You may not have heard of Duncan Spencer. If you have, you’ll probably recall one or all of the following things: he bowled at the speed of light to Sir Viv Richards on live TV, he had serious injury problems, and he was the first player in Australian cricket to be banned for taking performance-enhancing drugs.
All those are true, but a 140-character biography barely skims the surface of an extraordinary life story. Spencer might just be England’s great lost fast bowler. And Australia’s. Even in a golden age of quick bowling, his volcanic pace stood out. Richards said Spencer was the fastest bowler he’d faced. Ricky Ponting, who almost had a fight with Spencer in the middle of a Sheffield Shield match, said he and Shoaib Akhtar were the quickest he came up against. Dennis Lillee described Spencer as “frightening”.
All of these compliments referred to the period before he retired due to injury at the age of 26, his body in such a state that he could barely dress himself. “He had a reputation a mile high and could have made a million dollars – he was that quick,” said Daryl Foster, his coach with Kent and Western Australia. “Unfortunately, he kept breaking down with back problems.”
For Spencer, fast bowling really was backbreaking work; he had four stress fractures by the age of 24. His speed was the gift that kept on taking. He was blessed with the ability to bowl at close to 100mph and cursed with a body that wouldn’t allow him to do that for long. The misfortune did not end there. When he made an improbable comeback with WA a few years after retiring, he found there was a sting in the fairytale. Spencer, who lived fast and bowled even faster, was brought down by a man called Speed – Malcolm Speed, the CEO of the Australian Cricket Board. Spencer was banned for 18 months after failing a drug test, a verdict that many perceived as savage.
In the end he played just 16 first-class games, taking 36 wickets at 39.22, and 20 List A games, in which he managed 23 wickets at 29.56. Those look like the numbers of a mediocre seamer who wasn’t quite up to it. They don’t tell much of a story either.
Spencer was born in Nelson, Lancashire, in 1972, and his family emigrated to Perth when he was five. An outdoors upbringing involved all kinds of sport, not just cricket. “I was probably a better soccer player than cricketer,” he says, “but you couldn’t really make it out here, the level wasn’t great.” Australia are football World Cup regulars now but they only reached the tournament once in the 20th century. Cricket, by contrast, was a way of life.
He started as a batsman and for a long time was unaware of his superpowers. Spencer was a third-change bowler until, one day, all those in front of him were injured and he had to take the new ball. “I bowled quite quick,” he says, “and that was the start of it all.” He was so impressive in fourth-grade cricket that he was fast-tracked into the first grade for the last two games of the season. He was 15 years old and bowling to Geoff Marsh, the Australian vice-captain, in his first game. Spencer caught Marsh’s eye, almost literally. Marsh relayed his admiration through his brother-in-law, who was captain of Spencer’s club. It was such a huge compliment that Spencer gave up all other sports, thinking for the first time that cricket might become a career.
Although he was short, and never grew beyond 5ft 8ins, Spencer was able to generate paint-stripping pace. “When I first played against him, at under-15s and under-17s, he looked like his run-up and action had been produced by a computer,” says Ryan Campbell, the Australia and Hong Kong batsman who both faced and kept to Spencer. “It was absolutely perfect. He had a very fast arm action as well. Because he’s a shorter guy he had a very large delivery stride; there was quite a big jump into his action.” That jump meant that, on the harder wickets in Perth, Spencer would land with such force that the spikes on his boots would often bend back. “That momentum through the run-up and the explosion at the crease were just incredible. We always joked that he had a V8 engine in the body of a Mini because he bowled so fast yet he was such a short guy. He wasn’t much fun to face in the nets, when no-balls weren’t exactly policed!”
Spencer became a rising star in WA and the only things that stalled his progress were two stress fractures when he was 17. A back operation was a complete success. Western Australia had a serious pace attack, with five Test bowlers in Bruce Reid, Terry Alderman, Brendon Julian, Jo Angel and Martin McCague. Foster brought McCague to England in 1991 and Spencer two years later. Both had dual citizenship, and McCague was famously called “the rat who joined the sinking ship” before his spectacular Test debut for England in the 1993 Ashes.
Spencer’s first high-profile match was against England, or rather England A, during a tour match at the WACA in 1992–93. He bowled 42 no-balls in 35 overs, a reflection of how things could go wrong when his rhythm was not quite right, yet he still made an impression and dismissed Mark Lathwell, Graham Thorpe and Graham Lloyd. He was so quick that the keeper Campbell stood outside the 30-yard circle. “He had us hopping around,” remembers Lloyd. “Very unpleasant to face: short in stature, quite erratic, but extremely fast through the air. Our batsmen were saying things like, ‘I don’t think I’ve faced anyone as fast as that.’” Lloyd played with Wasim Akram at Lancashire and felt Spencer’s pace was comparable: “I’d say he was as fast as Wasim, possibly even a bit quicker through the air in certain spells. He seemed to come and go pretty quickly. But as a one-off, and certainly at Perth, he was as fast as anything I faced.”
Spencer arrived in England a month later, just after his 21st birthday, with his girlfriend Tracy. “We’d only been together a few months,” he says. “I said to her: come over and enjoy it if you want, it’s a free holiday.” They are still together and have been married for over 20 years. One of the first things that struck Spencer when he arrived in England, as it would anybody from Perth, was how cold it was. He had no idea how significant that would be.
