During his playing days, Ross Taylor was famously careful with his words. Now he's retired, he's telling his story, and, as he tells Greg Bruce, it's going to upset some people.
I'd encountered Ross Taylor once before, in 2012, in a press conference at Hamilton's Seddon Park, in the middle of a dismal Black Caps loss in a test match against South Africa, during his brief reign as captain. My strongest memory of that press conference is how unsure of himself he appeared: "Sorry," he said at one point, "I'm not very good at this."
When I met him in Hamilton two weeks ago, ahead of the launch of his new book, Black & White, he was retired from international cricket, no longer under pressure to perform, no longer beholden to a media-wary employer or the intense public scrutiny that attaches to high-performing sportspeople in this country. He was articulate, thoughtful and confident.
He said: "I've never been able to tell my side of the story. That was the idea. I didn't go out to slam people or anything. I just wanted to tell my side of the story because I've never been able to do that, for numerous reasons. And we were conscious it's going to upset some people, but if that's my story…"
We arrived at Hamilton's leading cricket ground, Seddon Park, for the photo shoot accompanying this article, to find the maintenance team in the process of tearing up the grass. Taylor phoned the turf manager, Karl Johnson, to ask if we could use the small remaining patch of green for the photos. The two are friends: "I've scored so many runs out here," Taylor said, "he's had to be."
Johnson arrived within minutes and quickly took credit for Taylor's international success: "You take Ross Taylor's average out of Seddon Park and it's pretty average," he said.
I asked Taylor if he knew how many international hundreds he'd scored at the ground.
"Ten," Johnson answered, before Taylor could open his mouth. "Out of 40. So 25 per cent of the money he's made over the years goes into my account."
"Managers only take 10 per cent these days," Taylor said.
"But managers don't prepare this," Johnson said, pointing at the ground. "You need this."
Taylor's first test match hundred was scored here, in 2008, in his third test. "It was against England," he says. "I pulled Steve Harmison, that side. Didn't know what I was doing. The Barmy Army were in that corner, singing me Happy Birthday."
The story is self-deprecating, but the innings was superb. It helped his team win the game and was crucial in the context of a career that was, until then, seen as not well suited to the test format, even by him. To some extent, that century made the rest of his long and illustrious test career possible: "You feel like you belong," he said. "If you take 10 or 15 tests to get your first 100, you start wondering whether you're good enough at this level."
In that same match, Black Caps opening batter Jamie How, who was also in the early stages of his career, was out just short of a hundred: "Say he got 120, he might have been away," Taylor said. "He got 95 and that might have been his highest test score and he didn't get that belief, where I got 120 and we won the test when no one really gave us a chance."
Most of a cricketer's career is failure, he said: "You fail 60, 65 per cent of the time. If you fail 62 per cent of the time, you're probably a world-class player. How you deal with failure is a massive part of the job."
Many of the headlines following the publication of the book two days ago have been about the drama and fallout following coach Mike Hesson's handling of the removal of Taylor as captain, beginning with a hastily arranged and brutal meeting while the team was on tour in Sri Lanka - a debacle New Zealand Cricket apologised for a few weeks later.
The aftermath of that mess is covered in chapter 8, which was to be titled "Reintegration" but, believing the word implied he'd done something wrong, Taylor changed it to, "Forgive but don't Forget".
He says he has friends who are journalists, who thought they knew the captaincy story, who have been surprised to read the book and learn what really happened and how it affected him. Then again, he says, "No one really went looking."
He says Paul Thomas, who co-wrote the book, told him cricket journalists didn't investigate what had happened: "They just took the status quo of what New Zealand Cricket were feeding them."
Taylor says: "They've never asked to this day. They've never asked Bob Carter, [recently retired former New Zealand women's coach, who was in the meeting along with Hesson and team manager Mike Sandle], 'What was your take on it, Bob?' Bob's in press conferences all the time: 'What happened in that meeting?' No one's ever asked."
After returning from Sri Lanka, Taylor received medical advice that he shouldn't go on the subsequent tour to South Africa. He was hardly sleeping and his weight had dropped to the lowest it had been since he was 14. In the book, Gary Hermansson says: "I wouldn't say that Ross had post-traumatic stress disorder as a clinical diagnosis, but he certainly had all the elements of it — that whole kind of empty despair, the sense of rejection."
Taylor's father-in-law noted that he was "quiet, almost blank" and wondered if he would ever play cricket again. His manager, Leanne McGoldrick, had initially planned to try talking him into going to South Africa but, within seconds of seeing him, knew he couldn't. "I'd never seen him like that. He was a shadow of his former self." She was concerned, she says in the book, at the way his subsequent decision not to travel was perceived by some people: "I don't think any of them realised or cared that Ross wasn't in a healthy psychological state."
Taylor says: "There's an element of you having to be thick-skinned. But to what extent?"
