Letter to Ezra, Pt I
A guest essay by former first-class cricketer Justin Paul.
A few weeks ago I took a trip down memory lane as I was asked to put some thoughts together on Heath Davis. That sent me not only to the aforementioned lane, but also down a late-’80s to early-’90s rabbit-hole of age-group cricket. A former teammate suggested I reach out to Justin Paul, a former Canterbury age-group opponent who was doing a bit of writing about cricket. It was a fantastic suggestion (thanks, Tarz).
This essay, which is written in the form of a long letter to his youngest son will speak to anybody who has enjoyed/ endured a childhood obsession; who has carried an adolescent dream into adulthood; who has paradoxically achieved the dream and had it crushed; who has wondered how their obsessions has shaped them; and who just enjoys good writing.
The Bounce is reproducing Letter to Ezra in two parts because of its length. I considered abridging it for the email format but I couldn’t bring myself to use the editing scalpel. There is no natural break in the story so if you have time to read it in one go, you could wait until later this evening, when I will run PtII alongside The BYC.
Enjoy. - Dylan Cleaver
For some reason this letter has taken longer to write than any other. For months I have made notes, crossed them out and then written about diggers and stuffed animals instead. After my parents and education, cricket - for richer or poorer - has been the most important factor in shaping my character, especially during my more malleable years. Much of who I am is bound to a game I played as a child. There is some shame in that confession, but I’m not sure I could tell you why.
There seems little point in trying to explain cricket. I may as well explain the sky. I might be able to describe its constituent parts but I would fail to capture its colour and depth, its rhythms and flux, let alone how these parts might fuse in unexpected alchemy. Cricket might be best compared to learning a language - tonal like Mandarin, teeming with incomprehensible characters and sounds your mouth and tongue are incapable of producing without exposure from infancy. With great effort, you might gain a level of skill and appreciation but fluency will remain laughably out of reach. Instead, I’ll try to illustrate cricket’s impact on my life and whether I want to initiate you into her fervent cult with its arcane codes and protocols.
I was doomed. My father and maternal uncle were both representative players. Cricket was genetic - addiction or mutation, take your pick. My uncle was an early hero, but I was baffled when one day he staggered from the field, face buried in a towel dripping with blood, after a top-edged hook to the brow. But in general, it was a bloodless obsession, ideal for first-born sons - risk-averse, self-absorbed, eager-to-please centres of the universe. It makes me cringe to admit it but if I had been born 30 years later I may well have been a gamer. But at the time, electronics - waiting for the shrieking cassettes to load Horace Goes Skiing onto my ZX Spectrum had limited appeal. I was intensely bookish but from a young age, I played intricate, days-long matches of cricket against various versions of myself. This is a well-documented phenomenon, Ezra, and while I accept its oddity, I was far from being alone in creating alter-egos, imaginary scorecards and statistics. This is what I tell myself anyway.
My opportunity to play these games came after school and before Dad arrived home from work. His car took up all of the remaining space in our garage beneath the house. I became skilled at hurling a ball against the wall and replacing the hand in time to hit the rebound. Depending on the team, bowler or conditions of the imaginary match, I would throw the ball harder or impart vicious spin. Depending on the player and their position in my hierarchy, a blind eye might be turned to their dismissal - a Border, Richards, Crowe or Greenidge.
It was almost always a tennis ball, seldom the highly unpopular ‘compo’ - cork and rubber, lacquered rock-hard white. If it was a wet weekend, The Snifter, Mum’s mint green Mini LE became a close fielder. If you examined its chrome bumper closely, or if the light fell particularly cruelly, you might imagine it was pocked with tiny dints. Hitting any object on the full - cars, walls, buckets or garden implements meant immediate dismissal. I can still see the lithe blue hoe lurking at silly mid-on. I must have driven my parents mad: the constant thump and tap would have been like living above one of Tolkien’s dwarf mines. But in all those years, I can recall only one broken window - when the compo took a wicked ricochet off the orange lawnmower. The moment is frozen in my mind - the crack spreading like a spider’s web from the bottom left corner of the pane. The noise and the silent fear after.
