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Rebel to vagrant: The tragic demise of Richard Austin

18th February, 2015
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Former West Indies cricketer Richard Austin (Photo: WIPA)
Roar Guru
18th February, 2015
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Last week, a former Jamaican cricketer died in Kingston Public Hospital. Years of cocaine abuse and living rough had ravaged beyond recognition the mind and body of the man once referred to as ‘the right-handed Gary Sobers’.

Those present say it was one of the best catches ever seen at the Kensington ground in Barbados: Graham Yallop’s powerful flick from a Colin Croft thunderbolt, miraculously caught one-handed by a spreadeagled Richard Austin.

“It was a superb take,” says ex-Australian skipper Yallop, whose stay at the crease was terminated three short of a half century.

That was in 1978. What troubles Yallop now is that in the decades that followed, Austin slipped so easily through the cracks. “You wonder what West Indian cricket could have done to help him out better?”

In the late 1970s and early ’80s Richard Austin was a gifted allrounder: a hard-hitting batsman and offspinner/medium pacer, who threatened to became part of the champion West Indian side that steamrolled all comers in the 1980s.

He played two Tests against Australia in 1978 and four Supertests against the World Series Cricket Australians a year later, but his decision to join the West Indies rebel tours of South Africa in the mid ’80s proved his downfall. He would be forever ostracised by his countrymen for accepting filthy lucre from the apartheid regime.

Former Australian captain Greg Chappell witnessed one of Austin’s finest moments – at VFL Park in January 1979 when the then 24-year-old blasted 77 opening the batting against Dennis Lillee and co. and followed it up with 4-85.

Chappell says Austin was “always different.

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“I got on well with him, but he lived for the moment. He was more laidback than the most laid-back West Indian. You could say he was Joe Cool before it had even been invented.”

Even then there were rumours about Austin’s drug taking, but his talent was good enough to prevail. The trouble was, Clive Lloyd was assembling the most fearsome pace battery in the history of cricket and opportunities for spinning allrounders were limited. By the time of the first Lawrence Rowe-led rebel tour, Austin was a fringe player, unable to command a regular place in the Test side and vulnerable to offers.

In May 2003 during the Australian tour of the Caribbean, a bedraggled Austin sat in a gutter on the border of upper and lower Kingston, surrounded by vagrants, eyes bloodshot with the effects of rum, and attempted to justify his decision to join the rebels.

“They welcomed us in Soweto – most of the black folks,” he rasped.

“We spoke to them and they said it was a joy to see us playing against South Africa. WSC was about making money… I signed the contract because of my livelihood when I was growing up,” he said, referring to his childhood in the violent ghetto of Jones Town.

But when Austin returned from the second rebel tour in 1984, still only 29, he was banned from any form of cricket for life, and unlike Rowe and other better-off players who fled to the US, was forced to live among men and women who despised him, a pariah in his own home town.

Being shunned destroyed him. He sought refuge in cocaine and life on the street, despite owning a house and cars bought from the proceeds of his life as a cricket mercenary. Shame and an appetite for self-destruction seemed to drive him.

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“When you live on the street, you live with street people,” he said. “If you want to party with them sometimes, I have to do it, to be alright, to live with them.”

In the ensuing years, Austin would set up camp outside the West Indies team hotel when they stayed in Kingston, begging for handouts and regaling former teammates and the next generation of Calypso kings with entertaining stories of his chequered past. By this stage, he was more widely – and affectionately – known by his street name, ‘Danny Germs’, and as local attitudes towards the rebel tours began to soften, coaching offers rolled in. But he could never stick it out – always returning to the lure of the gutter, where no man has the right to judge another.

Pace legend and fellow Jamaican Michael Holding was bitterly opposed to the rebel tours, refusing the humiliating invitation to become an “honorary white”, but he always sympathised with Austin’s plight, while stating that “players have to make sure their future is secure”.

It’s a far cry from the situation here, where the Australian Cricket Association has a fund to look after players who have represented their state at least once, but as Chappell points out, “There are not the same structures in the Caribbean because cricket there is so economically distressed.”

Towards the end of his life, Austin became more and more unpredictable: at one point officials had to intervene to stop his ranting at a Sabina Park Test match; he also turned up out of it at a talent competition staged by a fast food chain and belted out an Earth Wind & Fire song. Yet throughout most of his decline he still had the option of returning permanently to the house his brother Oliver maintained for him.

He never would. Austin was 60.

Ashley Gray is a sports journalist and writer who has written for The Age, Sun Herald Rugby League Week, Inside Cricket and Four Four Two. He is currently the associate editor of Men’s Fitness magazine.

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