In his 2016 autobiography, Declared, Brendon McCullum wrote: "If you looked at it objectively, [Taylor's] decision not to come on the South African tour was quite bizarre and really only explicable in terms of people fuelling his emotions behind the scenes."
Taylor says: "Brendon just came out and smashed everyone in his book. I didn't want that. I want people to read the book and be interested in the story because there's more to the story than captaincy. As I said, I didn't want to be defined by it."
When he returned to the team after the South African tour, he says, he "just got on with it. But it wasn't easy. It took a lot of mental energy on a daily basis."
The way he was treated over the captaincy changed him. He says he found it harder to trust people and to take things at face value. Eight years on, in 2020, when coach Gary Stead dropped him from the New Zealand T20 side, many of the old feelings came rushing back. When Taylor reminded Stead he'd been named the country's T20 player of the year only a few months earlier, Stead replied, "We don't pick the player of the year." Talking with Hermansson about it afterwards, Taylor learned for the first time of his PTSD-like symptoms. "That made me feel better," he says, "because I was like, 'S***, okay, it's not just me. I'm not soft.'"
The way he was treated no longer plays on his mind, he says. He doesn't wake up thinking about it: "I'm pretty happy, pretty content. I'm pretty proud of what I've achieved as a cricketer. I could have easily given up."
Black & White opens with the story of a discussion Taylor had with his captain Kane Williamson the night before last year's World Test Championship final, the most significant match in New Zealand cricket history. The pair were, and still are, New Zealand's greatest international run-scorers. When Williamson asked Taylor how he was feeling, Taylor said, "Well, not great, but I'm trying to hang in there." To which Williamson replied, "I was just asking to initiate a conversation, because I feel like I'm going to get out every ball."
I asked Taylor why he opened the book with that story: "People don't know who we are," he said. "I think they'll get a better gauge of who I am. And I like the story because me and Kane are human. That's what I like about that story. We're two veteran campaigners, but we can still seek help.
"I hope someone, like a kid who wants to be a cricketer, will read it and go, 'These are some of the feelings that I have, they're natural in this game of cricket. You're not there by yourself. Ross Taylor and Kane Williamson have these anxieties.'"
Six days after that conversation, Taylor clipped a ball from Mohammed Shami through square leg for four, winning for his country its first ever world cricket title. Williamson was at the other end.
Is it irony or something else that, within a few years of Taylor's sordid dumping as captain, the New Zealand team had become internationally and almost universally lauded as the game's greatest exemplars of sportsmanship?
"I always laugh when people go, 'They're the nice guys of world cricket, they don't sledge,'" Taylor says. He suspects the tag began to catch on following the 2014 death of Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes, after which the Black Caps largely avoided appealing for wickets: "There was never a conversation about it - it just happened - but [McCullum] got the praise for it. Brendon used to sledge all the time. There was definitely a conscious effort on his behalf because that's not his natural … he's an attacking person. And then everyone was loving this new culture - no sledging, attacking cricket. He's like, 'Oh cool, I'll run with this.'"
Asked whether the, "nice guys of world cricket" tag was justified, Taylor says: "I'm sure you just have to read between the lines of my book." Regarding his relationship with McCullum, he said, "If only he lived up to his own policies, we would have been fine."
He wants to make it clear he hasn't retired from all cricket: "The last couple of days I've picked up a cricket bat quite a few times," he says, "and that reinforces to me that I still want to play cricket."
He's still playing for his provincial team, Central Districts, when he can, and he's about to take part in a professional "legends league" in India, alongside international stars like Virender Sehwag, Muttiah Muralitharan, Chris Gayle and Jacques Kallis. The only team he's definitely no longer playing for is the Black Caps.
"I haven't missed it," he says. "I reckoned the biggest test for me was going to be that England series [in June this year - the Black Caps lost 3-0]. We lived in England six or seven years. That was the kids' second home. But I watched it, saw Devon Conway go out at 2/2 and looked at [wife] Victoria and said, 'I don't miss this.'"
I asked if he would have felt more enthusiastic had Conway been going out with the Black Caps on, say, 200. "No," he said, "Even worse, because you've been waiting. I'd be nervous as anything."
Given his career again, he says, he'd do many things differently. He believes, for instance, he'd have been a better captain had he been given the job a few years later. But the captaincy of your country doesn't wait for you to be ready for it, and even if it did, that doesn't mean it would be good for you.
"If I'd been captain for five years, I wouldn't have retired in 2022 - I'd have retired way earlier. The captaincy would have taken a lot out of me. So maybe the cricket gods said, 'Ross, you can play 450 games for your country or you can captain for three years, four years, have a World Cup and then move on.' I must have said, 'Yeah, I'll take playing 450 games for my country.'
"I'd do that again. As I said, I don't need to be captain to contribute."
Black & White, by Ross Taylor (Upstart Press, $50), is on sale now.
