The Peter Principle

GH on the enigma of Peter Roebuck

Gideon Haigh

During the Sydney Test, I caught up with an old colleague.  Mark Ray played for NSW and Tasmania preparatory to a career with the Fairfax broadsheets as that rarest of cricket things, a photojournalist.  His words, always astute and measured, complemented his images, ever candid, often unexpected.  Among the latter he shared with me was this unpublished photograph of our eminent contemporary Peter Roebuck, whose death twelve years ago was for journalists as the 2014 death of Phillip Hughes was for players - a rent in the fabric, never quite mended.  Like the best photos, I cannot quite stop looking at it, brooding on it.

Photo: Mark Ray

In his time, Roebuck was probably the most substantial and influential figure in the cricket media.  He wrote a well-read column in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age; he was a star of the ABC’s broadcast; his nine books sold well.  Newspapers, radio and books  were then at peak reach and import.  When Roebuck wrote a front page broadside after the ill-tempered 2008 Sydney Test that ‘Ricky Ponting must be sacked as captain of the Australian cricket team’ if ‘Cricket Australia cares a fig for the tattered reputation of our national team in our national sport’, it had immediate cut through.  Ponting recalled: 'I had got up early that morning and was playing golf when Rianna rang in tears to ask me if it was true that I was a chance to get the sack.  It was the first I knew of the story.  Cricket Australia advised me to lie low, said the storm would blow over.  It didn’t.’

No, it didn’t, and even Roebuck, I think, was impressed, and even slightly perturbed, by own sway: he also went to ground a few days.  This showed the limits of his self-awareness. ‘He [Ponting] turned a group of professional cricketers into a pack of wild dogs,’ opined Roebuck.  'Small wonder some Indians regard Australian cricketers as a bunch of unscrupulous thugs.’  Who could possibly be offended?! Oh, Peter, one thought.  By the same token, it touched a popular nerve: some were genuinely relieved that an Australian voice, if not an Australian accent, was prepared to issue such a proclamation.

But, then, this is what was expected of Roebuck.  He self-positioned as the man apart, the man who talked no book but his own. Mark’s photo somehow captures this.  Roebuck has stepped into a press box stairwell to make or receive a call on which he is clearly intent.  He is hunched, absorbed, balanced a little precariously.  He looks….tense?  He often looked tense, I thought, as though something were weighing on him that was fundamentally unresolvable.  He is talking, as he tended to, for his natural vein was didactic.  There was irony in the title of his autobiography Sometimes I Forgot to Laugh, as laughter never came naturally to him.

I cannot claim a deep acquaintance with Roebuck.  I knew him twenty years and probably as well at the end as the beginning, such was the distance at which he operated from most of his fellows.  On the other hand, I read him religiously for thirty years, from the days he started out as a player cum writer in the pages of The Cricketer - the pieces that formed his first book, Slices of Cricket (1982), still fresh and funny.

There is a particular intimacy that comes from a long relationship between writer and reader, and Roebuck in his season diary It Never Rains (1984) achieved a candour rare in works penned by active sportsmen, exposing the nerves on which so many cricketers play.  You felt like you knew him in verities like: ‘It is a cussed game. It can show you glimpses of beauty in a stroke perfectly played, perhaps, and then it throws you back into the trough of mediocrity.’  Few cricketers have been so utterly candid as Roebuck weighing up his prospects for success as an opener.

As [Somerset captain Brian] Rose and I sat in the warmth of the dressing room wondering how long we could desert our cold troops practising their fielding, he asked me if I wanted to open this year.  My first sustained experience as an opener was last year and it was only a partial success.  I started opening partly because it secured my place in the Somerset team – there were no other people willing and able to open in Championship cricket except some youngsters – and partly because there are hardly any openers in England and it was my only chance of representing my country.

Mind you, I’m not certain that deep down I want to represent my country.  Not everyone does.  It is obvious to me that I either want to play for England too much or not at all.  How else can I explain several total collapses of form when people begin to speculate that my chance is bound to come soon?  Am I too excited or too fearful?  I can remember a benefit game last year when, as I was walking out to bat, I heard a spectator say to his son, ‘There goes England’s next opener.’  I remember thinking ‘Oh no, don’t say that.’  Because it was something I desperately wanted?  Or because I didn’t relish the harsh exposure of a Test match?

Ashes to Ashes (1987) then kind of created Roebuck’s outsider-insider template: an Englishman in Australia writing about England in Australia, Bruce Chatwin in a straw hat.  The peak of this role, antipodean cricket ethnographer, was In It to Win It (2006), which offered the perspective on Australian cricket of a disinterested observer.  Unfortunately it’s a bit humdrum.  And by then, his status as cricket’s wandering sage had had some strange outcomes.

Though Roebuck liked to consider himself cricket’s great internationalist,  I suspect it derived from not really feeling particularly ‘at home’ anywhere.  He had been a solitary child.  As his sister observed: ‘He lived in his world and sometimes his world coincided with ours.’  He became a solitary adult, remote from his family, preferring acolytes and associates to friends.  The great failure was his relationship with his birthplace, which came apart under the stress of his unsavoury October 2001 conviction for assault - which itself had more than a little to do with his showdown at Somerset with former pals Ian Botham, Viv Richards and Joel Garner.

