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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