Letter to Ezra, Pt II

The conclusion of Justin Paul's brilliant essay, PLUS: The BYC eats into the rotting flesh of the Hadlee-Chappell series.

Below is the second instalment of former first-class cricketer Justin Paul’s evocative essay, Letter to Ezra. The first part was posted this morning.

Letter to Ezra first ran in The Nightwatchman. It is part of a wider project, which includes conversations with the best players Justin has played with or against including Dion Nash, John Aiken and Mark Richardson. If you are interested in learning more about the project (especially if you’re a book publisher!), you can reach Justin through his Facebook page.

Finally, your support makes guest contributions like this possible. Thanks.

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by Justin Paul

In my final year at high school, I decided I would leave home and pursue cricket. Ironically, Stephen Fleming turned down an invitation to become New Zealand’s Young Player to Lord’s so he could go to Teachers’ College. Years later, I would become the teacher. So my first year out of Timaru was spent in London. I lived in a hostel in Hampstead with 12 budding professionals from across England. I arrived before my teammates and had to share a room with a white Trinidadian who supposedly spoke a version of English. I remember him only as “KiwiMarn”, and our room was often filled with smoke and giggling Rastafarians. When the cricketers arrived, I set off eagerly in my shorts and jandals to meet them at a pub on the High Street. I didn’t stay long in my first gay bar. When I burst out, my teammates were outside our local, The King of Bohemia, howling with laughter on the opposite side of the road. 

Lord’s is the spiritual home of cricket. A cliché, yes, but for someone who had only ever dreamed of playing cricket, The Long Room, The Pavilion, the slope, the dressing room balconies, the honours board and The Nursery possess an aura, an intangible mana. The world has billions of cricket lovers and every one of them wants to experience Lord’s. I got to go there every day, lugging my coffin onto the 46 bus, sweating under my MCC Young Cricketers’ blazer. There were many memories: bowling to the touring West Indians in the nets; smashing Robin Smith in the forearm while giving him throwdowns and, according to The Sun, nearly ruling him out of the match (he went on to make 146); being too hungover to field for Mike Gatting’s Middlesex against the West Indies, only to hear a roar and see the scoreboard flash “I.V.A. Richards c sub b Fraser” - my replacement had caught Viv on the boundary off a full-blooded pull shot that would have killed me; the slow-motion stampede of octogenarians at the Grace Gate wearing egg and bacon blazers and ties, jostling for the coveted seats behind the bowler’s arm. 

I remember being on covers duty for one of the test matches and being out in the middle before the start of the day’s play with an Australian mate who was on the ground staff. Geoff Boycott came out to give his pitch report. Boycott heard Cam speak and asked if he played, “creekit”. 

“Yep.” 

“Are you any good?” 

“Yeah, I’m OK.” 

“OK? Ask me if I was any good?” 

Cam shrugged his shoulders: “Were you any good?” 

“I was fookin’ brilliant, I was.” 

I wrote IMFB on the handle of my bat in an effort to convince myself. 

Each year, the visiting New Zealander had just one chance to play on the hallowed turf. I can remember holding the rail as I walked down the stairs, through The Long Room - avoiding eye contact with Bradman and Grace - clicked down the steps and past the steward holding the gate open. It was worse in reverse two balls later, refusing to meet the eye of the “0” glaring down at me from the scoreboard - caught in close off a spinner. I took no wickets. 

Overall, I remember my first foray into professional cricket as a double-edged bat. Here I was, in my first year out of school, shuffling around Lord’s in my MCC shell suit to collect my wages at the Grace Gate - a tiny brown envelope pushed under a counter - and somehow I felt let down. This professional life did not match the image I had conjured as a child. If we weren’t away playing matches, hawking scorecards to straw boaters, polishing the Pavilion windows, or lifting covers on and off, we practised all day. I had always loved practising - but it had been a finite exercise, time and effort eked out between other areas of my life. Here, we merely had to practise. With compulsion and little else in my life, joy disappeared. I was surrounded by young cynics, worn down from trying and failing to land a county contract. They sneered and prayed for rain. I joined their ranks.

Despite this early dose of reality, I returned to the UK for two more seasons, to Birmingham and Edinburgh, and had the best time of my life. The warmth of seven consecutive summers pulled me further and further out of myself. As a club’s overseas player, there was pressure to perform but the position came with some credit: people didn’t look up to me but they did look to me. They wanted to hear my accent. Then they wanted to use my accent, taking me out and introducing me to girls as their Antipodean cousin. I was paid to cross the world to play a game, live in a free apartment, have a string of friends with similar interests and even join a family who became as dear to me as my own. Looking back, I am thankful for the great range of people who extended me but also provided a safe place to find myself. It is difficult to resist people who want to know you.