Martin Crowe, one of my greatest childhood heroes, wrote that his flawless technique was formed not just in but by his backyard. Playing with brother, Jeff, young Martin knew that he would score runs if he could hit the ball back past the bowler. And so, Crowe’s signature straight drive was born. My own backyard was similarly formative: a firm off-drive could wedge the ball in the gooseberry bush - you could keep running while the bowler-fielder shredded his hands on its spikes. But perhaps the greatest value was to walk across one’s stumps and whip the ball into the corn-rows at mid-wicket. The bowler had to tiptoe across the vege patch while keeping one eye on the upstairs windows. You could also pull the ball under giant rhubarb leaves or tuck the ball off your hip into the thick blackcurrant bushes at square-leg. A top-edge meant “six-and-out” because the old neighbour, Mr Buchanan, would steal our balls, revenge apparently for when my sister and I toddled down his driveway, turned on a tap and flooded his downstairs. Your eldest brother, too, had suitable walls and a backyard pitch when he was small, but our tiny patch of uneven moss will present a challenge.
I outgrew the garage and backyard but luckily for me, we lived beside an alley and a row of shops - a butcher, supermarket and fish-and-chip shop. One year they replaced the gravel with levelled asphalt. There was even a lip of concrete four-foot high that stopped the ball running away down the alley. It meant I could continue my fantasy matches if nobody wanted to bowl at me. My parents could see me from the window and yell when it was time for dinner or bed.
CRICKET IN Timaru was a big thing, and perhaps the biggest thing in the district was the shadow cast by one of my primary school teachers, Mr. N. He was rumoured to be 44 stone when he passed, as wide as he was tall in his flapping burgundy cardigan and groaning walk shorts. We rushed out of class at break and lunch and stood in the queue for bats, stumps and a white, rubber baseball, which swung and zipped off the dewy grass. We resumed games and innings that could last for weeks. Sometimes, Mr N would bolt his not insignificant lunch and join us. He always commandeered the bat or ball - incongruously delicate off-spin compared to the bludgeoning he gave us with the bat. He hit the ball so hard he never needed to run. On the odd occasion when the ball beat his defences and thudded into his body, we all took a deep breath. If it fell at his feet, he would grunt and tip, leaning against the quivering bat as he tried to reach the ball, each of us, standing back, too nervous to ask if we could dash in and help. The stalemate would usually end with another grunt and the ball kicked to the nearest kid. On one unforgettable day, for some reason, Mr N stood in the field. Of course, a catch flew in his direction. And he dived. Witnesses swear there was post-impact daylight between his body and the ground. Bounce or not, the game was halted as every player came across to help Mr N get to his feet.
While it would be impossible to say he was larger than life, the stories of Mr N were legion. He drove a white Holden Kingswood station wagon with red leather bench seats that burned scrawny schoolboys’ legs in the summer. Even with Mr N driving and a kit bag or two in the boot, he could transport a full team. I can still recall the moment when he would haul himself into the car and all eleven of us would tip, threatening to capsize. One morning he arrived late to class, dishevelled and out of breath - nothing out of the ordinary - until he wheezed that his Kingswood had started smoking on the way to school. He had pulled over. The car was on fire. Enough time to rescue the cricket gear and dive, with a kit bag under each arm, before the Kingswood exploded. He taught Standard Four - you were fortunate to be a teacher's pet, doomed if not. We watched the complete Tom and Jerry on his projector, played wolfball and four-square, had quizzes and sat in order of intellectual merit. I sat at number two behind a girl who became a Fulbright Scholar while the boy at 32 was nicknamed Lummox. Mr N lived with his mother and died soon after her, but he was a generous man to his cricketing protégés, offering a new bat to anyone who made a century and shouting fish and chips on away trips, emerging with two enormous parcels and his signature two-litre Mello Yello.
