The moment life stood still for cricketer Chris Lewis
Engaging a cricket membership audience
The incredible story of Chris Lewis
Readers of the MCC Members’ magazine form one of the most discerning, well-informed sporting audiences in the world, and our bi-annual title always has to deliver. This story, about former English cricketer Chris Lewis, is a prime example of the content produced for the historic cricket club’s title.
As the customs officer took his bag, the sense of unease didn’t so much spread through him as instantaneously paralyse him. Even the most innocent among us will have felt stomachs tighten when questioned about their luggage, when you suddenly second-guess yourself, despite knowing there can’t possibly be anything more awry than a rogue aerosol or half-drunk bottle of water. Chris had felt that too, but that was on different trips. That was when he’d been travelling the world as an England cricketer, on his way to or from some of the 32 Tests and 53 One-Day Internationals. He could have felt it when he flew to Australia for the 1992 Cricket World Cup, where he ‘terrorised Brian Lara’ and helped England to the final. He could have also felt it a year later when he flew to India with England, where he scored his first Test century.
This time though, it was different. Chris knew there was something in the bag he’d brought from St Lucia to London Gatwick. Cocaine worth £140,000.
“I didn’t realise you could have a million thoughts all at once,” recalls Chris, who’s travelled to London from his home to visit his aunt, mum and, of course, MCC Magazine. “And they all came at the same time. In an instant, it felt all that information about what you had done, the choices you had made, what it meant – not just to your mum, to everybody – was so apparent in a second. It freezes you. I stood there. He came back. I just didn’t move.
“The officer came back and said what I expected, it had tested positive for cocaine, and I remember the words, ‘you’re arrested’. It was an out of body experience because lots of things have happened over the course of my career, of my life, but there’s not one point in my life I ever imagined me in jail.”
One of those millions of thoughts did edge in front of the rest. “My mum,” he says. “It was the first one, ‘what would mum say?’ Because my mum has an idea about her son, who her son is and what he would and wouldn’t do. And she’s very proud of that.
“I stayed at my mum’s last night,” he says, “and we had a conversation this morning where we went over that moment and she remembers being at her friend’s house and how she told that friend she didn’t think that she would survive to see me come out at the end of it [the prison sentence].” He pauses. This information, almost as new to him as it is to us, clearly shook him. “My mum is 72 now,” he continues. “Of course you think about how hard it is going to be for your mum, but you don’t think of everything, and when you hear that you’re like, ‘wow, I know I put you in a bad place, but for a mother to be in a place where she doesn’t think she’ll see her son a free man before she dies… … there’s so much behind the scenes that goes with some of the choices you make.
“Immigrants [Chris hails from Guyana] want their children to become doctors, dentists, that sort of thing, so it was hard for my mum to take that she had a son who was a cricketer, because being a sportsman back in those days didn’t count for much, but to go from there to your son being a drug dealer…”
Thirty years earlier, a 10-year-old Chris had travelled alone from Guyana to London to live with his parents, having spent his early years being brought up alongside his nine siblings by his grandmother. It was a common immigrant routine, family members arriving one-by-one as each becomes settled in their new home.
Like many in the West Indies, he had been passionate about cricket, first watching his hero Clive Lloyd play by climbing a tree to catch a glimpse of him leading a side against Pakistan, and in England he held his first proper cricket bat – and never let go of it. Teaching himself to bowl to help enhance his chances with the school team, Chris began to form the game that would ultimately lead to a nine-year England career, delivering 1,105 runs and 93 wickets in 32 Tests and 374 runs and 66 wickets in 54 ODIs.
Although coming through the system at Middlesex, his first professional contract was with Leicestershire as an 18-year-old, a side he’d sign for twice in a 189-match county career that also took in Nottinghamshire and Surrey (also twice). There were successes, failures, and controversies, from haircuts and tardiness to the most infamous when he reported a match fixer’s approach to the ECB, naming other players that had been mentioned in the process.
He left professional cricket at 32, being released from his Leicestershire contract with three years remaining following the furore caused by the match-fixing scandal.
For all the things he was lambasted for in the game – drug smuggling aside, naturally – many seem unjust in the light of the modern game. “I think some of those things were acceptable then, it just depends on who did it,” he says. “We’ve always had those people in sport. Sport isn’t different to life, people are involved and that means there are characters. Where there are people, there’s different types.”
It was the start of his financial struggles, which he continually tried to deal with on his own, always hoping for light at the end of the tunnel. He’d never planned for his county salary to end in his early-30s. “A young Chris thought he was going to have plenty of time to do that [plan for the future], and, of course I wasn’t going to stop playing cricket at 30, I was going to play until I was 40. I’m fit, healthy, it’s not going to happen to me.”
