- Roshan Mahanama on his autobiography ‘My Innings’ and illustrious career
Roshan Mahanama is one of those rare cricketers who needs no introduction, even to those of us who are not avid cricket fans. A key member of the 1996 Cricket World Cup champion team, he went on to become an International Cricket Council (ICC) match referee as the first Sri Lankan to join the elite panel of ICC match referees following his retirement from cricket in 1999. Though he formally stepped down as an ICC match referee in 2015, Mahanama still referees internationally to this day, and will, later this month, serve as a referee at the 2022 Pakistan Super League.
December 2021 saw Mahanama release the second edition of his autobiography ‘My Innings, Roshan Mahanama – Retired Hurt to the Best View of the Game’, a sequel of sorts to his earlier self-published autobiography ‘Retired Hurt’ in 2001. While Retired Hurt reflected on Mahanama’s international cricket career and his retirement that caught him by surprise, My Innings takes the story further, capturing how he came back from retirement and transitioned into becoming a match referee.
Brunch connected with Mahanama for a chat on My Innings, starting with the age-old question every athlete gets asked: How they first fell in love with the sport they decided to dedicate their lives to.
For Mahanama, cricket played a huge influence in his life from its early days; his father, Dr. Upali Mahanama had played cricket (Dr. Mahanama was also a former President of the Association of Cricket Umpires Sri Lanka), his maternal uncles played cricket, and when Mahanama was around six or seven, his 10-year-old brother also took up the sport. In short, cricket has always been in Mahanama’s life, and in his blood. “Cricket has been my life,” Mahanama said, adding: “I can remember the good old days when I would go out and play cricket in the street with my friends.”
From Retired Hurt to My Innings
Retired Hurt was something Mahanama wrote in the years immediately following his retirement from playing international cricket, a retirement that he went into somewhat unwillingly. “I wasn’t planning to retire from the game I so passionately loved, but circumstances were such that I was left out of the teams, and I decided to go Australia,” Mahanama explained, sharing that in Australia, his dear friend David Cruise was of great support to him, helping him come to terms with retirement, inspiring him to begin coaching cricket in Australia, and sowing the seeds for what would become Retired Hurt. He noted: “He (Cruise) came up with the idea and made sure I wrote it, connecting me to Ken Piesse.”
The title Retired Hurt was chosen by Mahanama’s father, and the autobiography was released in 2001, with Mahanama making the conscious choice to self-publish so that he had the freedom to have the book translated for maximum impact and show his fans and budding cricketers the different challenges that people face reaching where they need to go in life.
The intervening years saw Mahanama’s career reach new heights, joining the ICC as a referee and going on to become a legend in this arena, becoming, among many other accomplishments, the first man to have stood as a match referee in a day-night test match in Test history. In 2015, Mahanama stepped down as an ICC referee to, among other things, spend more time with his family.
When he finished officiating, he received a lot of requests for another run of Retired Hurt, but the publisher of the Sinhala version was no longer in operation. This was remedied through an introduction to Darshana Publishers by Captain Elmo Jayawardena, but then Mahanama found that he had lost the soft copy of Retired Hurt, which was what ultimately led to him doing My Innings, as it was also an opportunity to cover the 20 years since his retirement as a player.
“To my knowledge, I think I must be the only sportsman to do an autobiography,” Mahanama said. “I know other people have books written about them, but more than anything I wanted to do the book to encourage other sporting personalities to do the same. It’s important to get the message across to youth because sports teaches you a lot, mainly valuable life skills and important values like integrity, loyalty, and friendship. Money shouldn’t be the number one priority or focus, and when living in a country like ours, sparing a thought to the less privileged and helping them is also very important.”
It was around this time that Mahanama met Ashan Peiris, with whom he would go on to write My Innings. Mahanama and Peiris bonded on many grounds. Peiris was also an accomplished sportsman at school and university who had gone on to build a strong career for himself in the corporate world, and understood the values Mahanama was looking to impart. This was how My Innings came to be, with Peiris restructuring the first part of the book (the base of Retired Hurt), arranging things chronologically for more clarity, and then tackling the years since Mahanama’s retirement.
Making an autobiography
On what exactly inspired Mahanama to create an autobiography in the first place, he credited his friend David Cruise as being the main catalyst behind his first autobiography Retired Hurt coming into being, but also noted that when Mahanama himself was a child, TV was nowhere near as popular as it would become in Sri Lanka from the 1980s on. “My parents read a lot,” Mahanama recalled. “My father was more into sporting books, as were my uncles, and whenever you saw a book in those good old days, you would read bits and pieces, look through the photographs, and these would motivate you – the idea that so-and-so has done this and achieved this, you get a thrill seeing those moments on the page – and when David (Cruise) told me I could do that for others, I knew I had to do it.”