This teacher’s pet read every cricket book he could find - no mean feat as surely no other sport has produced more words. I watched weeks of cricket on the television, including every ball of the 1987 Boxing Day Test when Dick French robbed Danny Morrison of glory on his début. I recorded tape after tape of old highlights packages replayed during rain delays. the transistor seemed to be switched on from October to April - a constant hum of scores from around the country, interrupted only by the pock of tennis, excitable bowls commentators and the exotic hiss of shortwave from Australia. Monday’s newspaper was full of scores from the weekend - the thrill of seeing your name in print was countered by the shame of a public duck. None of these things will make sense to you.
I also started accompanying my father to test matches at Lancaster Park in Christchurch. This meant days off school. My first test was in 1981 where Greg Chappell made 176 but the most memorable thing was not being able to see the ball when Lillee and Thomson bowled. One year, I won a cricket bat in a competition where kids had to score a full session. It was a terrible bat, an unfashionable County - paper-thin, riddled with knots and signed by Lance Cairns - but somehow I made my first century with it.
I was lucky to have grown up in 1980s New Zealand: we had Hadlee, Crowe and Billy Ibadulla’s commentary. I owned posters of both players (much to my chagrin, I could never find one of Ibadulla) and they reserved some of their finest moments for me - Crowe’s 137, his jaw split and then strapped, Hadlee’s two-day rout of England and his 400th wicket. I can still recall the crossover shuffle at the top of his mark, kids shaking discarded Double Brown cans filled with shingle from beneath the stands to the chant of “Had-lee”.
Then there were the West Indians of 1987. A boy from Timaru, I stared at men so black I couldn’t see their faces in the long shadow of the stands. Greenidge peppered kids’ shins as we tried to field his throwdowns and giggled when he chipped the ball high into the Man of the Series car. There was the clash of two knights, Richards and Hadlee - the gasps of wonder when Viv smashed five fours off an over, only to be followed by a groan when he edged Martin Snedden. We all wanted to be Viv, The Master Blaster. I wasn’t even The Masturbator. Pale and meek, I used red duct tape to hide the white stripe on my otherwise Rastafarian wristbands. To be frank, I was The Anti-Viv.
I became a cricketing Rain Boy. It is a game that appeals to the autistic - the value of a player is ultimately reflected in the numbers they can muster. But the unquantifiables of pitch, atmospheric conditions, opposition, state of play, form and luck tell their own story. I pored over statistics in annuals and almanacs and acquired a deep knowledge of the game’s history. I kept notebooks of my own scores while Mum kept scrapbooks of photos and newspaper cuttings. I also spent weekends clambering up and down the scoreboard at Aorangi Park watching South Canterbury play - sliding white numbers painted on black squares. Later, as a member of the groundstaff at Lord’s, I lumbered through the innards of the old scoreboard, tugging cords like Quasimodo. I was merely the latest recruit to an army of oddballs who have sought refuge in cricket’s esoteric symbols, signals and jargon.
Even my batting was autistic. I clung to the crease like a limpet to an unforgiving rock. My teammates and the match were secondary. I was scared of getting out and my sole goal was to bat for as long as possible. I counted the runs in my head and corrected the scorers when I was dismissed. On Friday nights in my top bunk with posters of Crowe and Hadlee looking down on me, I bawled if I could hear rain on the roof above. If I failed, I would sulk all weekend. Once a teammate made a joke at my expense too soon after my dismissal, so I grabbed his hat and rubbed it in some convenient dog shit. My dad, suitably appalled, made me buy him a replacement.
In the grip of adolescence, life becomes more complicated, but thanks to the obsessiveness those long years allow, I made painstaking improvements to my game. I baulked at trying any new activity: I needed to know success was guaranteed before I began. Paradoxically, cricket promised none of that - uncertainty is the key to its tantalising appeal. My friends were cricketers, too. We biked everywhere with cricket bags strapped to our backs. In spring - these were pre-helmet days - I had to pull my bag over my head and pedal as hard as I could down a hill, knowing a magpie was nesting in the macrocarpa at the top. Its looming shadow and rushing wings were the stuff of nightmares. I remember my brother arriving home with blood running down his face.
