Hit wicket: Why do cricketers commit suicide?

Cricket authorities today say they are aware of the suicide problem exposed by my books and they have set up helplines and counselling for cricketers and former cricketers in need of support.  Perhaps many of the past tragedies might have been avoided if such care was available in years gone by. Yet most cricketers — most people — who suffer from serious depression tend to keep it to themselves.

There are theories as to why cricket seems to have such a high rate of self-destruction (to which may be added alcoholism, which is what one might term Suicide Mark 2). It seems to me that the long days of dedication which cricket demands by its often punishing format can wear a man down, especially when he doesn’t know where his next run or wicket is coming from. Despite the comradeship on the field and in the dressing-room and club bar, a man who is out of sorts still needs somehow to find a good night’s sleep. 

A vicious circle is created: sleepless night, worrying about the next match, brooding over recent failures, which can even seem like humiliations; followed by further nervous performance and an extension of the bad run of form or, perhaps worse still, bad luck, such as a bad umpiring decision against you. It is all very wearing.
A young man who took his own life in 1995 was Danny Kelleher, who played for Kent. He was a good-looking young man and a promising bowler, but after a good start, when he finished top of Kent’s bowling in 1987, he lost form and confidence. His visions of fame were fading, and he didn’t handle the problem at all well. In 1991, the county club didn’t renew his contract. Briefly he appeared for Surrey, but when that club also discarded him, at the same time as his girlfriend did likewise, it was too much to bear. All his dreams were shattered. He even tried coaching in Argentina, before writing to more English clubs in the hope of recovering his career. He received no response.

Kelleher twice attempted suicide. Both times his parents hoped it was simply a cry for help.  There was a slight recovery of spirits, but he knew that his dream of a life at the top in cricket had gone forever. Just before Christmas 1995 he died from an overdose of tablets, leaving a sad little note.

Kelleher might be seen as a symbol for all young cricketers whose dreams glow for a time before being extinguished. This was the classic case of a man being destroyed not so much by cricket but by the unattainable glories of cricket. Lucky is the man who derives complete satisfaction from playing the game at a low level, just for village club or old boys’ team.

There is no over-riding pattern to the 150 or so cases I registered in Silence of the Heart. My mission to “get cricket off the hook” was realised up to a point. Most of the cricketers I wrote about had their reasons for self-destructing, mostly unconnected with the game of cricket. But it may well be true that a life in cricket can prove unusually wearing on the nerves, and perhaps lessens resistance to life’s outside problems.

Cricket can be a shelter too. West Indies batsman Basil Butcher scored a Test double-century very soon after losing his young daughter. It was felt that he locked himself into some sort of protective cocoon out in the middle, shielded from life’s harsh reality.

There is a strangeness about most cases of cricket’s suicides, with many a question left hanging in the air. Why, people ask, didn’t he tell someone about his burning problem? In Peter Roebuck’s case his problem seemed to be of such a dark nature that he could hardly have been expected to tell anyone, with the possible exception of a priest.

All suicides seem, among other things, “strange”, and none was more strange than that of an Australian, Billy Bruce, who kissed his wife goodbye one morning in 1925, saying he wasn’t sure after she had asked if he’d be home for dinner. A stylish left-hander who had played in 14 Tests in the late 19th Century, he was once described as the best batsman in Australia. Now, at the age of 61, his lean figure now portly, his legal practice in difficulties, drinking more than was good for him, and battling depression, Bruce drowned himself in the sea not far from his home.

Might his last thoughts have been directed to all his cricket travels and glories? And might he have remembered that extraordinary day in July 1893 when AE Stoddart and Arthur Shrewsbury, both suicides of the future, walked past him on their way to the wicket at Lord’s to open for England in the Test match? Only a few days previously Will Scotton, who had recently cut his throat in his lodgings near Lord’s, had been laid to rest.

We can but guess what part cricket itself played in these tragedies. It is hard to create a clear and precise profile of Roebuck, who threw himself from a sixth-storey hotel window in Cape Town.  He was born in England and had a distinguished cricket career with Somerset as batsman and captain; he emigrated and settled in Sydney, Australia; he then established a third set of roots in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. He more or less renounced the country of his birth. No-one is quite sure why. Maybe he expected a higher level of regard as player and writer, or else he disapproved of what his native land had become. To some extent I could align myself with this, if such was the truth.