In his first three-day game for Kent’s second XI, against Leicestershire, Spencer took a hat-trick and had figures of six for 26 in the first innings. Two were bowled, three lbw. He was too fast, too straight, too much. “Nice way to start,” he chuckles. “The sun was out, I think.” When he made his County Championship debut a week later, the wicket-keeper Steve Marsh stood more than a pitch length away. At that stage he was a fantasy cricketer but not a Fantasy Cricketer: Spencer was still learning how to consistently turn his pace into the hard currency of wickets. He took none in 24 overs in his first four-day match against Essex and, in part because of injury, did not play another Championship match that season.
Spencer was used to playing just weekend cricket in Perth, so Foster wanted to ease him on to the county treadmill by using him in limited-overs matches.“I was very much aware of his history and how it could react on him,” says Foster. “We made sure not to overbowl him.” In his first season at Kent he did most of his work in the AXA Equity &Law Sunday League. These were glamorous times in domestic one-day cricket, which had been dragged kicking and screaming into the late 1970s: there was coloured clothing for the first time, and 50 rather than 40 overs to bring it in line with ODIs (though England still played 55 overs in home ODIs until their humiliation at the 1996 World Cup).
Kent were attempting to win their first trophy since 1978. They had a fine side, including England players past, present and future in Dean Headley, McCague, Mark Benson, Alan Igglesden, Mark Ealham, Matthew Fleming and Min Patel, not to mention Carl Hooper, a run-machine with charm and soul. The burden of history, however, was heavy: since winning their previous trophy, Kent had been runners-up seven times across all four domestic competitions.
Spencer’s first significant contribution came in a vital win over their title rivals Surrey in August. His first over in the first team for three months was a spectacular affair that included two no-balls, a wide, five consecutive short balls, a six, 14 runs – and the top-order wickets of Monte Lynch and David Ward, the latter cleaned up by a scintillating yorker.
His next match, a month later, was effectively a semi-final. If Kent lost their penultimate game to Northants, it was likely Glamorgan would win the Sunday League with a game to spare. Kent needed only 166 in 50 overs but slipped from 48 for 1to 141 for 7. Past failures seemed to have infiltrated their subconscious. Spencer came to the crease at No9 and hurried them over the line with some swaggering leg-side flicks. “He displayed the exuberance and blissful ignorance of youth by hitting four sumptuous fours,” wrote Jack Bailey in the Times. He only made 17 not out but in the context of the season, and the collapse, it was the best innings of his career to date.
The win ensured their final game at home to Glamorgan two weeks later would be a title decider. For Spencer, the match had even greater meaning: Glamorgan’s overseas player was his boyhood hero.
Spencer had started as a batsman, so Viv Richards was one of his idols, along with Lillee and Malcolm Marshall. He had posters on his bedroom wall – the result of working at Slazenger, where Richards was a brand icon. In 1988, a 16-year-old Spencer had a special treat after school one night: he was used as a net bowler in Perth during West Indies’ tour of Australia. “I got Viv’s autograph, and that was a big thrill,” says Spencer. A bigger thrill was denied him. “I didn’t get to bowl to him in the nets. I was bowling to some of the other batters and I tried to sneak across, but I kept getting in trouble.”
The idea of bowling to Richards within five years, especially in such a big game, was unthinkable. “I didn’t say anything to anyone but I was desperate to play,” he says. “I didn’t really care what happened, to be quite honest, I just wanted to bowl to him.” Spencer was in decent form, and had routed a strong Zimbabwe top order in a tour match a week earlier. He was twelfth man for the four-day match, which was played alongside the Sunday League game, and had a bat signed by Richards on the Saturday night. “I was having a shower when he walked in – we had open showers back then – and he said: ‘Hi Duncan, how you going? I saw you bat against Northants, that was beautiful.’ I was amazed he even knew me.”
The Championship match was a dead rubber, so when Kent led by 380 after the first innings they decided not to enforce the follow-on. The plan was to rest their bowlers and tire out Glamorgan’s before the Sunday League decider the following day. Reports of what happened next vary, but it would be fair to say Richards was not entirely enamoured of the decision. His reaction has gone down in Glamorgan folklore; their players talk with wonder of Richards, wearing nothing but a towel, banging on doors and shouting at the Kent captain Steve Marsh: “You fuck with the game, Marsh, the game will fuck with you!” Some of the Kent team, including Marsh, have no memory of it, though Spencer says he can “vaguely remember a bit of shouting going on.” Whether it was a sincere reaction or a contrived grievance to raise spirits, it worked; the downbeat mood among the Glamorgan players disappeared almost instantly.
A crowd of 12,000 turned up for the title decider the following day. Many started queuing at 4am, and Canterbury became a temporary colony of Wales. Glamorgan had been 500-1 to win the league with some bookies after a poor start to the season. They were seeking their first trophy in 24 years; Kent were chasing their first in 15 years. Even the gods were caught up in the romance of the occasion: they gave the match a glorious backdrop by providing rare late-September sunshine.
Deep down Spencer knew he would play, though it was not confirmed until the morning of the match. A nervous Kent made 200 for 9 batting first. It was under par, especially against a batting line-up that included Richards, Hugh Morris, Steve James, Matthew Maynard and Adrian Dale, who was in the form of his life and had just been picked for his first England A tour.
They were cruising at 81 for 1 after 24 overs when Spencer gave the match an intravenous injection of adrenaline. Glamorgan had heard about his pace on the grapevine but had never seen him bowl. His first ball was a rabble-rouser, short and aimed at the head. Dale shaped to sway outside the line of the ball, realised it was following him and ended up lunging inside the line. It screamed past the back of his head to prompt a lusty roar from the crowd. There were oohs and aahs in the BBC commentary box from Jonathan Agnew and Vic Marks. “Well, that’s sharp!” exclaimed Agnew. “Not bad for a loosener,” said Marks. “Dale ducked almost posthumously.”
