Andrew Symonds: Mike Colman sits down with one of Australian cricket’s most controversial characters
HIS Australian cricket career was marked by several controversies, but the day Andrew Symonds flattened a streaker who’d run on to the pitch at the Gabba is the classic ‘Roy’ moment we’ll never forget.
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There’s always that nightmarish fear with long-distance interviews. You travel halfway around the world, arrive at the appointed place at the appointed time, and the interviewee isn’t there. There’s been a misunderstanding over the address or time, or worse still, they’ve pulled the pin.
Admittedly our flight is hardly long-haul – only a couple of hours north – and we’ve travelled light (I’ve got a briefcase carrying nothing more than a voice recorder and sunscreen, and photographer Mark has one bag of camera gear, albeit heavy) but even so, here we are banging forlornly on the heavy front door of a massive white house in Townsville fearing the worst and, some might say, with good reason.
Former cricketer Andrew Symonds – Roy to his friends and admirers – is renowned for many things: but punctuality isn’t one of them. In fact, it was his failure to turn up for a team meeting in 2008 that led to him being sent home from a Test series, ended his previously close relationship with stand-in captain Michael Clarke, and hastened his departure from Australian cricket.
At least we know we have the right address. Mark peeks inside the garage and calls me over. “This is the place,” he says. Taking up an entire wall is a set of metal shelves, filled floor to ceiling with what cricketers refer to as “coffins” – the long kit bags in which they carry their bats, pads, helmets and other gear. I count 18: Australian Test sides, Queensland Bulls, Australian and Queensland one-dayers. Nearby are five or six plastic storage boxes crammed with team uniforms. I can’t see any fishing gear. Must have his rod with him, I think.
With nothing else to do, we start sharing our “no show” experiences. My best is the time I flew 2000km to interview an Australian cricket captain who, when I’d rung two days earlier to lock in a time and place, had uttered the words that every journalist dreads: “Just give me a call when you get into town”. When I did, he told me he had other things to do and the interview would not be happening. “But I only want to talk to you for 20 minutes,” I said hopefully.
“Mate,” he snapped back. “It’s not about what you want. It’s about what I want.” And hung up.
Mark countered with his story of driving from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to photograph a female surfer. Everything was looking good. The sky was blue, the waves were pumping and the surfer came into view at the agreed time, headed down the beach towards Mark … and kept on walking straight past him into the water. “Not doing it,” she said over her shoulder as she paddled out of sight.
We finish our stories, bang on the door a couple more times and start to panic. And we’d had such high hopes too. After all, who doesn’t love Roy? From the mid-1990s until his retirement nearly four years ago, there weren’t too many more exciting, intriguing and endearing characters in world cricket. Following the 2006 Boxing Day Test, in which he brought up his maiden Test century with a straight six, and went on to top score with 156, he was suddenly the hottest property in Australian sport. Sponsors lined up to have him wear their logo, drive their car, drink their soft drink or use their fishing rods. Sales of white zinc cream soared as kids copied the Roy look and smeared it on their lips before heading outside to play. His Queensland one-day number, 17, was as well-known as Bradman’s Test average, and everyone knew his life story: born in the UK of West Indian parentage, adopted by English schoolteachers Ken and Barbara Symonds and brought to Australia as a baby when Ken accepted a job offer in Charters Towers; nicknamed Roy by a junior sports coach for his likeness to basketballer Leroy Loggins.
In his day he was cricket’s ultimate triple-threat. Dreadlocks exploding from under his cap, the athleticism of his fielding was at times breathtaking; he was a more than handy medium-pace bowler with a propensity to take key wickets at key times and, when it came to batting, his natural inclination was raw power rather than delicate strokeplay. When Roy was middling the ball, he was like a runaway train (as a 20-year-old playing English county cricket for Gloucestershire he hit a world record 16 sixes in an unbeaten innings of 254 – the last one landing on a tennis court outside the ground).
But much as Roy was a talented player, it was his look, style and attitude to life that won over the public. He was never the epitome of a Test cricketer – not the way the traditionalists expected one to behave, anyway. He loved his fishing and hunting, enjoyed a beer and, while he wanted to win as much as anyone, gave the impression that cricket was a game, not a job. Most of all, he spoke his mind. He was a straight shooter and he expected others to be the same. So much so that at the end of Australia’s tour of England in 2001, he pulled captain Steve Waugh and coach John Buchanan aside and informed them he was retiring.
“My reaction was ‘what? You’re joking’,” Buchanan recalls. “I told him he’d just made it into the team and he had a big future ahead of him. Roy is a man of few words, but he chooses those words well. He told us he didn’t like the team culture. He said he was honest with people and he expected them to be honest with him. He said there were people in the team that he didn’t think he could trust. He told us he was going back to Brisbane to play rugby league with the Broncos. I think Wayne Bennett told him that as a rugby league player he made a pretty good cricketer.
