Tragedy of the West Indian rebels It is almost 25 years since the most hated West Indian cricket side of all time was assembled. ROBERT CRADDOCK reports how the tour's bitter legacy taints careers and lives to this day.
NO matter what Brian Lara and his not-so-merry men cop for bowing out early from their own World Cup it would not be a tenth of the abuse and hardship that rained down on the 18 West Indians who, in January 1983, headed off to South Africa for a rebel tour.
It was seen here as the ultimate sell-out . . . black men agreeing to play in an apartheid regime in which blacks were second-class citizens though the players, many financially stricken, considered it a business decision.
Such was the abuse heaped on many of the men who took around $130,000 for two rebel tours that several have lost their minds.
Across the road from my hotel yesterday was former Test wicket-keeper David Murray, son of the great Sir Everton Weekes and whose life spiralled into a world of depression and drugs after the tour.
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He is 56 but looks older. These days he can be seen around Accra beach mixing with the men who sell drugs to tourists.
He makes no attempt to hide the trauma of his experience, saying 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 Woolworths Garry Sobers who could bat and bowl medium-pace and off-spin, begs in the streets on his home city of Kingston, Jamaica - a permanently distressed soul who also 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," said one local official.
The same official last week, driving down the streets of Jamaica when he took a wrong turn into a dark alley, saw to his surprise another rebel - batsman Herbert Chang - standing listlessly in the middle of the road.
He wound down his window and a clearly substance-affected Chang put his head into the car, moved to within a few centimetres of the official's face and said,"man, man, man, I just, I just wanna know which I 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 America, then Trinidad.
Another to move on was wonder batsman Lawrence Rowe, a man who so impressed Sir 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.
The rebel tourists were immediately banned for life and, though in 1989 Commonwealth heads decided to repeal the ban, 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 obtained the team access to all white areas only 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 dishonor to be black."
The tours short-circuited some potentially outstanding careers.
Outstanding allrounder Franklyn Stephenson, so talented a sportsman that at age 48 he works as a golf professional and plays off scratch at one of Barbados' leading golf clubs, never played a Test match and spent the last 10 years waiting to be invited back into the local system until a change of heart in recent months.
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," Stephenson said.
"I still feel officials should aplogise for banning us and I don't believe West Indies cricket has ever recovered from it. They have been crap ever since."
Every tour 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 and won the second Test series 2-1 and the one-dayers 4-2.
Another wasted talent was Sylvester Clarke, whom Steve Waugh rated the fastest bowler he had faced and who once bowled to Waugh in county cricket without a man in front of square.
He played just 11 Tests and returned to work as a carpenter but collapsed and died at his home in 1999.
At least his suffering has ended. For several others it will continue until the day they join him.
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