To underline my oddness, when I was tired of being smashed over the wall at the school nets, I would pack a bag with six balls and a sack and cross the road to the athletics oval and its discus cage. I marked a pitch and bowled for hours at the sack. I repeatedly tore the callouses which developed on my spinning fingers. It was an ailment that dogged my entire career and led to desperate trials of, among other things, boracic acid and urine (my own). I played with illegal, skin-toned bandages but they hindered more than helped, and it was only towards the end of my playing days that I happened upon a remedy - nail-hardening polish. Thanks to the dearth of spin bowlers in New Zealand and our batsmen’s consequent inability to play the turning ball, I was selected for teams young. So while searching for an identity, I became known as “the Cricket Guy”. It was my sole focus and it meant that outside of those who spoke cricket, I was a mute, often labelled arrogant or aloof. Girls may as well have been giraffes: long of lash and utterly out of reach.
I began playing with and against men; men who gave no quarter and often resented the promise of youth. When I returned to play against boys my own age in tournaments, it felt like a literal walk in the park. In adolescence when one’s father is at best an object of derision and at worst a target of vividly imagined violence, cricket provided me with a bridge to access the world of men. Sometimes I was the only teen in the team, so it was like travelling with 11 uncles. Most looked out for me, and my ability was both recognised and encouraged. It was a safe but uncompromising environment, and I had a lot to learn. Once, I was asked to make cups of tea for my roommates. Panicking, I tore open the tea bags, and eventually offered up cups of cold leaves. I was a lazy, selfish 16 year old and, rightly, I was never allowed to forget it.
These men also provided examples of humour, sportsmanship and camaraderie. Due to its tempo and duration, cricket allows more space and time for idiosyncrasy than other sports. I opened the batting with an avuncular man who played in our school’s 1st XI to ensure we weren’t abused too unreasonably when we umpired against the men. At that time, South Canterbury had some fine players, and among them were two fast bowlers who both, bizarrely, sported glass eyes. One only ever pitched the ball up to us; the other only ever bowled bouncers. One wore an eyepatch - you can guess which.
On this occasion we were playing Eyepatch and I was relieved to be standing at the non-striker’s end as he shuffled in to bowl. At the moment of release, he grunted and his glass eye popped its patch and rolled down the pitch. I looked down at an eye looking up at me. I didn’t dare glance across to Eyepatch; I could feel the glare from his good eye. I remember it being very quiet… until my partner bounded up and shouted, “Two of us can play that game!” With that, he spat his dentures into his glove and hurled them at Eyepatch: false teeth and false eye lying side by side in the dust - a tooth for an eye. I have many fond memories from cricket but watching these men walk arm in arm from the pitch to wash the grit from their body parts while both teams cried with laughter takes some beating.
On another occasion, I nearly did take a beating. On the night before a rest day at the national under-20 tournament in Whanganui, our coach and manager thought it would be a good idea to introduce their charges to some culture by taking us to a vineyard. On reflection, it was a novel idea because the legal drinking age in New Zealand at the time was 20. While Thommo, our manager, waffled about nose, legs and texture, we were arranging ourselves into two rows for a boat race. On the drive back into town, Blair ‘Bubba’ Davis leaned out the front passenger window and gave the white van pinot noir racing stripes.
“Check the texture of that, Thommo!”
I don’t remember anything else from that night except the stagger home. We were staying at the Whanganui Girls’ College hostels and had to cross the river. Rob Frew - a solid citizen both on and off the field - took it upon himself to escort me home. It was a long, meandering walk. I paused to vomit off the bridge but when I lifted my eyes, we had company. Two black-clad bogans had materialised out of the mist.
“Give us your money.”
Rob’s wallet was notoriously muscular. It recoiled at the words, like a snail meeting salt. Rob took off. One bogan followed; the other kept watch over me. I didn’t or couldn’t move an inch.
