When Jack came down for breakfast at the Australians’ hotel on the morning after the Sydney Test, he got instead a taste of his own new celebrity. Sir Donald Bradman was the only other diner, and the chairman of selectors issued him a friendly warning: ‘There must be at least fifty blokes outside the front porch. They’re not waiting for me. They must be waiting for you.’
For a month or so, Jack was the toast of Australian cricket. His face was in every newspaper, on a set of cricket badges produced by the Argus, even on a box of Duncan’s Yachts safety matches. Arthur Mailey presented him with one of his famous caricatures, featuring Jack as a human corkscrew with the fond caption ‘From one twister to another.’ Schoolboys passing 148 The Esplanade commented that this was ‘where the Test cricketer lives’. There was even a racehorse named after him: Iverson, a two-year-old bay gelding by Cold Shower from Turvo, raced by a Mr P. C. Bell. And on 16 January, he became the subject of his own newsreels, performing his repertoire for both Movietone and Cinesound at Brighton Beach Oval.
Viewing this footage—now transferred from 35mm nitrate stock to video by the National Film and Sound Archive—was one of the most delightful detours of my search. Movietone’s newsreel cameras were positioned behind the batsman’s stumps, a small but appreciative crowd behind the bowler’s arm, as Jack rehearsed his repertoire. The toppie skidded through, the leggie turned just enough, the wrong ‘un broke quite massively, and bounced like a rubber ball. And as though to deepen the mystery, the hand was obscured by a black square so that its varying attitudes could not be associated with individual deliveries: one wonders whether this was Australian caginess or Jack’s proprietorial disposition towards his art.
Jack barely acknowledged the camera. Shyly but intently, he spring-loaded a ball in his fingers and squeezed it out a couple of times. The ball whirred, even seemed to hover, before settling back in that huge hand. It was like a magician producing a dove from his shirt cuff. I was dumbstruck: still photographs of Jack, entrancing in their own way, had not prepared me for the sensation of watching him bowl, however artificially. Sadly, Jack was also dumb: the original soundtrack had been lost and, when he briefly addressed the audience, there was no accompaniment to his moving lips.
The Cinesound reel, however, delivered on its promise: ‘Vic Wonder Bowler Jack Iverson Shows How He Does It’. A batsman, keeper and a scattering of fieldsman, arrayed to convey the Englishmen’s dilemma, went through motions narrated by announcer Charles Lawrence. ‘Watch this one,’ Lawrence promised. ‘It’s an Iverson special.’ And so it was, jabbing through a batsman’s gate like a fencer’s foil. ‘Here’s one on a nasty length,’ Lawrence continued as Iverson floated one down the pitch to imperil the stumps. ‘And it just tips the bails...But that’s good enough in a Test match as quite a few Englishmen know.’ A touch of Australian schadenfreude that locals would doubtless have silently applauded.
Historian Alf Batchelder recalls watching the film at St Kilda’s Palais theatre. As a wheeze, management invited Iverson on stage to demonstrate his bowling to a juvenile batsman protecting a box. The tennis ball bounced once one way, then another, past the probing boy and into the ersatz wicket. For more than forty years, Batchelder doubted the evidence of his own eyes, until he interviewed Jean Iverson while compiling an entry on her husband for the Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket. Yes, she said matter-of-factly, her husband could do that. That and so much else.
Something was now happening to Jack Iverson at the peak of his success, however, something he had perhaps foreseen, but which nonetheless would have come as a shock. Being a star cricketer introduced cares he’d not experienced; he was a bowler whose threat opposing batsmen needed to neutralise.
The day after his newsreel appearance, Jack joined Hassett’s Victorian team flying to Brisbane for its match against Queensland. In 1949-50, he’d routed the northern state twice, taking 17 wickets for 175 in two matches. But in their first encounter in 1950-51, the Queensland batsmen had fared better, especially Don Tallon and Colin McCool during a brief but bright second-innings stand of 75 in forty-minutes. McCool, in particular, had concluded that Jack might wilt under sustained attack:
His lack of experience let him down badly as soon as the batsmen started to ‘tap’ him. Tallon, who was a good player of spin bowling, and myself got stuck into him...Iverson just didn’t know what to do. In his agitation his arms started flapping like ducks’ wings as he walked back to his mark, and the harder we hit him the more his arms flapped. It was fascinating.
At this second meeting at the Gabba, the locals played Jack even better, especially the adhesive Ken Mackay, who batted almost seven hours in the match for 57 and 139 not out. On a pitch conducive to spin, Ian Johnson bagging 12-181, Jack recorded the poorest analysis of his career: 1-110 from 33 overs.
