Whole-hearted doesn’t do Streak justice. He was also whole-bodied, whole-minded and whole-souled.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
HEATH Streak didn’t die wondering what people thought of him. They thought the world of him, which they said when his death was erroneously reported on August 23. The warm tributes brimmed with admiration and came from the length and breadth of the game.
It is to be hoped some of that warmth stayed with Streak until the early hours of Sunday morning, when he did, in fact, die. He was surrounded by love from far and wide and, most importantly, near. Streak was taken, with a cruelty that should make atheists of all of us, just more than six months short of a half-century in a life that, had it endured, would have left the world a better place than he had already made it.
To know that a man who stood 1.84 metres tall and had shoulders to match, who played the last of his 175 first-class matches — in a total of 588 games of all descriptions — not quite 16 years ago, who was unarguably Zimbabwe’s greatest allrounder and easily among world cricket’s finest in his era, a man whose heart was as big as he was, could be taken down by cancer revealed as recently as May this year is to feel the rise of an anger made all the more terrible by its futility. How dare it.
Streak, born on March 16, 1974, was a huntin’, fishin’, shootin’ boy from Bulawayo, a slow, sleepy, sprawling place of sunshine, shadows and melancholy. Actually, Streak was from a farm near Nyathi, 100 kilometres north of Zimbabwe’s second city. If you have a decent grip on southern African politics you would feel entitled to assume much about him from those two short sentences.
He was the scion of one of the white families who, in the view of millions inside the country and out, owned land illegitimately and were propped up by a racist post-colonial government elected largely by whites to oppress the black majority. Enough of those millions believed that sufficiently strongly to wage war against the forces of that government. The conflict, which claimed around 20,000 lives, started almost 10 years before Streak was born and ended when he was five.
His father, Denis, played cricket for a country called Rhodesia. Heath played cricket for a country called Zimbabwe. They were and are the same country, of course, and also as different from each other as two countries could be. Place and street names and laws have been changed, but you can smell the mingled stink of stale racism and fresh oppression on those renamed streets. Streak was a product of a society ripped apart by fear and hate. Yet he became the embodiment of the best Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans could be.
Which is not to dismiss the elephant from the room: Streak died a fixer. In April 2021 the ICC banned him for eight years for consorting and collaborating with cricket’s criminal underworld. Could that also be the poisoned fruit of mould cast for him by being born Zimbabwean? Seven days before Streak died, the party that has ruled his country since 1980 were declared winners of an election that, not for the first time and probably not the last, was at best disputed and at worst has been stolen. The difference between now and the 1960s and 70s is that one side have all the guns, and that they are in power.
Streak said of his dalliance with cricket’s crooks he had been taken in by a conman in an attempt to establish a T20 league in Zimbabwe, and that he had done nothing to influence or manipulate matches. Even if that is true, he should have known better.
There is nothing selfless about corruption. Or about abusing trust. Or about taking money from people you know — or should find out — are dishonest and dangerous to you, your family, your team and your game. Streak did these things, and in the process damaged his reputation and his otherwise honourable place in the annals of cricket. He admitted his guilt. He deserved his punishment. He also deserves to be remembered for more than that.
Streak took his 216 Test wickets in 65 matches. Zimbabwe’s next most successful bowler, slow left-armer Ray Price, claimed 80 in 22: just more than a third of Streak’s total in just more than a third of his number of matches. Henry Olonga is the country’s next best fast bowler. He took 68 wickets in 30 Tests: less than a third of Streak’s quota in less than half his matches. Streak made 499 first-class strikes — 157 of them for Hampshire and Warwickshire — and grew into allrounderhood well enough to score six first-class centuries, one of them a Test hundred. He was respected as a threat by all opponents and an unparalleled giant for Zimbabwe.
Over the course of Streak’s career only 11 of Test cricket’s other 344 pace bowlers took more wickets. Just six of them bowled more overs. Zimbabwe’s next hardest working seamer in that era was Guy Whittall, who sent down 1,478.5 fewer overs than Streak. A crafty but genuine medium pacer, Whittall opened the bowling in one innings of one of his 46 matches. Streak took on that responsibility 73 times in his 65 Tests. He captained Zimbabwe in 21 of them, a record he shares with Alistair Campbell. Nobody has led the team to as many victories as Streak: four.
