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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town
MOST cricketers do not have an inner James Thurber to channel. Ashwell Prince is not most cricketers. So when Prince tweeted a Thurber quote - “ ... most people want to believe rather than to know, to take for granted rather than to find out” - people noticed.
James Grover Thurber was among the United States’ most celebrated men of letters, a denizen of no less venerable an organ than the New Yorker. Ashwell Gavin Prince is that rare cricketer - his own man in a game that does not suffer individuals gladly.
When Prince was recalled for the third test against Australia at Newlands in March, 2009 after Graeme Smith was injured, he was told to captain the side and open the batting.
Not so fast, Prince said. If he was going to captain, he would decide where he would bat. And his preferred spot was not at the top of the order: of his 109 test innings, only 10 were undertaken at Nos. 1. 2 or three.
Of course, the suits and tracksuits were having none of that. Whoever heard of a player outthinking them? Accordingly, Jacques Kallis led the team and Prince opened the batting - and scored a career-best 150 in SA’s innings victory.
Whether Prince or the powers that be knew better is as deliciously unknowable now as it was then, as is what Prince is on about with his Thurber reference.
Might it have something to do with the use of less thoughtful language than Thurber’s during a championship match between Lancashire and Yorkshire at Old Trafford earlier this month?
As the shadows lengthened, Yorkshire’s captain, Andrew Gale, tried to smuggle another over into the session. Prince, an old hand, invented an adjustment of his thigh pad that simply had to be made then and there, and that held up play. Tick ... Tick ... Tick ...
Unsurprisingly, Gale and Prince had words. The most widely reported version of them has been disputed by Prince. But there has been no quibble that Gale said to Prince: “You can fuck off back to your own country, you Kolpak fucker.”
That earned Gale a two-match ban because of his suspended sentence for an earlier conviction for dissent. He was charged by the umpires under level two of the England Cricket Board (ECB) code of conduct, which gets its knickers in a knot about “using language or a gesture that is obscene, offensive or of a seriously insulting nature”.
When Yorkshire won the championship, the honour of accepting the trophy was taken away from Gale. Now, he will be on the carpet on charges that have lit the headlines with their implications of racism.
Gale has since been lumped with a level three offence: “Using language or a gesture that offends, insults, humiliates, intimidates, threatens, disparages or vilifies another person on the basis of that person’s race, religion or belief, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, gender, sexual orientation or background.”
Or casts aspersions on someone else’s favourite flavour of chewing gum, the ECB forgot to add; a shocking oversight.
Quite what about Gale’s crude quip falls foul of any or all that is difficult to fathom. “National or ethnic origin” is in there somewhere, but it hardly “offends, insults, humiliates, intimidates, threatens, disparages or vilifies” Prince’s blackness, his South Africaness or even his left-handedness. It is much less xenophobic than a bouncer aimed at the throat.
Prince has not hidden his schadenfreude at a player he clearly does not have much time for being put in a difficult position, but even he is struggling to understand why the issue is dragging on.
“My response had nothing to do with racism,” Prince said. “I was insulted and I fired back.”
Has cricket reached such levels of ridiculousness that it is no longer acceptable for opponents to compete on any level that is not explicitly dealt with in the laws of the game?
Or is this kind of farce bound to arise because law 42 includes greeting card nothingness like, “The responsibility lies with the captains for ensuring that play is conducted within the spirit and traditions of the game, as described in ‘The Preamble – The Spirit of Cricket’, as well as within the laws.”
The preamble itself goes on like the poor man’s Kipling about cricket being “a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its laws but also within the spirit of the game. Any action which is seen to abuse this spirit causes injury to the game itself.”
And all the while you thought cricket was a game to be played hard, and won and lost. Prince certainly thinks so, as does Gale.
Even Thurber, American or not, would get it. “There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception,” is another of his quotes, as is, “Let us not look back in anger nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”
Cricket? Are you listening? It’s the real world here ...
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