The target shoots back

Magazine photographer Dan Dry caught up in cricket mayhem.

When Dan Dry takes photographs, personal safety is only a passing concern. So maybe it’s not surprising that he got hit by the ball while shooting the cricket club—but rather that he got hit only once.

“It came fast and hard, and I sure didn't see it coming,” Dry says. The ball struck his left arm (Dry is left-handed) just above the elbow. “What started with a slight sting and a thud quickly became burning pain. I kept shooting, and no, I didn't cry.” The impact resulted in “a blackish-purple lump and bruise,” which “turned to a darker shade the next morning and mellowed out to a sunshine yellow within a week or so.”

Aside from the ball, Dry was also hit by one of the bowlers, Rohit Naimpally AB’09, AM’10. (In cricket, the bowler—the rough equivalent of a pitcher in baseball—takes a running start.) “He may be a small guy,” says Dry, “but he had the strength of a Bears lineman.”

Dry is accustomed to abuse. While taking photographs, he says, “I’ve been bitten by a multimillion-dollar racehorse, gotten shoved to the ground by a striking union worker, run into on the sidelines by members of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and fallen off the edge of an oil rig when the cap blew, spraying oil everywhere, only to be saved by my safety harness. I have stood waist-deep in the snake- and alligator-infested waters of Florida’s Everglades, been run over at half court by an All-American basketball player, and been screamed at, hit, pushed, and kicked by people on both sides of the busing movement in Louisville.”

On that scale of pain, being struck by a cricket ball, says Dry, “is pretty much at the bottom of the list.”

Read more about the cricket club in the summer issue of the Core.

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

July 15, 2010