The rest of the over included a wide yorker that beat Dale for pace, another yorker that was superbly defended, a full-length delivery that kicked to such an extent that the keeper Marsh took it at shoulder height, and finally another nasty short ball that followed Dale and cracked his rib. The non-striker Morris walked down to see if Dale was OK. “Sharpen up,” said Dale. “This boy’s got pace.”
In one over, Spencer had completely changed the mood of the match. Kent fans had fresh hope; neutrals were caught up in the primal thrill of seeing a proper fast bowler for the first time. Even Agnew and Marks – experienced, high-class broadcasters – conveyed a childlike excitement.
The batsmen were not the only ones forced to take a backward step: within a few deliveries of the first over, the Kent captain and wicket-keeper Marsh had gone back 10 yards. “He had serious, serious wheels,” said Marsh. For the next few exhilarating overs, Glamorgan’s batsmen were either beaten or beaten up. The number of times the ball vroomed past the bat, often when the batsman was barely halfway through his stroke, verged on the comical.
Dale was dismissed by Headley in the next over, and the new batsman Maynard didn’t last long; Spencer beat him for pace and trapped him plumb lbw. “Had he bowled that the next 10 times he played against me, he probably would have got me out 10 times,” says Maynard. “He had some proper gas, did Duncan.”
Spencer broke into a boyish smile as he high-fived his team-mates. It was a dual-purpose wicket: he had dismissed Maynard and brought Richards to the crease. There was a standing ovation from both sets of supporters as Richards, playing his last professional game, sauntered to the wicket. At 41, he was 20 years older than Spencer. Some players are intimidated or overwhelmed by bowling at their heroes. When Arthur Mailey dismissed Victor Trumper, he said he felt like “the boy who had killed a dove”. There were no such concerns for Spencer, who bowled like a man who wanted to skelp the aged. Straight away he hit Richards in the ribs and split his batting glove with a vicious lifter.
When another short ball was dug in soon after, Richards’ pride kicked in and he snapped into a pull shot. It was on him far too quickly and looped up in the air to David Fulton at square leg. Richards was walking off the field when everyone realised that the umpire David Constant had signalled a no-ball – one of only two from Spencer in the innings. The front-on replays suggested the ball was only at chest height, although Spencer thought it was given for height. “I walked back and looked at my footmark, and my foot was landing in the hole beautifully every time. And it was a pretty late call. I never actually asked because I didn’t want to know.” Constant did not begin to signal a no-ball with his left hand until after Richards top-edged the ball towards Fulton, though he says he had called it long before then. The more one-eyed Kent supporters thought it was a sympathy call because it was Richards’ last game. It became a bit of unsolved mystery among Kent fans, especially as there were no side-on replays to show where Spencer had landed. Constant says it was “definitely a front-foot jobby,” and disputes that it was a late call. “All my no-ball calls throughout my career were at the same tempo, as were my ‘out’ signals to the batsmen,” he says. The square-leg umpire Gerry Stickley and the non-striker Morris are also sure it was for overstepping rather than height. James, the Glamorgan opener, said in his autobiography that it was a case of the game fucking with Kent, just as Viv had promised 24 hours earlier.
After that Richards put away the hook, a significant compliment to Spencer, but the reprieve winded Kent. “We knew we had to get Richards out to win the game,” says Foster. “I don’t think we really recovered from that.” Richards gave a couple of reminders of his pomp, most notably a storming drive over mid off for four off Spencer, but this was primarily a triumph of will rather than skill. He played with fierce determination and dragged Glamorgan towards victory.
When Spencer returned for a second spell late on, he knew it was over. “I had nothing left,” he says. “I was so tired from the adrenaline and the emotion. I’d never played in front of a crowd like that or in a situation like that. I couldn’t keep my emotions in control – I was knackered before I even bowled! It was so exciting for me. I had the shakes. I gave it my all for those first six overs and I was done.”
Glamorgan won comfortably, by six wickets and with 16 balls to spare. Richards was still there, 46 not out, when Tony Cottey hooked the winning runs, and wept with joy in the dressing-room after the game. Spencer ended with figures of 8.4-1-43-1. There are lies, damned lies and bowling figures.
Richards did not say much to Spencer during the game – just a quick “Sorry, my man” as they high-fived after an accidental collision, a playful image that was on the cover of the next month’s Wisden Cricket Monthly. “I remember Viv talking about him after the game,” says Dale. “He said: ‘That boy hit the bat hard,’ and he really pronounced it. ‘He hit the bat hhhhhhhard.’”
After the game Spencer sought out Richards to congratulate him on the win and his career. “And he actually said to me, ‘That’s the quickest bowling I’ve ever faced.’ I looked at him and said: ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Man, that was fucking quick! And that’s a slow wicket.’”
When Spencer returned to Perth to play for WA in the Australian summer of 1993–94, his Kent team-mate Igglesden didn’t expect to see him again, except on his TV screen. “Spencer’s one of the fastest bowlers I’ve ever seen, he’s quite phenomenal really,” he said. “He’s just unbelievable, and I honestly can’t see him coming back to Kent. Australia are playing a lot and I can see him getting an ODI appearance at least.”
The England A squad to tour South Africa had been named a few days before the Glamorgan match. The impression Spencer made in that game was such that, had the squad been announced a few days later, he might well have made the tour on potential. Word was starting to spread, and he was the subject of a full-page feature in the Melbourne Age, with the headline “The Great White Hype”. “They don’t come any quicker in world cricket,” said Foster, “except maybe Allan Donald.”
