GRAHAM THORPE stumbles into the England team hotel, barely visible beneath the bags he is attempting to manoeuvre along the concourse and unrecognisable with his baseball cap pulled down tightly over his eyes. He is very late, but his excuse is so fabulous that I am almost glad.
“The taxi driver wanted me to go and meet his family,” Thorpe explains, with a shrug of his shoulders. “He was such a nice bloke, I couldn’t say no. So I went back to his house for a cup of tea. Nice family they were, too.”
Right. Coming from anyone else, this would strike one as the most bizarre story. But coming from Thorpe? Well, it seems quite a reasonable course of action. “I’m all in favour of seeing the bigger picture these days,” he said. “It’s wrong to be too self-centred — being nice to people is important.”
Sincerity ripples through 34-year-old Thorpe’s voice. He is quietly spoken with a faint lisp that serves to give his views — whether on the subject of his “emotionally crippling” divorce or his cricket — a sensitivity uncommon to, or possibly masked by, other sportsmen. “I have no doubts that I’m an emotional person,” he admitted. “I know that my emotions show in whatever I do. I’m just not a ‘chin up and get on with it’ sort of bloke.”
Never was that more apparent than 16 months ago, when he discovered that his wife was having an affair. “It wasn’t just an affair. What she did was to bring another man into my house and stop me from seeing our children. My life fell from under me. I had no foundations — nothing.”
Thorpe accepts that he was no angel during the couple’s marriage. In 1997, he hit the headlines after a fling while on tour to New Zealand with England. But he said that the effect of his wife’s affair on him was devastating because it robbed him of the chance to live with his two young children. “Was I depressed? Oh, yes. Was I suicidal? No, but I think I was pretty close to the edge. I didn’t want to leave the house, I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I couldn’t see any hope. I’d just stay at home and have another beer. “When I heard what had happened to Frank Bruno recently, I thought: ‘S***, I know where he is and what he’s going through.’ I’m lucky that I managed to find something to cling on to — some rays of hope. I hope he finds something to cling to, too. I really feel for him.”
One of the rays of hope that Thorpe clung to was cricket. But, in the midst of his heartache, when he was confronted by the prospect of touring Australia with England last winter, just a few months after learning about his wife’s affair, he decided he just could not do it. He pulled out of the tour at the last minute, causing most to doubt that he would play international cricket again.
“How could I have gone? I was a mess,” he said. “An absolute mess. It would not have been right to tour. Even now I don’t regret any decisions that I made when I was low. I didn’t want to let my team-mates down, but not going to Australia was the right decision when I look at the time and place I was in. My wife didn’t give a s***, I’d got two kids who I wanted to see but couldn’t, and suddenly there was this tour. I just couldn’t go.”
A year has passed and in that time Thorpe has pulled himself back up to the top. He is in the England Test squad in Bangladesh and he is in a new relationship.
The cricket comeback started slowly after his father advised him to get back into the gym and resume the sport that had once meant so much to him. “I listened to him and went back to the sport. It wasn’t easy. I was being dropped from the Surrey first team a year ago,” Thorpe said. “I didn’t walk back into the side by any means. Then I played a game down at Somerset which was shown on television. I scored a hundred.
“That match really was a key moment in giving me the belief that I could do it. I knew that I just needed to keep in the frame with the selectors and the fact that the match was televised helped, but I also knew that there were lots of new, young players doing well. I didn’t expect to get a recall.”
It was when Nasser Hussain was injured that Thorpe was given a route back into the Test arena. He was called up for the fifth Test against South Africa at the Oval. “It was quite nerve-racking when Nass was injured. I got the call saying ‘you’re in’ and from then on, right up till the time when I walked out, I was very nervous.
“I hadn’t played international cricket for a year, so the two days before, I was very apprehensive. I so wanted everything to go well because of the way I came away from cricket the year before — it would have been a sad way to end my career. If I’d looked back in ten years’ time and that had been my ending, I would have been a bit angry that it had ended in such a bad way.” He scored a century at the Oval. “It was a bit of a fairytale for me,” he said. “The reaction of the crowd was unbelievable. I think they knew how much I’d been through and they gave me a great welcome, which was almost off-putting because I’d steeled myself going in to bat, to try and get focused on the job. I was thinking: ‘Please don’t let me make a fool of myself.’
“Then I had that reaction and suddenly I wasn’t so steeled any more. I couldn’t believe it all went so well. It was as if I was being helped somehow, as if nothing was going to go wrong.”
His emotional comeback started when he began to realise how much support he had from his parents and friends. “I went outside the door and realised that the world was still turning,” he said. “Life was carrying on. I knew I had to find some strength somewhere and I did.”
Meeting Amanda, his new girlfriend, was a key stepping stone on his route through the maze of depression. “I can’t tell you how much that has helped me,” Thorpe said. “The guys have been great, my family have been great and the public have been fantastic. I’ve had tons of letters from other fathers in the same position as I was, but that’s not the same as a loving relationship. She (Amanda) is separated as well and understood what I’d been going through.
“I’m just going to enjoy life now. I’m probably more excited about my cricket career this time round than I’ve ever been before. The whole process has taught me a lot and made me stronger. I tend not to worry about small, petty things now. I try to be trusting. You hear of people becoming bitter, but I’ve tried not to. Certainly, I look left and right in life a bit more now, but I still trust people. I can forgive. I’m trying to learn to forgive my ex-wife. “I feel that cricket has given a lot back to me. It has been a wonderful thing to be involved in. When I was younger I used to complain about touring, but I don’t now. I’m going to enjoy this chance. I’ve gone through the dark tunnel and I’m out the other side.”
Thorpe has a reputation for being anti-establishment and contrary. He denies this and says that he just does not like time-wasting bureaucracy. “I’m not this hell-raiser at all, I just hate daft things like when they fuss about you shaving and wearing the right gear and you’re worrying about playing against the world’s best bowlers,” he said. “Who cares whether you’ve shaved or not if you play well?” But, despite his protestations, there is clearly a touch of the rebel about Thorpe. He was the only England player not to turn up in regulation tracksuit and was surely pushing his luck by turning up late on the eve of the tour after all that happened before the last tour.
“Yeah, good point,” he said. Then he laughs. “Actually, I bet they were really worried, weren’t they? The management. I mean, I bet they thought I wasn’t coming. I bet they were looking at their watches and thinking: ‘Oh no, not again.’ How funny. And there was I just having a nice cup of tea with the taxi driver.”
alison_kervin@yahoo.co.uk
