Clive Rice – Bulletproof Truth

Lawson Naidoo: Polymath pads up

“I would hope they support South African cricket rather than a 50-year-old vision of what South African cricket was.” – Lawson Naidoo, CSA board chair, on his compatriots.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

JAMES Brown was in jail. But that didn’t stop the queue from coiling around the block to see the James Brown All-Stars at the Jazz Café in Camden Town in London. Lawson Naidoo was happy with that: not because the “Godfather of Soul” was in the tjoekie but because more punters meant more money to fight apartheid.

It was circa 1990 and one of the venue’s owners, Jon Dabner, supported SA’s freedom struggle by donating the door takings from certain gigs. Naidoo, who worked for the ANC mission in London from 1987 to 1992, was instrumental in establishing the arrangement.

The story captures one of his Naidoo’s numerous lives and a sliver of his colourful times. If you’re old enough to remember the start of SA’s journey towards democracy in 1994, you recall Naidoo as a special advisor to Frene Ginwala, the post-apartheid parliament’s first speaker. If you fancy yourself a builder of a better world, Naidoo’s name registers as the executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution. For politics junkies, Naidoo is a founding partner of the Paternoster Group, a risk consultancy.

If you’re a certain kind of cricket person, you know Naidoo as the founder — in 1998 — and captain of the Spin Doctors XI, who delight in their flannelled foolery in Cape Town’s Friendly Cricketers’ Association. If you’re a more sensible kind of cricket person, you know Naidoo has been chairperson of Cricket SA’s (CSA) board since June.

It’s the most recent CV entry that jars. Not because Naidoo isn’t fit to hold the office, but because of the sorriness of the suits who have too often been charged with stopping SA cricket’s buck.

Ray White, who was forced to resign for undermining transformation efforts, damned the board as “little more than the cricket organ of the ANC”. Famously, Percy Sonn “fell out of his pants”, according to a parking lot eyewitness, after a long and liquid night during the 2003 World Cup. Chris Nenzani’s super power was inflicting something close to death by circumlocution on anyone uninformed enough to ask him a question.

They all came to CSA’s presidency from the provincial structures, where they spent years knee deep in manure backing the right horses until they were the horse to be backed. Naidoo is an independent member of the first majority independent board the game in this country has known, and the first independent director to lead the board. That changes things.

“This is not an ordinary organisation; it’s very complex,” Naidoo told the Financial Mail. “Fundamentally it’s a public asset. It’s not a private entity. It belongs to all South Africans. That brings a greater level of responsibility to everyone that’s involved in it. We’re custodians of a game that’s going to be here long after we’ve gone.”

Naidoo was at Kingsmead on February 5, 1970. He was not quite seven years old. By lunch, when Barry Richards was 94 not out having flayed Australia’s bowlers to all parts, the youngster had found a lifelong passion.

The Group Areas Act had slithered onto the statute books the year before. It would force the removal of the Naidoo family from Durban’s old casbah to Chatsworth. At 12, Naidoo was spirited away from the evils of apartheid to join an elder brother in the UK. He would remain in the other hemisphere for 17 years and earn a Masters in law from Cambridge.

Music became a tether to the real world: “I got to know some of the exiled jazz artists, Julian Bahula in particular and later Dudu Pukwana, and others like Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa. I got drawn into South African jazz through them.” So much so that, from 2011 to 2014, Naidoo managed the Mahogany Room, a jazz club in Buitenkant Street in Cape Town. Bra Hugh himself graced the stage.

Cricket, too, kept Naidoo from disappearing into Englishness: “The first thing I would check in the newspapers was how the South African players had done in the county championship — Barry Richards, Mike Procter, Clive Rice …”

Many of that generation would struggle to credit people like Naidoo with using sport to help change our society for the better. “I would hope they support South African cricket rather than a 50-year-old vision of what South African cricket was,” he said. “Some of them just don’t get it. The game has moved on and they’ll get left behind.”

