Khrushchev and me
It was December 1968, and I was a twelve-year-old English schoolboy seriously obsessed with cricket. The sport’s headline news at the time concerned a thirty-seven-year-old South African-born, dark-skinned player named Basil D’Oliveira. The previous August, D’Oliveira had scored a magnificent century (baseball fans need only think of Reggie Jackson hitting three consecutive homers in the clinching game of the 1977 World Series to get the flavor) while representing his adopted home team of England in a match against Australia. Despite this achievement, just days later the English team’s selectors omitted D’Oliveira from a tour of South Africa that was due to follow in the winter. Was the decision taken on purely technical cricketing grounds?
