RICHARD AUSTIN’S death in his native Kingston on Saturday, aged 60, cut short a life that began with optimism for a bright cricketing future and ended with years of debilitating cocaine addiction, ironically brought on by the very game at which he excelled.
It turned him from an exceptionally gifted all-round sportsman to a bedraggled vagrant, trawling the streets of Kingston, depending on sympathetic handouts from those who recalled his time as one of Jamaica’s finest sportsmen.
As I came to discover over time, the tall, slim individual known by the mystifying nickname as “Danny Germs” throughout his playing days, would chat intelligently and passionately in his more coherent moments about the state of West Indies cricket and his experiences for Jamaica and for West Indies which he represented under