Brendan Taylor, Zimbabwe’s wicketkeeper batter, shares his journey of how he came back to life after getting addicted to drugs. During September 2021, when he was removed from the team while playing against Ireland, he definitely was sure about three things; his career ended, his drug test was positive, he was delayed too long to report match fixing approaches. As a result of these, he was refrained from the cricket grounds for 3.5 years. But the reason that changed his life in an amazing way, was the drug test report.
“The walls were closing in,” Taylor said while talking about the outcome of drugs and alcohol addiction.
“It was an absolute pressure cooker because I was dealing with the ICC and knew there was a ban looming, so the fact that I was retiring and I’d had a failed drugs test – I was just totally defeated.”
Taylor waited for the ICC sanction for over four months, then he started to share that news with his wife, Kelly, all his wrong doings that he was addicted to. She didn’t believe the news, not even when the whole world was aware of it. After all that he visited himself to the rehabilitation centre.
“ I said to Kelly, ‘Everything is coming to a head and I’ve really got to get some help.’ And she was infuriated. She thought I was running away from the problem but only knew about 5-10% of what I was really getting up to.”
Before three days of ICC announcement of Taylor’s ban, he registered himself into a 90-day rehabilitation programme at Rehab centre located in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, which was at a distance of four hours from Harare. During the first two weeks he was denied access of cell phone because of his mental peace as he started the 12-step recovery programme.
“I was convinced that if I only drank on the weekend, then I wouldn’t have a problem, but I didn’t know what two beers were. I could hide behind the binge-drinking culture, but the reality was that I couldn’t actually predict how much I was going to drink.”
The 12-step programme helped him a lot to rebuild his personality and not to slip back again.
At rehab, Taylor did “a lot of meditation, a lot of running, cold-water plunges, reading, writing and being out in nature”, he said.
“It was very beautiful and I had a lot of time to think and reflect, especially with the early sunrises and quiet, and to unpack the wreckage of my past.”
“The disease of addiction is in the mind, so I had to really re-engineer my whole way of thinking. My old ideas were chaotic and catastrophic. I needed to implement a new way of thinking. You’re dealing with something that’s so damn strong on human beings, you need something a lot stronger than you to take that away. So you develop a faith. I was asleep to God for 36 years and once I woke into that, I really sort of tapped into that.”