Roebuck never married, and as far as one could tell he never seriously consorted with the female of the species. A few years ago, in Sydney, he was at the centre of a scandal, and narrowly escaped a jail sentence after spanking with a cricket bat, across their bare buttocks, three young cricketers he had been coaching. Most people in the cricket world seemed generously prepared to overlook this curious episode in view of his on-going incisive writings on cricket.

Now he is gone, leaving behind an investigation into his recent activities concerning a 26-year-old Zimbabwe male cricketer. This man who had gone so close to becoming a Test cricketer seems to have had no close friends — apart, perhaps, from former Somerset teammate Vic Marks, who said this week that despite their many years as teammates he felt he never did really know Roebuck. This tragic figure was even estranged from some of his family.

His father’s opinion, quoted in Roebuck’s 2005 autobiography, is telling: “He is an unconventional loner with an independent outlook on life, an irreverent sense of humour and sometimes a withering tongue.” It is not often that a person with such limitations makes it to the top of his profession as a writer and broadcaster, as Roebuck did.

In his early days as a journalist I invited him to write for Wisden Cricket Monthly.  Having written already for The Cricketer, he said in a covering letter to me that “I can see no reason why I should forever be bound to one magazine”. In time, however, he decided to align himself with the opposition, and there was a sneeriness in his attitude towards me thereafter. I watched his development with interest as his journalistic career flourished, mostly in Australia. When I found myself batting with him in a press match in New Zealand, between overs he was solicitous, advising me how best to handle the yorkers of rugby international Grant Fox at one end and the sinister slows of John Morrison at the other. Next over Roebuck himself got out. I had to smile.

The last time I was with him was in an ABC Radio chat during the Sydney Test match of 2006-07. It has to be said that his voice on air came across as somewhat conspiratorial, even creepy.  He held forth that lunchtime on, among other matters, the ICC’s supposed prejudice against potential chuckers only in Asian cricket. Afterwards I regretted not challenging him on that, but I knew that for every listener he offended there were others he wanted to please.

Now he has joined that frighteningly long list of cricketers who have terminated their own lives.  There is nothing quite to compare with him in terms of the immediate background to his death.  All 150 cases in my book Silence of the Heart differ, even if there may be a vague background pattern. Principally the causes are clinical depression, health worries, financial difficulties, sexual problems, or a combination of some of these. With Peter Roebuck it would seem that the imminent police investigation caused him panic and despair.

What intensifies the drama of all this is the fact that when I wrote the first — more restricted — volume on cricket’s suicides (By His Own Hand) in 1990, it was Roebuck whom I asked to write a foreword.  This invitation stemmed from the fact that he had already written a book, It Never Rains . . . A Cricketer’s Lot, in which he had explored, with some sensitivity, the mental stress which a professional cricketer faces when he loses form and wonders what he is doing with his life.  In his foreword to my book he wrote: “Some people have predicted a gloomy end for this writer . . . It will not be so.”

This was a welcome assurance, viewed without any great deliberation at the time, for who could possibly have foreseen the dreadful episode of twenty-one years later?  

Peter Roebuck (1956-2011) therefore joins a tragic roll-call of major cricket figures who have terminated their own lives. My book revealed some surprising statistics (all offered tentatively, for there can be no precise figures in this study): almost all the cricket suicides noted in my 2001 book were white “Anglo-Saxons”.  Continuing research, however, has seen a new factor: there have been a number of attempted or completed suicides on the Indian subcontinent.  The cause often seems to be inconsolable — perhaps slightly irrational — disappointment among youngsters after failure to reach the top of cricket’s now-lucrative career ladder, with all the glamour and money on offer.

Among my multitude of thoughts on this unwelcome subject, there was the conclusion that the very loss of cricket — whether through rejection or retirement — causes great anguish to some of its participants. That is why the luckiest people in the great wide world of cricket are those who come off the field for the last time and go straight into the commentary box. There their views are widely heard and people continue to chase after them for autographs. And, my goodness, the money’s good.

And yet Roebuck was one of these, in fact the first suicide, as far as I know, from the media ranks of modern times to have ended his own life. But there was an unconnected cause, dark in nature, and about which more will undoubtedly be known in the months to come.