Foster gave Spencer his Sheffield Shield debut just over a month after his duel with Richards. “I didn’t have a great season,” says Spencer, who played eight matches and took 20 wickets at 37.50. “I felt I should have taken more wickets and bowled a little bit better, but I was starting to learn my trade and find my rhythm a lot more.”
It was a unique education. This was the most powerful era of domestic batting in the game’s history: a year later, in the quadrangular one-day tournament also involving England and Zimbabwe, Australia A had a top six of Greg Blewett, Matthew Hayden, Damien Martyn, Michael Bevan, Justin Langer and Ponting. That was the reserve team. Adam Gilchrist couldn’t even get in the squad.
Spencer chuckles regularly as he reflects on his run-in with Ponting on a flat one at Hobart in 1993, though there wasn’t much mirth at the time. Ponting, the golden child of Australian cricket, and Jamie Cox were cruising towards centuries when, after tea, WA captain Geoff Marsh asked Spencer to raise hell. “I gave him three bouncers in a row,” remembers Spencer, “and he turned to the umpire and said: ‘How many are you going to let him fuckin’ bowl?’ I said: ‘What are you fuckin’ whingeing about, you’re on 90-odd and this pitch is a road!’”
They were playing testosterone cricket. The next ball was short, wide and smashed towards gully, where Julian took a blinder. “It was an absolutely awesome catch. We were all yahooing and telling him where to go, and then the umpire called no-ball! Of course Ponting had a smirk on his face, so the boys were pretty upset. I gave him another short one and he spat the chewy again and then I thought: ‘I’ve got to pitch this one up or the umpire’s going to nail me.’
“I pitched it up, he blocked it and it went off towards cover. He shaped like he was going to take a run, so I picked it up and threw it at the stumps. Trouble was that as he turned to get in the way of the stumps, it just went past his head. If it hit the stumps I reckon he might have been out. He turned around and said: ‘You do that again, I’ll wrap this fuckin’ bat around your head.’ I walked down the wicket and said: ‘Well, don’t let me hold you back!’”
Ponting dropped his bat and the two players ran at each other, bumping chests in the middle of the pitch before players and umpires separated them. After a couple more overs, mostly pitched up, Spencer was given a rest. That night, after play, he went to a nearby pub for a meal with his captain Marsh and bumped into Ponting – though not literally this time. “I went up to him and said: ‘How you goin’, mate?’ and then we had a beer together and a laugh,” Spencer says. “We played against each other again and we never had a problem. It was two young blokes with massive egos and a bit of passion.”
Allan Donald calls it “a touch of the Rodney Hoggs” – the bit of bully that all fast bowlers need. Hogg was the nasty Australian fast bowler of the 1970s and 1980s who was described as a “lunatic” – by himself, in the title of his autobiography. In Spencer’s view, “As a quickie, you’ve got to have that bit of shit about you. If you don’t, you’re about as good as a blow-up dartboard.” Ryan Campbell, who kept to and faced Spencer, agrees: “He is a magnificent fella, who loves a beer and loves to enjoy life, but he also had the white-line fever and he wanted to kill everyone. If you had a bat in hand you were enemy No1. It’s the same with all fast bowlers.”
Though Spencer thrived on confrontation, he felt he bowled better when he was calm rather than angry – as against Glamorgan, where he had a relaxed rhythm and was in the zone. The more Spencer played, the less he sledged. He resented players who “hid behind the white line” by becoming tough guys when they went on the field. His guiding principle was: “Would you say that to someone in the pub?”
The grind of county cricket also inadvertently helped calm him down. “We played so often and I ran out of lines in the first two games. You can’t call everyone a wanker! You get angry anyway – that’s part of the job of fast bowling – and I always had an aggressive nature. But I became a better cricketer by controlling my aggression. I found I bowled a lot better and was able to get my rhythm a lot more.”
When he had that rhythm, he joined an elite club. “What power there is in bowling fast!” wrote Frank Tyson in 1961. “What a sensation of omnipotence, and how great the gulf between this sublime sensation and ordinary, mundane everyday existence!” Spencer is one of maybe 20 or 30 people to frequently experience that sublime sensation.
“It’s an unbelievable feeling,” he says. “If you get your rhythm and timing and everything just clicks, it feels effortless. Some days it’s going through and it feels like nothing; other days you’re running and bustling in and really trying to bowl fast, and you think you’re bowling fast but you’re not.”
Some sceptics thought that was down to attitude; that there were days when he didn’t fancy the hard yakka. Spencer and Foster say it was about rhythm rather than mood. “I was always pretty ordinary if I didn’t get my rhythm,” says Spencer. “I’d search for it and sometimes, by doing that, I’d make it even worse. Guys would come up to me and say, ‘Why aren’t you bowling quick, what’s going on?’ I’d say, ‘I’ve got no rhythm!’ You could see they thought I was holding back or whatever. It’s hard to explain to guys who haven’t done it.”
Foster, who watched him bowl more than anyone at Kent and WA, agrees. “He varied a lot. When he had his rhythm and he didn’t have his niggles, he was as quick as anybody. He was a very difficult customer at his peak, though that didn’t always happen. He didn’t have the ideal body type to be a fast bowler, so you had to accept that some days would be better than others. He tended to get a few soft-tissue injuries. Quite often they weren’t enough to put him out of the game, but they were enough to impede his performance. A fast bowler has to be seasoned. You can’t just expect them to come out and bowl fast every time. But when he was on song he was magnificent. He was a natural athlete with freakish ability. You don’t expect a short bloke, even with such a smooth run-up, to bowl as fast as that.”
