If sport reveals character then Dermot Reeve is an unorthodox all-rounder.
The son of two teachers, Reeve was born in Hong Kong and ended up playing three Tests and 29 One Day Internationals for England. His greatest successes on the pitch came at county level, however, as he captained Warwickshire to six trophies in two years in the 1990s, earning him a reputation as one of the domestic game’s greatest skippers.
Reeve was an obvious choice to make the transition from player to commentator and when TV network Channel 4 won the rights from the BBC to show cricket in 1998, his wit, charisma and eloquence made him look a smart choice as a pundit.
And he was — until he wasn’t. In May 2005, on the eve of an Ashes series which subsequently earned a reputation as the greatest ever played, he left Channel 4 after admitting to a cocaine addiction. He even admitted to using the drug prior to commentating on an England vs New Zealand match at Lord’s the previous summer.
The man who appeared to have it all suddenly didn’t.
Twenty years on and Reeve is late to arrive at the Portsmouth coffee shop where we have arranged to meet. It’s an hour away by foot from the supported housing complex where he currently resides after a recent stint in rehab. He has made that walk in the rain and without a jacket as he looks to get by on £6 per day in the hope he can save enough to get back to Australia and his children.
We speak for hours as the self-proclaimed “hermit” still clearly loves an audience, relishing the opportunity to showcase his array of uncanny cricketing impersonations when he’s not analysing his worst impulses with genuine candour.
Reeve is always thinking.
We start at the beginning: how did a man who grew up in Hong Kong end up playing cricket professionally?
“At school, the thing with cricket that I loved is that it took all day,” he says. “With football, I’d get frustrated when the final whistle went because it meant we had to stop.”
Dermot Reeve is congratulated by Graham Gooch, Ian Botham and his England team-mates after taking a wicket at the 1992 World Cup (Graham Chadwick – PA Images via Getty Images)
The young Reeve excelled at football, cricket and hockey and was named the best schoolboy sportsman in all of Hong Kong.
He was the youngest of four boys, so sport dominated his childhood in “a very competitive household where it was difficult to get a chance to be the one to have a bat”. His father, a proud Yorkshireman, may have been headmaster of the school but Reeve Jr was always more interested in games than revising for exams.
His ambition at that point was to play football for Manchester United, something he would daydream about while sitting through yet another interminable Mass. Reeve Sr was a man who had trained to be a priest but “struggled with feeling he was good enough”, a trait his youngest son appeared to have avoided inheriting.
His only addiction at this point was sport — as a 14-year-old his brothers had got him drunk, but he felt so dreadful in assembly the following morning it put him off alcohol for good — and the tragedy of his life is that one cannot play it professionally indefinitely. He sums up his personality and, perhaps, that of most addicts, with the words: “If people tell me there’s something I shouldn’t do then I want to do it.”
This was evident even in his playing days.
At Warwickshire, Reeve once pulled Curtley Ambrose, the legendary West Indies international, for four and couldn’t resist following it up with a cheeky grin at one of the game’s most fearsome fast bowlers. Ambrose was irked enough to bowl three beamers — dangerously high full tosses — at the batter in a single over.
Reeve, nicknamed ‘Marmite’ as a nod to his divisiveness, was not popular with opposition players generally. He would deliberately call young batters by the wrong name when they came to the crease, but drew the line at anything he felt constituted mocking a team-mate — “One of my non-negotiables as captain”.
He wanted his own charges to feel he was “friendly, encouraging and trusting”, something he brought to his coaching roles later in life. Learning, for better or worse, is at the heart of everything for Reeve. “I try to coach discovery,” he says.
That fatherly protection of team-mates was not something Reeve enjoyed in his early days as a professional at Sussex when the youngster would be laughed at by older team-mates like Imran Khan when he talked of playing for England one day. And yet, like Gary Neville at his beloved Manchester United, the all-rounder made the most of his abilities.
Few of his team-mates at Hove would have predicted this young upstart would ultimately represent England in a World Cup final, but one senses part of the joy for Reeve has always been proving people wrong.
Dermot Reeve is chaired off the field by jubilant Warwickshire fans after the county’s win over Kent in the semi-final of the NatWest Trophy in August 1994 (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
He remains one of the sport’s great thinkers. As a player and captain, he was noted for innovations like reverse sweeps and slower balls before they became commonplace. He talks a lot about energy, both good and bad — a byproduct of his interest in Reiki. He introduced huddles in the changing room at Warwickshire, something he believes was unprecedented in English sport at the time, because he wanted to feel a physical transfer of positivity between the players.