The Victoria-New South Wales Shield match that began at the SCG three days later was an even more significant reversal. Jack’s figures against a strong home batting line-up were 29-5-108-3, with two of his Test teammates in delectable form: left-hander Arthur Morris, having scored 29 in his four preceding innings, made 182 in five and a quarter hours; Miller, in 99 minutes, clubbed 83. When Jack was bowling, Morris and Miller evolved a simple rule of thumb: the high-tossed ball tended to be the top spinner, the lower-trajectory delivery the wrong ‘un. Only batsmen as accomplished as Morris and Miller could have profited from such an observation, but their finding was significant: they had demonstrated that, even if Jack remained unintelligible from the hand, he could be decrypted in the air.
Morris recalls the match with characteristic modesty:
Jack was an extraordinary bowler. I always played spinners from the hand, but he was one bloke I could never pick. For the first 80 or so, I had no idea what it was going to do. But after that I suddenly realised that you could pick him in the air, which is something I’d never done before and it was probably the only time I ever did it: his off break, he spun tremendously, but the other one he just looped. And I think that surprised Jack a bit. He was the kind of fellow who, if he didn’t take 5-20 every time he bowled, he thought he was a failure.
Miller’s chief recollection, meanwhile, is of Jack’s stupefied expression as he was deposited in the Ladies’ Stand: mouth agape, bottom lip quivering, eyes uncomprehending. ‘It was almost like: "You can’t do that to me’’,’ Miller said. ‘Like he couldn’t believe it had happened.’ The Sydney newspaper headlines, so joyous in Australian victory three weeks earlier, now had a more parochial feel:
Jack the giant killer got whacko
NSW batsmen win first battle against Iverson
Batsmen smash Iverson bogy
The subtext of the Morris-Miller ambush is as intriguing as the duel in the middle. Miller asserted in his 1956 book Cricket Crossfire that, for the duration of the Ashes series, Hassett and Ian Johnson had seen to it that Iverson never bowled to NSW batsmen at Australian practice sessions. He wrote:
At Brisbane in 1950 Arthur Morris went out for practice and, as he walked into one net, Iverson left and went into another where a Victorian player was having a knock. The usually placid Morris was furious. He put on a real show in the dressing-room, demanding something be done about this sort of stupidity. ‘We are representing Australia. It is disgraceful to let interstate considerations be carried to such lengths.’
The story has since been widely retold. In his Bumpers, Boseys and Brickbats, most popularly, that prolific chronicler Jack Pollard linked the two events-Hassett’s ploy of preserving Iverson’s mysteries and the retaliatory assault by Morris and Miller-as a way of evoking the ginger in Sheffield Shield contests between NSW and Victoria:
Morris and Miller recalled that Hassett had become perhaps the only Australian who could accurately predict what type of ball Bill O’Reilly was about to bowl by frequently batting against him in the nets during Australian team tours. They decided to frustrate Hassett’s attempt to prevent them doing the same with Iverson by making a full-scale onslaught on Iverson next time NSW and Victoria met...This story is typical of dozens which have come out of the NSW-Victoria skirmishes since interstate cricket began in Australia with the inter-colonial matches of 1856.
Here, however, may be an example of a story too famous for its own good. It is a quality of cricket history that, once written, it is seldom unwritten, partly because its main consumers are enthusiasts prepared to countenance a little embroidery and embellishment, partly because stories are usually exaggerated for the sake of congeniality with a received image or sentiment. This is not a criticism, nor is it a remark that one would necessarily confine to cricket: goodness knows, a true history of fishing would be neither worthwhile nor popular. But it does mean that scratching for the truth in cricket can be the very devil. To give a recent example, it was not until Simon Rae’s 1998 biography of W G. Grace that two famous stories long entangled in the warp and weft of the great man’s tapestry were finally proved of doubtful veracity. Rae established that the young Frederick Spofforth could not as he claimed have bowled Grace in the nets at Melbourne in 1873—being verifiably elsewhere at the time—and that A. C. Croome’s story of Grace saving his life after he impaled his throat on railings surrounding the Old Trafford enclosure in 1887 was in all likelihood rather sentimentalised. Yet the disentanglement of fact from fiction took more than a century in each case, and much else besides in the Grace legend will remain forever folkloric.
Turning to Pollard’s Iverson story, some of it is obviously wrong. The dates are out: he asserts that Morris’s protest came ‘during practice for the First Test against the West Indies at Brisbane in 1951 ‘, a Test in which Iverson did not play. En passant, one might also point out that Pollard gets wrong the date for the commencement of intercolonial cricket (1850 not 1856), Jack’s age (out by a year), height (out by an inch), spinning finger (out by a finger) and Test record (out by six wickets).
