What do you see? A man celebrating, right? That man, for those who don’t know, is New Zealand’s Craig McMillan. So, what’s McMillan celebrating? A century. That’s nice, right? A century that came off 67 balls. Gets better? Let me make it even better. A century off 67 balls against arch-rivals Australia in a chase of 347 when his team was down at 41/4 when he walked in. Sounds almost like some script of a movie, right?
Well, that’s a story that the scorecard could tell. Let me tell you a story that the scorecard wouldn’t and one that might make these set of photos bigger than the story told by the scorecard dated 20th February, 2007.
In 1991 at the age of 15, Craig McMillan’s cricketing aspirations were dealt with a major blow when he was diagnosed with diabetes. As a teenager, McMillan had the choice to probably walk away from a game that he loved but that would also take extra toll on his body because of his condition. But he didn’t. He chose to play the game he loved instead and didn’t allow diabetes to hamper his growth as a cricketer, making his New Zealand debut at the age of 21 as a batting all-rounder.
But playing with the condition wasn’t easy. In 1998, after scoring a century against Zimbabwe that required him to bat for four hours, his blood-sugar levels dropped so much that his speech started to get slow and awkward when he came out to the press conference later in the day. His subsequent days as a professional cricketer involved taking four insulin injections a day and keeping a bag of jellybeans handy when playing in case his blood sugar levels came down drastically.(5) Battling this condition, Gladiator, as he was called for his resemblance with Russell Crowe, played close to 50 Tests and about 200 ODIs in the first eight years of his career.
And then came June 2006. New Zealand Cricket announced the list of players who had been offered NZC contracts for the 2006/07 contract year and McMillan’s name wasn’t there. The cricketer was practically without work at the age of only 30. He went to play in the Lancashire League for a while but then decided to look for something that would take better care of him, something that at that point seemed wasn’t done too well by the game that he had given his life to. He encapsulated it best in his words when he said in an interview to Richard Boock, “I guess when something hits you that hard you have to start thinking ahead and that’s what I did."
And so he went looking elsewhere. The all-rounder could bat, bowl and field. But could he sell? He realised the answer was in the negative. McMillan went to a number of job interviews that could have made him a salesman but the man who faced Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar at their peak, somehow found the volleys thrown at him in the job interviews too hot to handle. He would admit to Boock later, “It was an interesting experience being so far out of my comfort zone; having to sit before two or three people and be questioned about things that I couldn’t possibly answer - because I hadn’t been in the workforce before.”
And now, late into 2006, in a life that he thought he would create away from the game, McMillan realised it wouldn’t be too easy, at least not being a salesman. If you’re still reading this, pause for a while and just imagine being in McMillan’s shoes at this point. Only 30 years of age with so much and so many years given to a sport that seemed to have given up on him and suddenly finding himself not so good enough for other conventional things. I hope you all realise that so many sportsmen whose stories we probably don’t even know of because they are not even told by anyone find themselves in a similar situation in their lives.
For McMillan, though, life did come back with a second chance. On 31st December 2006 against Sri Lanka, he turned out for New Zealand after a gap of more than a year. And about two months later, here was Macca, celebrating a century off 67 balls against Australia in a chase of 347 where he walked into bat with his team on 41/4 and helped the Kiwis eke out a one wicket win.
Irrespective of whatever happened to his career after this match, just take a second and try to imagine how it must have felt to be Craig Douglas McMillan that night, only months after being unable to answer questions at a job interview where, at best, he would have become a salesman.