That he’d been at the top – Test cricket, a Cricket World Cup, the ‘next Botham’ – only made it harder. “There’s embarrassment,” he admits. “You appreciate that, compared to other people around you, you’re in an advantageous position, so the fact that here you are, on your knees, you have this hesitancy about reaching out [to family] about it.
“You feel embarrassed, and you have the hope that it’s a case of ‘just give me a moment, I’ll sort this, then I’ll give you a call when I’m that person you know’.
“At 40, I had the opportunity to come back (with T20), I put a lot of energy into it, and then first game back I was knackered.”
The spiral began again, this time without the hope. “From that bad place you make a whole host of choices,” he says. “People have been in dire situations and haven’t resorted to the extremes that I did. I’d got myself in such a state that for about six months there wasn’t really a decent thought going around in my head.
“I was so focused on one issue and, for me, that was money. It wasn’t about getting down to your last few quid, it was actually not having any money in the bank day-to-day. Everything else falls to one side, even the standards you’ve set for yourself, or the morals set by your parents.
“When I’m stopped and the officer goes away to look at the stuff in my bag, that’s the first time my brain has kicked in, and you’ve gone, ‘what the f***, what have you done? Do you realise the consequence, what are you going to do now?’”
At court, a plea of guilty could have seen Chris released after just three and a half. years. But another bad choice got in the way. “A year in my head seemed like 10 years to be honest,” he says, “and although I was guilty, I didn’t think I could survive in jail so I went not guilty, so as a consequence, I was found guilty, and got extra years.”
Instead of three and half years, he was sentenced to 13 years, meaning he was likely to serve six and a half. “Before that moment, there’s hope,” he says of the sentencing.
“You’re not convicted yet, there’s a chance, maybe one percent, you’re grabbing hold of anything.
“Then when I was convicted and sentenced to 13 years, when I got back to my cell, there was finally an emotional outpour when you’re actually feeling sorry for yourself. I had pictures up of family, friends, girlfriends – I looked at them and took them down.
“I took them down because that life was over, you weren’t going to see those people or interact with them for six and a half years, and I did my crying that night. The next morning, I wouldn’t say I felt better, but I felt stronger.”
Even with that strength, it took time for Chris to adapt. “I would say it took a year, after sentencing, to get my head around it,” he says. “I remember getting to my second Christmas, and going, wow, you’ve done a year, now you’ve got to do a year, six times more you can do that. You don’t want to, it won’t be fun, but you can do it.”
Being alone with his thoughts for so long, had also meant he’d come to some serious conclusions about mental health. “Being in the cell promoted a certain type of thought – depression, dark thoughts. Getting out would mean not thinking about that for a couple of hours.
“It was so tiring because you’re thinking, thinking, thinking, and it’s not the good stuff, it’s all the crappy stuff. The good stuff doesn’t count anymore – you’re in this world you’ve created of pure crap.
“And, after months of that, you realise you’re going to burn out if you don’t get any sleep. Then it occurs to you, what they call ‘madness’, would be a release. Because you wouldn’t have to think about this stuff for a bit. Then you think, ‘oh my god, I didn’t realise that’s how it works in here, madness is a release’. Even though I’d be doolally I’m not thinking about all this stuff that’s causing me pain.
“That was the moment when I realised I had to fix up here,” concludes Chris, pointing to his head.
That time was taken up by courses, with many lasting three months or even three years, each representing a significant chunk of time chalked off. Painting and decorating; cooking (so he could get some good food); electrical; plastering; computing; and even psychology. “I started a degree in psychology,” recalls Chris. “I did it for a year but then I stopped. The teacher kept saying the same thing, ‘psychology poses more questions than it answers’. What she didn’t realise was that I only started it because I was looking for answers!”
Either way, his strategy for facing time was working. “Each of them were different lengths of time, so they built up, and, after you’ve done them, you’d look back and years had gone,” he says.
“Time was always a matter of focus,” he continues on the theme. “A day can seem like a month if you’re focused on it.
“There are moments when you take your eyes off time, and you go, ‘is that a month gone? It went so quickly’. But, day to day, the days went amazingly slow and yet you look back and you think that six months went quickly. I think it’s because, in the day, you think you’ve got nothing to do, but over a month, there aren’t many memorable things to remember, so it doesn’t seem like much.
“Even over the course of six months, it’s only when your family came and brought you some sweets that you remember.
“You have to stop focusing on time, otherwise it’s like when you’re finishing
work and watching the clock – that hour goes on forever.”
Visiting times were the best of times. “The visiting was beautiful,” he says. “You’d think that because you went back to your cell there was a difficulty in that, but just for that moment you forget where you are, you’re having a laugh, seeing the people that you are connected with, and it’s a little bit of normality. Even though it’s a serious situation, there is a joke and a laugh, and those things are priceless. The guys in prison would spend hours getting ready beforehand: they’re shaving, showering…
“The importance of those, I can’t put into words,” he admits. “One thing you do in jail is manage the situation, and if things are causing you pain you tend to turn them off, and if your family things are causing you pain, you turn the switch off.
