Tag: Robin Jackman

Dale Steyn: Extraordinary representing the ordinary

Steyn had no business selling speed, nevermind becoming the best speed merchant of his generation.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

THAT wasn’t him, was it? It was. Not many who were out and about late on that summer Friday night recognised him as they went from restaurants to bars to who knows where else. But that really was him. On a downtown corner in Perth as the dregs of time drained out of November 4, 2016 stood Dale Steyn.

For someone who had, hours earlier, not only broken different bones in the same shoulder for the second time in 13 months but also ripped muscles in his chest, arm and back, he looked in rudely good health. He was well enough to engage in a few minutes of smalltalk with a couple of bypassing South African reporters. All that hinted that something was wrong was the sling that cradled his right arm across his chest. And his eyes, which were unnervingly soft with uncertainty. For years batters have looked into Steyn’s eyes and frozen with fear. To look at his eyes that night was to see the fear returned to sender.

Steyn wasn’t born a champion fast bowler. Instead he was an apparently regular bloke — in many senses — who was able to bowl outrageously fast, and with verve and swerve and great skill and aggression to boot. That night in Perth he was surely confronted by the truth that, after so many years of strong suggestions to the contrary, he was as mortal as the next guy. More so, in fact: the next guy doesn’t hurtle in and bowl with all his might for ball after ball, over after over, spell after spell, day after day, match after match, series after series, and season after season. It isn’t part of the next guy’s job to wake up in a world of hurt. Perhaps, that night, Steyn allowed himself to imagine waking up, someday sooner rather than later, free of pain. 

He made his debut in December 2004 and, in just more than a dozen years before he suffered his first shoulder injury — bowling against England at Kingsmead in December 2015 — he played in 82 of South Africa’s 105 Tests. That’s a shade under 80%. From then until he retired from the format in August 2019, he would be involved in only 11 of the 35 Tests South Africa played — fewer than a third.

From the start of Steyn’s career until South Africa’s tour to India in November 2015, nothing beyond the blood-in-the-boots bowlers’ ailments befell him. Then everything did, in escalating succession. Or enough, and quickly enough, to make him rethink the career suicide of bowling fast for a living. A significant groin injury in India was followed by the two shattered shoulders and, against India at Newlands in January 2018, a heel injury that tore the tendon clean off the bone. 

Maybe this was always going to happen. Steyn had no business selling speed, nevermind becoming the best speed merchant of his generation. With less than six feet of height at his disposal and a body to match, he didn’t have a lot going for him in sheer physicality. He wasn’t even Allan Donald, nevermind Joel Garner. That didn’t disqualify him — he is a centimetre shorter than Malcolm Marshall and four taller than Robin Jackman — but it only added to the challenge of trying to rise above bowlers like Morné Morkel, his best mate in cricket.  

From the start of his representative career, for Northerns under-15s in December 1998, to the end — for the PSL’s Quetta Gladiators in March — Steyn bowled 42 909 deliveries. And that’s just in matches. He asked his body for a whole lot more in training. Something had to give. When it did, a cruel crescendo of calamities quickly rose. No more will follow.

On Tuesday Steyn called time on his playing career. All of it. He signed off, on social media, with lines from “A Long December”, a song by his favourite band, Counting Crows: “And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe/Maybe this year will be better than the last/I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell my myself/To hold on to these moments as they pass.”

So much for the glass half-empty. Because Steyn’s story is, mainly, of triumph. Plenty has and no doubt will be written about his crazy eyes, his gallery of tattoos and his chainsaw celebrations. But when you look past the special effects you see a fast bowler’s fast bowler. His ability to make the ball sing with swing, and at pace, was unrivalled. He fetched his bouncer from the top of a tower of terror, his yorker from the depths of a swamp strewn with skewing serpents. And he did it all with style, presence, and elegance. In a tour match against Zimbabwe in Paarl in December 2017, he took no wickets for 16 runs in 12 overs. But nonetheless Vincent Barnes, South Africa’s long-time bowling coach, couldn’t stop himself from videoing Steyn for his own edification. “I never get tired of watching that action,” Barnes said with a schoolboy’s enthusiasm. 