To paraphrase James Brown, they won’t feel good.

First published by the Financial Mail.

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Baboo Ebrahim: Smiling through the sadness

Through lack of opportunity, not talent or skill, Ebrahim had just 48 chances to shine at first-class level.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

HAD life, cricket and everything else been more just, this piece would have been much richer in detail and description of great feats. Instead, the cricket life of Ismail “Baboo” Ebrahim, who has died in Durban at 73, will be known as well as it should be only to those who played with and against him, or watched him play.

His passing is a tragedy to those who loved him. Another tragedy is that many more who would surely have come to love him, or at least have recognised him as the pre-eminent South Africa spinner of the age, were denied that joy by the laws of the day. Apartheid barred sport that was not organised racially, simultaneously elevating white sport — and everything else that was white — above all else and subjugating, brutally, the rest. That meant the lives of more than 90% of South Africans were viciously stunted.

As a South African of Asian descent, Ebrahim was among them. And so his potential went unrealised, as did that of so many others. But his legend is as large as it could be.

He resolved to become a left-arm spinner after seeing, from the “non-white” pen in the stands at Kingsmead, England’s Johnny Wardle cleanbowl Roy McLean, a dashing South African, through the gate in January 1957. Wardle was unusually creative for a spinner of the time — not to mention for a Yorkshireman — because he bowled wrist spin as well as the orthodox variety. As did Ebrahim, who became a wizard of flight as well as turn: still a rarity for a South African spinner.

In February 1970, When Ebrahim was 24, Bill Lawry’s Australians came to Durban to play a Test in what would be South Africa’s last series before the were banished for 22 years because of apartheid. Ebrahim went to the nets to watch them practice. And to ask if he could have a bowl. A brown man? Bowling to white foreigners? In South Africa in 1970? Who did he think he was? But the Australians shooed away the security vultures, and Ebrahim was given a crack. He bowled Ian Redpath, caught the eye of Ashley Mallett, who stayed in touch for years afterwards, and reportedly earned Ian Chappell’s opinion of him as the best spinner in the country.

Six years later he played for a South African Invitation XI against the composite International Wanderers on a Kingsmead pitch so typically green and nasty that Vince van der Bijl, Clive Rice and Eddie Barlow took all 10 wickets inside 40 overs, or before Ebrahim could be tossed the ball. He made up for that in the second innings, bowling 29.1 overs and taking 6/66. Mike Denness, Greg Chappell and Bob Taylor were among his victims.

By then white clubs were making efforts to sign up members of other races, and Ebrahim was among those who did so — to the chagrin of his more politically minded peers, who held to the line that there could be “no normal sport in an abnormal society” like South Africa’s. But his best days were behind him by the time he played his first match for the white Natal side: he turned 32 on the second day of that game, against Rhodesia in Bulawayo in November 1978.

White contemporaries like Alan Kourie, a slow left-armer of flight and guile but not much turn and four-and-a-half years Ebrahim’s junior, played 127 first-class matches. Ebrahim, through lack of opportunity, not talent or skill, had just 48 chances to shine at that level. The Transvaal team Kourie played for called the Wanderers home, and appeared on television wherever they went. Ebrahim and his black and brown comrades toiled away in relative obscurity on ill-appointed grounds, their exploits covered only by reporters from newspapers that had exclusively black and brown readerships.

And yet it could have been so different. Kourie is of Lebanese heritage. So, unlike Ebrahim, he was adjudged white enough to escape the stroke of an apartheid aparatchick’s pen that would have condemned him as too dark to play with those of paler skin.

Ebrahim sought solace from his reality, and took the chance to earn some decent money, by playing in the Lancashire Leagues. But sometimes reality came to him. In the summer of 1974-75 the great Rohan Kanhai was in South Africa to play four matches for the non-racial Transvaal team. He scored three centuries in five innings, one of them against Ebrahim’s Natal. Ebrahim didn’t dismiss the West Indian in the two innings in which he bowled to him, but he took 2/18 from 21 overs in one and 2/90 from 41 in the other. What might have been had they tussled in Test cricket?