“That was Roy. He is honest as the day is long and he expects people to be honest with him.”
In the end, it was Roy’s feeling that the hierarchy of Australian cricket weren’t being honest with him – particularly during the much-publicised “Monkeygate” clash with Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh in 2008 that led to the downfall of his international career. Disgruntled and disillusioned, he sought solace in fishing and booze. They combined to result in him being sent home from a Darwin Test match later that year when he chose fishing over a compulsory team meeting. In 2009 he was sent for counselling after a grog-fuelled outburst on radio in which he called New Zealand wicketkeeper Brendon McCullum a “lump of shit”, and finally, later that year, he had his contract torn up after being sent home from the Twenty20 World Cup in England following what was officially termed an “alcohol-related incident”.
He might have been gone from the Australian scene but Roy, now 41, still had another three years in the lucrative Indian Premier League before finally hanging up the boots in 2012 and, seemingly, putting up a “Gone Fishing” sign and vanishing forever. Until now. On Boxing Day, Roy will make his debut as part of the commentary team for the KFC Big Bash League (BBL), the popular T20 series that starts on Network Ten on December 20.
Which is how we come to be standing outside Roy’s impressive acreage home where he lives with wife of two years, Laura, 33, and their children Chloe, 4, and Will, 3, at the appointed time of “between 11am and midday”, watching the seconds hand on my watch make its way to the 12, at which point Roy will be officially a no-show.
And then we see it. A gleaming maroon-coloured two-door Toyota V8 Turbo LandCruiser with a big black bullbar edges its way around the house from the back of the property and onto the main driveway. As it gets closer we see the numberplate “17 ROY” and two blue cattledogs in the back tray. Behind the wheel, wearing a stockman’s hat and holding a stubby cooler, is the man who sold a million cans of Solo. He parks in the garage and walks towards us, barefoot and dressed in a pair of white footie shorts and a red shirt with his nickname stitched over the right breast pocket. He looks sensational. “G’day,” he says shaking our hands as we introduce ourselves. “I’m Andrew – or Roy … can I get you blokes a beer?”
I decide to break the ice with a Dad joke. Nodding at the shelves along the garage wall I say, “Kept all your gear in case you need to make a comeback?” He doesn’t laugh. “Some of my mates reckon I might have to, the way we’re going.” When we were leaving Brisbane three hours earlier, Australia’s batsmen had just started what would turn out to be a very short final innings in the second Test against South Africa. I ask Roy how the match is progressing.
“Dunno, haven’t been listening,” he says, leaning into the cabin of the truck. “Hang on, I’ll turn on the wireless.”
Wireless. Perfect.
WHEN I’d made the interview request I’d suggested that we speak “somewhere he feels comfortable”. For Roy that’s a no-brainer. “The bloke in the tackle shop reckons there might be some barra biting. We’ll take the boat out, see if we can catch something and you can take some pictures and ask me anything you want. It’s a pity you won’t be here tonight. I’m pulling up my crab pots.”
I’m starting to think this is going to be one of the better days of my life. Mark asks Roy where he keeps the boat.
“Round the back,” he says and leads the way past the swimming pool, under the big tree with the plastic swing hanging from it, and towards what on first sight appears to be an aircraft hangar but is actually the largest man-shed I’ve ever seen. Everything Roy needs outside his family is in this shed. There’s a fridge with a big XXXX logo on the door, two freezers, a ride-on mower, gym equipment, more floor-to-ceiling metal shelves filled with tents and camping gear, a speargun, another Toyota LandCruiser – this one with child seats in the back – and, sitting on a trailer, a five-metre plate aluminium boat with a 135-horsepower Honda outboard motor. Oh, and fishing rods. No wonder he doesn’t keep them in the garage. He wouldn’t be able to fit the cars in if he did. They are lined up on rows of double-sided timber racks – the kind you see in the best tackle shops. I do a quick calculation of between 60 and 100. “And more on the way,” he says as he connects the boat to the four-wheel-drive. “You can never get enough rods.”
We’re heading to Roy’s fishing spot, the dogs Buzz and Woody in the back and Tania Kernaghan singing, “I’m gettin’ out, I’m leavin’ now, I’m going bush” on the radio … sorry, wireless, when I look more closely at the front windscreen. Someone has written and drawn a sequence of words, letters, numbers and symbols down both sides in thick black felt pen: Tues 11-12; Mabo $300; 1st L O 1st R PSchool L-R. “That’s stuff I have to remember,” Roy explains, running down the list. “That’s when you blokes were coming; I owe Mabo (former Queensland captain Jimmy Maher) 300 bucks, and this is directions: first left at the roundabout, first right at the school, then left and right and you’re there … ”
Roy puts the boat in at the Loam Island ramp at the top part of the Ross River. There’s beer, water and cold chicken in the Esky (“Don’t be shy you blokes, help yourselves”) and we’ve got the spot to ourselves. Roy prepares three rods, lets the boat float with the current and effortlessly flicks his lure towards the bank as Mark takes his pictures and I ask whatever I want. We talk about his love for fishing, how he was introduced to it as a child by his father and “got bitten by the bug”. Ken Symonds, now 70, also fuelled his son’s passion for cricket, “throwing balls to me for hours before and after school”.