Spencer gathered momentum through a menacing run-up of around 16 paces, before an explosion from his shoulder at the crease. “The run-up was really important to me,” he says. “I always accelerated through my run-up so when I hit the crease I was generally flat out. If I had a good rhythm from my run-up I tended to bowl really fast.”
He certainly bowled fast against Glamorgan. To the naked eye it looks comfortably in excess of 95mph, though we will never know for certain. Spencer’s speed was only ever recorded when he was a teenager, when he won a competition despite bowling off three paces because of injury. The speed gun was not regularly used until the late 1990s. Cricket fans thought in acronyms rather than metrics: RM, RFM, RF. Spencer was more of an RFF. “There are two types of fast bowling,” says Campbell. “There’s fast, like the guys we face today who bowl 140kmh; that’s quick. But then there’s the next bracket, and with the next bracket you know you’re alive as it’s winging past your ears. It’s appreciably faster. I faced Shoaib Akhtar and Brett Lee, and Duncan was up there with those two. There’s no doubt that at times he hit the mid-150s.”
In his autobiography, Ponting said that Spencer and Shoaib were the fastest bowlers he faced. “I was quite surprised by that,” says Spencer. “When you realise both Ponting and Viv have said it, you think: ‘Yeah, I must have been up there.’” Although his run-up was important, there was no magic secret. “You can’t teach people to bowl fast,” he says. “It’s like sprinters. You’re born with fast-twitch muscle fibres that fire quicker than anyone else’s, and that’s why you can bowl fast. You can teach people to bowl better but you can’t teach them to bowl fast.”
He agrees with Kevin Pietersen’s observation that anyone who says they enjoy facing fast bowling is a liar. “Yeah, absolutely. You’d have a few beers with batters after the game, and the first thing they’d say is: ‘Ah, I love it when you bounce me, the hook shot’s my favourite shot.’ All this sort of stuff. Then they get a few beers into them and they go, ‘I’d love to bowl as fast as you because I’d just bowl a bouncer every ball!’ You just think, ‘Yeah mate, no worries, you dumb prick, you’ll cop it tomorrow!’ That’s batters, mate, can’t hold their piss.
“Did I enjoy scaring batsmen? Well, yeah! Who doesn’t? It’s a natural instinct. It’s almost like being a bully. You don’t want to refer to yourself as a bully, but you’ve got a power the batsmen don’t have. You always felt that if you could intimidate a batsman then you had a big chance of getting him out. Whatever it took. I hurt a couple of guys badly. I broke a guy’s jaw – that was a colts game, I was only about 17 – and I hit another guy and crushed his thumb. I hit Ronnie Irani on the helmet, bust his helmet in half. Mind you, he was on about 160 at the time.”
Those moments were put in a different context by the death of Phillip Hughes in 2014, when Sean Abbott bowled a bouncer that had unimaginable consequences. “I spoke to a good mate of mine, Paul ‘Blocker’ Wilson [who played one Test for Australia in the 1990s],” says Spencer. “We both said: ‘Jeez, that could have happened to us at any time in our career.’ We both hit a lot of blokes. You want to hit them and even hurt them, make no mistake, but you want to see them get up. It’s a really fine line. I hit someone in grade cricket and smashed his helmet to pieces. It bust his jaw and everything. He went down immediately, and straight away a couple of the boys grabbed me and took me back to my mark. They didn’t want me to look at him because he was a bit of a mess. I felt a bit crook in the guts, to be quite honest. He went to hospital, I sent my best wishes and hoped he was alright, and he was. I caught up with him a few months later and he was fine; he didn’t hold any grudges. We ended up playing against each other again and he played really well. I did bounce him, yeah.”
The decline in fast bowling saddens Spencer. He admires players such as Ben Stokes – “He’s got a bit of shit about him, hasn’t he?” – but wishes there was more extreme pace. “There aren’t many guys who bowl really fast with genuine hostility, so someone like Mitchell Johnson really stood out because he was aggressive and bowled bouncers. Well, fuck me, there were four West Indians doing it in the ‘80s and ’90s!
“It might be a generational thing – it is hard work being a fast bowler, and the guys work out pretty quickly that if they want to make money from the game, they should back off a bit. I didn’t have the temperament to do that. I didn’t know when to stop, or when to back off and bowl within myself. I couldn’t slow down.”
At the start of the 1994 English summer, Spencer felt better than ever. “I got really, really fit after the Shield season, because the wear and tear is pretty hard in England,” he says. “I was a bit quicker, starting to really hit my straps and was learning a lot more.” After watching New Zealand’s Danny Morrison, he smoothed his run-up to get closer to the stumps, which increased his chances of lbws and made his bouncer harder to evade. Ray Illingworth, the new England supremo, put him on a long list of players to watch. “I didn’t really have a preference between England and Australia,” Spencer says. “I’d have been very happy to play for either.”
At the start of May, he took 7 for 47 in a second XI game at Taunton despite suffering with flu to the extent that he did his warm-up stretches in a boiling-hot bath. His pace was such that a young Marcus Trescothick gloved a six over third man. Spencer bowled even better in a Sunday League match at Chelmsford, stealing some of the headlines from Graham Gooch, who had been recalled by England that morning. He bowled Nick Knight and Nasser Hussain in the same over and ended with figures of 2 for 16 from eight overs.
