TEN

‘Bacchus Is Being Absolutely Obnoxious’

RUNS DID NOT stop trouble. Sample copies of four jigsaw puzzles released by PBL Marketing landed on the Western Australian Cricket Association’s doorstep in November 1981. An Australian cricketer starred in each: Greg Chappell driving sumptuously, Rod Marsh swooping spectacularly, Dennis Lillee hovering high in his delivery stride, feet flying. Kim studied the fourth jigsaw. The only things flying were bails. PBL flunkeys—Packer’s flunkeys—had unearthed a photo of him charging a medium pacer, Lance Cairns, and actually getting out stumped. They had turned two seconds of insanity and humiliation into a 560-piece jigsaw.

There was no puzzle. It was obvious—a vendetta. It was a trap too. Say nothing and he’d look a fool. Complain and he was a crybaby. He whistled up his lawyers. They appealed to Australian Cricket Board officials. That went nowhere. Memorabilia was the Packer people’s domain. And it was too late. And it was a jigsaw. And what could be more trivial than that? Neither names nor jigsaws were mentioned in an interview with sportswriter Richard Sleeman. ‘Maybe I’m too sensitive,’ said Kim. ‘I don’t know. But people are gunning for me. They’re in reasonably high positions too.’

After World Series Cricket, Kim had returned from India to find himself no longer Australian captain and not even WA captain. Chappell and Marsh filled those jobs. Yet Kim, not Marsh, got the Australian vice-captaincy. That added up to one too many compromises. Instead of everyone being happy, unhappiness was rife. The next season, 1980–81, Kim replaced Marsh in WA. That at least was logical: the national vice-captain was now running his own state. But unhappiness turned to foul fury. Lillee was miffed by the decision and ropeable about its leaking: Kim—‘in his own cute way’—dropped it over a card game in Faisalabad. That evening, Marsh told Lillee it wasn’t worth stewing over. Lillee’s respect for his gumnut-tough buddy grew. Marsh, it would emerge, had quieter ways of signalling displeasure.

‘Possibly the biggest moment in my life . . . every young kid’s ambition,’ said Western Australia’s new captain. Marsh refused to be his deputy. So did Lillee. Feeling hurt, Kim tried to hide it. Their mere presence would be ‘a great comfort’. But what if they were present in body only? Daryl Foster recalls the tenor of team meetings changing overnight.

‘We’re playing Victoria, we’re gunna do this,’ Kim would say. And then: ‘Rod, have you got any thoughts?’

‘You’re captain. You control the meeting.’

Eyes flicked uncomfortably to the floor and around corners. ‘Rod wouldn’t participate in team meetings,’ says Foster. ‘He wouldn’t cooperate in any Hughes-led ventures. Or if he did it was with a growl and a grump. People who know Rod know he’s a fantastic team person; so it was the lack of that, him trying to make things harder for Kim.’ Reaching out to Lillee proved equally fruitless. Foster tackled them. He got the old response: ‘And how many Tests have you played?’ Bruce Laird shouldered the twin posts of third-choice vice-captain and unofficial go-between.

‘Stumpy,’ Foster would say, ‘Bacchus is being absolutely obnoxious. It’s affecting the ten other blokes.’ And Laird would go to Marsh. ‘For a couple of weeks everything would be hunky-dory,’ says Foster. ‘Then if you needed it done again, he’d do it again. I had tremendous respect for Laird because he wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t reticent about telling Rod: “Listen, mate, pull your head in. All these young blokes, they don’t know what they should be doing.”’

Not every youngster minded. ‘It was great being in the dressing room with them, whether they were fighting or not,’ says Geoff Marsh. But the anxieties were real enough for Sam Gannon’s temporary recruitment as manager of Kim’s first eastern states expedition as WA captain. ‘My job was to integrate people,’ says Gannon. ‘Some younger players, the future of West Australian cricket, were in a state of flux and confusion about where to show their allegiance. Because Rod was such a strong bloke and Kim was captain.’