BACK HOME, like many of my New Zealand Youth teammates, I was fast-tracked into first-class cricket. I wasn’t good enough to play for my home province, Canterbury, so I leapt at an invitation to live in Dunedin and play for Otago. Again, like many of my contemporaries, there was impatience and a sense of entitlement. I was duly selected just after my 20th birthday and soon discovered the difference between boys and men. I spun the ball hard and when playing against the technically deficient on tired pitches, I succeeded. Now, my own deficiencies meant that I lacked the accuracy to trouble good players on good surfaces.

First-class debut v Auckland, Sunnyvale Park, Dunedin. Walking off with Aaron Gale (left) having scored 20 not out. Photo / supplied

 Spin bowlers often provide the clown to the dressing-room’s circus - depending on form, either water-squirt Bozo or Stephen King’s Pennywise. Unlike the fast bowler who can stand at the top of his distant mark, scrape the ground and snort before finally muscling in, the spinner must tease and deceive. Until Shane Warne shattered the mould and ate it, spin bowlers were often an indulgent sideshow. They were innocuous - both the deliveries they bowled and physically. Shambling, winking and bespectacled, looking as if they hadn’t set foot outside for months, their shirts hung off pipe-cleaner frames. The batsman can survive a torrid over, ducking and diving at one end and seeking refuge at the other. He loosens his shoulders and feels that he can cash in before he has to resume battle. The threat of spin is imaginary - the spin bowler insinuates, creates pressure where there is none until the batsman’s mind or technique falters. Caught on the boundary is as good as a gloved bouncer. The genuinely fast bowler does not need to think - he frightens the batsman into submission, whereas the spinner is susceptible to thought. Through the years, these jokers, gamblers and geeks have succumbed to over-analysis and sometimes paralysis. As in golf’s yips, a simple, repetitive action honed to the brink of automation by years of practice can seemingly disappear overnight.

Otago Cricket played a cruel trick on Mark Richardson and I by making us flatmates. Mark was a struggling left-arm spin bowler, well before he transformed into a dashing middle-order batsman, dour test opener and finally, television anchorman. At the time, we were competing for the same spot. Mark was even more damaged than me: he would wake in the middle of the night, dreaming of a technical breakthrough, drag me to the nets at dawn and implode when the new trick failed. He abandoned the game for a season, packed his surfboard into the back of his yellow Sigma and toured the country’s beaches. The following season he reignited his love of the game when he hit - in what must surely be unique in high-level cricket - 33 runs off the final over to beat Canterbury ‘B’. A few months later, he was hooking the touring West Indians into the Carisbrook terraces on his way to a run-a-ball century. 

I, too, suffered terrible nerves before I bowled because of my technical shortcomings (a comically short delivery-stride that made me look like a stork) and overactive brain. When things were going badly, I also clutched at theories and tweaked my technique almost daily. If my first over went well, I had half a chance, but my first ball was often a full toss. I even took to meditation before matches, much to the amusement of my more pragmatic teammates. Otago’s seasoned professional, Neil Mallender, walked in on me and thought I had died.

It was only years later that I silenced my little man, the internal voice who reminds you of your flaws and failings. The game that brought me travel, friendship and identity also brought anxiety and alcohol. There was always excitement about being on the road for weeks with friends, but the evenings were monotonous, interminable. Add frustration and failure and you had a potent cocktail. Cricket’s obsessives are called “tragics” and the players’ wives “widows” for good reason. Surely, in David Frith’s Silence of the Heart, cricket is the only sport that has a book dedicated to its suicides.

I carried the drinks more often than I played first-class matches. In four-day games, I was used as cannon-fodder - a makeshift opening batsman on the green pitches prepared for our bowlers.

Drinks in hand, Molyneux Park, Alexandra. Photo / supplied

 I bowled more in one-day games because the field could be spread far and wide. I pulled muscles in front of jeering drunks at the Basin Reserve, who pointed and howled as the ball trickled into the boundary out of my freshly hamstrung reach. The walk of shame as I hobbled around the boundary perimeter was a particular lowlight. But there was also a lot of fun and lifelong friends, one of whom announced his arrival by driving on to the pitch, via 10m of terraced seating, after his foot had slipped from brake to accelerator. But after three intermittent seasons, Dick Wixon and Paul Wiseman - more spin bowlers - came south and that was that. My childhood dream was effectively over at the ripe old age of 22.

I PLAYED for another five seasons and during that time probably reached my peak. In that time I loosened up and caught some glimpses of the player I might have been if I’d allowed myself. I recaptured some of the joy of the game. I even captained a strong New Zealand Universities side. Humour and camaraderie became more important. At one tournament, I walked up to collect the trophy for Otago University, turned around and my team had disappeared. They burst in a few minutes later, panting and crying with laughter.

The team had done a nude streak around the Basin Reserve, and hadn’t seen the guy rope for the nets in the outfield. Some of them ended up in the net, flapping, trapped like bloated fish. To recount these stories with old friends still brings tears to the eyes. 