There were bad days too. Bill Athey took him for 25 in a single over of a County Championship match at Tunbridge Wells, and he had a poor game against Nottinghamshire in front of the selector Brian Bolus. But he was a regular in the four-day team and was clearly going in the right direction. The manner in which the Lancashire batsmen effused about his pace put him on the radar of the England captain Mike Atherton, and he was mentioned in dispatches in a couple of previews of the England squad announcement for the second Test against New Zealand.
A consequence of being a four-day regular was an increased workload – not helped by the fact that Spencer wanted to bowl long spells. At the start of June he began to feel back pain, a concern for anybody who has had stress fractures as a teenager. He spoke to Foster and they both concluded it was just muscle soreness, another soft-tissue injury. You get pains in your legs before a stress fracture, and Spencer had none of that.
On Sunday 12 June, he was included in the Kent side to play Middlesex. “I was bowling my fourth over to Mark Ramprakash, I think, and I started getting a bit sore during the over,” he says. “I thought: ‘There’s something not right here.’ So I backed off a bit. Then, and I don’t know why, I really decided to let one go.”
It’s often said that tired bowlers can’t feel their legs. Spencer literally couldn’t. The bottom half of his body went numb as he bowled the ball, and the next thing he knew he was lying flat out on the pitch. Eventually he was helped off the field and into the dressing-room. Spencer is a tough man, but he broke down in tears straight away. “I knew I’d done something bad,” he says wearily. “Yeah, I knew.”
Spencer was living in a flat at Kent’s ground at the time. He went home and “tried not to think about it” for the night. He had x-rays the following day; they showed no stress fractures and he began his rehab. But there was no improvement, so a couple of months later, he flew back to Australia to prepare for the 1994–95 season. He continued to make no progress, however, and was used as a guinea pig for a new MRI machine. It showed two stress fractures, one on each side of the back, joint damage, “the whole works”. He had an operation and missed the entire Australian summer.
“The biggest problem I had was that I kept playing,” he said. “I ended up bowling with stress fractures, because you don’t want to be called a weak prick, you know? I destroyed facet joints and things like that. The only thing I didn’t have was disc problems, thank god. I wanted to keep bowling, but my back couldn’t handle that. It was no one’s fault. With fast-twitch muscle fibres, your body takes a lot longer to recover – I know that now, but I didn’t then – and so you’re bowling when you’re still really sore. I’d talk to other guys and ask: ‘Are you sore?’ and they’d say, ‘Nah, I’m not too bad.’ And then people question your fitness and things like that. But I was pretty fit and strong. I was a strong boy, I just couldn’t handle the day-in, day-out of it all.
“I was young and didn’t really understand how to look after myself. I was training a few nights a week in 40-degree heat, playing on a Saturday and occasionally on a Sunday; then all of a sudden I’m in England trying to bowl fast every day. The cold weather probably did a fair bit of damage – I still don’t like the cold, it makes me bloody ache even now.”
In his book One-Man Committee, a superb document of a fascinating period in English cricket, Illingworth makes it sound as if Spencer had a series of minor niggles. “Spencer turned out to be a big disappointment,” he wrote, “mainly because he could not stay fit and played only four games all summer.” In 1994, with the internet in its infancy, news travelled slowly. Atherton recalls how Lloyd, who was fascinated with Spencer’s pace, would look at the county scores in the Lancashire dressing-room every morning and announce: “Spencer’s still not playing!”
To all intents and purposes, Spencer disappeared. He was unable to bowl for two years, but captained WA second XI in 1995–96 and played as a batsman, finishing as second-highest run-scorer. “I could actually bat,” he says. “I probably didn’t apply myself enough at first-class level. I could have done better with the bat – confidence-wise, I didn’t back myself enough.”
He came back to Kent for the 1996 summer with a view to bowling again. “I just wanted to play. I think I came back a bit early. The stress fractures from 1994 hadn’t healed fully; I kept opening those guys up. I remember coming off after a second XI game, and the coach said to me: ‘Mate, you alright?’ And I said: ‘Nah, nah, I’m not.’ He said: ‘Mate, you’re white as a ghost.’
“I was playing in total pain, I had pain going down both legs to my feet, and I was really, really struggling. So I flew home, back to the doctor, another stress fracture, and it wouldn’t heal. It’s the time it takes as well – over those years everything took so much time with the rehab and recovery. I’d come back, and then I’d do it again. It was so frustrating. It meant more x-rays and more rehab and more time away from the game. In the end I thought, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough.’ I retired.” He was 26.
In the next couple of years, Spencer started to reshape his life. “Mentally it was pretty tough. I couldn’t play golf, I couldn’t cast a fishing rod, I couldn’t even mow the lawn. It was just pathetic. When you’re a very physical guy, it’s very hard when you struggle even to put your undies on in the morning.” His doctor eventually prescribed Nandrolone to heal the muscle wastage after his last operation. “He told me I had little option,” says Spencer. “I had to go to work, and get on with everyday life.” He did a few odd jobs for mates, but money was tight and, with his first child on the way, Spencer decided to take a series of diplomas in fitness training. He set up his own studio as a personal fitness trainer and also became a bodybuilder.
“With all my back injuries, I took a keen interest in finding out what was going on,” he says. “I felt the physios weren’t quite right in what they were saying because I wasn’t getting any better.” Later his local club asked him to coach, and he started to bat in the nets. He returned to the gym, too, and was free of pain for the first time in years.
