The lingering question in 1951-52 was whether Jack Iverson would be part of Australia’s Ashes defence in 1953. Wise observers held unanimously that Jack’s skills would be perfectly suited to English pitches. Clive Fairbairn remembers Bill Ponsford’s pronouncement:
A lot of us at the time reckoned that Bill was the best judge of cricket and cricketers around. So I used to go see him a bit, have a cup of tea with him, rack his brains. And one day I asked him: ‘What do ya reckon the big bloke’d do in England?’
Bill says: ‘Under a good captain, he’d rewrite the record books.’
Jack was again ambivalent. In a letter on 14 February 1952 to an English admirer, he explained: ‘I have recently taken over my Father’s business and this will mean the end of any ideas about making the trip to England. So you will not be seeing the "Freak" in action. It looks as though Doug Ring and Ian Johnson will be the slow attack on that trip.’
As winter set in, however, so did second thoughts. With Clive Fairbairn and Jack Daniel, he began off-season practices during July in an indoor net on the roof of the Commercial Travellers Association in Flinders Lane. Percy Millard of the Herald went along to watch and commented: ‘He looked what he is—still one of the world’s best bowlers.’ As rumours spread that Jack was planning to try out for the forthcoming Test series in Australia against South Africa preparatory to seeking selection for the Ashes tour, more and more observers became excited by the prospect. Lindsay Hassett added his voice to the swelling chorus in the Herald on 5 August: ‘For Australia’s sake, I hope big Melbourne spinner Jack Iverson will be available for the Tests against South Africa and in England next year...The English wickets should suit him.’
Given Jack’s history with Hassett, this clarion call would have had particular resonance. Indeed, the very next day, Jack told Rex Pullen of the Sun that he would indeed be having a go:
Iverson said last night he wanted nothing more than to bowl against the South Africans and again against the Englishmen. ‘Taking into account my performances in New Zealand in 1949-50, (where he took 75 wickets), I think I would be able to give a good account on the similar English wickets,’ Iverson said.
At Melbourne’s pre-season, Jack was back to his keenest. He practised sedulously. The 1953 trip would clearly be his only chance to get to England—he would turn thirty-eight within the span of the tour—and he gave every appearance of making it his prime objective. When the Australian Board of Control published the itinerary for the trip on 10 September 1952, he even went to the trouble of cutting it from the newspaper for inclusion in his scrapbooks. And after two district rounds, Jack was selected for Victoria’s first two matches of the season: the fixture against the touring Springboks at the MCG and the subsequent Shield match against South Australia at the Adelaide Oval. The scenario could hardly have been more propitious: one game against an opposition unfamiliar with Jack’s wiles, another on a surface where his record was unimpeachable, with five weeks before the First Test on 5 December.
The Springboks, a young, eager and determined band, had been hearing about Jack for some years. Of all the local cricketers who attended a reception in the tourists’ honour held by Victorian Cricket Association president Arnold Seitz at the Windsor Hotel before the game, Jack was the one the visitors most wanted to meet, as their captain Jack Cheetham recalled:
We had heard a lot about Jack’s bowling and, perhaps, had talked a lot about it-the wise men from the stands had told us all there was to know about him, making it sound all so easy—nevertheless, when he demonstrated his grip on an empty glass, there were fifteen very interested spectators.
Nor did Jack disappoint when he took the ball at the MCG the next afternoon. He was on the spot at once, looking to Percy Beames of the Age like ‘Victoria’s most dangerous bowler’, and picking up as his first wicket the visitors’ accomplished batsman-keeper John Waite. Cheetham recalled:
Waite had been entertaining us in the dressing room to a very apt and demonstrative description of how Iverson tricked all batsmen. He had watched ‘Wrong-Grip Jake’s’ overs with interest, and was convinced that he could pick his off break and play the leg break comfortably. We were eager to see the duel, but Jake’s second ball moved away—it was the leg break—and Johnny played for the other one and was bowled.
