Clive Rice (right) with Richard Hadlee during their time together at Nottinhamshire County Club.

By Paul Weaver in London/The Guardian

The New Yorker magazine once described the polymath Clive James as “a brilliant bunch of guys”. Well Clive Rice, who died on Tuesday aged 66 after suffering with a brain tumour, was a brilliant bunch of cricketers—a pugnacious batsman, a challenging fast‑medium bowler, a safe slip fieldsman and, above all else, a leader with the heart and mind of a true warrior; Hannibal would have vacillated before him.
Younger supporters may wonder why the cricket world is making such a fuss over Rice. They will consult their smartphones and learn that his international record consists of only three one-day internationals, in which he scored 26 runs and took two wickets, at 57 runs apiece.
Rice, though, was a mighty cricketer, one who took on and often defeated the great all-rounders of his heady day. In the 1980s, when the only blimps at cricket grounds were colonels, and when the county game was as strong as it has ever been, he was a giant of the game.
It was his great misfortune to have been born in 1949. He made his first‑class debut in 1969, the year before South Africa were banished from international cricket because of the country’s policy of apartheid. He would have made his Test debut on the 1971-72 tour of Australia but it was cancelled.
He represented South Africa for the first time in Kolkata on November 10, 1991—as captain, naturally—and for the last time in New Delhi four days later. He was 42 and considered too old for the World Cup that followed in 1992.
Yet his performances for Nottinghamshire and Transvaal are still the talk of Trent Bridge and the Wanderers Stadium.
The shadows of great all-rounders were always poised to engulf him. He first captained Notts in 1978; Sir Garry Sobers, the greatest all-rounder of them all, had done the job 10 years before.
In the team he led to the County Championship in 1981 and 1987 it was another dual-purpose cricketer, Richard Hadlee, one of the finest fast bowlers in the game’s history, who hit more headlines. As arguments raged over the identity of the finest Test all-rounder of the time, between Hadlee, Kapil Dev, Imran Khan and Ian Botham (actually it was Imran), Rice was not included because he had never played Test cricket.
Even in his native South Africa the slightly older Mike Procter was the brighter star. He had sneaked in to play seven Tests before the tyro Rice was still making his way.
In first-class cricket there was not that much between the two. Procter scored 21,936 runs at 36.01 and took 1,417 wickets at 19.53. Rice scored 26,331 runs at 40.95 and claimed 930 wickets at 22.49. He always insisted, by deed and through character, on rubbing flannelled shoulders with the very best.
He did not look that frightening, at 6ft and a little over 13 stone. Even in his playing days most of his hair had gone, as if unable to gain a purchase on the rather pointy dome of his head.
The essence of his cricket was his character and his physical strength. He would drive the ball through the covers, and cut, with immense power. He was not a genuinely fast bowler but was “quick off the pitch”, surprising batsmen with his bounce even on pitches that looked ready for a sofa sale. There were yorkers, too, and a cunning change of pace. Rice came with everything.
You could see his determination in his fierce eyes, hear it in his cogent words. “He led from the front, setting high standards for himself and for everyone around him,” his old Notts team-mate Mike “Pasty” Harris said on Tuesday. “He was a very strong captain but fair too.”
Another of his players, Basher Hassan, said: “He always set his players targets, and if they didn’t hit them you would be out of the team. He asked me to get 1,000 runs in a season, which was OK. Then he said he wanted 30 wickets from me. ‘But I don’t bowl,’ I told him. He let me off because I was a good fielder. He also worked hard on training and physical fitness, which was not such a big thing in those days.”
Notts sacked him when he joined Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in 1978—but they soon reinstated him because he was simply too good.
My own memories, apart from his cricket, are of phoning him up in South Africa during the northern hemisphere winter. He was always fearlessly opinionated, a godsend for a cricket hack looking for copy, though he wanted to talk about fast cars much of the time.
And, always, there was that vibrant sense of competitiveness. He won three out of four single-wicket world all-rounder competitions, with Botham, Imran, Hadlee, Kapil and Malcolm Marshall, losing out to Imran in the other.
“Paddles (Hadlee) never beat me,” he said. “I know it irritates him.”
Hadlee paid a moving tribute to his former Notts teammate yesterday, describing the South African as one of the greatest cricketers never to have played a Test match.
“Whether it be Test cricket, whether it be one-day cricket, I can sit here and comfortably say that he would have competed with the best,” Hadlee said. “He was a tough, uncompromising captain. He led by example and demanded players lift their performances to win matches and championships.”
In an era when many of the world’s best players were involved in county cricket, Hadlee said Rice’s talents shone through because he had a point to prove over the Test ban.
“He tended to measure himself against quality opposition in county cricket, particularly the international Test players who were playing as overseas players,” the New Zealander said.
“The likes of Joel Garner, Imran Khan, Wayne Daniel, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding. When he batted he didn’t want to get out to them. They were wonderful bowlers but he wanted to score runs against them and dominate them. I can tell you here and now he was a high-class player... he was magnificent. That he could never play Test cricket is a loss not just for Rice but for the game itself.”
(With inputs from agencies)