By the time Roebuck returned to England, for the Ashes of 2005, he was easy to draw on the subject of English malaise and hypocrisies, albeit to a fault.  England had disappointed him; England must pay.  I recall an afternoon of bad light at The Oval over where English fans jokingly raising their umbrellas in order to encourage a light appeal; Australian fielders enjoyed the joke so much they donned sunglasses.  In the presence of what he saw as nationalist excess, Roebuck smouldered like a damp fire much of the day: I kept waiting for him to laugh, but it was definitely a day he forgot.

Africa began playing an ever-greater role in his life, thanks to Straw Hat farm, the rambling homestead he built in Pietermaritzburg as an establishment for disadvantaged black youth.  The year before he died, Roebuck proclaimed: ‘In my life I have only ever really cared about two things, apartheid and the poison destroying Zimbabwe. I’d happily give my life to either cause. For all its flaws and mistakes, my career can only be understood in that light. Death holds no fears.’  Though it was widely quoted after his death, at the time it read as rather self-dramatising, and not even all that accurate: he had been at best one voice among many with regard to Apartheid, South Africa having been excommunicated from international cricket well before his emergence as a player.  Zimbabwe, meanwhile, was very much a minority interest, well as he wrote about it.

I’ll never forget walking out of Adelaide Oval circa 2006 with Roebuck.  He was declaiming on a subject in his cut-glass Oxbridge tones when his phone rang.  The call was evidently from Straw Hat, because he immediately broke into the broadest South African accent.  This he maintained for the next five minutes, until the call finished, whereupon his Anglo intonation returned without remark.  Everyone accent hops in certain degree; this was an accent triple jump.

Roebuck’s changeability, in fact, was a byword.  I had an early experience of this.  Our first significant contact was thirty years ago, when I solicited from him a cover note for my first cricket book, The Cricket War (1993).  He was obliging, prompt and generous and, when next I saw him, soon after the book’s publication, I sought to thank him personally.  He stared at me coldly.  Why had he not been been sent a copy?  How could I be so rude as not to have sent him a copy?  I hastened to assure him that a copy had been sent - perhaps it had missed him.  He was not placated, even when I promised to send him a replacement.  One or other copies must have reached him: when The Australian’s Hedley Thomas went to Straw Hat farm in 2011 to investigate Roebuck’s death, he told me that The Cricket War had been one of only half a dozen books in the house.

Also a byword was his productivity.  He wrote a lot, including for the Sunday Times in England, The Hindu in India, and really anyone who asked.  The Hindu’s Vijay Lokapally recalled in an obituary: ‘ “How much can they afford?” was all he would ask, when requested for a commissioned piece. “What length? And, by what time, please?” He knew his job well.’ Well, up to a point.  Cricket writing is easy; good cricket writing is hard.  This is partly because it depends in part on the raw material, the quality of a day’s play, the standard of the day’s players.  Test cricket tends to the indeterminate: I think of them as six for 260 days, where three guys make 50 but nobody gets to three-figures.  About this it can hard to be interesting, let alone definitive.  To compensate for this, I think Roebuck developed a fondness for essentialising: cricket was this, or it  was that; batting was like this thing that was uncertain; bowling was like this other thing akin to physical labour; Australia was this kind of country rather than another kind, must do this, should cease that.  How many times did he roll out that hackneyed line about life involving not so much black and white as shades of grey?

For this epigrammatic tic Roebuck first showed a liking in his anthology Tangled Up in White (1990).  The appendix called ‘Roebuck’s Maxims’ is just that, and not very interesting.  ‘Learning how to use a machine is no substitute for an education’: did anyone say it was?  ’Achievements in concrete are too often mistaken for concrete achievements’: I am not even sure I know what that means.  The longer his career, the more Roebuck seemed to be reaching, straining for effect, as if to justify having spent so long at the same game.

For here was an oddity of Roebuck.  We know he had the intellect to be a top-notch lawyer; he almost certainly had the talent to venture wider in his writing.  He was apt to complain that cricket was too inward-looking, oblivious to the wider world, of culture, society, politics.  But he had a similar weakness.  Scott Fitzgerald famously criticised his friend Ring Lardner for writing too much about baseball - ‘a boy’s game with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, a game bound by walls which kept out novelty or danger or adventure.’  This disserved Lardner, with his sublime vernacular fiction, but feels like it could apply to Roebuck and cricket: at a certain point he stopped developing, instead producing commentary to measure and opinion on request.  He grew more hit and miss; the pleasures were further separated.

On Australian sports writing, Roebuck exerted profound influence, making use of his outsider’s license to ignore our reflex allegiances and lean against our ‘just-the-facts’ sensibilities. The chief influence on it now is social media.  I wonder sometimes how Roebuck would have coped with the tyranny of the hot take.  His style was suited to declamation from on high, to an audience that in the main did not answer back, to a world with phones like the one he is using in this photo, rather than a world where the phones seem smarter than we are.  The readers now are writers and the listeners talkers.  How would Roebuck have coped with the competition from his own audience?  That he died before having to make the adjustment may have been just as well.  It was the fear of others’ judgement that caused Roebuck to take his own life in 2011.  Now there is little time for fear, save the recurrent nightmare of the deadline.