JOIN OUR DECEMBER 10
ZOOM SESSION
Dear ACS member & friend
By popular demand, after our successful series of spring-time Zoom sessions, we welcome Ashley Gray, the Australian-based author of The Unforgiven,already short-listed as the William Hill sporting book of the year.
Ashley will join us on Thursday, December 10 from 5.30 p.m. To register use this link:
Ken Piesse is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting:
Topic: Australian Cricket SocietyPersonal Meeting Room
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9031831172?pwd=NTdKY1VPbFBFc2tMVzNVWXpFUzdUdz09
Meeting ID: 903 183 1172
Passcode: 944822
This is one of the most riveting cricket books I have read. If only those 20 rebel West Indians could have made their decision again… and NOT toured South Africa in the early ’80s.
They had chosen cricket over country and blood-covered krugerrands over morals. They were pariahs and their lives were never to be the same. Ostracised as blackmen for accepting white man’s monies in an abhorrent, divisive system which systematically discriminated against people of their own colour, the rebels were banned for life, even from Saturday afternoon club cricket.
The lives of four, in particular, were shattered. One died young having become a shoeless street beggar, another a mentally ill drug addict. Many fled their hometowns. Their slide was immediate. All were stigmatized by the blood money tours. Never were they to be forgiven.
Captain Lawrence Rowe was paid upwards of 60 times the average Jamaican wage. He fled to Miami. Known as ‘Lawrence of Jamaica’ it was like a king abdicating. At his zenith, a triple Test centurion, he was in the same exulted class as Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge. Gray interviewed him and many of the others, Rowe remaining constant in his belief that as a professional cricketer he needed to feed his family. ‘The only person who can convince me that is not so is Jesus Christ,’ Rowe told Gray. ‘If he comes down to me and says: “You were wrong”, I will apologise.’
I finished The Unforgiven, mercenaries or missionaries? in one afternoon. It was compelling.
- We will have a limited number of the book available. For ACS members and friends only it will be sent post-free, for $50. Register your interest in a copy with Ken Piesse please. For the first six orders only, we guarantee Christmas delivery.