No-one has taken more Test wickets for South Africa, but let others analyse his statistics and place him in the pantheon. That matters less than the widely felt belief that he didn’t represent South Africa as much as he was the standard bearer for ordinary humans who dreamed of doing extraordinary things. Steyn’s humanity was with him at Eden Park on March 24, 2015 when Grant Elliott sent what became the last ball of the World Cup semi-final screaming into Auckland’s night sky for six. The confirmation of defeat poleaxed Steyn, who had to be peeled off the pitch by Elliott. The scene was straight out of the real world situation of your buddy helping you stand up after one too many beers.

Steyn’s humanity went everywhere with him; from delightfully sweary press conferences, to hunting and gathering junk food long after team curfew, to testy interactions with reporters.

“Perhaps I’m just not good enough,” he rasped at the WACA in November 2012 when he was asked where all the wickets had gone: he had taken a combined 5/258 at the Gabba and in Adelaide in that series. “Tomorrow it will say in the paper that we won this game regardless,” was his ice cold retort to the charge that South Africa’s victory over Sri Lanka in Galle in July 2014 had been tainted by Vernon Philander’s conviction for ball-tampering during the match, in which Steyn had taken 9/99. Once, on Twitter, he railed at a journalist: “You used to be a reporter. Now you’re just a hater. Fuck off. Blocked.” That reporter remains blocked by Steyn, who has since granted him several insightful interviews, all of them conducted with genuine, mutual warmth. No-one, in this reporter’s experience, has been more enjoyable to write about.

That’s what you get with Steyn — everything. The bouncers, yorkers, outswingers, inswingers, tattoos, mad eyes, chainsaw celebrations, colourful petulance, press conferences that venture far beyond the usual clichés, and conversations that are more than interviews.

Steyn was not made for cricket, but cricket was made for Steyn. That was enough to give us his greatness. 

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Robin Jackman: A life in much more than cricket

Decent, loved, complex. Jackman was, like all of us, someone of light and shade.

Telford Vice | Centurion

ROBIN Jackman smiled as easily as he made others smile. He knew how to tell ordinary stories in extraordinary ways and in a warm, welcoming voice that helped him earn another career in the game. He could bowl a bit, talk a bit, and sing a bit: “Jessie, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now I should know better, your dreams are never free.”

Few of the evenings on which South Africa’s cricket media gathered didn’t feature Jackman crooning soulfully through Joshua Kadison’s 1993 song. Those happy times are no more. Jackman died on Friday. He was 75.

He lived a life that seemed to have spilled from the pages of a novel. His father was a one-legged officer with the Second Gurkha Rifles, which is why he was born in the Indian hill station of Shimla. His uncle was Patrick Cargill, a noted actor, who one day invited his nephew, then 15, to lunch. Also there were Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren — who arrived in a Rolls Royce and elegantly swept into the kitchen, carrying her own pots and pans, to do the cooking.

“She was drop dead gorgeous, sitting in a chair, a bit like royalty … I wish I could claim that I dazzled her with my scintillating conversation and rapier wit but I don’t think I said anything to her other than ‘Good afternoon’,” Jackman wrote, with the help of cricket journalist Colin Bryden in “Jackers: A Life In Cricket”, of his encounter with perhaps the most famous woman in the world at the time.

Despite the title of that 2012 book, Jackman’s life involved so much more than cricket. Even his playing career collided with the real world. His record lists four tests and 15 ODIs for England, but the truth is he was as much South African as he was English. His widow, Yvonne Jackman, is a nurse originally from Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. His home was in the Newlands area of Cape Town. Along with Surrey, he played for Western Province — and managed and coached them — and what was then called Rhodesia. All that connection to pariah states like South Africa and Rhodesia was bound to raise red flags.

So what were England thinking when they picked Jackman for their tour to West Indies in 1981, considering by then his ties to South Africa stretched back 11 years? Guyana revoked his visa, England refused to back down, and consequently the second Test at the Bourda in Georgetown was cancelled. Barbados let Jackman in, and on debut at Kensington Oval he had Gordon Greenidge and Clive Lloyd caught at slip and Desmond Hayes taken behind.

