On 14 March, 2015, the pews of the byzantine-revival Holy Trinity Church were stuffed with the heavyweights of Jamaican cricket and society: ex-Test players, administrators and ministers of government. The man they had come to pay tribute to, Richard Austin, had, in death at least, been forgiven the sins of life.
But as one eloquent speaker after another recalled Austin’s tragic fall from West Indies allrounder to shoeless street beggar, it became apparent that many of those well-dressed orators were seeking their own kind of salvation. Forgiveness for the way Austin, whose primary sin was playing cricket in apartheid South Africa, had been treated by his countrymen. It was a reminder, the presiding priest said, that “we are all mere sinners, here to help each other in love to make it home to God”.
Jobs for the boys attitude highlights English cricket's failings on race
Barney Ronay
Barney Ronay
Read more
In many ways the phases of Austin’s life hold a mirror to Jamaica’s own expedient moral consciousness. As a young, elite-level sportsman from the ghetto area of Jones Town, he was feted for transcending a poor background, a rare example of social mobility in a nation dogged by the remnants of slavery; as a former Test cricketer he was shunned and scorned for visiting a country that practised a modern form of slavery; and finally, as a middle-aged vagrant, he was tolerated and humoured, the target of both earnest sympathy and benign neglect.
Years earlier, in 2003, sitting in a gutter next to Tastees, a pastry chain restaurant in the commercial district of Kingston known as Crossroads, Austin, then 48, began to tell me his story. Wiry and weather-beaten, eyes bloodshot with the effects of rum and cocaine, his conversation veered between the tragic and comic as he first asked me to call his “good friend” Kerry Packer. “I can come to Australia and play for Sydney or NSW,” he rasped, while politely refusing a swig of rum from one of the gang of drifters he was running with. “Kerry Packer to me was like a gift in the cap.”
Then he addressed his cocaine habit. “When you live on the street you live with street people. If you want to party then sometimes I have to do it [cocaine].”
But as one eloquent speaker after another recalled Austin’s tragic fall from West Indies allrounder to shoeless street beggar, it became apparent that many of those well-dressed orators were seeking their own kind of salvation. Forgiveness for the way Austin, whose primary sin was playing cricket in apartheid South Africa, had been treated by his countrymen. It was a reminder, the presiding priest said, that “we are all mere sinners, here to help each other in love to make it home to God”.
Jobs for the boys attitude highlights English cricket's failings on race
Barney Ronay
Barney Ronay
Read more
In many ways the phases of Austin’s life hold a mirror to Jamaica’s own expedient moral consciousness. As a young, elite-level sportsman from the ghetto area of Jones Town, he was feted for transcending a poor background, a rare example of social mobility in a nation dogged by the remnants of slavery; as a former Test cricketer he was shunned and scorned for visiting a country that practised a modern form of slavery; and finally, as a middle-aged vagrant, he was tolerated and humoured, the target of both earnest sympathy and benign neglect.
Years earlier, in 2003, sitting in a gutter next to Tastees, a pastry chain restaurant in the commercial district of Kingston known as Crossroads, Austin, then 48, began to tell me his story. Wiry and weather-beaten, eyes bloodshot with the effects of rum and cocaine, his conversation veered between the tragic and comic as he first asked me to call his “good friend” Kerry Packer. “I can come to Australia and play for Sydney or NSW,” he rasped, while politely refusing a swig of rum from one of the gang of drifters he was running with. “Kerry Packer to me was like a gift in the cap.”
Then he addressed his cocaine habit. “When you live on the street you live with street people. If you want to party then sometimes I have to do it [cocaine].”
Both Danny G and his brother Treasure lived in Mona Heights. Both were mentally ill. Really sad.