Earlier I wrote that I pursued cricket. It was very much like that - the hunt for something unattainable. Sometimes I could close in on it, only for it to turn and laugh. But when I stopped chasing, it stopped, too. The moment I started to push and care, it would flee again. Then I sustained a knee injury that required surgery. It didn’t work out, so I stopped for good. I have played one game in 20 years. Thankfully, because your eldest brother was watching and believed in some mythical father figure, I scored 45 in that game. I was asked repeatedly to play in ‘friendly’ matches but always declined. Like Miss Havisham, so much of my identity remained trapped in that phase of my life: to give anything less than my best was unthinkable. It wasn’t worth the risk. I was unable and unwilling to play for fun, simply because it wasn’t. I had children, discovered the beach and the long days of summer. I stepped into the light.

Looking back 20 years, it is more accurate to say I didn’t miss the weight or tension, but I did miss the competition, the brotherhood and its banter. But more deeply - and I have only come to appreciate this recently - I missed the discipline, the direction, the sense of achievement, continuous learning and improvement. After a 20-year plateau, I have rediscovered some of these in my work, through writing and at times, parenting, but I suffered from what Jon Hotten captured when he spoke of players who leave the game: “What must be resolved is a relationship with the game that has defined them.”

Other sportspeople - perhaps those who have reached the heights and fulfilled their aspirations - have slipped seamlessly from sports to business careers, the path often smoothed by fame and its association, but in cricket’s wake, I never redefined myself. In a typically coruscating dismissal of “games not sport”, A.A. Gill wrote: “You should feel nothing but pity for the schoolboy hero... For his life has peaked before he’s barely stepped onto the field. Everything for ever after will be an anticlimax and a slow descent into disappointment and comparative failure.” I read this and wince. Gill also said: “Encouraging youngsters to punch each other’s heads… chase balls or run in circles for money is… no different from urchins diving for coins.”

I worry for your brother who is plunging into the same tiny pool. I understand his commitment and focus but I appreciate, too well, the pitfalls that lie in wait for him. He’s not me, of course - he plays the game with far more personality and far less introspection. I want you all to find a passion and dream big, but now we can no longer (legally) send you up chimneys, how else will you fill those idle teenage years? Some have filled them with books and learning. Others with skateboards, cars, music, girls, boys, self-love. Others stack shelves or handle meat in supermarkets.

Cricket is the most self-indulgent pursuit, designed for those who have the luxury of time - the ultimate pastime. During adolescence, there is ample room for more than one focus, but at a stage when your life and body is beyond your control, sport is a gift. Cricket bought me time and gave me something to do while I figured out who the hell I was. It was a safe vehicle that steered me towards manhood - identity and belonging - and on the way I picked up lessons on perseverance. Perhaps most importantly, I felt the first stirrings of self-respect where previously there had been, at best, none. The critical words in Gill’s sentence are “for money”. I see more merit in sport than him - it provides more long-term benefit than merely being good at Lego - but to continue to dive far beyond one’s youth is to risk drowning in his “slow descent”.

I remember Cam wearing holes in the lawn, thrashing balls over the house and nearly decapitating kids at kindergarten. I fed his fire with time and encouragement. I coached his teams and watched his teammates butcher the game. These days, however, I can come and go - like other parents. I can sit and watch and chat with old friends in the sun. But I have no Sky TV and no interest in watching others play (aside from the 2019 World Cup final, from which I may never recover). At times, I feel as if I have led your brother into a forest and left him there.

I don’t think I can do it again, Ezra. Already your tiny silhouette looms in the doorway to the garage, holding an autograph bat at your side, like Anton Chigurh. You ask to wear Cam’s first pads. The Velcro straps can wrap around your entire body. Tiny riot policeman, your eyes peep over the top. Tentatively, I lob balls at you and it is clear that you, too, have an eye. You chase the ball and sweep it across our sloping driveway. The ball swings up and back down to you, waiting at the bottom.

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On to more prosaic matters, the BYC gathered again to pick the maggots off the rotting carcass that was the Hadlee-Chappell series.

The consensus, as unhelpful as it might be, is that we’re just not sure where this team is at and what the logical next steps are in terms of its development.

To that end, there was some good feedback in the comments from Monday’s newsletter, essentially questioning whether you can continue to build your bating lineup around Kane Williamson any more. I still see this as a blip in an outstanding career and think there are three to four more potentially great years left in him but he definitely needs a new get-off-strike bail-out shot in white-ball cricket because good teams are not giving him the single to third man any more.

Can’t say I was overly convinced by Gary Stead’s comments in this piece.

“The guys are disappointed and frustrated after having opportunities in all three matches and not getting over the line. I think it’s easy when you lose that you can go soul searching a little bit, but we try not to do that. We try to be clear in our processes and what we’re trying to do and try to get better each day. Unfortunately Australia put enough pressure on us and we couldn’t quite get over the line last night again.”

There’s a lot of quatsch in there and, quite honestly, if this isn’t the time to search souls, when is?