A Beautiful Game

by Mark Nicholas

  Next morning I paced out the distance between me and Piper, 30 yards. Try it some time. It looks so ridiculous you won’t believe me. Paul reckoned we were that far back a couple of times ourselves: once when Maco bowled to Glamorgan in a Sunday League game (I do recall that we didn’t have a fielder in front of square that day, a 40-over match); and another time when he mowed down Derbyshire in a championship match.

  In the second innings I made 5 and see from Wisden that I was caught Piper, bowled Donald. I have a hazier memory of this. I remember that the Warwickshire players were all over me, hyenas every one. Donald pounded in and delivered a ball that kicked from short of a length around off stump, of that much I am sure. I either nicked it or gloved it. Donald sprinted past me, right arm aloft in salute of the moment. I was flattered that my wicket mattered to him so much.

  MY BUSTED FACE

  Gladstone Small wasn’t fast but he was extremely nippy. Gladstone was nippy enough to hurry Test-match batsmen and nippy enough to make me wish I had worn a helmet. I was on about 60 when Bob Willis returned to the attack. I remember David Turner calling for a helmet and asking if I wanted mine. ‘Don’t think so. Pretty flat out here. I’m seeing it fine.’ Big mistake, huge.

  Willis bowled an over at Turner. Not much happened. The first ball of the next over was from Small to me. I’m pretty sure I saw it pitch but saw nothing else. It was shortish and reared from the easy-paced pitch like it was angry. I hardly moved. At the very last moment, fear of the unknown made me jerk my neck. Too late. It hit me flush in the left cheekbone and ricocheted straight back down the pitch. I collapsed like a sack of shit. Everyone came running but I felt nothing and knew only the shock. There was blood. They called the medics, who called the ambulance. I was taken off on a stretcher. I remember the ambulance journey specifically because of my fear of the extent of the damage and the likely surgery. I hate all that hospital stuff. They had to operate pretty quickly. My mum turned up from London not long before the anaesthetist started to count me out: five, four, three, two, one. Goodnight and good luck.

  God, it was like I had been hit by a bus. Everywhere around my head felt heavy and tight. My mouth was dry. My eyes stung. I was straining to breathe through my nose. Oh god. I drifted back to sleep.

  Mum was there when I woke up. The nurse came in and then the consultant surgeon. He said the operation was complicated but a success. They had decided not to cut into my face but, instead, to make an incision by the side of the back of my ear, raise the flesh on the side of my face and lift the compressed cheekbone back into place. I could play again in six to eight weeks but would be well advised to wear a helmet. Thanks for that.

  The areas around my left eye socket, the left side of my nose and the upper left teeth are still numb to this day. The hair round my left ear grows funny. That’s it, no more collateral damage. I went back to the ground the following evening after play, all bruised and bandaged up. The boys were in the communal plunge bath and in a spirited mood after a good day. They briefly went quiet when I appeared around the corner with my mummified head. Then they cracked on.

  It wasn’t Small’s fault. I should have worn a helmet or watched the ball more closely. Bloody stupid. Gladstone is a great bloke, salt of the game. We laugh about it now, or I do; he gets a bit sheepish. It happened near the end of the English season and I played in South Africa about six weeks later. I hated the compulsory helmet thing. It took the winter to get used to it and I was okay by the next county season. In fact, I don’t think I thought about it again at the crease.

  I have often thought how lucky I was not to have been hit in the face by Imran or Le Roux at Hove. I reckon the ball would have come out the back of my skull.

  I remember Wes Hall’s long run-up and gold chain. I remember listening to the wireless when John Snow hit Terry Jenner in the head at Sydney. I loved Snow—what a bowler, what a dude. And I came to be a friend of Jenner’s. I remember Thommo terrifying England in 1974–75 when, watching the news clips from 12,000 miles away, English county batsmen hid behind their sofas.

