Cricket and me: an unlikely love story
It’s a remarkable feat of fortitude in the face of extreme odds that I ended up loving cricket as I do – my first (and only) experience of professional cricket as a youngster was a day from hell.
My father took me to watch a provincial game between Transvaal and Western Province at the Wanderers in Johannesburg (we lived in Pretoria at the time) some time in the early eighties.
I spent a long, hot, sticky day in the blazing heat of a Transvaal summer, watching hour upon hour upon hour of Henry Fotheringham padding up to Omar Henry, with a scoreline that increased by 73 runs per day.
It was torturous and should have precluded any future enjoyment I might have had for the game, but I was determined to represent my country one day and manfully attended school practice at every opportunity.
Unfortunately, those practices were a disaster. The Irish Catholic brother who coached our junior team had an unnatural, disproportionate hatred of me and ensured I rarely got to play at all.
He also encouraged the fast bowlers to bounce me in the nets with corkies – the cork inner ball you find inside the outer shell of a normall ball. It’s whippy, bouncy and small, which makes it impossible to play, especially in the meaty grip of a sadistic Catholic boy who’d had the last vestiges of decency thrashed out of him on numerous occasions and who now had been given license to kill.
The mirth was uproarious as Tagg hopped about, desperately trying not to get hit and failing miserably. See the song The Nightwatchman for greater insight into my nightmarish fear of the bouncer.
My big break came in my second-last year of high school, when due to injuries, illnesses and other truancy issues I was called up for duty in the school’s second XI for a mid-week game against one of the great Cape Town sporting schools, Bishops.
Their first XI no less, who had been stood up by a team they were supposed to be playing. Our own First XI were otherwise engaged, hence our merry little band of intellectual second-stringers.
My friend Dylan was the captain and he assigned me bowling duties. “Get in there, Tagg”, he told me, acting on a hunch. He saw something in my eye that day – a thousand-yard stare. He had a feeling about it all. He ran with his sixth sense and threw me the new ball. “Get in there,” he said.
We’d heard that the Bishops side had some kid who was only in Standard 7 (the equivalent of Grade 9), who was fresh off making X amount of hundreds in his last X amount of school games. I saw it as a challenge and threw down my gauntlet. Drew my line in the sand. And then I steamed in.
The first six came off the first ball I bowled, and it was beautiful. An inside-out lofted drive over deep extra cover, disappearing into Mount Road. A bitter-sweet crack of willow. In three overs I went for 53 runs and never played cricket again.
The batsman? He went on to become Herschelle Gibbs. I must accept at least some responsibility for his skill at the inside-out lofted cover drive, having spent my debut/swansong lobbing fat, wet, meaty pies at him.
The alma mater still gets sued to this day by the good residents of Mount Road.