“The problem with that is that if you switch off your emotional side you become a different human being. I saw people do that because of the difficulty, they cut ties with family, just to have some modicum of control. Or they pretended those things didn’t matter which is just as bad, because if you’re not getting that support during these times, you then go, ‘well, love isn’t very important’.”
As his category of prison, changed from B, to C, to D, in the final stages of his sentence, he was allowed out to work at a local housing association in Ipswich, as a cook in the canteen. “The first day they drop you off in the centre so you have to walk to the place of employment,” he says. “I remember walking through Ipswich town centre, and going past the cake shops and the smell hitting me – it was everything on the high street, all the sights and smells I’d not had in five years. I was looking into shops and just thinking, ‘that’s how kids must think – all the cakes!’
“With six months to go that was the hardest part of the sentence, because I’m also allowed to go home once a month and get back to normality. Then you get back to the jail and the next 31 days waiting for it to happen again lasted a year. Every minute of every day you’re ticking it off until the next day you went home.
“All those things you’ve shut down in order to cope come back.”
And when the day came? “I felt a massive relief,” he explains of his release. “Until that day came, I didn’t realise how much pressure was on me, was on my shoulders – I felt it lift. From my mum’s point of view too, especially now I know what I know – she was thinking she was never going to see me again as a free person, so when I walked out a free person, what must it have been like for her?”
The concept of time, how quickly when you’re taken away from it and how quickly you fall behind it. When you’re in prison you don’t notice the pace of the change, but when you come back, oh my gosh, everything has changed”.
Since his release in 2015, Chris tried his hand at coaching at the Trent Bridge Academy – “I don’t think it’s for me,” he admits – and picked up the bat again too. “I played club cricket last year,” he says, “but this year I’ll give it a rest if we’ve got a couple of decent bats, I’m not going to be trying to win any leagues at 52. Lashings have got a full diary though, so I’ll play for them.”
More significant has been his work away from the game, where his play The Long Walk Back recently completed a nationwide tour. It goes far beyond the game of cricket, with the message one that has come to the fore in all aspects of life. “Going through the whole experience, the thing that stuck out was the emotional journey, and that was always the part that surprised me, that was the part I wanted to tell.
“I wanted to tell everyone, ‘hey, mate, did you know that, if you’re in a bad mood, you won’t be able to access your good thoughts?’
“I found myself in an unimaginable place, a place that was so dark, that for a lot of the time, I thought there was no possible hope. I thought everything I’d looked at I’d mucked up. Even in those situations, there was hope.
“I look now at my life experience as not very different to anyone else’s. Of course not everyone goes to jail, of course not a lot of people get even close, but the point I’m making is that everyone has their demons, their pains, the things they worry about, and whatever they are, they lead you to a dark place.
“From my point of view I wouldn’t want to make a big thing of the drugs, but what I’ve learned is more from an emotional point, you can turn it into such a thing that it puts you into a really bad place.
“My career plan now is to stay positive and knowing that, based on my actions, things will get better. Don’t get me wrong, people will make their judgements [about me], when you do something this extreme, people will decide what side of the fence you stand on and so they should. If it was someone else, so would I.
“But actually, keep your positivity, knowing things will come around, and that everything flows from you. The fact I ended up in jail wasn’t to do with someone else, it flowed from me.”
Given his experiences in cricket, the response to his actions – even before the court case – it would be easy for Chris to have fallen out of love with the sport. “Cricket is beautiful mate,” he says. “I fell in love with this sport as a young boy. And the sport on its own is just as beautiful as it’s always been.
“This sport has taken me everywhere, it’s taken me around the world, it’s allowed me to live my life in a style – for most of it – that was pleasing. Everything that I have is either indirectly or directly because of my association with cricket.
“So me and cricket is a love affair and it’s actually still there. The issue was there was a time when things were happening in cricket that I didn’t appreciate, but that wasn’t the cricket. That had nothing to do with cricket.
“And here I am now, as a 52-year-old, an ex-cricketer, ex-convicted criminal, and cricket is still supporting me, so there’s no issues with cricket. As for the rest of it, I can look at it and go, ‘this went wrong, that went wrong’ and I could’ve got a better result, but at the end of it, it’s been my journey.
“I don’t want to give people the wrong idea and think it’s all been delicious, but when you take away those scary moments…” He pauses, gathering his thoughts again. “I need to think of the word…” He pauses again, before it dawns. “Wow, it’s been a ride,” he concludes, adding. “It’s been alright mate.”