He stopped taking Nandrolone in July 2000. A few months later, Spencer tried to bowl medium pace in the nets. To his surprise, there was no pain. “So I just went a little bit quicker and a little bit quicker and built up, and I felt like I was 20 years old again.” He had been bowling for around a month when he returned to grade cricket with Melville. He took a five-fer in his first game against a Midland-Guildford side that included Tom Moody, who was also captain of WA. Even after so long out of the game, he was probably faster than anyone else in Australia, bar Brett Lee. “I had to make a lot of changes to my action,” he says. “I was still sharp but I was nowhere near as quick as I was. I don’t think I was anyway.”
After the game Moody told Spencer to get fit as he was going to play in the second half of the Mercantile Mutual Cup, Australia’s main domestic one-day tournament, a couple of months later. “You’re dreaming, Tom,” said Spencer, and thought nothing more of it. On New Year’s Eve, two days before the tournament resumed, Spencer got a call to say he was playing. He had to arrange time off work, and didn’t even have his own shirt. In his first game, the man with Robbie Baker’s name on his back took 4 for 43 in a seven-run victory over Victoria. He went back to work the next day. It was all very ad hoc; Spencer was given a contract in the car park. “I didn’t even know what it was,” he says. “I thought it was fan mail, so I took it home with me. I read it and was surprised by the figure so I thought: ‘Yeah, I’ll sign that!’” When someone offers you a fairytale, you don’t read the small print.
Despite missing the first half of the tournament, he was one of the leading wicket-takers with 11 at 22.36, and his strike rate of 21.81 was the second-best in the tournament. Western Australia got to the final, where they were beaten by a Michael Bevan masterpiece. Shane Warne, who was dismissed for a golden duck by Spencer during the tournament, wanted him at Hampshire and arranged talks with the chairman Rod Bransgrove. Kent were also interested in taking him back to Canterbury. Spencer had a week to make his decision. Then the phone rang.
“Tested positive for what?” Spencer was confused when was told by a lady on the phone that he had failed a routine drug test after the final of the Mercantile Mutual Cup. He was told it was for Nandrolone, which made him even more confused: he had not taken it for over six months. “What I didn’t realise is that this stuff stays in your system for up to 18 months.” When he had last taken Nandrolone, he had no idea he would ever play grade cricket again, never mind for WA. “That was one of the big issues. At no stage was I given a drug talk or anything like that, because I came in halfway through the season. The WA doctor copped an earful from the ACB but I didn’t blame him or the procedures. I didn’t blame anything; it was just one of those things.
“I was backed by a guy called Doc Larkins, who’s a doctor for the AFL and pretty high profile. He read the story and said: ‘There’s no way he’s done anything wrong,’ and he was happy to put his reputation on the line. Even the Australian doctor said the levels I had in my system would have given me no benefit whatsoever. Yet they still banned me from all cricket for 18 months. It was Malcolm Speed. He was going for the ICC job, so he was just trying to prove he was tough and able to deal with things.”
Drugs in sport were a big issue at the time, with the ACB introducing an anti-doping policy in 1998, and many felt Spencer was a political patsy. His ban was reduced from the minimum 24 months to 18, with the Anti-Doping Committee acknowledging a number of mitigating factors, including the relatively small level of Nandrolone in his system, the fact he had not received a copy of the ACB drug policy and the improbability of him playing for WA when he took Nandrolone.
The official report of the hearing has not been made public but a Cricket Australia spokesman said the Committee regarded his back trouble as the “primary but not sole motivation” for taking Nandrolone, and that they thought he was “seeking to improve his back to the point where he could bowl fast again”. Spencer does not agree.
The Committee did not describe Spencer as a cheat. It didn’t matter; in the media, his name was still casually etched onto the list of drug cheats.“That’s uneducated people taking potshots from the outside,” says Campbell, who was in the WA squad with Spencer. “We were with him the whole time, and the fact is that he took medication from his doctor to get his life back, so that he could look after his kids and things like that. It was an administration error that wouldn’t happen today. In the modern world, if you make a mistake you’re a drug cheat. I understand why the drug agencies have to do that but unfortunately some people get caught in the middle and Duncan was one of them.”
Being called a cheat rankled, as did subsequent shorter bans for higher-profile players such as Shane Warne. “They proved they don’t give a shit about the small person in the game,” says Spencer. His voice is normally chipper and effervescent. Even when he is describing the bad times, his stories are punctuated with laughter; now, suddenly, he sounds sad and weary. “Everyone knows I didn’t try to cheat. It’s just bollocks, man. Being called a drug cheat really pissed me off.
“I copped a few pretty bad articles that were completely inaccurate. I spoke about where I stuffed up, and my lack of knowledge of how long it stayed in your system. To be fair, I’d do it again. I got my life back. The only thing I’d do differently is that, if I knew I had a banned substance in my system, I wouldn’t have played. I had plenty of supportive phone calls from players around Australia. The people who’d had a beer with me from other teams knew what I was like, and that it wasn’t my way of doing things. I didn’t cheat. That certainly wasn’t the issue. I sleep at night.”
Western Australia would not pay for Spencer to appeal and he decided it was not worth the financial risk. “I decided to cop it on the chin,” he says. “If I was younger and I didn’t have a family, I probably would have taken them on. But we’d just had two boys, we were just keeping our heads above water, and there was no way I was going to put the house on the line.”
In some ways the ban is a red herring in the Spencer story. He was 29 and had a new life. The back injury against Middlesex in 1994, when he seemed to be hurtling towards stardom, is the biggest “what if” of his career. “By 2001 I had a job; my career was over really. After about two weeks it started to die down and I just got on with my life.”