In Sydney, Marsh spotted 70-year-old Alan McGilvray’s familiar face: ‘Come into the room and have a beer, Mac . . .’ Instantly Marsh overruled himself. ‘Sorry, I’m not captain anymore. I don’t have any right to invite you in.’ It was Marsh’s quiet signal. McGilvray got the hint loud and clear. John Inverarity, who’d moved to Adelaide, detected uneasiness when he played against his old state. ‘Rod was, in a sense, captaining through Kim. He had the better views on bowling changes, tactics, field placings. That created an awkward situation for all. It was clear to me on the field because I heard what was going on.’

For those off the field it was less obvious. ‘The WA Sheffield Shield team is sick . . . torn apart from within,’ huffed straightshooting Sunday Times columnist Doug Cunningham. Yet they won the Shield. They might even have pickpocketed the double, except in the McDonald’s Cup final Kim fell first ball. Pure slapstick, that was: he hooked, missed and ran himself out attempting a madcap second bye. It earned him a Marsh bollocking, which Kim welcomed as a wonderful learning experience. ‘A turning point,’ Kim called it. Then he led Marsh and Lillee to England in 1981, and it became clear that this was no turning point, just another flashpoint.

Western Australia did not attempt to name a vice-captain the following season. Graeme Porter remembers Marsh’s reaction when requested to stand in against Pakistan: ‘No, no, no. Shippy [Greg Shipperd] can take over.’

Kim’s parallel life as Test vice-captain would normally have seemed inconsequential. If captain of Australia ranks second only to prime minister in importance, as is commonly asserted, then vice-captain is like being odd-job man at the Lodge. But these were not normal times. The preferred Australian captain, Greg Chappell, was routinely unavailable for overseas tours, a situation unprecedented then and unrepeated since. Australian teams to England, Pakistan and the 1983 World Cup took—and occasionally didn’t take—instructions from Kim. He was the hair in certain people’s eyes. And if he couldn’t be brushed aside, one alternative was to snip away at him.

•••••

NO ISSUE WAS TOO SMALL to squabble over. The Sheffield Shield bonus points system, which rewarded rapid scoring inside the first 65 overs, came up for review in 1981–82. Bonus points had operated for a decade and encouraged the innate dasher in Kim. Yet he felt future batsmen should be groomed to linger longer. Every other WA squad member voted to keep them. Kim reported to the board’s cricket committee that Western Australians wanted them scrapped. Lillee and Marsh never mentioned their disgust. They didn’t, Tim Zoehrer recalls, say a word:

Kim was in the nets, no helmet on, and it was like war. Dennis was bouncing him. Kim was top-edging balls out of the ground. It was on. It was fearful. People were sitting back watching: ‘Oh, Jesus. Kim’s going to get killed here.’ Nothing needed to be said. Dennis and Rod didn’t openly express their disappointment. They were just letting him know, hey, we love you as a mate to have a drink with, but fuck, that hurt us.

Kim’s head could be a popular target. Weeks later, Len Pascoe aimed a beamer at it. Kim had been hooking Pascoe bouncers all afternoon. ‘That’s four more, Lenny,’ he’d say—‘and that’s as he’s hitting it,’ remembers Graeme Wood. Some saw Kim actually laughing at Pascoe as he hooked one delivery. Kim main- tained he simply smiled. Some believe Pascoe’s Yugoslavian heritage was canvassed. Others say that wasn’t Kim’s nature. After Pascoe’s retaliatory beamer drew no blood and a ticking off from Kim, he visited the Western Australian rooms at teatime.

‘Isn’t this nice. Lenny’s come to apologise,’ thought Foster. ‘Next minute he’s got Kim by the scruff of the neck up against the wall.’ Pascoe pushed Kim in the chest. Kim landed on a wooden bench in front of the lockers. Kim got up. Another shove. A sort of whimper, a squeak, came out of him. New South Wales team-mates suspended Pascoe for one game. Crook knees needed a rest anyway. And the season ended with Kim lamenting a lack of snarl in Australia’s pace stocks. Maybe the selectors should trawl the beaches? ‘Hughes,’ replied Lillee, ‘would be better advised looking at his own batting before pointing the bone.’