  We all remember Lillee, perhaps the most dazzling sight of them all. I remember David Steele lunging bravely forward to West Indians and Australians alike. Steele was chosen for England by Tony Greig, who took a survey among county umpires: ‘Who do the fast bowlers around the circuit find most difficult to get out?’ asked Greigy. After Boycott, who was unavailable, the reply was close to unanimous: ‘David Steele.’ So Greig told the other selectors he wanted the grey-haired chap with specs in his team and Greigy was a hard man to argue against. It is true that Steele went down a flight of stairs too many for his first Test innings at Lord’s in 1975. Nerves will do that to you. Instead of entering the Long Room and making his way to the pitch, he found himself in the gents while 28,000 folk waited for him outside. Luckily he had a sense of humour. He shook a few well-wishing hands, climbed back up a flight of stairs and made a brave fifty against Lillee and Thomson, who at first thought him a joke—‘Who the hell is this guy, Groucho Marx?’ Soon enough they came to respect him. Steele became a national celebrity. Littlewoods sent him cheques and butchers sent him steaks. He was voted BBC Sportsman of Year in 1975, the unlikeliest winner they ever did have.

  I remember Michael Holding at the Oval in 1976, the driest English summer of them all, and his 14 wickets. I don’t recall England being much good—with the notable exception of Dennis Amiss, who was a seriously fine player. Holding bowled so fast it was funny to watch England try to bat. The ground was bone-dry, Viv made 291, and Mikey bowled at the speed of light to blokes without helmets. He ran in smoothly and so light of foot that they christened him Whispering Death. He bowled mainly full, to hit the stumps and the pads.

  I went to the 1973 Cup Final at Lord’s and when the public announcer said, ‘From the Nursery end, Mike Procter,’ I rushed to my seat. I shall never, ever forget Proccy steamrolling Hampshire at Southampton in the Benson & Hedges Cup semifinal in 1977. He took a hat-trick and 4 in 5. What a cricketer. He sprinted in and bowled fast inswing with an unusual and thrilling action. Yes, Proc was a proper hero. In the age of the four great Test-match all-rounders—Botham, Hadlee, Imran and Kapil Dev—he had them all covered. But, of course, like Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock from the same era of South African cricket, he was denied a Test career by the government’s policy of apartheid.

  After that, I was playing against (and with) some of these guys.

  A BEER WITH TIGER WOODS

  The Emirates lounge at Melbourne airport was much like any other in 2009, just before it was tarted up. I cruised in, chuffed with my week’s work for Channel Nine on the Australian Masters. The tournament was won by Tiger Woods who, in just four sunlit days, had taken Australian golf back to the days of Greg Norman, when huge crowds followed the Shark’s every step and rejoiced in his ability to transform the golf course into a theatre of dreams.

  I had just interviewed Woods on the 18th green in front of 10,000 people. There was not a cloud in the sky nor an inkling of the fact that within a fortnight Woods’s world was to be turned upside down by a fire hydrant, among other things. He had slipped on the gold jacket (a tournament tradition knocked off from the better known US Masters green jacket that is won each year at Augusta) lifted the trophy, thanked us for the cheque—‘which Mom can buy some more koalas with’—and answered a series of Nicholas questions with charm and humour. I didn’t know it at the time but he then made a dash for the international terminal at Melbourne airport. As did I.

  Upon entering the lounge, I saw Geoff Ogilvy, who is such a good bloke. ‘Hi Geoff, decent week, mate. Looked like the putter let you down.’

  ‘No kidding,’ he replied. ‘Fancy a beer with us?’

  ‘Sure.’ And with that Tiger appeared with a couple of Crown lagers.

  ‘You guys know each other,’ said Geoff. ‘You just had a chat on the 18th green.’

  ‘Sure do. Hi, buddy,’ said Tiger. Surreal.

  ‘Thought you had your own pla
ne?’ I said.

  ‘Gave it to Mom. She needs the space for all those fluffy kangaroos and koalas and stuff she’s been buying.’ Of course. Lucky Mom.

  Geoff said, ‘Mark is the face of cricket on Australian TV.’ Good intro.

  ‘Okay. Cool. Helluva game that,’ said Tiger. Honest, he did.

  ‘You watch cricket?’

  ‘Yup, hours in hotel rooms, often through the night. Wish I understood it better. I mean, damn, those pitchers, they run at full speed, sprinting speed, right?’

  I nodded. ‘Bowlers,’ I said.

