Procter plays it straight in compelling book, in time for Christmas
STAR cricketer Mike Procter played the last of his 401 firstclass matches – and scored the last two of his 21 936 runs and claimed the last three of his 1 417 wickets – almost 29 years ago.
Yet, there he is at a bookshop near you‚ beaming brightly from the cover of‚ Caught in the middle: the autobiography of Mike Procter. Why now? Because it is Christmas time, of course. But also perhaps because Procter’s cricket career extended far beyond what he did as one of its most stellar players.
He was South Africa’s first post-isolation coach and has been a convener of selectors, a match referee and a commentator.
Now 71‚ Procter has not been involved – at any noticeable level for years, save for a few days – at the sharp end of the camera‚ into video punditry.
But it will surprise anyone who knows him, should he pop up in some significant role in future.
Procter is a man of cricket as much as cricket is a part of this man.
The book‚ which rings true with Procter’s goodnatured‚ straightforward manner‚ was written by Lungani Zami‚ among the most erudite of younger cricket journalists.
It covers all aspects of Procter’s time in the game and does not duck when the going gets messy.
Like it did at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 2008‚ when Harbhajan Singh was alleged to have racially abused Andrew Symonds.
The saga went back and forth and‚ as is so often the case in these matters‚ fact become irrevocably detached from fiction.
It is hard not to empathise with Procter‚ who was the match referee – not only because of the whorls within whorls that stained the issue with absurdity‚ but also because through it all he had to deal with easily the most arrogant teams in cricket.
Procter’s frank and forthright retelling of the incident and its fallout only reinforces that opinion.
He was also in the thick of the bomb blast that rocked Karachi during New Zealand’s tour in 2002‚ and Pakistan’s walk-off at The Oval in 2006.
And all that after he had been a member of the lost generation of white South African players whose careers were stunted‚ but not nearly as much as the many generations of black players who came before and after Procter’s time.
He would not be human if he did not wonder what might have been‚ but Procter knows he got the better end of the deal compared to his black mates.
“It must have been hard to believe a team that was still almost exclusively white was representing a nation with a rich diversity of people – with white people being in the minority‚” he writes about South Africa’s first trip to the World Cup, in 1992. Such sensibility has served Procter well. It is all there in black and white – next to the photograph of the older‚ smiling Procter is another of him at the moment of delivery.
Michael John Procter has spent 71 years getting the big things right – bugger the rest.