wife, mother and favourite uncle, an all-in-one family that, once initiated in, you cannot see beyond.

The game's intrigue draws you in from a young age, consumes you, then ejects you little more than a carcass a decade or two later. I cried when I was sacked by my county, Middlesex, having played for them at various levels for 22 years. I felt spent and worthless, like an old washing machine thrown on the tip. Cricket defines professional players - it is all they've ever done. Without it, they don't know who they are or what they can be instead.

Some land on their feet, others don't. While his England contemporaries like Graham Gooch and Geoff Cook still enjoy prominent roles in the game, Larkins today is playing at Sedgefield CC and has an uncertain future.

Other fine players, names like Chris Old, Graham Dilley and Barry Wood, endure a similarly meagre existence clinging to the cricketing bosom. There's an unpalatable truth here. They need to divorce themselves from the one thing they love to avoid turning into an emotional wreck.

THE main contenders for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year have already emerged - quite a relief, considering the array of charisma bypasses on offer last year. A fair bet is that Michael Owen will win it by a short head from Justin Rose with Angus Fraser a close third. These are all chaps of excellent character and sound fathers. They have all made fabulous contributions to an outstanding sporting summer.

They are starkly different in their sponsorship earnings, however. Owen is on a £5 million five-year deal with sportswear manufacturers Umbro and was rumoured to have been offered a million-pound sweetener by Nike just to whet his appetite for a contract in the future. His dad, meanwhile, gives him £200 a week and invests the rest.

After his success at the Open, Rose signed with the golf club company Cobra, partly owned by Greg Norman, and once supplementary deals with Titleist balls and other sports companies have been finalised, he will be worth a million a year. Again, his father Ken will manage the money.

Don Fraser does not play family accountant for the simple reason that his son's sponsorship receipts are precisely nil. Well, people who strike balls are always a more glamorous commodity than those who propel them. While most of Fraser's England colleagues earn tidy sums to arrive at the wicket clad head to toe in Slazenger or Kookaburra, he doesn't even enjoy a sole kit supplier. He wears Kalli pads, Pony boots, a Gunn and Moore thigh pad, a Gray Nicholls forearm guard, Mizuno helmet, one Easton glove and one Slazenger, and a personalised Salix bat superimposed with a large 'Gus' and a picture of a toiling bowler. Yesterday, he had added 'G'day Richie' on the bottom, to which the great Benaud responded "and good evening Angus" when he came into bat.

Fraser is 33 today. Look out for the 'Any Birthday Offers?' line on the back of his bat.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)