Under his stewardship, Warwickshire managed the seemingly impossible achievement of winning three trophies in an English domestic season in 1994, losing just once in the county championship. They narrowly missed out on the quadruple after defeat by rivals Worcestershire in the final of the NatWest Trophy.
And yet, for the captain, the energy was not right. It was his least enjoyable campaign as a player.
The primary cause of the issue, paradoxically, was the arrival of Brian Lara during arguably the finest summer a cricketer has ever had. Reeve, coach Bob Woolmer and the rest of the cricket committee at Warwickshire felt the overseas player ought to be an all-rounder, not least because it would mean the captain bowling fewer overs.
India’s Manoj Prabhakar was the initial target but an ankle injury meant he failed his fitness test. So it was Lara who rocked up at Edgbaston weeks after breaking the record for the highest individual score in Test cricket.
In his autobiography Winning Ways, published in 1996, Reeve recalled how, on Lara’s arrival in Birmingham, he invited him over for a glass of wine but the response was a curt, “No, thank you”. It effectively soured their relationship from the off. Reeve believes Lara was under the impression he didn’t want him when the reality was more nuanced, and related to the balance of the team.
Most matches that season would follow a familiar pattern with Lara invariably arriving half an hour late, scoring plenty of runs, questioning Reeve’s tactics in the field and Warwickshire winning.
For the captain, though, victory was never the primary focus. “Winning is only for a short time and then it’s gone,” he would tell team-mates. “What you have for life is self-esteem and that’s not fuelled by winning cricket matches. It’s fuelled by knowing I’m a good bloke and I did my best.”
Brian Lara raises his bat after his record-breaking 501 not out for Warwickshire in the summer of 1994 (Graham Chadwick/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Not everyone could quite understand this attitude. Gladstone Small, the England fast bowler, would sometimes become irritated with his captain for merrily whistling in the shower in the aftermath of a defeat but, for Reeve, “all that exists is the next ball”.
This mantra is eerily close to the “one day at a time” mindset used in battling addiction, the key being to focus on the manageable next 24 hours rather than thinking about the weeks, months or years ahead. Jonathan Trott, with bat in hand, had a remarkable ability to focus only on the next ball until he became overwhelmed by anxiety and his form suffered. Similarly, Stuart Broad’s batting never recovered after he was struck in the face by a Varun Aaron bouncer.
These England greats could no longer operate in the “zone” where elite sport happens almost unthinkingly. Reeve could be talking about life or cricket when he says: “If you live in the past, you’re depressed. If you live in the future, you’re stressed. You live in the moment, you’re blessed.”
Reeve was certainly blessed in his playing days, seeing as he was that rare combination of photogenic, funny and athletic. He believes his only addictions at that stage were to “fitness and the endorphins produced by going to the gym every day” and “lust”, the latter an issue that would invariably cause him marital strife and led to him “praying for a male waiter” at restaurants.
He occasionally smoked marijuana in Australia during the off-season and somewhere in the back of his mind was the thought that one day, after cricket, he’d like to try cocaine.
A hip injury hurried the premature end of his playing career but, unlike many sportsmen of the era, Reeve had options and chose media. He resisted the urge during his early years as a broadcaster before the “adventurous” side of his personality took over. It was, he concludes, his “biggest mistake”.
Just two years later he was snorting four grams a day and unable to drive to Trent Bridge to commentate on a Test match, blaming his incapacity on a stomach ache. The lies were inevitable since, in Reeve’s words, “the fabric of your reality ends up dictated by your addiction”.
Dermot Reeve, working for Channel 4, interviews South Africa’s Gary Kirsten during the post-match presentation in Leeds in 2003 (Matthew Ashton/EMPICS via Getty Images)
It feels bitterly ironic now to think that he called his book Winning Ways. It gained headlines for the Lara tales but, a few decades on, is more notable for its prescience. It saw Reeve call for the introduction of central contracts, something that would be ratified by the ECB by the end of the 1990s.
The great thinker and improviser on the pitch proved equally adept off it, spotting a gap in the market. “I would notice people coming through the gates to see an hour or two of cricket after work and I felt like there should be a shorter form of the game that started around that time,” he said. He was invited to share his ideas at a meeting in London and, 30 years later, Twenty20 cricket has transformed the game financially.
And yet this early proponent is now struggling to make ends meet.
Jerry Seinfeld once observed of his friend and colleague Larry David that he was exactly the same person as a struggling comic contemplating homelessness as he was once he became a millionaire. Reeve has had the opposite trajectory yet shares that ability to treat triumph and disaster just the same.