“Give me your money.”
I pulled my wallet out. This was no time for heroes. The blue of a $10 note peeked out the top. I tried to poke it back in but my mugger had seen it and took it. I swayed meekly in the breeze. We waited silently for the return of his accomplice until he turned to me,
“Do you want a beer? It’s DB.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “OK.”
I don’t recall a “Cheers!” Stockholm Syndrome or not, $10 was a lot to pay for a beer in 1990. Eventually, the bogan returned and like some budget mob movie, I was told to walk back to the town end of the bridge, turn around and come back.
“Do I have to?” I whined.
I did. By the time I had returned to the scene of the crime, the bogans had fled. I trudged onward, across the bridge and turned toward our hostel. My only thought was bed. Then I heard a hissed, “JP. JP.”
“Rob?” I spun my head.
“Up here!”
There, wide-eyed and clutching the fork of a tree like an aye-aye, was Rob, blood dripping from the nose that had clearly been smashed across his face. He had been winning the foot race until he tripped on the roundabout at the end of the bridge.
NOT LONG after, I was the victim of serendipity. During every spring school holidays, Graeme Blanchard, a local legend, somehow coaxed cricketing dignitaries to come to Timaru and coach. One year, this included the only recently retired Glenn Turner. In short, I bowled well to him and important people took note. I was invited to take part in a national spin-bowling clinic with the Australian, Ashley Mallett and, as luck would have it, he liked what he saw. Later that season, Mark Richardson had to pull out of a New Zealand Youth side, and I was called up. The late Mike Shrimpton was our coach, the best I ever had. Shrimpo prophesied that I would become a Buddhist monk. I was never sure if it was because I was at peace or was in need of it. A quirky individual himself, Shrimpo had his own mystical, monastic air.
I performed better than I would ever have imagined. I took the first five wickets in a match against the feared Australian Institute of Sport, including, apparently, one Michael Slater. Apart from the enormous Phil Alley whose left arm disappeared above the sightscreen, I had no idea who we were playing. In the space of six months, I found myself on the path I had always dreamed of. I also remember all too clearly returning to Timaru from my national success and playing club cricket. A lower-order batsman shambled out to the crease with what looked like a homemade bat and reached his half-century off 13 balls, every single run coming from me.
After a taste of fame (and free kit), the game consumed me. My summers were spent at tournaments and if I played reasonably well, I was selected for month-long tours up and down the country. This meant days in vans and weeks in motels with young men similarly twisted by cricket. They became my closest friends, and it became difficult to return home. These times fostered ambition, excitement and restlessness that the stability of home could never match. Previously, shyness had branded me arrogant or aloof to those who didn’t know me. Now I couldn’t blame shyness for those who did. I continued to make teams: over three years, I played in Youth test series against John Crawley’s England, a surprisingly weak but unsurprisingly obnoxious Australia and, best of all, a month-long tour to play Rahul Dravid’s India.
Whether one accepts Peter Roebuck’s eerie declaration that “cricket draws people of a fragile nature”, the best players are far from fragile in the heat of battle. They rise above and impose their personalities on the game while the rest wallow. I played with and against some fine players. Batsmen divided themselves into friendless introverts and impervious pariahs. The lag between failure and redemption can be days - often spent watching rivals succeed - more than enough time to sink into the Slough of Despond. The gregarious bowlers guffawed and played pranks, knowing they needed others to help them succeed. Some of these personalities were inspirational. Dion Nash and Jeff Wilson (the last Airbender and double All Black) were gifted athletes who struggled to fit in the same room - competitive to a fault, no situation was unsalvageable. Watching Stephen Fleming lean on a cover drive from the non-striker’s end, I turned and exchanged glances with the umpire, both of us knowing I would never play a shot as elegantly as that.
My teammates were simply playing a different game.
(to be continued…)
The best cricketing piece I have read. Cannot wait for Pt 2
Another fine export from Timaru. Mr N was a legend as was Blanch. A very well written and nostalgic read.