Six weeks in New Zealand felt like half a lifetime’s drizzle. Kim’s best in three Test innings was 17. He proved instrumental in the one-day decider. Greg Chappell, knowing the pitch was moist and his vice-captain a lucky tosser, sent out Kim, who performed a little jig when the coin landed the desired side up. Less auspicious was an acting captain’s stint against Central Districts at postcard-perfect Pukekura Park. A 5.30 alarm bell, two flights and a breakfast eaten out of tinfoil gave the injury-mangled Australians little appetite for a day’s cricket. Manager Alan Crompton was asked to keep wicket. Crompton declined. Marsh opened the bowling and batting. Wood went in last. Australia lost on the second-last ball. Kim, prompted by a journalist’s $50 dare, batted in his Australian team tie for twenty minutes until Marsh informed him that the manager wasn’t guffawing.

‘Kim was an extremely likeable, approachable, friendly fellow,’ says Crompton. ‘Some senior players regarded him as a boy who hadn’t grown up yet. In New Zealand I felt they not only regarded Kim as an immature boy but to some extent treated him as such. They were a little bit aloof, a bit dismissive of him, not as inclusive as they could and should have been.’ Equally striking was the way everyone buzzed around their boab-legged wicketkeeper in bars, buses, dressing rooms. ‘The players,’ sensed Crompton, ‘would have died for Rod Marsh.’

Next stop was Pakistan, without Chappell. Abnormal times were about to get less normal. The captain’s job went not to the incumbent vice-captain but to a vote of the fourteen Australian Cricket Board delegates. Ten of the fourteen are dead. The surviving four are aged between sixty-eight and eighty-five. Some have forgotten. Others wish to forget. The captaincy was one item on a long agenda. Details weren’t recorded in the minutes. There might have been a show of hands. There could have been a secret ballot. No one’s quite certain. But they met on 25 March 1982. The captaincy discussion lasted more than an hour. Silences were few. Everyone who wanted to talk talked. There were two candidates.

The board’s composition was and is based on archaic power structures: New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia had three delegates each, Queensland and Western Australia two, Tasmania one. Two of the fourteen, Crompton and Fred Bennett, had managed Australia’s two most recent tours. They’d lived with the team. They didn’t consider themselves anti-Kim; they were pro-Marsh. They stated their case boldly. The third New South Welshman, Tim Caldwell, voted with them. Two more votes sailed Marsh’s way—probably from South Australia, perhaps from a mix of South Australia and Queensland. And the chairman, South Australia’s Phil Ridings, favoured Marsh. This was crucial. If there was a 7–7 deadlock Ridings’s vote would become the casting vote and Marsh would be appointed captain of Australia. But there wasn’t, it didn’t and Marsh never. Kim won 8–6.

He owed it to WA’s men on the board, Bert Rigg and Lawrie Sawle. ‘I’m eighty-four years old, I’ve got no bloody memory and I’ve been through all that,’ says Rigg. ‘No factual recollection or recall on matters twenty-five to thirty years ago,’ says Sawle, eighty-three. Both men were teachers. Sawle, quiet and sagacious, went on to become perhaps Australia’s most respected chairman of selectors. He was probably less outspoken that day than Rigg, a Western Australian batsman of the 1950s, who wore thick black glasses and had been on the board a year longer. That mattered. John Rogers, the WACA’s general manager, believes:

Kim was like a son to Bert. That’s how Bert saw him. And Bert would have pushed Kim’s barrow very hard. Oh, he was proud of the fact he did. It did Kim a huge disservice. Really, it ruined the career of one of the all-time great WA batsmen. I don’t know whether Bert saw it that way. But having promoted him to be Australian captain and to then see what happened would have been an incredible disappointment for Bert.