No-one who knew Jackman was surprised by those polar opposites. He was made for drama, or comedy-drama. His uncle was the thespian in the family, but one of Jackman’s early ambitions was to follow him to the footlights. Instead he developed one of the most theatrical appeals of his era, which upset with Ian Botham. “When I first played against him I wanted to knock his head off because he really antagonised me; I thought you arrogant, strutting gnome,” Botham wrote in his autobiography. 

Jackman was proud of being able to bowl fast despite, as he described it, being “five-foot fuck-all” and built like an old-fashioned rugby scrumhalf. In the Times, Alan Gibson dubbed him the “Shoreditch Sparrow”. He was a workhorse for Surrey, sending down 71,094 deliveries in the 611 matches he played for the county from June 1966 to September 1982. He took 1,206 first-class wickets at 22.36 for them, and 399 at 20.73 in list A games.

His eyes shone like medals when he was told, in 2010, that he had dismissed Barry Richards more times — 16 — than anyone else who dared bowl to him in first-class cricket. That was no doubt influenced by the fact that Jackman had more chances than others to get Richards out because both played in England and South Africa, but it tells the story of Jackman’s class nonetheless. As did his decision not to use that truth to talk himself up, but to paint a picture of Richards’ greatness: “When the fixtures came out at the beginning of the season, one thing we always used to look at was whether we were playing Hampshire over the Wimbledon fortnight. Because if we were, there was very little chance that Barry would be playing. He managed to find a groin injury when Wimbledon was on.”

CSA’s interim board captured something of what Jackman meant to cricket in a statement on Saturday: “His passing … leaves a void in the cricketing world but particularly in South African cricketing life. We mourn the loss of a fine man, a lover of life, a cricket aficionado and a commentator who became part of the fabric of South African cricket in so many ways.”

A little later came confirmation that South Africa would wear black armbands on the second day of the first Test against Sri Lanka at Centurion on Sunday. But that wasn’t soon enough for Jacques Kallis, who tweeted on Saturday: “Sad to see no black armbands worn by Proteas for Robin Jackman today. A man that gave so much to SA cricket at all levels and all walks of life. RIP Jackers.” That would be same Kallis who has said nothing for all the months that the fraught conversation about racial injustice in cricket has ripped through the game in his country, and who has shown that he is not above using sport to talk abut politics by calling for the return of the death penalty in South Africa.

Ben Dladla, the president of the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Union, a candidate for the vacant CSA presidency, and one of the few figures on the members council who commanded respect, died in the early hours of Sunday morning. Nobody said a word about him until a CSA statement landed at the stroke of lunch on Sunday. There was no mention of black armbands, although the team has been asked to state their position.

Even in death, Jackman can’t avoid the real world. The fact that he was fathered by a member of a colonising army in a brutally colonised country is in itself worthy of honest examination. Jackman wasn’t responsible for that, of course. But it was his decision to associate himself so closely with apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, where a war between a minority white regime and a subjugated black majority raged even as cricket continued regardless.

And yet, it was impossible not to like Jackman. He neither suffered fools nor put himself on a pedestal. He afforded all he encountered a level of respect that, were it more widespread, would make today’s social media poisoned world exponentially more kind. It was as much a pleasure to talk to him as it was to listen to him. “Howzit Jackers,” was among the most common things you could hear in South Africa’s press boxes. As was: “Fine, thank you, mate. And how are you?”

Jackman’s life teaches us what we should know already: that no-one is entirely good nor entirely bad, and that most of us — if we’ve lived decently — will be closer to the former than the latter when we die. Jackman, who spent his evenings drinking and smoking but always looked good as new in the morning, who could crackle with swearwords and cackle with joy all in the same sentence, was decent. And complex. And loved. He will be missed, including by those who question aspects of his life and times.

An hour before the resumption at Centurion on Sunday morning, with the players warming up and the press filtering in for work, the strains of Joshua Kadison’s “Jessie” echoed around the ground, courtesy of the public address announcer. Few seemed to understand the significance, but those who did allowed their eyes to shine like medals.

Jackers, paint a picture about how it’s going to be. By now we should know better, our dreams are never free.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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