Spencer served his ban and then resumed playing grade cricket at weekends while doing his day job as a fitness trainer. After an excellent winter with Melville in 2005–06, he was recommended to Sussex by the former Zimbabwe batsman Murray Goodwin. He was given a short-term contract and, at the age of 34, played first-class cricket for the first time in 12 years. He also took the wicket of Kumar Sangakkara – Spencer’s last in first-class cricket. After two months he left Sussex, unhappy with their offer. “I wasn’t going to play for peanuts,” he says. “You either want me or you don’t.” The Northamptonshire coach Kepler Wessels wanted him – and then Wessels was sacked. Spencer flew back to Australia, returning to play for Buckinghamshire and also Tring later in the English summer along with his mate Blocker Wilson. They offered him a contract for 2007. “To be quite honest, I’d just have been taking the money because I’d lost the passion for it then.” This time, he retired for good.
There are some who might sniff at Spencer’s career figures – 16 first-class matches, an average of 39.22 – and wonder what the fuss is about. Those who saw him, and especially those who stood 22 yards away, will be able to explain.
Besides, all bar two of those matches were played by the age of 22. Spencer was still learning how to bowl. When he collapsed against Middlesex in 1994, he had taken 34 first-class wickets at 36.97. At the same age, Tyson and Jeff Thomson – the two fastest bowlers of all time – had taken one first-class wicket between them.
The infinity of potential appeals to the romantic in most sports fans. Add that to Spencer’s charisma and raw speed, the most thrilling thing in cricket, and it’s no surprise he is remembered by many. In a parallel universe he might be a superstar. “People say, you’d have done this and you’d have done that, but we’ll never know,” he says. “The first couple of years when I was injured I was really frustrated, but after that I knew I was finished. I’m pretty well at peace with it now. There’s more to life. You don’t realise that until you get a bit older.”
Foster is not sure how good he could have been.“It’s hard to tell. He was very, very talented and very, very promising. I felt sorry for Duncan because I knew what potential he had if he could have developed some seasoning. I think he had a limited [career] span because of his body. I have no doubt about that.”
After he retired in the late 1990s, Spencer’s studies belatedly taught him what he might have done differently. “With hindsight I would’ve pumped a few more weights as a younger guy and got a bit stronger that way – particularly in my legs, to build them up to handle the punishment. When I was young the big thing was: ‘Don’t do weights, don’t do weights.’ Well, I’m a big believer in weights, and when I did weight training and did a lot of power work later in my career, I didn’t get injured. From 28 onwards I think I had one soft-tissue injury – a little side strain, that was it.
“I probably wouldn’t have started bowling when I was 14 or 15. I would have left it a few more years, just let the body grow, because it’s the impact that really nailed the body. Everyone says younger kids have got to bowl more and bowl more. Well, it’s the joints that go first, so if you can save your joints you’ll have a longer career. You don’t have to bowl flat out until you’re a bit older and the body can handle it.
“Even the recovery was different. We didn’t have ice baths until later in my career. I’d walk off the field shattered and struggling to lift my legs; then I’d have an ice bath and do my recovery and I’d walk out of there feeling like I hadn’t even bowled. I wish I’d had that when I was 20 or 21.”
There are other reasons why Spencer might wish he had been born a decade later. Even with his back problems, he would have had a lucrative, high-profile Twenty20 career like Shaun Tait or Tymal Mills. “Yeah,” he laughs, “I try not to think about that! I don’t really think about my career that much these days. I do other things in life. I just don’t have that much interest in cricket. I don’t even watch it much anymore.
“I made some great friends in my career and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I had a great time with Kent and WA. It was probably a bit more close-knit with Kent, because you travel so much, and there was a lot of laughter in the dressing-room. Graham Cowdrey was funny as hell. They were really good blokes and I really enjoyed my time there. I’d play for Kent in a heartbeat. My back’s not too bad now. I have my moments where I get a bit stiff and sore, but not too bad considering. I think the bodybuilding really helped with that.”
A 10-minute video on YouTube of his performance against Glamorgan has introduced Spencer to a new audience – including some of his workmates. “A few of the younger generation don’t know who Viv is!” It’s the happiest memory of his career. “That was a pretty special day for me given that Viv was my hero growing up. I caught up with him a few years ago. He came out for a talk for a footy club. I had a mate who played for them who asked me if I wanted to come. We caught up, he remembered me, and we had a beer. He’s just a fantastic guy.”
Spencer is proud that people still mention him, over two decades after that spell to Richards, as one of the fastest bowlers of modern times. “All the other people they mention are people who played for their countries, so to be mentioned in that group, yeah, it’s nice. I was only around for a short time but I must have made a bit of an impact.
“I think people liked the way I bowled. I wasn’t the greatest bowler or anything like that, but I bowled bouncers, I got into blokes, I took wickets, I was exciting to watch. I would do anything to get a batter out. If that meant running through the crease or bowling six bouncers in a row then I would do that, I would take the consequences. And people like that.”
These days he gets his speed kicks through riding dirt bikes, and vicarious sporting thrills through watching his sons play AFL. He now works at a mining camp in Perth. “I came up to the mines to run the gym and got friendly with a few blokes up here. I had a few mates who worked at other mine sites who drove the trucks, so yeah, I got into that. Now I drive the biggest trucks in the world and the biggest loaders. It’s good fun.”He works two weeks on, one week off. “It’s tough but the money’s pretty good, so it’s a bit of a golden handcuff.”
When we talk, Spencer has just finished for the day. “I’m just sitting in my room. We’re on shift change, so we go to nights tomorrow.” He breaks into that distinctive warm laugh one last time. “I’ll go and have a couple of beers now.”
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