  ‘Right, bowlers. Then they jump, turn their body pretty much sideways during the jump, land in an unnatural position and pitch with a straight arm at around 90 miles per hour. That looks hard, buddy.’

  ‘It’s hard, Tiger.’

  See, it was worth waiting for. Tiger Woods is into cricket. He said the biomechanics interested him, alongside the many parallels with baseball. He said Roger Federer really liked it, which had fired his own interest.

  ‘What about their ankles, knees, hips? From the point of landing that front foot to the point of releasing the ball, the stress on the three crucial mid- and lower-body joints is extreme. The injuries must be long-term damaging. How many years do they play for?’

  ‘Well, it’s a . . .’

  ‘And don’t they move the ball in the air, like a baseball pitcher?’

  ‘The best of them do, but . . .’

  ‘And why do they land the ball in the field, not pitch it direct on the full to the batter?’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Geoff. ‘Another beer, guys?’

  Sure.

  So I sat in an airport lounge explaining to Tiger Woods the detailed skills of fast bowling and the courage required to do it effectively and over a long career. That job done, he asked about Adam Gilchrist (he knew the name) hitting home runs. I told him Gilchrist was a freak, the ultimate game-changer. Then he asked about Warnie.

  ‘I’d like to meet Warnie,’ he said.

  ‘And he’d like to meet you,’ I replied.

  ‘The Nike guys tell me he’s a cool guy. I reckon we’d get on.’

  ‘Yes, Warnie is a cool guy and you would.’ We called him. No luck.

  After 40 minutes of this, during which time I got in one question about golf, his people came to take him to the plane. He said Geoff and I should go with him. Riveting, a VIP route, hidden from the crowds. It was fun. I had been upgraded from business and guess where I was sitting? Across the aisle from Tiger. I tried Warnie on the phone again. No luck. (When we landed in Dubai there was message after message from Warne—‘Give him my number, mate’ overrode most of the others. So I did.) Tiger had a glass of champagne and then wine with his dinner. We chatted a bit more about spin bowling (I know, how bizarre is all this?). After that he put on headphones, pulled shut the doors of his Emirates first-class suite and the next I saw of him was thirteen hours later when we said our goodbyes.

  I interviewed him exactly a year later, at the gala dinner on the eve of the 2010 Australian Masters. His manager told me not to touch upon ‘you know what’. I thought, bugger that. He was on stage with Warne, two of the greatest sportsmen the world has ever seen. I began by asking if they had met before. ‘Just now, upstairs, we had a beer together,’ said Warnie.

  ‘Do you have anything in common?’

  No fast bowler performs without pain. Day in, day out, pain is a given. Tiger nailed that. Most have surgery at some point or another—back, knees, ankles mainly. Pace is the greatest gift but it comes at a price. Every decade or so different theories arrive to guard against injury. These tend to revolve around the physical action of bowling, which is subject to trends and change, and the workload. Footwear has evolved from a heavy boot made with leather soles and uppers, which was designed for strength and support, to a shoe that is more like a trainer and takes account of comfort and fashion. Most top bowlers work with the manufacturers to find something that balances the two. The ideal boot is light and resilient but still supportive, especially around the ankle. All bowlers are different. Marshall, who was so light on his feet, bowled in something like slippers—albeit with spikes in the sole—if the ground was dry but reverted to the tried and tested form of boot if the ground was soft or damp. Garner needed a workman’s footwear whatever the conditions.

  The best and most classical action of the modern era was Lillee’s: sideways on, eyes looking at the target from the left side of the left arm, right wrist perfectly behind the seam of the ball, head steady, front leg braced, left arm pulling the upper body into a complete flow-through. After starting out in Perth as a tearaway, Lillee applied the science of body and mind to the art of bowling fast, and wrote a fine book about it. He returned from serious back surgery to become a more complete bowler and year upon year added pieces to his jigsaw. By the time he packed it in as the world’s leading wicket-taker, he had created the perfect template for others to study.

