New Zealand's legend Ross Taylor's autobiography 'Black And White' has revealed many interesting cricketing anecdotes since its launch. This time the batting great narrated one incident from the book where he along with India head coach Rahul Dravid, went to Ranthambore National Park to spot a tiger, where the normal public took more interest in Dravid than than spotting a rare tiger.
Back then, the duo used to share the same dressing room for Rajasthan Royals franchise in the 2011's edition of IPL. Then the Kiwi batter got to know the popularity of Indian players and how much fandom they enjoy.
"I asked Dravid, 'how many times have you seen a tiger?' He said, 'I've never seen a tiger. I've been on 21 of these expeditions and haven't seen a single one.' I thought, 'What? 21 safaris for zero sightings.' Seriously, if I'd known that, I wouldn't have gone. I would've said, "No thanks, I'll watch the Discovery channel. Jake Oram had been out in the morning - no joy. There was some baseball game on TV that he wanted to watch so he didn't come with us on the mid-afternoon safari. It wasn't long before our driver got a radio call from a colleague to say they'd found T-17, a famous, tagged tiger. Dravid was thrilled: 21 safaris without seeing as much as a tiger turd, but half an hour into number 22 he'd hit pay dirt," Taylor wrote, as reported by stuff.co.nz.
"We pulled up beside the other vehicles, open-top SUVs a bit bigger than Land Rovers. The tiger was on a rock, a good 100 metres away. We were stoked to see a tiger in the wild, but the people in the other vehicles immediately aimed their cameras at Rahul. They were as excited to see him as we were to see the tiger. Maybe more: across the globe there are almost 4000 tigers in the wild, but there's only one Rahul Dravid," he wrote further.
Taylor called it quits to the International cricket earlier this year and later launched his autobiography on Thursday which is loaded with sundry of instances of his cricketing career, right from bring subjected to racism and getting slapped from Rajasthan Royals' owner in IPL.
"Cricket in New Zealand is a pretty white sport. For much of my career I've been an anomaly, a brown face in a vanilla line-up. That has its challenges, many of which aren't readily apparent to your teammates or the cricketing public," Taylor wrote.
"In many ways, dressing-room banter is the barometer. A teammate used to tell me, 'You're half a good guy, Ross, but which half is good? You don't know what I'm referring to'. I was pretty sure I did. Other players also had to put up with comments that dwelt on their ethnicity. In all probability, a Pakeha listening to those sorts of comments would think, 'Oh, that's okay, it's just a bit of banter'. But he's hearing it as white person, and it's not directed at people like him. So, there's no pushback; no one corrects them," he continued.
In his career spanned over 16 years, Taylor was one of the best batters of the game. He excelled in all three formats for the Kiwis. He mustered 7864 Test runs, 8602 ODI runs, and 190 T20I runs for his side.
