Simple Symonds

Will he or won’t he? Brisbane’s newspapers and airwaves seem to be full of conjecture about whether Andrew Symonds will walk away from his Cricket Australia contract or not. Public opinion is surprisingly split - a local newspaper poll had a rough 50-50 response as to whether he deserved his Darwin punishment or not.

For someone like me who works in the area of “elite athlete welfare”, the Symonds incident is all-too-common, not just in cricket and not just in Australia. It is a product of a sporting landscape that takes young people away from the things that ‘ground’ them and offers them fame and riches without necessarily checking to see if they have the support structure around them to help them deal with it.

Symonds is a classic example of someone with all the talent in the world. On the field, bat in hand or patrolling the deep, he is a powerful panther-like figure, supremely balanced. Yet, “balanced” would be the one thing that seems furthest from his life at the moment. Brisbane is a small town and for someone working in my field, the stories of lives in the balance tend to reach you weeks before it blows up in the media. It was not a closely guarded secret that Symonds was finding it difficult to reconcile the double life of being one of the most marketable athletes in the country with his own private desire to be left alone to enjoy the simple and savage pleasures of a life in the bush. He is not alone in feeling this sense of isolation.

Brian Lara faced his demons a decade ago. More recently, Marcus Trescothick and Shaun Tait have been forced out of the international game for similar reasons. Like Symonds, they are not bad men. Just confused and alienated, owing their fame, fortune and disenchantment to the same mistress.

International cricket is going to face this situation increasingly more often I fear. Australian cricket especially, just seeing the end of the first generation of ‘career cricketers’ (since the game went fully professional at first-class level in the late 1990s) is going to have to deal with young men who have made a life out of cricket but may not have a life outside of cricket. It is a poignant difference.

For three years, I helped look after the cricketers who were coming through the Centre of Excellence (formerly Cricket Academy) who were resident on campus at Griffith University. To their credit, Cricket Australia runs some excellent educational programs to help these cricketers with life skills, not just cricket ones. I witnessed many young men who realised that cricket was a precious gift and they treated it as such. There were also a small minority who treated their talent as a birthright. Cricket owed them but they never saw that it could also own them.

These young stars of the future are acutely aware of their earning potential. It is a ‘front-end loaded’ career that promises great wealth. Some of them, sadly, never grasp the complexity of the symbiotic relationship between talent, commercial success, sponsorships, media attention and ultimately, a loss of privacy.

Put simply, one cannot expect to volunteer for a life in the spotlight (note, I deliberately said “volunteer”) and then expect a life of relative anonymity whenever it suits. Any celebrity will tell you that. The minute you cash those cheques, you agree to a life as more than just an on-field gladiator. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Sponsors can be ruthless paymasters.

It is this sort of attention that threatens to end the career of a wonderful cricketer. By all accounts, Symonds just wants to be left alone to hunt pigs, catch fish and hit big sixes. Perhaps he never quite understood that life in the spotlight is not that simple. By virtue of his aura and presence, sought by advertisers and seduced by managers, Symonds is now public property. He is not the first sports star to resent that. He won’t be the last.

The word on the streets of Brisbane is that this is no ransom note or false alarm. His confusion is genuine and his anger at being dropped from the Australian team is very real. No one knows whether he will walk away or return to thrill us again. He’s a special talent and will be a loss to the game. He needs a good friend whom he trusts to remind him that there will always be plenty of fish in the sea but his career needn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean just yet.