by Abhishek Mukherjee
Glenn Turner was 21 when he realised that he would not remain content with playing cricket in New Zealand.
He obviously wanted to play Test cricket for his nation: that was a given. On the other hand, he wanted to prove his mettle outside the confines of his country – and become a professional cricketer.
So, he decided to do what no New Zealand cricketer had done before. While his countrymen (Donnelly or Dempster, for example) have played for English counties, they did not travel back and forth every season to play cricket in both summers.
Once in England, Turner took up a job at a bakery for £22 a week. Then he set off for Edgbaston, where he had a decent outing at the nets. Unfortunately, Mike Smith informed him that Warwickshire had already completed their quota of overseas players.
But Warwickshire arranged trials for Turner – with Worcestershire, Lancashire, Middlesex, and Surrey. Eventually Worcestershire signed him up.
Unfortunately, playing professional cricket came with a price – the usual tag of "playing for the dirty dollar", especially from the New Zealand cricket fraternity.
Not that it mattered to Turner. This was 1968. He played for Worcestershire till 1982.
Turner repaid his county's faith by devoting his career to a single-minded pursuit of runs. He scored 34,346 runs in all First-Class cricket with 103 hundreds, 72 of them for his county.
Turner's feats are many. In 1971 he became the seventh batsman in history to score a thousand runs before the end of May in an English summer.
At Swansea in 1977, Turner scored 141 out of Worcestershire's 169. The second-highest score was 7.
Turner got his hundredth hundred in 1981. He remains one of only four non-Englishmen to the landmark.
There were only 17 English counties playing cricket at that point (Durham came in 1991). Turner scored hundreds against all (he was playing for the touring New Zealanders when he got the hundred against Worcestershire).
He scored 311 in a day against Warwickshire, the county that had once rejected him.
One can go on.
The highlights of his Test career was the 1971-72 tour of West Indies, where he scored two double-hundreds in the Tests, and two more in the First-Class tour games.
When New Zealand beat Australia for the first time, at Christchurch in 1973-74, he got 101 and 110 not out when none of his teammates managed even a fifty, and only one had reached 30.
He was also among the early outstanding ODI batsmen.
Glenn Turner was born this day, 1947. In one particular part of the world, for some reason, he is more remembered for being married to an Indian.