Conrad Hunte
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 West Indies (WI) |
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| Batting style | Right hand bat | |
| Bowling type | Right arm medium | |
| Tests | First-class | |
| Matches | 44 | 132 |
| Runs scored | 3245 | 8916 |
| Batting average | 45.06 | 43.92 |
| 100s/50s | 8/13 | 16/51 |
| Top score | 260 | 263 |
| Balls bowled | 270 | |
| Wickets | 2 | 17 |
| Bowling average | 55.00 | 37.88 |
| 5 wickets in innings | 0 | 0 |
| 10 wickets in match | 0 | 0 |
| Best bowling | 1/17 | 3/5 |
| Catches/stumpings | 16/0 | 68/1 |
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Test debut: 17 January 1958 |
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Sir Conrad Cleophas Hunte (May 9, 1932, St Andrew, Barbados - December 3, 1999, Sydney, New South Wales) was a West Indian cricketer and one of the best opening batsmen the West Indies has ever had.
[edit] Playing career
Conrad Hunte came from a large, poor family — he was the eldest of nine children of a sugar plantation worker. His talent as a batsman was spotted while he was at school, and made his first-class debut for Barbados at the age of 18, scoring 63 in his first innings.
He was expected to make his Test debut on the West Indies tour of England in 1957, and even moved to England in preparation, but he was surprisingly not included in the team; there were claims that a letter inviting him had not reached him.
He did make his Test debut the following winter against Pakistan at his home ground of Kensington Oval. He hit the first two balls that he faced, from Fazal Mahmood, for fours and made 142 runs in his first innings. In the third Test of the same series he made 260, including a partnership of 446 with Garfield Sobers which was then the second-highest partnership in history and is still the sixth highest[2] — Sobers went on to make a then world-record 365 not out as the West Indies reached 790 for 3 declared. In the fourth Test of the series, Hunte made another century. He finished his debut series with 622 runs at an average of 77.75, and the West Indies won the series 3-1.
After this successful start, Hunte was the West Indies' regular opening batsman for the next nine years, and vice captain of the team for eight of them. This was a successful period for the West Indies, in which they won seven of the ten series in which he played.
Hunte played a major role in West Indies' series win in England in 1963. He curbed his aggressive instincts as a batsman in order to build a solid platform for the innings. This was rewarded with two crucial centuries. He scored 182 in the first innings of the summer as West Indies won by 10 wickets. Then in the final Test of the summer, the West Indies needed to avoid losing to win the series. They were set 253 to win in the fourth innings, at that time regarded as a difficult target, with over two days to play. But Hunte scored 108 not out as the West Indies won by eight wickets, and won the series 3-1. Hunte finished the series with a batting average of 58.87, and was chosen as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1964.
After the tour to England, the captain of the West Indies, Frank Worrell, retired. Hunte expected to be appointed captain in his place, and when Garfield Sobers was chosen instead, he was bitterly disappointed, and for six weeks considered resigning himself. But he chose to continue playing, and in the next series, against Australia in 1965, he scored 550 runs, although without a century: he scored six fifties in ten innings, with a highest score of 89 and an average of 61.11. This was the record for the highest series aggregate without a century until Mike Atherton scored 553 in a six-Test series against Australia in 1993.
In total, Hunte played in 44 Tests between 1958 and 1967. Despite having 13 different opening partners in his Test career, he accumulated 3245 runs at an average of 45.06. He scored eight centuries, including at least one against every country he played against.
[edit] Life after cricket
Hunte was a committed Christian. The defining experience of his life was when in 1961, on the West Indies' tour of Australia, he saw the film The Crowning Experience, about the life of the black American educator, Mary McLeod Bethune. This film was promoted by Moral Re-Armament (MRA), a Christian organisation promoting absolute moral and ethical standards of behaviour, to which Hunte committed the remainder of his life.
Hunte made no secret of his beliefs. Some reports suggest that the other members of the West Indies team became tired of his constantly expressing them in the dressing room, and that this contributed to his not being awarded the captaincy in 1963.
Hunte retired from cricket in 1967, although he could possibly have continued for some more years, in order to work full time for MRA, promoting harmonious race relations. He wrote his autobiography, entitled Playing to Win, in 1971. After several years in Britain, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to help with the racial situation there. It was there that he met his wife Patricia, a local newscaster, with whom he had three daughters.
In 1991, as apartheid was coming to an end in South Africa, Hunte rang the director of the new United Cricket Board of South Africa, Ali Bacher, and offered to help develop cricket in the black townships and promote reconciliation between the races. He worked as National Development Coach, funded by the MCC, for seven years. He was knighted in 1998.
In 1999, with encouragement from the government of Barbados, he returned to the island of his birth. He was elected to the presidency of the Barbados Cricket Association, with plans to revive cricket in the country, but he died two months later, while in Australia to speak at a conference of the MRA.