To this, Arthur Morris adds a further intriguing postscript. He recalls that, apparently when Cricket Crossfire was published, Hassett telephoned him in some distress. ‘Lindsay denied it absolutely,’ Morris recalls. ‘He said he’d never do anything like that, and Lindsay wasn’t the sort to say that lightly.’ Morris had transferred his suspicions to ‘some other Victorian, and I won’t name names’, clearly implying Johnson.
One might also consider a third possibility: that it was Jack who, anxious not to overexpose his method to future opponents, had taken it upon himself to avoid the New South Welshmen in the nets. If not obsessively secretive about his technique, Jack was certainly proprietorial about it. More than a decade later, when he was playing sub-district cricket for Brighton, his friend Col Shipley as a tease used to stand behind Jack and sing out as each ball left his hand: googly, top spinner, leg break. Jack would gripe: ‘Cut it out, Col. Wait till you come in.’ Continuing the byplay, Shipley would say: ‘Aww, don’t much feel like a bat tonight, Jack.’ If Jack felt that way about a friendly jest, one can imagine his sensitivity round players of the calibre of Morris and Miller. One can also imagine how disquieting their apparent penetration of his mystery must have felt.
It is the very essence of delivering a cricket ball at a lesser velocity that one invites aggressive batsmanship, and thus also overambition and indiscretion. Being hit is consequently an occupational hazard. A fast bowler can escape punishment even when bowling poorly. A spinner seldom will. Sometimes, on a benign surface against entrenched opposition, harsh treatment may have to be endured irrespective of the quality of the bowling. In his book The Psychology of Cricket, Graham Winter says: ‘Spin bowling is arguably the most subtle art in cricket and it may be the most psychologically demanding.’
The need for spin bowlers to cop it sweet has been remarked upon since the beginning of time. As William Clarke, one of the first great proponents of underarm leg spin more than a century before Jack Iverson took up cricket seriously, put it: ‘At times it’s enough to make you bite your thumbs to see your best balls pulled and sky-rocketed about—all luck—but you must console yourself with "Ah, that won’t last long".’ Of all cricket’s species, slow bowlers have been the ones most in need of that thin suit of philosophical armour against cricket’s occasional unfairness. ‘Ranji’ Hordern, progenitor of the Australian googly, lamented:
It is said that everybody loves a lover, but who, unless it be a big hitter, really loves a slow bowler? If he gets five or six wickets, there is no credit, because that is what he is there for. But if he gets ‘pasted’ the crowd howl at him, his captain is furious, and even his teammates are inclined to shun him. Medium paced and fast bowlers never get this treatment, even after a clever little effort like 0 for 100. I don’t know the reason, but there it is.
There should have been consolations for Jack amid his Sydney sufferings. He actually dismissed Miller, who mistimed to mid on, and also bowled Ron James and Robert Madden. Victoria’s two other international spin bowlers, Johnson and Ring, yielded almost six runs an over. Yet teammates recall him as devastated by the experience, and the unanimous opinion of those who played with and against Jack is that he was a lesser bowler from that day forward. Doubts about his ability he’d hitherto sublimated would grow increasingly evident. Here, then, was where the lack of ‘cricket brain’ really counted; not in his confessed and documented ignorance of the game’s mechanics, but in his lack of the faith that cricket fortune is ultimately even-handed.
In a sense, it is hardly surprising that Jack Iverson found the humiliations of Sydney hard to bear. From an early age, cricketers learn to regard failure, if not as a friend, at least as an acquaintance to whom they must at times doff their caps. Without that upbringing, with a record essentially of unleavened success, Jack Iverson was always destined to be a player apart. As his Melbourne and Victorian teammate Colin McDonald comments: ‘Jake had a bit of an inferiority complex when it came to other cricketers. He’d never been through the rough and tumble, never understood that some days are good and some are bad, because it had never been hard for him.’
Jack’s heartfelt response to being hit might also reflect that, unlike Johnson and Ring, orthodox purveyors of spin, Jack was bowling his own invention, his ‘specials’. In a very real sense, I think, his spin was a part of Jack, perhaps the nearest he had come to self-actualisation; unlike his home and his business, both his father’s, Jack’s cricket was completely and authentically his. So did it feel, at some subconscious level, as though Morris and Miller were hitting not just his bowling but him?
It might also be worth turning the question back on itself. If we know what Jack lacked, what do other cricketers actually have? What about the peculiar blend of stoicism, fatalism, even masochism, that cricket demands of its players? Is one of the factors that separates the great cricketer from the competent the ability to distinguish between ‘failing’—a particularly wretched nought, an unusually inglorious flogging, a specially ham-handed attempt at fielding—and being ‘a failure’? We might think of it as cricket’s own version of the dilemma the Prince lays before Father Pirrone in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: ‘The real problem is how to go on living this life of the spirit in its most sublimated forms, those moments that are most like death.’