Bengaluru: I was sitting with my baby boy a couple of years ago, and suddenly I felt useless. Like I wasn’t worth anything, I couldn’t provide for him. For a second, I thought ‘Maybe, he and the family would be better off without me’. It was the kind of guilt I had never felt before. Luckily, I didn’t do anything in that moment,” said an Indian cricketer, whose international career was cut short abruptly, on condition of anonymity.
He is a son, a brother, a young husband, a younger father… a Test cricketer.
The ‘anything’ he is referencing is self-harm.
He was programmed to provide on the promise he had made towards his family, and he was doing better than fine as far as the finances and loyalty to immediate relationships were concerned, but he wasn’t doing it in the way his brain had foreseen he would.
See, he was a Test cricketer one day, one with a bright future. The next day he didn’t have the status, nor the promise.
His sense of ‘self’ was stripped in that moment because his identity was inextricably linked to being an elite cricketer. At this point, he was a son, a brother, a young husband, and a younger father, and that wasn’t enough for him.
It took him a while to realise that accessing all aspects of human interaction through separate and more empathetic filters is more rewarding than seeing the world through a singular, reductive, filter of a professional cricketer.
Unfortunately, many cricketers put an end to their lives before this realisation reveals itself.
Only recently, Graham Thorpe took his own life by hurling himself in the path of a moving train in Surrey earlier this month.
A couple of months before that former India cricketer David Johnson passed away by allegedly falling off the balcony of his fourth-floor apartment in Bengaluru.
Both of these cricketers suffered from crippling depression.
“I remember when I was going through this phase,” says former Indian cricketer Maninder Singh. “I knew something was wrong with me but I didn’t know what. I remember telling Bishan sir (Bishan Singh Bedi) that my rhythm was gone. I remember him asking me out of sheer surprise ‘How can you lose your rhythm? How is that possible?’.
“The problem is that he had never been out of rhythm so he never understood me. That’s not his fault. The same thing happens with mental health. A lot of people don’t experience it so they don’t understand your struggle, so you spend all the time by yourself, in that cave, and you begin to have some very negative thoughts.”
Depression is world-wide concern, and there is no reason why athletes should be immune to it. However, researchers are postulating that cricketers, relative to other athletes, might be more prone to it. Furthermore, cricketers in this space are more likely to end their lives prematurely, at least that’s what research in England and other parts of the Western world points to.
This was the essence of David Frith’s book ‘Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides’ in 2001. The weighty tome indicated at the time that cricketers are almost twice as likely as the average male to commit suicide, and have a higher rate of suicide than participants of any other sport.
Granted, this was a study done in England over twenty years ago, but some of the findings are still relevant because the book carefully slithers into the whys of elevated suicide levels among cricketers.
Cricket, while a team sport, is individual by design. The success and the failure of a team sometimes become irrelevant to an individual’s performance. Worse yet, you have all the time in the world to introspect and push your brain to the point of exhaustion and occasionally beyond. Moreover, given your average shelf life as a cricketer, quite a few struggle to find purpose once their boots are hung.
Long foreign tours add another layer of loneliness to the mix. Long-distance communication has gotten better with the advent of technology, but that doesn’t take away the longing for home. This makes having interpersonal relationships significantly harder. Cricket and family have never been easy bedfellows.
Fortunately, the cases of suicide among cricketers are far less prevalent in India due to a largely integrated family system, but suicidal thoughts are another matter. The likes of Robin Uthappa, Mohammed Shami, Kuldeep Yadav, Praveen Kumar and S Sreesanth have openly spoken about their tryst with those thoughts, and there maybe several others who have felt and continue to have them but are hesitant reveal them unlike aforementioned cricketers.
“I lost my parents early in my career and that sent me into a spiral,” says former Indian cricketer Sadanand Viswanath. “I am not sure if you’re aware but my father took his own life and that had a way of pushing me into depression. I have since come a long way in my journey to fix it. It’s never really gone, but I do all the things I need to do daily to remain grounded and grateful.”
“That’s all you can do. You’re at the mercy of the gods,” he adds.
Cricket at the highest level tends to promote thought patterns and anxiety levels which far exceed what the everyday man or woman has to endure. That’s not to dismiss what everyone else is going through. This is only to say that perhaps we should view cricketers and other athletes with more empathy and not reduce their lives to men or women who live for money and therefore can’t have anything wrong with them.
“Life is a lonely pursuit, but cricket is lonelier. Those playing are rarely allowed to feel that. They’re told they’re men, they’re warriors, they’re professionals, they should buck up. It sounds good for a while but then you realise you’ve been living for someone else. Once that happens, it all comes tumbling down,” says Maninder.
Maninder knows a thing or two about it, but at least he lives to tell the tale. A lot of them don’t. As in life, so in cricket.