Marsh’s larrikinism would have been mentioned. Ian Chappell’s cowboy boots gave some long-serving board members blisters; they were reluctant to now elect his ‘clone’. World Series Cricket, feelings of abandonment by Marsh and others, lurked in a few minds too. ‘Vengeance is far too strong a word,’ says Crompton. ‘But there may have been a subconscious prejudice. That’s possible.’ Besides, children loved Kim. He was young, polite, attractive. He looked like the future. ‘And heaven help us,’ Crompton recalls, ‘we were all trying to look to the future.’

To have both WA delegates favouring one WA candidate over another was impossible to ignore. Victoria’s Bob Parish, Ray Steele and Len Maddocks backed Kim. Bob Ingamells probably voted with the Victorians because Tasmanian delegates invariably did. Among the others, Kim inspired sufficient hope to secure eight votes.

Had the conversation been less robust the fourteen men round the table might have heard destiny rapping on the door. So much swung on so narrow a margin. If one Kim supporter switched his vote, Marsh would have led Australia to Pakistan. If Marsh impressed, Greg Chappell might never have got his job back. Three years later Kim—worldlier, steadier—might have inherited it. Three years after that he might have bequeathed it to Border. Instead everything ended unhappily ever after.

•••••

MARSH’S QUIET SIGNALS of displeasure got louder. Named vice-captain to Pakistan, he declined the job. Days before departure he gave an interview to Russell Deiley of Playboy magazine. Marsh was at North Sydney Oval, filming an antihistamine commercial. He’d drunk a can of Tooheys and was feeling frank, chatty—enough to fill nine text-heavy pages.

‘Kim is bloody good company,’ Marsh told Playboy, ‘but he’s always liable to do silly things, whether he has a bat, a golf club or cards in his hand . . . That’s not the sort of thing you need if you’re a captain.’ Kim was ‘still learning’. Kim ‘suffers a lot by comparison’ with the Chappells, Inverarity and Lock. ‘You don’t deny,’ said Deiley to Marsh, ‘that you have challenged some of his on-field decisions?’

I don’t agree with some decisions he makes and I feel it’s my duty to tell him. He listens, but that doesn’t overcome the real problem. You tell him something but a week later he’s doing the same thing again . . . I don’t think he resents advice. In many ways he’s a very naive person and, like most of us, he works on adrenalin. When his adrenalin is pumping he makes decisions that aren’t calculated . . . I’m very proud to be playing for Australia and I will play under anyone. But I honestly would prefer to play under several other players who I think would do a better job than Kim.

Books became almost annual: Lillee’s My Life in Cricket (1982) and Over and Out! (1984); Marsh’s The Gloves of Irony (1982), The Inside Edge (1983) and Gloves, Sweat and Tears (1984). Puns were not only painful but occasionally repetitive.

Stacky . . . thought defence was something you build around de house! (The Gloves of Irony)

Thomson . . . believes defence is something you build around de paddock to keep de sheep and de cows in. (The Inside Edge)

Kim references were plentiful and usually insulting. Often the tone was patronising, sarcastic or both, sometimes schoolyardishly so:

He was thrown in at the deep end—and that was well over his depth . . . 

The man—or should I say young man—wasn’t fully prepared . . . 

Co-writer was Austin Robertson. His distant puppetmaster’s presence in Kim’s life was proving unshakeable. Whole chapters belittled Kim in Gloves, Sweat and Tears and Over and Out!. Marsh listed his team-mate’s shortcomings in point form, a first for Australian cricket literature. Lillee, master of leg-cutters and off-cutters, exhibited a penchant for throat-cutters. The following is a small selection from Over and Out!:

I didn’t like Hughes as captain.

I don’t think he was even close to being a good captain.

A very mediocre leader of men.

I thought him a poor captain—and I was no orphan.

I had very little respect for him—and I wasn’t Robinson Crusoe.

His lack of interest in what you had to say was bordering on the astonishing.

Kim would burst into print about how he should get the job. How stupid was that!

I didn’t really give a dead prawn what he thought about me.

