David Murray (cricketer)
David Anthony Murray is a former West Indian cricketer who played in nineteen Tests and ten ODIs from 1973 to 1982 as a wicketkeeper.
Murray, a son of the great West Indian batsman Everton Weekes, often courted controversy. A marijuana user from a young age, he was almost thrown out of the 1975–76 tour to Australia, only saved by the intervention of the sympathetic senior player Lance Gibbs. His drug habit was reportedly fuelled by a tour of India where he found drugs easily available: "A waiter at the team hotel started the whole thing. There was a market there, near the Gateway of India, where you used to get anything, good African marijuana, everything... it's a great place." By 1978 he had moved on to cocaine.
Murray spent most of his international career as understudy to his Trinidadian counterpart Deryck Murray, and was usurped in 1981 by Jeff Dujon of Jamaica. Frustrated at his lack of opportunities, he threw in his lot with the West Indian rebel tours to South Africa and received a lifetime ban in 1983.
Murray now lives in poverty at his childhood home in Bridgetown.
Murray’s son, Ricky Hoyte, Weekes’s grandson, was also a wicketkeeper, playing for Barbados in the 1990s.