We can never know, although we do know that Ebrahim dismissed Gordon Greenidge and Viv Richards — as well as Collis King and Carlisle Best — in the twilight zone of a Masters Cup semi-final at the beautiful Brabourne in Mumbai in March 1995, when he was four months past his 50th birthday.

Another victim of era of Ebrahim’s prime, newspaper editor Donald Woods, whose association with activist Steve Biko cost him some of his white privilege and forced him into exile, wrote in the 1993 edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack that Ebrahim would have been a star in “any first-class arena”. Biko paid a far higher price than Woods for being loudly, proudly, thoughtfully black: he was murdered by the state in 1977.

Such were the horrors of the time in which Ebrahim forged his career. But, to see him in his later years in the president’s suite at Kingsmead, where he became something of an éminence grise, you would never have guessed. A twinkle danced in his eye. His smile was as warm as Durban’s summer sun. He had retained his impish, fluid slightness. His hair, by then thoroughly grey, slumped lankly over his head, lending him the louche look of a rock star freshly tumbled out of bed. He had presence. You knew, without knowing, that this man had done great things.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Amla saga harks back to past muddled thinking

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in London

IF the agonising over Hashim Amla and the World Cup seems familiar, it should: South Africa have been shot in this movie before.

It stars Peter Kirsten and Jacques Kallis, and might be called Apocalypse Then, Again and Now.

Amla has devoted himself to helping to care for his ill father since the Test series against Sri Lanka last month.

That meant the stalwart missed the five one-day internationals and three T20s against the islanders, which ended South Africa’s preparations for the World Cup in England starting on May 30.

Amla answered some of the questions around his recent form by scoring 108 not out and 59 amid the 214 runs he made from five ODI innings against Pakistan in January.

But there is concern that the player who has been a fixture in South Africa’s ODI line-up for much of the past 11 years — but who has fallen far short of his Test average in four of his last five series in the format — may not be best placed to anchor the order in so important an assignment.

So, should Amla’s name be among the 15 Linda Zondi will announce on April 18?

Selection melodramas have complicated South Africa’s as yet unfulfilled ambition to win the World Cup since their first trip to the tournament almost 27 years ago.

Clive Rice, Jimmy Cook and Kirsten were left out of the preliminary squad of 30 selected for the tournament, apparently because they were 42, 38 and 36.

A petition calling for Rice’s inclusion drew more than 30 000 signatures and the Sunday Times published a photograph of him in a wheelchair being pushed by Cook.

The selectors’ idea of a compromise was to pick Kirsten in the final squad. And a good thing, too — his 410 runs in eight innings was the third-highest aggregate at the tournament.

Years later, Rice still hadn’t got over it: “I was very pissed off not to go. I never saw eye-to-eye with our chairman of selectors, Peter van der Merwe.

“He was a total amateur when it came to playing the game and he was the same as a selector.”

Might the example Kirsten set have clouded thinking around the 2015 World Cup?

Kallis retired from Test cricket in December 2013, but he remained an important part of South Africa’s planning for the tournament.

The bubble burst in July 2014 when Kallis pulled the plug on his international career after scoring five runs in three ODIs in Sri Lanka.

“I realised in Sri Lanka that my dream of playing in a World Cup was a bridge too far,” Kallis said. “I just knew on that tour that I was done.”

Perhaps because South Africa are never as confident in the depth of their batting reserves compared to how many quality fast bowlers they have at their disposal, seeing their best players near the end of their careers has always caused anxiety.

Amla is undeniably among the finest they have yet produced, but he is also approaching his last innings.

Where South Africa will find another player of his stature isn’t his issue to resolve, and prolonging his time in the team to try and bridge the gap wouldn’t be fair to Amla, the team, nor the emerging generation of batters.

Perhaps that movie should be called Lord of the Runs: Crowning the New King.