It is a black and white pic, seldom seen ... unfamiliar.
So most of the 'cricket lovers' will ignore the post.
Perhaps a blessing and I really don’t give a f***
The world is like that.
Basil D’Oliveira here is aged 25. At the height of his powers as one of the best batsmen of the world.
Only, few in the world got to see him.
That D'Oliveira played in East Africa, Keny and some shoddy pitches of South Africa reserved for black men.
He ended his Test career in 1972, having played 44 Tests, scoring 2,484 runs at 40.06 with five centuries and 15 fifties.
He claimed he was 38 then ... he was actually 41.
Quite an achievement for a man for whom international cricket looked a futile dream across infinite impediments. Who played his first decade of cricket behind the apartheid curtain, with no hope of ever appearing on the international stage.
The world never got to see the great cricketer at his best.
He moved to England when he was 29, made his first-class debut at 32.
D’Oliveira made his debut in 1966 at the age of 34, when he should have had a Test career of a decade and a half behind him.
He should have been groomed by Dudley Nourse and Bruce Mitchell, and perhaps Taliep Salie and Frank Roro. He should have faced Lindwall and Miller, Trueman and Statham, Laker and Lock … as well as Ramadhin and Valentine, Fazal Mahmood and Khan Mohammad, Vinoo Mankad and Ghulam Ahmed.
He should have been compared to Peter May and Neil Harvey, Hanif Mohammad and Clyde Walcott. He should have batted with Jackie McGlew and perhaps Cec Abrahams; bowled second change after Neil Adcock, Peter Heine, and perhaps Eric Petersen; grabbed catches off Hugh Tayfield and perhaps sent in his returns to Lobo Abed.
All these Test playing men mentioned in the paragraph had retired. All those great cricketers preceded with ‘perhaps’ never became Test players. (So, if you want to shed your tears about the great 1970 South Africans missing out on their careers can go elsewhere ... they at least played some cricket and lived comfortable lives)
D’Oliveira finally did play, and was making up for lost time, trying to stretch himself through another generation, playing alongside the Amisses and Boycotts, facing the Bedis and the Gibbses.
Playing alongside all those men who had retired would have been possible in a world that Martin Luther King Jr dreamt of, not in the one D’Oliveira had lived in.
But it was he who changed the world. The winds of change, resisted by the longroom windows in the white-blind cricket establishments, finally started to blow in.
The old buddy South Africa could not play again after 1970 until they realised Apartheid was not acceptable.
Dolly ensured that.
Somewhat. Apartheid still exists, as does white blindness ... in every nook and cranny of the cricket and other worlds. Only, it can no longer be paraded as legislation. Dolly saw to that. He and others ... but he played a main role. Just by clinging on to his ambition.
He carried on playing regularly for Worcestershire till 1978, till the age of 47, often turning in scintillating performances. He appeared even after that, scoring a half-century inclusive of a hooked six off Joel Garner in 1979, and turned out in one match against Middlesex in 1980. The man who should have played much of his cricket facing Jim Laker was dismissed by John Emburey in his final two first-class innings.
He ended up enjoying a long first-class career, with 367 matches, 19,490 runs and 551 wickets.
That he did all that after playing his first ever first-class match after 30, first county game at 33, and first Test match at 34, is nothing less than the most wondrous of miracles.
D’Oliveira remained a cricketer and then a coach. Though he was against apartheid, he never became a radical or an activist. This led him to rub many a radical activist in SAN-ROC, SACBOC and other organisations the wrong way. He frequently clashed with Hassan Howa, and did not see eye to eye with Dennis Brutus.
However, in England and among his people in South Africa, he remained a beacon, a pioneer, a household name.
In the sixth episode of Fawlty Towers, Major Gowen tells Basil Fawlty that when he went to a Test match at The Oval, a woman kept referring to the Indians as niggers. “‘No, no, no,’ I said, ‘the niggers are the West Indians. These people are wogs.’”
It is a rather clever way of satirising the English upper-class bigot.
At the same time, in the very first episode of the series, Touch of Class, the same uninhibitedly racist Major Gowen reads his paper, and after all the depressing news about the strikes he is delighted to find that D’Oliveira has scored another hundred. John Cleese as Fawlty responds saying, “Good old Dolly!”
Touch of Class, the first episode of Fawlty Towerswas aired in September 1975. It underlines the enduring appeal of D’Oliveira the cricketer.
Other than that, it also brings out the changes in society that were set off by the phenomenon of D’Oliveira and the subsequent long-hair aided movements he triggered.
The biggest of the culprits had to stand back, admire, applaud, and accept.
Basi D'Oliveira was born on 4 Oct 1931