THIS month came the terrible news that the ex-England cricketer Graham Thorpe had taken his own life.
When he wrote his autobiography in 2005, it was a happier time, and he had discovered a Christian faith. Throughout the 1990s, he had been England’s best batsman, but his first marriage failed in acrimonious circumstances in 2001; the resulting divorce proceedings and stress had led him to take a break from all cricket in 2002. Later that year, he met the woman who would become his second wife, Amanda, who happened to be a Roman Catholic. Her faith rubbed off on Thorpe.
“Had you told me several years ago that Graham Thorpe might want to pray, I would have laughed at you,” he wrote. “Religion can come to you at any stage of life, but my faith has helped me cope with bad things, and appreciate the good.”
With his new relationship, he found a renewed appetite for cricket, and he was recalled to the England side for the Test against South Africa at the Oval in 2003. As it happens, I was present in the crowd that day as he played his comeback innings. I still recall how easily Thorpe seemed to be finding it, the ball flowing from the middle of his bat. He may have been playing against the pace and skill of Pollock, Ntini, and Kallis, with 1100 test wickets between them, but it looked like he was batting against a clergy team’s medium pacers, and he made a century.
His autobiography revealed that he had gone out to bat with a settled mind: “I’m not sure I could have done it without my religious faith to calm me. I don’t think I could have coped with all that pressure unless I had told myself that what was about to happen was in somebody else’s hands.”
He wrote in more detail about that innings than any other, finishing his account with this: “When I look back on the slices of luck I enjoyed in that innings, it is hard not to think that divine intervention did not play a part.”
Anyone of serious faith both knows to question those words — after all, would God really intervene in the vagaries of batting? — but also recognises the sentiment, the sense that, sometimes, one feels that one is precisely where one is supposed to be, doing exactly what one is supposed to do.
Thorpe’s words have a renewed poignancy today; for, faith or no faith, we now know that his mental troubles were not at an end. That should not mask the fact that there were also times in his life when he felt at ease with the world around him. I am glad I was present for one of them.
The Revd Robert Stanier is Vicar of St Andrew and St Mark, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark.