Ali: The Life of Ali Bacher - Rodney Hartman

Does anyone in cricket deserve a 450-page biography, like this one of Ali Bacher? He is no Bradman, or WG. Gideon Haigh kept an interest in Warwick Armstrong going for 440 pages but, as a Test captain, Bacher was no Armstrong, and Rodney Hartman is no Haigh. If his editor were a disciplinarian, this exhaustive book would be shorter and even more interesting. Not every episode in Bacher's life requires rehearsal and justification.

But the story is well worth the telling. Not because of his playing days, although Bacher did captain the great South African side that demolished the Australians 4-0 in 1969-70 in the last Test series before the boycott began. He is clearly worth a long footnote in cricket history as the best of a tiny handful of Jews who have played Test cricket.

His father emigrated from Lithuania and his mother from Poland before the Nazis wiped out the Jews who were left. The Bachers settled in Johannesburg where well-educated Jewish boys like Ali were expected to become lawyers or doctors. Bacher was an accomplished opening bat but he also qualified as a doctor.

The good reason for this book is the crucial part Bacher played in the astonishing and peaceful transition from apartheid to black rule. Since South Africa is sports mad, the cricket officials were unusually significant figures and no other white committed himself to transition with the same zeal as Bacher. And yet no other cricket administrator had played with such skill the covert game of seducing good players from England, Australia and West Indies to join rebel tours and give a little credibility to apartheid.

Bacher did find it odd that, after he became managing director of the South African Cricket Union, he should enjoy the hospitality of his English cricket cronies while simultaneously negotiating behind their backs, but he is unapologetic. He did so, he says, because it was imperative that South Africans should not be allowed to forget international cricket - until the disastrous Gatting tour in 1989-90, that is, when Bacher was traumatised by the fierce anger of well-organised black demonstrators. He decided then that cricket would have to accommodate black and coloured players and officials if it was to survive in the new South Africa.

Bacher was industrious, decisive and sharp-tempered; he had great media savvy and well-developed marketing skills. (He had given up his medical practice to run a business making dishwashing liquid.) He is a doer not a thinker. Raymond White, who was president of SACU when Bacher was managing director, remarks: "Ali was not the easiest of people to deal with. He didn't seem to have a philosophical or political compass to guide his decision-making."

Bacher's instinctive pragmatism enabled him to deal with the tricky problem of team selection with hardly a qualm. Peter Pollock and Hansie Cronje insisted that merit was the only qualification for a place in the national team. Their intransigence so angered Bacher's great chum, the sports minister Steve Tshwete, that he threatened to bring in a law to make the selection of some black and coloured players mandatory. Bacher was forced to concede the principle of quotas for black and coloured players and cobbled together a compromise which kept the peace until Makhaya Ntini and Herschelle Gibbs were picked on merit.

It is easy to huff and puff about this, especially from a distance, but cricket in South Africa has so far avoided the capricious dismantling of the game that appears to be happening before our eyes in Zimbabwe. If mediation were required in Harare, Hartman's book would be a brilliant CV for a job application from Ali Bacher.