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Rebel West Indies cricketers who toured South Africa in 1983 living wasted lives


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IT IS almost 25 years since the most hated West Indian cricket side was assembled, and still its members are looking for love in all the wrong places. No matter what Brian Lara and his not-so-merry men cop for bowing out early from their home World Cup, it would not be a tenth of the abuse rained down on the 18 West Indians, who, in January 1983, headed to South Africa for a rebel tour. It was deemed here as the ultimate sell-out ... black men agreeing to play in an apartheid regime in which blacks were second-class citizens. However, the players, many financially stricken, considered it a business decision. Such was the abuse that many of these players copped that several of them have lost their minds. To tour around the Caribbean with the World Cup is to encounter the occasional chastening experience or tale about the wrecked lives of the men who took around $130,000 each for two rebel tours. Across the road from the Bridgetown hotel at which I am staying was former Test wicketkeeper David Murray, son of the great Everton Weekes, whose life spiralled into depression and drugs after the tours. He is 56 but looks older. These days he can be seen around Accra beach mixing with the men who sell ganga to tourists. He makes no attempt to hide the trauma of his experience, claiming it is hard to convey the distress you feel when you are walking down the road "and someone you don't even know turns in your direction and says 'you sold your soul, man'." Richard Austin, once considered a poor man's Garry Sobers who could bat and bowl medium-pace and off-spin, begs in the streets on his home city of Kingston, Jamaica, where he lives his life in a drug-fuelled haze. Last year at a Test in his home town, police had to quieten him down as he bellowed hysterically from the grandstand, laughing one minute and crying the next. "Richard has been in and out of therapy about five times ... we don't hold much hope for him," one local official said. The same official was last week driving down the streets of Jamaica when he took a wrong turn into a dark alley and saw, to his surprise, another rebel, batsman Herbert Chang, standing listlessly in the middle of the road. He wound down his window and Chang, clearly out of it, put his head through the window and moved to within a few centimetres of the man's face and said: "man, man, man, I just, I just wanna know which end I bowl from tomorrow". Nine members of the squad have sought refuge in other countries and some have fared much better as a consequence. Collis King has moved to England, Colin Croft to the US and then Trinidad. Another to move on was the wonder batsman Lawrence Rowe, a man who so impressed Vivian Richards that he spray painted Rowe's name on his back fence as a child. Once considered a national treasure of Jamaica, Rowe was reduced to sneaking into a private bar at the ground in Kingston to watch Sabina Park Tests and eventually fled to Miami, Florida, to start a small business. The day after Bob Woolmer died, he made a surprise appearance at Jamaica's Pegasus Hotel. In a brief interview, he was asked the provocative question "are you happy?" to which he replied "happy enough". For the rebels, that is about as good as it gets. They were banned for life and although in 1989 that ban was lifted, their careers were all but gone. Tales of their tour did not impress locals. Croft was kicked off a whites-only train in South Africa and organisers then got the players access to all white areas by giving them status as "honorary whites". Michael Holding, a bitter opponent of the tour, said: "I didn't like that at all because the assumption is it was a dishonour to be black." The tours short-circuited some potentially outstanding careers. Outstanding all-rounder Franklyn Stephenson, so talented a sportsman that at age 48 he works as a golf professional and plays of scratch at one of Barbados' leading golf clubs, cruelly never played a Test match. An impressive, articulate man, Stephenson yesterday declared: "I have no regrets. "People were breaking into houses to steal tickets for our matches and I felt we started the change of thinking (in South Africa) that we (black sportsmen) were a lower form of animal," he said. "I still feel officials should aplogise for banning us and I don't believe West Indies cricket has ever recovered from it." The players were cult heroes in South Africa. Every match was a sell-out and they played excellent cricket to draw the first Test series one-all, though they lost the one-dayers 4-2. They won the second Test series 2-1 and the one-dayers 4-2. "And, incredibly," Stephenson said, "we had just one team meeting in two tours because some guys started fighting at it so we thought we wouldn't have them and would just go out and play." Another wasted talent was Sylvester Clarke, whom Steve Waugh rated the fastest bowler he faced and once bowled to Waugh in county cricket without a man in front of square. Clarke played just 11 Tests and returned to work as a carpenter but collapsed and died at his home in 1999. For several others from that West Indies the suffering continues.

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