As South Africa crumbled on a damp pitch for 113, Jack’s figures were a respectable 3-38 from 14 overs; the Sporting Globe decided that he looked ‘a certainty’ for the First Test. He should have set off on the Overlander for Adelaide at 8pm on 12 November in good heart. But, it would seem, he did not.
When South Australia won the toss and batted in gloomy weather, Jack was quickly into the attack, and earning respectful treatment. His final figures of 4-65 included a hard-hit return catch from Duldig and a waspish wrong ‘un to trap Gil Langley in front. Yet, as he sat with teammates watching the rain fall at the completion of the home innings, he was patently unhappy. Doug Ring tried joshing him along: ‘C’mon Jack. Four for 65. They’re good figures in anyone’s language.’
‘They’re reading me,’ Jack said to no-one in particular. ‘They’re reading me easily.’
In South Australia’s short second innings, as they completed a seven-wicket win after two Victorian batting collapses, Jack was even unhappier. He asked Hassett to field at short fine leg to watch his bowling, and wanted to be taken off after only five unsuccessful overs for 17. When the train left Adelaide at 7pm on 18 November, Jack was in a lugubrious frame of mind. The teammate sharing his compartment, George Thoms, could not extract a word from him. He sat looking out the window into the darkness of the evening.
Later on, he visited Ian Johnson. They opened a couple of beers. ‘I’m going out to graze,’ said Jack. ‘Back to Melbourne fourths.’ Johnson asked why. ‘I’ve lost it,’ answered Jack. ‘They’re playing me easily.’ Finally, late in the evening, Jack drifted into the dining car where Hassett was talking to Sam Loxton. ‘I’d like you to inform the selectors,’ Jack said, ‘that I’m no longer available.’
Why did Jack’s spirits sag so quickly, and so thoroughly? One reason is immediately obvious. Victoria’s next match at the MCG in three days’ time was against New South Wales: Morris, Miller, Jim Burke, all of whom had played him well in the past, not to mention Sid Barnes, now fighting to rehabilitate himself with the national selectors after his self-imposed internal exile. The visitors, moreover, had apparently laid another ambush for Jack’s bowling. George Thoms remembers Barnes saying to him over a drink before the game: ‘I see Iverson pulled out. We were going to fix him right up.’
Jack’s own remarks after his withdrawal, however, suggest broader and deeper concerns. Indeed, seldom can a cricketer have been so abject and earnest in expressing his lost confidence. He told Jack Dunn of the Herald that he was simply being honest about his position: ‘I could have hung on until the selectors woke up to me. However, I think what I have done is better.’ He told Ben Kerville of the Sporting Globe: ‘I’ve lost it, that’s all. For some inexplicable reason, I am unable to push the ball through with fizz and control. Rather than make a fool of myself and let the side down I advised the selectors to this effect.’ To Percy Beames he mourned: ‘Two years is a long time and I can’t recapture my old form.’
‘Form’ is perhaps the most elusive concept in sport. The sensation of its absence is the most debilitating feeling an athlete can know, faith in its presence the most empowering and blessed. As the sociologist John Carroll puts it in his Ego &Soul:
Being out of form is a kind of discord, of inner chaos—literally being at odds with the form. It makes the player frustrated and lonely, not only cut off but feeling some sort of defilement—indeed, teammates have the tendency to respond to one of their number who is out of form as tainted and untouchable, someone to be avoided. Being in form, in contrast, is a state of grace. It is as if some transcendental power has given the player its blessing.
When a slump commences, the search for reasons begins. Perhaps it’s a technical flaw. Perhaps it’s lapsing concentration. Perhaps it’s equipment. Form disappears so capriciously that, even among the best players, responses can seem ungoverned by logic. Around the time Jack Iverson was bowling for Australia, there was a gifted Colombian tennis player, Willy Alvarez, who maintained a constant monologue at his racquet, whispering it blandishments when it hit sweetly, swearing at it bitterly for a mishit. Occasionally he would throw it to the ground and circle it, warning it of the consequences of continued misbehaviour. So completely did he scapegoat it for poor play that, when asked about his form, he would reply: ‘I’m playing great; but my racquet’s been awful.’
