Heath Davis

[_Ed_]

This has already come up in the Black Caps thread, but probably warrants a thread of its own IMO:

Finding Heath Davis

'There was a part of me that needed to break free and I wanted a partner to love. That was really all.'

thespinoff.co.nz

 

[Shady Slim]

worryingly quick

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

Good on him. It’s also quite reassuring that the Auckland team were accepting of him back in the day. A little bit surprising given how much attitudes have changed even since then. Clearly he still felt uncomfortable about being more open about it until now.

 

[Burgey]

That's a really touching article actually. Bloke obviously went though a lot. I hope he doesn't find the inherent tension between his faith and his ***uality overwhelming. Good luck to him.

 

[Smudge]

Heard a heck of a lot of stories about Davis - usually entertaining and without malice - from one of the guys featured in the video no less, but as is said, he may have thrived if he'd popped up 20 years later.

 

[Athlai]

The golden era of CW was when Phlegm and I believed Heef was Heath.

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

The golden era of CW was when Phlegm and I believed Heef was Heath.

That was all because Richard really creepily used people’s first names and I refused to let him know mine. It was all weird at the time, let alone in hindsight.

 

[Smudge]

The weirdest thing was discovering I was working in the same organisation as HeathDavisSpeed in 2008 but despite looking around everywhere, I couldn't spot a tall Maori fast bowler with bleached hair on any of the floors of head office.

 

[ankitj]

He has Maori roots? Never knew anyone from the community played international cricket.

Wish good life to Heath Davis!

 

[ankitj]

Also never knew that he was terrifyingly fast. Only remember him for being smashed around silly by Tendulkar in an ODI in 1997 which ended his career iirc.

Edit: scorecard

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

He has Maori roots? Never knew anyone from the community played international cricket.

Wish good life to Heath Davis!

Not huge numbers. Heath Davis, Adam Parore, Jesse Ryder, Daryl Tuffey, Trent Boult. Looking it up suggests a few others - Shane Bond, Doug Bracewell, Kyle Mills, Craig McMillan and Peter McGlashan. And then on the women's side, at least Susie Bates and Lea Tehuhu.

 

[ankitj]

That's quite a few. Mixed ancestry for many of them?

 

[Binkley]

That doco and article were really a revelation to me. I was at school with Heath, and we played cricket for the same club. “Different” is exactly how I thought of him. He always seemed to swing between outrageous and completely absent. Like at club functions he would make a short very loud and attention-seeking appearance and would then disappear and not be seen again. Similarly, on the field or in the nets he would veer wildly between bored and distracted and lethally focused. Which was scary as ****. I had no inkling of his ***uality (in fact, I remember him hitting on my sister a lot), but he always struck me as someone who didn’t really fit in, and was alternating between trying to fit in and not wanting to fit in at all and wanting to just **** everything up instead.

For a long time I felt really frustrated whenever I thought about him - my perspective being “he could have been great, if only he got his **** together”. I feel shitty about feeling that way now. Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes and all that. Kudos to him for achieving what he did, while still trying to figure out who he was. That really is remarkable and a real testament to him.

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

That's quite a few. Mixed ancestry for many of them?

Yep. Absolutely.

 

[thierry henry]

That doco and article were really a revelation to me. I was at school with Heath, and we played cricket for the same club. “Different” is exactly how I thought of him. He always seemed to swing between outrageous and completely absent. Like at club functions he would make a short very loud and attention-seeking appearance and would then disappear and not be seen again. Similarly, on the field or in the nets he would veer wildly between bored and distracted and lethally focused. Which was scary as ****. I had no inkling of his ***uality (in fact, I remember him hitting on my sister a lot), but he always struck me as someone who didn’t really fit in, and was alternating between trying to fit in and not wanting to fit in at all and wanting to just **** everything up instead.

For a long time I felt really frustrated whenever I thought about him - my perspective being “he could have been great, if only he got his **** together”. I feel ****ty about feeling that way now. Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes and all that. Kudos to him for achieving what he did, while still trying to figure out who he was. That really is remarkable and a real testament to him.

True, but also...seems a bit reductive to pin everything about him on "ah he was gay, that explains it", right? By all accounts he was a genuinely "different" guy in a lot of ways and it seems like he had certain personality traits that weren't going to lend themselves to a long and glorious cricket career. I dunno if this is me being churlish but I'm not sure if the message here is "Heath Davis would have been an ATG if society was more accepting of homosexuality".

Also everyone already knew this right? I've known this for like 20 years but now I can't work out how

 

[thierry henry]

Also funny how he says he played on acid, if you go to the YT video of his first ball in test cricket one of the old comments is just "this guy sold me LSD".

 

[Chubb]

Not huge numbers. Heath Davis, Adam Parore, Jesse Ryder, Daryl Tuffey, Trent Boult. Looking it up suggests a few others - Shane Bond, Doug Bracewell, Kyle Mills, Craig McMillan and Peter McGlashan. And then on the women's side, at least Susie Bates and Lea Tehuhu.

Peter McGlashan's sister Sara too.

For non-NZers, there are a lot of people who have mixed Maori-European ancestry in our country.

 

[thierry henry]

Not sure how someone could have seen Tuffey, Davis or even Ryder and just thought…there’s a white guy?

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

Not sure how someone could have seen Tuffey, Davis or even Ryder and just thought…there’s a white guy?

Tuffey, perhaps. But I think if you're missing the cultural context, it's not necessarily as obvious as we might think.

 

[Binkley]

True, but also...seems a bit reductive to pin everything about him on "ah he was gay, that explains it", right?

I am not trying to be reductive, but I talked about this with a non-binary friend of the same age today, and he felt Heath’s behaviour really reflected his own lived experience. In summary, my friend said he was a real dick as a young guy - and that this dickish behaviour wasn’t about being gay, it was about being self-hating and unable to be true to who he actually was.