Sunday Times - February 23, 2014
TELFORD VICE, Port Elizabeth
Herschelle Gibbs has lived a lot of life since playing his first match for the Western Province senior team two months before his 17th birthday.
Gibbs had a walk-on role in a drama dominated by Northern Transvaal’s Mike Haysman, who scored 72 and 135 not out. And in other news, Gibbs scored nine and 14, and took no catches.
But he did do some growing up. “I thought Herschelle’s eyes were going to pop through his grille, he was terrified,” Haysman said. “Tertius Bosch wanted to kill him.”
Gibbs confirmed the story: “That’s what he said - he wanted to kill me. Obviously, he didn’t. Guess I won that one.”
Unlike two of the men Gibbs shared the field with over the three days of that December, 1990 Currie Cup game, he remains that most elemental thing: alive.
Bosch and Louis Vorster have died, both in suspicious circumstances - Bosch possibly a victim of mercury poisoning, Vorster in an armed robbery.
Several of the other players have found some corner of cricket to call their own. Still others have faded from the game that once celebrated them.
But Gibbs, a confirmed rock ’n roll wild child, continues to live large in cricket’s dysfunctional family as a commentator. It is a job for men in sensible shoes. Gibbs pads about the studio in flip-flops.
On air during the second test at St George’s Park, he dealt in deliveries that veered from the damn straight - “If AB de Villiers is going to carry on batting like this and keeping wicket at the same time, give him the gloves forever” and “If as a finger spinner you can’t bowl the doosra you’re not going to be effective” - to the snarky, as in, “Wonderful, Nostradamus himself.” That was Gibbs’ reply when a colleague suggested he had predicted JP Duminy would emerge from his slump.
Once he had escaped the microphone Gibbs glanced at a text message on his phone. “Shit,” he said. “I’m saying ‘Y’know’ too much.”
Or maybe he knows too much, considering his advancing age. Today Gibbs reaches a milestone that many consider a millstone, a stage of life that looms ominously, a view from the top of a hill that once climbed can only be descended.
He turns 40 today, a fact that shimmers with wonder - Gibbs! Forty!
Peter Kirsten wasn’t convinced: “He looks older than 40. At least he’s not as old as Jack Daniels.”
Many of us reach 40 despite tilting dangerously at life’s windmills, but usually at the cost of our humanity. Gibbs has remained the person he was in that game against Northerns.
“I still live every day as if it’s my last, but maybe not like I did in my 20s,” Gibbs said. “Maybe I’d rather let loose at home these days. Anyway, if you don’t have a sense of humour, you’re going to have a very boring life.”
No chance of that. Cricket has always demanded that Gibbs reinvent himself as just another bore soaked in seriousness. He has always refused.
Gibbs has been in trouble for so long we’re amazed when he isn’t. If he wasn’t flirting with the disaster of being sent home from his first tour - to West Indies with the SA under-19 team in 1992 - he was taking the matchfixer’s lure, smoking dope, breaking curfew more often than he broke sweat, chasing women, being chased by women, drinking too much, then driving, divorcing messily, and giving away his man-of-the-match medal from the 438 game.
In fact, the trouble started when Gibbs was caught drinking at Nuffield Week. He protested: “But by then I was 18! I was eligible!”
These days, Gibbs drinks almost as much water as whiskey. Round midnight on Thursday, for instance, he baled out of an evening of escalating raucousness in the company some of his fellow pundits - at least one of whom apparently made it back to his hotel at 6am the next morning.
But reputations die hard. Would his employers get Gibbs a cake or a bottle of Jack Daniels as a birthday gift? “A bottle of Jack,” came the quick reply.
Gibbs thought carefully: “A cake. Please let it be a cake.”
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