He speaks slower than in his Channel 4 days but there’s never the hint of an “um” or “err” and his memory of particular matches and even individual wickets is startling. He can be too trusting at times, sharing things without contemplating the ramifications and, above all else, his mind is always working in overdrive. It is easy to see why he might have been attracted to amphetamines after retiring, a drug used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
His personality was a perfect fit for a sport he describes using adjectives that might equally apply to the man (“fascinating”, “complex”) but what happens when a career comes to an end but the mind shows no signs of slowing down?
In the 2000s, he used his energy and resources for philanthropic purposes, and proudly recalls an article penned by Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris, in which he wrote that Reeve’s love of cricket was only trumped by his desire to help the less fortunate. The tattoo on his back quotes the Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Give It Away Now”, and is an approach that equally applies to his wealth and his emotions.
Dermot Reeve at St George’s Park, Port Elizabeth, in December 1995 where he learned he was to receive an OBE (Rebecca Naden – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)
His desire to do good suggests there has always been an underlying sense that cricket is not everything, something that was brought into sharp focus when a day broadcasting alongside Richie Benaud left him feeling as though the whole endeavour was pointless. Reeve remained immaculate with the microphone in hand but that particular reaction was the cocaine talking, not the commentator.
At his worst, Reeve was spending between £150 and £200 a day on the drug. He says he has only used three times in the last five years, but each of those occasions has had “monumental consequences”.
On a trip to see his daughter in Australia, he felt compelled to seek out his dealer first and saw another relationship wrecked by an act of supreme self-sabotage. Now the man who once owned multiple Antipodean homes seems content to have nothing but remain clean. He is yet another casualty of cricket’s retirement problem, something that seems particularly pronounced with England players of Reeve’s era.
But there is no sense of self-pity.
The drugs, failed marriages and online gambling addiction wash away at night when he still regularly dreams of a time before the fall. In his sleep, he is still a player but, tellingly, not one in his prime. Reeve’s unconscious places him in his late 30s, no longer able to bowl much but “still able to do a job with the bat”. In reality, at that age, he was in the midst of a media career that was prematurely curtailed by drugs.
Perhaps if the injuries hadn’t happened and the television work had come later then things might have been different, but he has a more fatalistic view of things. “If I end up at a monastery in the future with no belongings, then I don’t really have any fear of that,” he says.
His preferred option, though, seems to be back in Australia or New Zealand, reconnecting with his family and dividing his time between coaching cricket and playing golf. At times, hearing him speak of his desire to get there can feel like Lennie and George discussing the farm in Of Mice and Men, a doomed ambition that only serves to highlight the grimness of the circumstances.
Dermot Reeve talks to The Athletic in a cafe in Portsmouth (Stuart Martin for The Athletic)
And yet, some combination of his astute tactical analysis and a knack for silencing the doubters suggests there might yet be an inspirational third act.
The former England all-rounder turned journalist Derek Pringle analysed Reeve in The Independent during that remarkable 1994 season and the subject can only hope the assessment proves as true of life as it did cricket.
“Reeve’s talent, as such, is that of the conjurer or the escape artist, most effective when cornered, with few options and large stakes to play for,” he wrote. “Nobody is quite sure how he does it, but give the man a demanding and pressurised situation and he usually pulls something out of the bag.”
While he made a natural pundit, coaching seems like his primary passion and a surefire way of giving something back to the game. He has worked with Australia’s Cameron Green, an integral member of their Ashes squad. He lights up when discussing an unnamed New Zealand player who called him up when he received his first international cap to tell him, “It wouldn’t have happened without you, coach”.
He talks about addiction “stealing time” and years passing with little to show for them as he awaits his next opportunity, a chance to prove he’s not done yet. “I know all that exists is the moment that we are in,” he says. “I’ve just got to keep appreciating that and dealing with each moment and not get in a world in my head of regret and shame.”
The law of attraction holds some appeal for Reeve, a belief that he has some power of manifestation in the universe. “I always wanted to live in Queenstown (on New Zealand’s South Island),” he adds. “I always wanted to play for England. I always wanted four kids. I always wanted to try cocaine. All those things have actually occurred in my life.”
Dermot Reeve, in his role as Somerset coach at the time, speaks with Australia’s Shane Warne at Lord’s during a net session during the 1997 tour (Chris Turvey/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Now he wants to work again.
There has been the occasional bit of radio commentary in recent years and he will head to Hampshire in January to work with their academy on T20 bowling. He will be around next summer and believes his cricketing nous could prove beneficial if he is given a chance to prove the naysayers wrong once again.
These are small steps, not giant leaps, but it feels as though he is accumulating runs in singles, building an innings perhaps after just about navigating the new ball.
The future is uncertain but for Dermot Alexander Reeve, playing each ball on its merits, all that exists is what comes next.