Among the most liberating experiences for a sportsman in a trough of confidence is the discovery of a previously undiagnosed injury. When Dennis Lillee’s bowling disintegrated on a tour of the West Indies in 1973, X-rays of his back conducted by radiologist Dr Rudi Webster revealing three fractures in his lumbar vertebrae left him perversely euphoric:
I will never forget Dennis’s reaction when I gave him the bad news and showed him the X-rays. He jumped in the air and said, ‘You beauty! I knew there had to be something there. I wasn’t imagining it. For a while they had me thinking I was. Perhaps the bastards will believe me now.’ The relief on his face was obvious. I had never seen anyone so ecstatic after being told his back was in a mess.
For Jack Iverson, however, there was no inanimate object to curse for his feeling of cosmic disharmony, no injury to which to ascribe his unease. His bowling was so much part of him—it was his invention, his creation, his devotion—that the feeling it was fading must have struck like a personal reproach. He had waited his whole career for cricket to reject him, to finger him as an ‘impostor’. He had taken precautions against such a predicament, equivocating about total commitment to the game, declining to regard himself as a serious cricketer. Nonetheless, it had arisen.
As Jack was agonising about what might have gone missing in his bowling, one of the best dramatisations of his kind of dilemma had just been published; Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The Natural. For Roy Hobbs and his miraculous bat ‘Wonderboy’, like Jack Iverson and his extraordinary hand, form proves so evanescent as to border on the supernatural. When Roy falls from the exalted standards he has set and goes to his friend Red Blow for guidance, Malamud captures all the desperation, self-recrimination, hope and hurt that would have been Jack’s experience at around the same time:
‘You haven’t knocked up a dame maybe?’
‘No.’
‘Any financial worries about money?’
‘Not right now.’
‘Are you doing something you don’t like to do?...Once we had a guy here whose wife made him empty the garbage pail in the barrel every night and believe it or not it began to depress him. After that he fanned the breeze a whole month until one night he told her to take the damn garbage out herself, and the next day he hit again.’
‘No nothing like that.’
Red smiled. ‘Thought I’d get a laugh out of you, Roy. A good belly laugh has more than once broke up a slump.’
‘I would be glad to laugh but I don’t feel much like it. I hate to say it but I feel more like crying.’
Jack’s announcement of his withdrawal from the Victorian team spelled the end of his hopes—everyone’s hopes—that he would play Test cricket again. As Percy Beames told readers of the Age: ‘This looks like the end of Iverson in big cricket...Even if he bowls sensationally in district cricket, the selectors will be loath to bring him back after this and last year’s withdrawals.’ In fact, he did not bowl sensationally in district cricket, because he did not bowl at all, standing out of the Melbourne team, and entering Heidelberg Hospital in January 1953 for an operation on varicose veins in one of his legs that precluded another comeback had he even thought of making it. The bowler who eventually took what would have been Jack’s place in the Australian team for England was Jack Hill, who had similarly only gained a regular Sheffield Shield berth after the other Jack’s withdrawal from the Victorian side.
Whether Jack’s absence had a material impact on Australia’s defeat in a closely-contested Ashes 1953 series is, of course, imponderable. Many good judges favoured his selection regardless of his appearance in only two first-class matches in 1952-53. Keith Miller believes that Jack ‘would have murdered England in 1953’, Richie Benaud that ‘we would have "walked" the series had he been there’. Jack’s Melbourne colleague Jack Daniel recalls saying to Lindsay Hassett: ‘Bad luck the big bloke wasn’t available.’ Hassett replied: ‘If he’d come all the matches would’ve been over in two days.’
To an extent, however, they are talking about two different bowlers. The Jack Iverson of 1950 would almost assuredly have been an irresistible force in English conditions. But the Jack Iverson of 1953 had suffered sufficient setbacks and checks on his confidence to make him less of a known quantity, not least to himself. It is hard to depict his omission from the Australian team of that year as a miscarriage of justice when Jack had grown so expert at inflicting these on himself.