“I’d fish every day if I could,” he says. “I probably get out about three days a week. It depends what I’ve got on.”
Which leads to the obvious question. Just how does Roy fill his days? “Well, I drop the kids off at childcare in the morning so Laura can get to work, and then the days are pretty much mine until it’s time for them to come home. Laura’s a very good mother. She’s got them in a good routine. They know when to eat, when to sleep. They’re pretty much idiot-proof. Even I can look after them.”
Roy and Sydney-born Laura met when she was studying a Bachelor of Exercise and Movement Science at Queensland University of Technology and was assigned work experience with the Queensland Bulls’ strength and conditioning department in 2004. “When they told me where I was going I didn’t know what sport the Bulls played,” she says. “I had to call my brother and ask him.”
With both being in relationships at the time, they struck up a friendship, which continued loosely when Laura’s internship ended. On Melbourne Cup Day 2009, he texted asking if she had a tip. She gave him the horse wearing her lucky number on its saddlecloth. It won, Roy cleaned up, and he asked her to his home in Brisbane for dinner to celebrate. “He’d caught these crabs and fish and laid the table with all this beautiful seafood, and I didn’t eat seafood at the time. I thought, oh no, how am I going to get through this?” Roy won her over. They’ve been together ever since, and fresh seafood is on the menu most nights.
By the time Laura came back into Roy’s life he had already been through arguably the two most memorable events of his career. One enhanced his legend as a latter-day Australian folk hero; the other set him on a destructive spiral of disillusionment and dismissal.
First, The Streaker. It was March 4, 2008. Australia was playing India in the final of a one-day series at the Gabba when a naked spectator invaded the pitch, ran towards Symonds and was flattened by a classic shoulder block. “It was frustration more than anything. I wasn’t trying to hurt him,” he says. “But it was a final and a tight part of the game. I’d just run Matty Hayden out and we’d just started getting back on track but we were still under the pump. He was an Aussie bloke and he ran out and I’m thinking, mate, are you watching the game? You didn’t have to run out now; you could have saved it for later or done it when they were batting … There was a copper chasing him who was a big man and his two-way had fallen off his belt and was bouncing on the ground and they were getting further and further apart and then the bloke looked at me and smiled and we locked eyes and he came over towards me. The umpire sort of ran backwards and I wasn’t going to do that. I suppose I took things into my own hands.
“All these meetings we did in pre-season; safety and drugs and racism and all these things and then that happens. They talked to us about safety and then this bloke runs out on the middle of the Gabba. He ran 120 metres and no one got hold of him. What if he did have something sharp and he did want to poke a hole in someone? He was just having a bit of fun, but these are the questions we ask ourselves.”
And then there was what is commonly known as “Monkeygate”, the controversy over allegations that Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh had racially abused Symonds by calling him a “big monkey” in the Sydney Test of the 2007-08 series. This followed similar insults by Singh and the crowd during a series in India the previous year. After Australian captain Ricky Ponting made an official complaint, Singh was suspended for three matches. The Indians were incensed and threatened to boycott the rest of the tour. With huge gate money, broadcasting agreements and the next year’s World Cup being held in Australia all at risk, the case was reheard. Cricket Australia convinced Symonds and his teammates Ponting, Hayden and Clarke to drop the racism charge for one of “abusive language”, and with key evidence of Singh’s previous record not presented due to “human error”, the punishment was downgraded to a fine and Symonds admonished for instigating the affair.
Six years later, former CA board member Allan Border admitted Symonds had been “hung out to dry”.
“It was just very poorly handled and let’s be honest, it was all about money and politics,” Roy says. “I’d had it out with Harbhajan the previous series and I said, ‘listen, the name-calling’s got to stop because we’ve got a few names for you blokes too and I know what’s going to happen. You’re going to go the umpires and it’s going to get out of control’. So it was all done and dusted as far as I was concerned. As I said, we go through all this racism stuff, we sit there for hours and hours. We all know right from wrong, we’re not stupid, and then blokes that I enjoyed playing with and was very good mates with, they’re all dragged through the mud. That was not a good time for me. That was when it all started to go downhill.”
Feeling betrayed by the system, Roy went from being Cricket Australia’s golden boy to its biggest headache.
