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Profile: Chris Lewis, the 'prat without a hat'
20 May 2009Chris Lewis was an under-achieving athlete whose stupidity led to him being dubbed "the prat without a hat".
The 41-year-old former England cricketer, once tipped as the next Ian Botham, failed to live up to expectations, frustrated captains and teammates, and once turned up to meet the team in Newport, south Wales, leaving everyone else waiting for him in Newport, Shropshire.
Lewis's career peaked in the early 1990s but has been on a downward slope since January 1994 when, the day before a Test match in the West Indies, he shaved his head completely and was forced to miss the match when he suffered sunstroke after failing to wear a hat.
Born Clairemont Christopher Lewis in Georgetown, Guyana, in February 1968, he made his one day international debut for England against the West Indies in 1990, followed three months later by his Test debut against New Zealand at Edgbaston.
Known as a fast-medium bowler and an aggressive lower-order batsman, he returned his best bowling figures in a Test match against the West Indies in July 1991, taking six wickets for 111 runs. A year later, he returned four for 30, his best one day international figures, against Sri Lanka in Ballarat.
His first and only Test century came against India in Chennai the following year and then, after being dubbed "the prat without a hat" by a newspaper after missing the game in the Caribbean in 1994, he never fulfilled his early potential.
A Test match against Pakistan at The Oval in August 1996 turned out to be his last for England when he arrived late, citing a puncture on his soft-top Mercedes sports car, and was subsequently dropped from the upcoming one-day series.
The cricketer, who played for Nottinghamshire, Surrey and Leicestershire, was never far from controversy either.
In April 2000 he passed information to the England and Wales Cricket Board regarding match-fixing allegations involving offers made to him and three other players.
No wrongdoing was ever proved, but Lewis was later jeered by crowds and he retired from first-class cricket later that year, aged 32.
A short and unsuccessful comeback last year saw him agree a pay-as-you-play deal with Surrey for the Twenty20 Cup campaign.
But he played just one Friends Provident Trophy match and one T20 for the county, both wicketless, before injury ended his season.
His drug smuggling conviction, after being found with £140,000 of cocaine in his cricket bag at Gatwick Airport in December last year, leaves him facing 13 years in jail, a new low.
His high-profile former team mates spoke of their concerns over the "supreme athlete" who was also a frustrated loner.
Former England captain Mike Atherton, writing in The Times, said "the last straw" came when Lewis missed the start of the Test match in 1996 by arriving late.
"At first his cricketing mistakes were given the benefit of the doubt, but after a while our patience ran out," he wrote.
"Here was the supreme athlete who underachieved; the intelligent man who more than once punctured a hole in his career through sheer stupidity; the warm, friendly face who was also a committed loner, for whom controversy was never far away."
Former England cricketer Derek Pringle described him as an "avid Bible reader" whose father was a "fire-and-brimstone preacher".
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said: "Talented, narcissistic (he once posed naked in a magazine), frustrating, though never anything but unfailingly polite, Lewie, as he was then known, had the anti-social habit of ordering just about everything on the room-service menu, tasting a mouthful of each, and then leaving it to smell out the room."
Pringle added that Lewis had a liking for "the finer things in life", including designer clothes and flash cars, "even when they were not within the orbit of most cricketers' salaries".
