I Timed Twenty Years of Overs on a Watch I Was Afraid to Scratch

Six Balls, Then Look Down

For twenty-one seasons I stood behind the stumps at grounds all over the Eastern Cape, and every six balls I did the same three things. I called "over". I moved the little pebble from my right pocket back to my left. And I looked at my watch.

It was a steel Rolex, plain, nothing flashy, with a black face that I could read in any light. I bought it in 1998 after my first season on the provincial panel, with money I had saved for two years from my day job at the harbour. My wife Meryl said it was the most expensive thing I had ever bought that did not have wheels. She was right. It still is.

I did not buy it to impress anybody. I bought it because a senior umpire I admired, a quiet man from East London called Mr Pillay, wore one, and he told me once that an umpire's watch should be the most reliable thing on the field, including the umpire. I took that seriously. I was twenty-nine and I wanted to be taken seriously.

The Careful Years

What nobody tells you about owning something you saved so long for is that you spend a great deal of energy being afraid of it.

I never once let it get wet on purpose. When it rained at St George's Park, the players ran for the pavilion and I ran with my left arm tucked into my jacket like a man carrying a kitten. I wore it on the field and to church and to weddings, and took it off for everything else. Gardening, no. Fishing, absolutely not. When my grandson Liam was small and wanted to try it on, I let him hold it over the bed, so that if he dropped it, it would land on the duvet.

There is a tiny scratch on the bezel from 2007. I know exactly how it got there, a Kookaburra off the edge of a bat at short leg in a club final, and I know that I felt sick for a full day about it, more than I felt about the batsman, who was fine.

The Last Over

My eyes started to go about four years ago. Nothing terrible, just the ordinary slow fading that comes with being past sixty. But an umpire with doubtful eyes is no use to anyone, and I knew it before anybody had to say it to me. I stood my last match at a club ground in Walmer on a Saturday in February, and at the end of it I took the bails off, put them in my pocket, and walked off with the players clapping, which was kind of them.

At home that night I took the watch off and put it in its box. Then I realised I had no reason to put it back on in the morning.

For two years it mostly lived in that box. I would take it out on Sundays and wind it and wear it to church, and then put it away again. It started to feel less like a watch and more like a museum piece of a man I used to be.

Liam and the Ski Boat

Liam is nineteen now. He did not want to go to university, which caused some tension at Christmas, but he loves the sea more than anybody I have known, and since he was fourteen he has been crewing on other people's fishing boats out of the harbour, getting up at four in the morning and coming home smelling of chokka and diesel and sunburn.

Last winter he came to see me with a proposition. A man he worked for was retiring and selling his ski boat, an old but sound one. Liam had saved some of the price. He wanted to know whether I would go in with him, half and half, and come out fishing on the days he was not running trips for other people. He said it shyly, like he expected me to laugh. "You've got the time now, Oupa," he said. "And you always said you'd fish when you stopped umpiring."

I had said that. For about twenty years.

The Money I Did Not Have

Meryl and I live comfortably but carefully. My harbour pension is fine for groceries and the medical aid and not much else. I did not have half a boat lying around.

What I did have was in a box in my sock drawer.

It took me nearly a month to even say it out loud. The first time I mentioned it, at supper, Meryl put her fork down and said, "Are you sure?" in a way that made it clear she already knew I was not. I did not sleep well that night. I kept seeing Mr Pillay on the field in his white coat, checking his wrist. I kept thinking of the scratch from 2007.

I typed "how do I Sell My Rolex safely" into Meryl's tablet a few nights later, feeling absurd, like an old man in a television advert. I read for an hour. Mostly what I learned was that there were questions I should be asking, and that it was perfectly normal to ask them, and that nobody worth dealing with would be offended.

Learning How It Works

I am not a person who sells things. I had no idea where you would even start with a watch like that. I had heard the stories everybody has heard, about men in shopping centres offering a fraction of what something is worth, about fakes and swaps and people being talked into things.

Liam, being nineteen, simply looked it up on his phone while I was still talking about it. He found a few places that described themselves as Rolex Watch Buyers and read me what they said, standing in my kitchen in his boat shoes. I made him slow down twice. I wanted to understand what they would look at, how they would decide what it was worth, and whether I would need the box and the papers. I had both, because of course I had both. I had kept the receipt from 1998 in the box too, folded in four.

The Morning I Took It Off

The day I went in, I wore it one last time. I drove with my left wrist on top of the steering wheel the whole way so I could see it.

The man who looked at it was younger than my son and very calm. He turned it over in his hands with more care than I had expected, put a loupe in his eye, and asked me about the scratch. I told him the story about the club final and the ball off the edge of the bat, and he smiled and said he had played a bit of cricket at school. He asked to see the papers and the receipt and he did not rush me. When he named a figure, I asked him how he had reached it, and he explained it in plain language, without the thing I had been dreading, which was being made to feel like a fool.

I did not take the first offer instantly. I went outside and phoned Meryl from the car park and she said, "Do you want the watch, or do you want to go fishing with Liam?" When she puts things like that, there is only ever one answer.

I had read online that some people walk in wanting to Sell Rolex for Cash on the spot and walk out with an envelope. I had expected to feel something dramatic when the transaction was done. Mostly I felt lighter on one side, which is literally true. For about a week afterwards my right hand kept reaching across to touch a wrist that was not there.

Six Balls, Then Look at the Water

We bought the boat in May. Liam named her Third Umpire, which I pretended to find silly and secretly love.

On the first morning we took her out together, the sea was grey and lumpy and I was sick over the side twice before eight o'clock. Liam did not laugh, which is how I know he loves me. By ten the wind had dropped and I caught a geelbek that he said was a decent size, and I believed him, because I had no idea.

I do not wear a watch at all now. Liam keeps time with his phone in a waterproof pouch. Sometimes, out there, I catch myself counting, one, two, three, four, five, six, and then I look up instead of down, at the water and the sky and my grandson leaning over the side with the line in his hands.

It turns out the most reliable thing I own was never on my wrist.