“Towards the end of it, CA started changing the rules on me. I had a different contract to everyone else at the end of my career. I had a curfew, no drinking, all of that. They claim to pride themselves on everyone having the same deal, which wasn’t the case at the end. That was partly my own doing but if I wanted to keep playing for Australia that’s what I had to sign. I didn’t have a choice. I did want to keep playing, so that was something I just had to cop.”
Was that when the drinking became a problem? “Yeah. It got to the point where I’d just had enough, and my way of unwinding is to drink. Obviously sometimes wrong place, wrong time or too much, but that was my way of dealing with it. Whether it was the right way or the wrong way … I did an eight-week course and I was diagnosed as a binge drinker. My problem was not knowing when to stop. I never had any intention of not going to a commitment but obviously turning up in the right state and the right way, I wasn’t always good at that.”
John Buchanan, whose time as Australian coach ended eight months before the “Monkeygate” series, is of the belief that Roy had become a victim of his own popularity.
“He had so many sponsors and commercial commitments. CA made him the face of the game. I saw him at a function and he looked very down. He said ‘mate, I just can’t get away’. That was something he loved so much, to get away up north by himself or with a mate or two. Go fishing or hunting, have a few beers without anyone caring. That’s what he missed, what he needed. He didn’t go for all that other stuff. He was 100 per cent a team person. That’s why I would always have him in any team I was coaching. He lived for the team environment.”
WHEN the break from CA inevitably came, Roy had a lifeline provided by, ironically, India. The sudden popularity of Twenty20 cricket and the establishment of the Indian Premier League, with its mega-rich club owners, led by Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, resulted in a cash bonanza for players. Roy was in the right place at the right time, being “bought” for $US1.35 million at auction by the Deccan Chargers. For five seasons he won the lottery, received a huge paycheque for six weeks’ work and enjoyed the culture shock of an unreal world of razzamatazz cricket.
“At the games there was all this entertainment, dancing girls and fireworks and music, and outside of that the parties and fashion shows. You talk about that next level. For the owners it’s about bragging rights. When I played for the Mumbai Indians, iPads had just come out. Our owner went to New York and came back with about 30 iPads for everyone. There were video cameras, phones, all that sort of thing. If we won the owners would fly us home in their private jet and if we got hammered we’d be down the back in domestic with the crates and the chickens.”
An unexpected bonus of the IPL was the opportunity to play alongside his longtime nemesis Harbhajan Singh. “The funny thing was the Mumbai Indians were pretty desperate to get me in their squad that first season but they had Harbhajan, so they didn’t think that would be a good thing. Then I ended up going for Mumbai for two years after playing three years with Deccan and we actually got on pretty well. He’s not a hugely different animal to myself, really; that’s probably why we clashed.”
With Laura due to give birth to Chloe during the sixth IPL season, Roy chose to retire. They had moved from Brisbane to Townsville two years earlier so Laura could take up a job as sport and recreational officer with Townsville City Council and Roy could return to his north Queensland roots. “He was over the game at the time,” Laura says. “Not his teammates, but the politics and the negativity. He needed to get back up here. He has everything he needs to be happy up here. It’s his paradise.”
With the pressure off and the proximity to water, bush and Brothers Rugby Club, where he plays lower grades to get his fix of team camaraderie, Roy is now a different man to the tortured soul who reached for the bottle as an escape. “That’s run its course,” he says. “There’s probably still times when I drink too much but I don’t need to drink for the same reasons that I used to. If I go fishing I’ll have a few beers but I don’t find myself going out and bingeing and carrying on for days. I don’t have a problem with it. Like this morning when I met you blokes, I’d been on the go all morning and I was hot and thirsty so I wanted a beer, but I didn’t feel like I should go drink two cartons of the stuff.”
It’s fair to say that Roy is at peace as he prepares to return to the game. As he says, “life is good”.
“I suppose we’ve moved to the next stage in our lives, we’ve got a good set-up here, two ripper kids, so what to do next, you know? When I finished playing I basically did nothing apart from fishing. I was disillusioned with the cricket side of things – not the boys – and fortunately I didn’t have to throw myself into something I didn’t want to do. But now it’s time, I think. It’s good to be commentating, I think I’ve got something to give, especially in short form cricket. I’ve played my fair share of it so I have a good understanding of the game and what you need to do well to be good at it. Hopefully I can give a good spin and understanding to the people at home watching.”
And, one thing is for certain. Roy will tell it how he sees it. With Mark staying behind to take some pictures of the family, he drives me to the airport, thanks me for coming and hands me some fillets of cod, wrapped in towelling and secured with gaffer tape, straight out of his freezer.
“Here,” he says nodding at my briefcase. “Put this in your port.” Port. Perfect.
Originally published as Andrew Symonds: Mike Colman sits down with one of Australian cricket’s most controversial characters