One thing can safely be said half a century after Jack Iverson played cricket: there will never be a player like him again. This is not to say that a cricketer will not appear in club cricket at the age of thirty-one and play for his country four years later. It is not to say that someone will not, by dabbling in some other sport, discover by chance a unique kind of delivery. It is not to say that there won’t be a bowler again so outstanding but specialised that their incompetence with the bat and in the field will be overlooked. It is not to say that there won’t be cricketers who erupt on the scene in future, then of their own volition vanish off the face of the cricketing earth, and cause barely anyone to wonder why. None of these, while exceptionally unlikely in our global, professionalised, celebrity-smitten and media-saturated game of today, is quite impossible. But no cricketer, surely, will again fulfil all these criteria. I’d sooner bet on another Sir Donald Bradman than on another Jack Iverson.
It is, nonetheless, not altogether surprising that very few people remember Jack today. Fifty Australian seasons ago, he cast a long cricket shadow. Opponents agonised over how to combat him, comrades fantasised of his likely success in England, pundits picked him in imaginary world XIs. Yet anyone starting an interest in cricket even a short time later would have been forgiven ignorance that he had even existed. Rex Harry still calls him ‘my hero’. Barry Holt, just a few years younger, confesses that he’d never even heard of Jack until he started courting his daughter.
He is, however, worthy of our regard. He cannot be classed an innovator in the same sense as John Willes and Edgar Willsher, who brought modernity to cricket by causing bowlers to point their hands to heaven rather than earth, or B. J. T. Bosanquet or Ellis Achong, who brought postmodernity to cricket with deliveries that looked like one thing and were the other. No-one replicated Jack’s methods with anything like his success; he is one of a kind. But for sheer originality, scarcely anyone in cricket’s history comes even close. By curious coincidence, exactly forty years after Jack turned up at Brighton Beach Oval in search of someone to bowl to, another remarkable slow bowler did the same. Yet Shane Warne, astounding as he was and is, had more than a century of slow bowling lore to draw on. Warne speaks the foreign tongue of leg spin fluently. Jack invented his own language.
Had circumstances been only slightly different, moreover, there might have been no Jack Iverson at all. His story involves accidents of genetics: had his fingers been shorter or weaker, or had he been shorter, he’d have been markedly less effective. It has accidents of upbringing: had Jack’s family been less well-off, for example, there’d probably have been no table tennis table at Burnett Street, nor a ball to start tinkering with. It has accidents of history: had 11 Battery been sent to Scarlet Beach and not kept in reserve at Moresby, to choose one, Jack might have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to see his potential future in French cricket.
Even Jack’s peculiar innocence where cricket was concerned was, perhaps, a stroke of fortune. All those cricketers who lamented to me the shame that Jack had such a narrow understanding of the game might have it the wrong way round; only someone from beyond cricket’s pale, a Spedegue if you like, could have concocted a technique so thoroughly counter-intuitive. And, as the Bedser twins asked in Following On: ‘What would a coach, schooled in orthodox theories, have said to Iverson? According to their lights, Iverson did not bowl "properly".’ We might think it a pity that Jack lacked a cricket constitution of the hardiness of, say, Allan Border-born, as chance would have it, on Jack’s fortieth birthday. But would bustling, bristling, stoical Allan Border have had the imagination to perfect something so against the grain of his learned experience?
Separated as he is by technique and temper from any of the other 380 or so men who’ve worn Australian colours, Jack Iverson nonetheless shares something with them. Sport is the most precarious of pursuits. In the context of sportsmen’s lives, their spells at the very peak will be short. Yet even as we acknowledge how brief and fleeting is our acquaintance, we lean to defining a sportsman with emphasis on the sport to the exclusion of the man, perhaps because we wish chiefly to admire rather than to understand. In Jack Iverson’s case, the reductiveness of sporting celebrity is exacerbated by the brevity of his career and the virtual anonymity of his life; for convenience’s sake his twenty-three days of Test cricket has time and again been allowed to stand in for the balance of his fifty-eight years. There are actually more photographs in cricket books of his hand clasping the ball than of his face; a striking visual synecdoche, but equivalent to knowing Bradman only for 99.94, or Einstein only for E = mc2.
So here, perhaps, lies a little truth in the life and death of Jack Iverson. More than 2000 men have played cricket for their countries, and what have we really known about any of them? Even today, when we study and write about players so exhaustively, the idea that we can obtain a measure of their character seems essentially a journalistic vanity. Those who watched or wrote about Jack Iverson can have had little conception of his frail sporting self-worth. No-one who played with him could have fathomed the depths of his disappointments and fears. By a man’s sporting deeds, we can know only the merest fraction of him.
When I started this book, I sensed it would be difficult and problematical to write about Jack Iverson. The man who lived ‘in my own quiet way’ left little behind; no published works, no journals, no diaries, no boxes of correspondence, only some photos, statistics, reportage of his feats and a scattering of others’ recollections. As I traced his fugitive figure, I often learned more than I had expected, but always less than I wanted. The mystery of his life remains preserved as surely as the enigma of his bowling, leaving us mainly with impressions, like those of A. W Pullin on the death a hundred years ago of Billy Bates, the first Englishman to take a Test hat-trick: ‘He had his failings—who has not?—but he also had trials that fall to the lot of few men. He was a great cricketer, and a most kindly soul.’