Mahanama’s favourite thing about writing his autobiographies has been revisiting key moments in his life and career, reflecting on them, and understanding that his path, though it may seem otherwise, was not an easy one, and he faced challenges at every phase of life, from when he was 15 and trying to make it nationally, and when he was an international player facing retirement, to his work as an international match referee. It also allowed him to reflect on his humble beginnings as a child listening eagerly to matches on the radio to becoming an international cricketer who played over 600 international matches and a referee of over 300 matches.
In terms of challenges he didn’t quite see coming when embarking on his autobiographies, Mahanama shared that communicating his message across different languages was trickier than he thought it would be, and that this is a challenge he is still dealing with, for while My Innings has been translated into Sinhala, he was able to play an active role in getting the nuances of translation right. However, this is not something he can do when translating My Innings into Tamil, though this is something he is actively working on, and he hopes to be able to release a Tamil version of My Innings in the near future.
Roshan Mahanama: Here and now
At the time of our interview, Mahanama was making preparations to visit Pakistan to referee at the Pakistan Super League 2021, showing that a legend’s work will never be done. But what else is he doing?
60% of Mahanama’s time is spent giving back. “Over the last six or seven years, I’ve been trying to give back, I am involved in about eight different charities. My aim is to leave the world a better place for the next generation,” Mahanama said, sharing some of the many instances where he has rallied with family and friends to support the less privileged and the victims of disasters like the 2004 tsunami and the 2019 Easter attacks.
“The work I do is not for publicity,” Mahanama stressed, adding: “But an obligation to my nation. As a nation, Sri Lanka is very good at paying gratitude, and my way of doing that is by being there for the nation, through the charities I’m involved in.”
Some of Mahanama’s chief charitable work takes place through his roles as Hemas Outreach Foundation Brand Ambassador, Ayati Centre of Excellence for Children Outreach Partner, SOS Children’s Villages in Sri Lanka Ambassador, Mithuru Mithuro Drug Rehabilitation Centre Ambassador, Kidney Patients’ Society Ambassador, National Stroke Association of Sri Lanka Ambassador, and member of the Indira Cancer Trust. Mahanama is also the founder of the Roshan Wijerama Family Foundation, which focuses on supporting underprivileged schoolchildren to receive an education.
Despite all this, Mahanama maintains a strong balance between work and family, noting that a supportive family is key to success and that he is very careful to always prioritise his family and maintain a balance between his work and family.
“In a nutshell, I spend a good 60% of my time giving back. I’m blessed to know a lot of prominent people in the country who can help me give back,” Mahanama said, adding that giving back is not always about funding. “I think people have this wrong impression that it’s all about giving or spending money, and I don’t agree with that. Everyone has limitations about what they can do and contribute, but if you have the heart, you can contribute with time, knowledge, or even through networking.”
Cricket and the future
Reflecting on the future of cricket and young cricketers looking to make it, Mahanama observed that since winning the World Cup in 1996, cricket as a national sport has come a long way and the players who played for passion in the years before 1996 should be applauded for their passion for the sport which is what has allowed it to grow into the kind of national sport that athletes can now make successful livings from. Unfortunately, the administration of the sport does leave some things to be desired, with Mahanama noting that over the last five or six years inefficient administration has seen the sport take something of a downward turn.
“We have immense talent, but it’s very important to give correct values to the younger generation,” Mahanama said, speaking on aspiring cricketers and sharing his advice. “My advice for everyone, not just youngsters, is not to compromise on hard work and to be honest with themselves – they should be willing to work hard and make sacrifices to work towards their goals. Whatever we want to achieve in life will not come, but for us to get satisfaction, we cannot compromise on good values – honesty, discipline, friendship, and so on. Above all, we need to structure our lives so we can be good human beings,” he concluded.
My Innings, Roshan Mahanama – Retired Hurt to the Best View of the Game can be purchased in English online through https://brightlight.lk/products/my-innings-roshan-mahanama and is also available islandwide at Sarasavi Bookshop (26 branches), Samayawardhana Bookshop, Sadeepa Bookshop, Samudra Bookshop, Expographics (Pelawatte), Makeen Bookshop, Jeya Bookshop. Poobalasingam Bookshop (Jaffna), Wasana Bookshop (Dankotuwa), Wisdom Bookshop (Wattala), and Granthaloka (Kottawa).
