Today in 1986, an Australian cricketer stepped up during a really important match, literally left it all on the field, when he played through high heat and humidity, dehydration, exhaustion and illness to lead his team toward success.
(Just a note here: I know virtually nothing about cricket, so I’m going to keep this description really, really basic so I don’t make a fool of myself.)
Maybe the closest parallel those of us who know North American sports best can point to here is Michael Jordan’s famous “flu game,” when the basketball icon was suffering from food poisoning, but scored 44 points including a tie-breaking three-pointer near the end of a crucial NBA Finals game.
A decade before that astounding performance, there was Dean Jones, who was playing for Team Australia against Team India in the Madras Test.
This event is named the Test because it’s supposed to be the ultimate test of a cricket player’s abilities, but this one also served as a test of the players’ health.
The Madras heat and humidity had already sent several players back to the locker room with heatstroke and dehydration.
Jones might have been one of them; he wasn’t feeling too well himself.
But the team captain sent him to bat anyway, and since he hadn’t been sure he would even get to play at all, he wanted to make the most of the opportunity.
He scored 210, which according to the articles I read is really good, even as his health was falling apart.
As Jones himself said later, “When you’re urinating in your pants and vomiting 15 times, you’ve got massive problems.”
Indeed.
But even after heading to the hospital to get IV fluids, he wasn’t done, and returned to play the next day.
He says he was so dehydrated that he ran on autopilot and had no memory of the match from that point on.
Jones did at one point ask that he be replaced, but the captain sort of taunted him, saying “If you can’t hack it, let’s get a tough Queenslander out here!”
So he stayed in and scored a few more runs, all of which made a big difference when Team India launched a big comeback.
The two sides ended up in a tie, which might not have happened had Jones not played so well under those very much less than ideal circumstances.
That said, any sick and dehydrated athletes who might be reading this: take care of yourselves, ok?
Today in 1911, the birthday of author William Golding.
His novel Lord of the Flies became a huge hit, but only after it was rejected 21 times, probably by people who didn’t even have the conch.
‘I can’t remember a thing after 120 in that innings’ (The Cricket Monthly)
William Golding (Biography)
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