Fast bowlers are cricket’s most often injured players, but Streak was in action in all except 14 possible Tests in a career of a dozen years. Only Grant Flower, less at risk of damage as a batter and part-time slow left-armer, has played more Tests for Zimbabwe. Two more.
Streak was part of the XI in more than half of Zimbabwe’s total of 117 Tests. He bowled more than 11% of all the overs sent down by the 126 men who have marked out a run-up in a Zimbabwe shirt. Narrowed to his own career, when 67 bowlers turned an arm over for Zimbabwe, he owned almost 18% of the total deliveries. He was selflessness in whites and boots.
The modesty of some of those figures next to the numbers produced by others — Glenn McGrath, for instance, played 46 more Tests than Streak during the latter’s time — tells its own story. Australia featured in 59 more Tests than Zimbabwe while Streak played. Only Bangladesh had fewer Tests than the Zimbabweans’ 79.
Yet Streak, along with Andy and Grant Flower, bestrode the world game like few others. Often Zimbabwe were veritable flyweights shoved into the ring with heavyweights, and they held their own — and better — more frequently than anyone could reasonably expect. As their captain, the leader of their attack and their premier allrounder, Streak earned more of the credit for that achievement than anyone else. The term whole-hearted doesn’t do him justice. He was also whole-bodied, whole-minded and whole-souled.
To know this unequivocally you didn’t have to see Streak play cricket. Instead you had to see him dance. Like he did at a dindindi — a party — to celebrate victory over Bangladesh in Harare in August 2011 on Zimbabwe’s return to Test cricket after almost five years of self-imposed exile. Streak, then Zimbabwe’s bowling coach, was a roiling mass of head, shoulders, arms, legs, torso and everything that connected them, all moving to the beat of the music in a rhythm as unscripted as it was unmistakably joyous. He was unselfconscious exhilaration on the hoof. The sight of him made one onlooking black Zimbabwean turn to another and say, “He could be any colour.” A nod of agreement came back. He couldn’t be any colour, of course. But he hadn’t asked to be white, and he moved away from whiteness in significant ways.
Streak preferred to present a simplified version of himself to the world — white Zimbabwean but fluent in the language and customs of the indigenous Ndebele people, boy from the bush, family man. The truth was more complicated. You might have heard or read that Streak was apolitical. In fact he was political enough to know he needed to stay away from politics if he wanted to continue playing professional cricket in and for Zimbabwe.
He captained the team that took the field against the Netherlands in a World Cup match Harare on February 10, 2003 — when Andy Flower and Olonga wore black armbands to “mourn the death of democracy in our beloved Zimbabwe”. Streak did not.
In April 2004 Streak was sacked as captain after threatening to retire over what he saw as discriminatory and unfair selection policies, racially as well as geographically. In response 13 other white players went on strike in an intensely political episode in world cricket history. While other figures involved in the saga spoke out Streak stayed largely silent.
But politics is also personal. Streak’s marriage to Nadine Clarke, a single mother, landed with a thud in the conservatism that encircles cricket and Zimbabwe. The couple had two more children and adopted another, who is black. Cue more gasps, albeit stifled.
In quiet but powerful ways Streak followed his own mind when he might have been told to do something else. If you didn’t know who he was and you met him, you would never have guessed you were in the company of someone who had lived so big a life. He was unfailingly polite, friendly, and accessible to all. He lived less for himself than for others.
“The madam likes it,” Streak said to two infrequently seen acquaintances on a bright morning in a Bulawayo café some years ago. They had remarked on the full, dark beard that covered much of his previously cleanshaven face, lending his imposing presence extra gravitas. His eyes flitted sideways as he spoke, a subliminal attempt to divert the focus of attention. “The madam” was Nadine. Not for the first time, nor the last, Streak had done something to please someone else.
Now, somewhere, he is dancing on his own, to his own music, and having been to something like his own funeral just days ago. He is warm with love from far and wide and, most importantly, near.
Cricbuzz
Bulletproof Truth 