  LILLEE AND THE MIRACLE MATCH

  For all Lillee’s magnificent Test-match performances, nothing was quite so dramatic as the Gillette Cup (one-day) semifinal he won for Western Australia against Queensland at the WACA in 1976. In what has been dubbed ‘The Miracle Match’—the title of an excellent 2014 book by Ian Brayshaw, who played in the game for the home team—Lillee refused to bow in the face of near-certain defeat. Western Australia had been put in to bat by Greg Chappell and bowled out for 77. Rod Marsh rallied his players: ‘There’s a big crowd here. Let’s not let them down. Let’s make ’em fight for it.’ Lillee’s message was a little more raw: ‘Fight for it be buggered. We’re going to beat these bastards.’

  Which is exactly what they did. Inside two hours, Lillee accepted the man-of-the-match award for figures of 4 for 21 from 7.3 eight-ball overs. He bowled Viv Richards for nought, had Chappell caught at the wicket by Marsh for 2 and knocked over David Ogilvie and Denis Schuller to complete the rout. When Viv Richards, who played all of that season for Queensland, was once asked if he remembered the Gillette Cup game at the WACA, he replied, ‘Man, barely a day goes by without me remembering it.’

  Lillee was a primal force. His long mane of dark hair, bristling moustache and flapping gold chain combined with an unbuttoned shirt and general snarl to give the impression of a pirate on the high seas. He ran in from such a distance, and with such menace, that the following eye became mesmerised. Upon reaching the crease at fever pitch, he released the ball with an authority and intent given to few others. He was, of course, blessed with myriad skills. By the end of his career, he could deliver everything from his original and beautiful outswingers to seamers and cutters with masterful changes of pace and angle. He overwhelmed the meek and confronted the strong, challenging them to match him blow for blow.

  At his best, Lillee was the most dynamic and charismatic bowler of the age. If that Gillette Cup performance on the fast and bouncy Perth pitch stopped most of Australia in its tracks, his 11 wickets on a low pitch in the Melbourne Centenary Test of 1977—each one of them captured with innate cunning and unimaginable reserves of stamina—caught the attention of the world. The photograph of the winning moment when he traps Alan Knott leg before wicket and turns in his appeal to raise an arm to the sky is one of cricket’s most enduring images. No other bowler could have made so much of the unresponsive surface. It was during this wonderful cricket match that John Arlott, commentating on radio, said, ‘The seagulls on the top of the stands are as vultures recruited by Lillee.’

  The Miracle Match is an excellent read, providing a more than useful social biography of the time and revealing profiles of the great players of the day. Just four months after the match, the cricket world was rocked by the formation of WSC. In the book, Kim Hughes, who batted at four for Western Australia in the game, says, ‘Talking about the money we got that day—and it was the same for all of us, from the captain down—we later found out that the bloke on the gate, a lovely old fellow, got more than we each did for playing! And it was a huge game, televi
sed Australia-wide and featuring such world stars as Richards, Chappell, Thomson, Lillee and Marsh, with a big crowd in attendance. Unbelievable entertainment and all we got for the part we played was 18 bucks. A ten, a five, a two and a one—all notes in those days!’

  Lillee, who was winning a lot of matches and signing a lot of autographs for eighteen bucks a day, and was sick of the rip-off, had already spoken to his manager, Austin Robertson, about some breakaway matches for big money. Needing muscle and money, they approached Kerry Packer, who told them to hang tight for just a few months because he had an idea of his own they might like. No kidding. Packer has long been considered the villain who stole the old game and replaced it with the new. The reality is that it would probably have happened anyway. The players were ripe.

  PROC AND SNOWBALL

  If Lillee’s method was testament to the orthodox, Procter was a vivid example of the unorthodox. Describing his action is difficult. My guess is that he sprinted to the wicket at a pace hitherto unseen, at least by any bowler in control of the delivery of the ball. Where Lillee had menace, Procter had venom; where Lillee had side-on outswing, Procter had chest-on inswing. Upon reaching the crease, he all but threw himself at the batsman, giving the impression of releasing the ball from the wrong foot. This was an illusion but all the more confusing and alarming for it. His arms worked like helicopter blades and the ball truly flew at the batsmen as if propelled by machine. It would skid and swing, and when he rolled his fingers across the seam it would bite and cut. He frequently operated from around the wicket, swerving amazing in-duckers back towards the stumps as panicked batsmen searched in vain for the line of the ball. He recorded four first-class hat-tricks and more in other forms of the game.