The books sit on fans’ shelves today and raked in riches. And money mattered, more and more. When Lillee belatedly exposed the Headingley bet—itself a money-spinner—Marsh was not the only one perturbed. ‘For him to deny having had the bet and to now admit it to sell a book, well I don’t go along with that,’ said respected West Australian elder Ken Meuleman. 1979–80 was memorable for Lillee’s on-field marketing of his aluminium bat. In 1981 he had two lightning bolts—his personal logo—stitched on to his previously unadorned orange headbands and started raffling them. In advance of breaking Lance Gibbs’s Test wickets record he sold exclusive rights to his post-milestone reaction to Sydney’s Sun, before eventually making himself available to all comers ‘for a short period’. The same newspaper later bought the scoop on Lillee’s retirement.

In Pakistan, Australia lost all three Tests under Kim and won none of nine games on tour. Abdul Qadir’s serpentine flippers and googlies would have flummoxed most sides. A team spooked by flying rocks, burning marquees and suspiciously scuffed balls stood no chance. ‘For me,’ wrote Pakistan captain Imran Khan, ‘the disappointing aspect of the Australian attitude to Pakistan has been the inability to accept the country as it is—a third world country with its own culture.’ As if to underline Imran’s point, Marsh watched The Sting thirty-three times on video and lampooned the boredom, facilities and curries. ‘Imagine what one of those devastating Pakistani concoctions could do to you as you stood behind the stumps all day. You’d be making more runs than Bradman.’

The team’s homecoming coincided with Playboy’s November 1982 issue hitting magazine racks. ‘If I’ve got team-mates like that,’ said Kim, ‘I wonder what I’d do for enemies . . . I’m not a Greg or Ian Chappell; I’m a Kim Hughes.’ A Greg Chappell interview in October’s Cricketer gave him another jolt. ‘I’m a better captain now than five years ago,’ said Chappell. ‘I’m a better captain now than twelve months ago. I think last summer as captain I really did a good job . . . In a head to head contest between Kim and myself, I’m a better captain.’

It read a lot like Chappell had chosen the hustings over Pakistan. ‘It was almost like he was running a campaign,’ the board’s executive director David Richards reflected. ‘I’ve always felt he was a little indiscreet.’ The board took some persuading; brother Trevor’s underarm had left many feeling overwrought. Greg pipped Kim to the captaincy in 1981–82. Eight days before the 1982–83 Ashes series he was reappointed.

Kim was disappointed, not surprised. More shocking was his sacking as Western Australia’s representative on the ACB’s cricket committee. A meeting was arranged at state training while Kim was away helping pick the First Test team. Players plonked themselves down on the lush WACA grass. Nominations were called for and three received: Mann (nominated by Marsh), Serjeant (nominated by Lillee) and Kim. Hands went up. Mann won comfortably. Kim polled two votes out of about twenty-three, coach Foster’s and rookie Subiaco fast bowler Brian Raven’s. Nobody told Kim, about the meeting or outcome, for four days.

A sensitive man could have wept or made a fuss. But it all passed virtually unnoticed. Kim kept quiet. December’s Cricketer consulted Len Pascoe for his views on the captaincy. ‘Of the Tests I’ve played under Kim, the less said the better.’ Yet Pascoe never played a Test under Kim. Again—silence from Kim. But of course he was sensitive. He was sensitive, everyone knew it and it only made things worse. The jigsaw business showed that. ‘It would have been right for him to be upset but better for him to be man enough to cop it on the chin,’ says Crompton. ‘If you react all you do is reveal your underbelly.’

Kim did ask one person for help. He asked Don Bradman how he should handle Lillee. Bradman wrote back, unsure if he could assist but pleased to be asked, inviting Kim to dinner with himself and Lady Jessie. Bradman scooped Kim up at the airport and drove him out to their Holden Street home. Kim was nervous. He considers it one of his life’s highlights. He still has the letter. Over dinner, Bradman related a story about how he himself dealt with a wilful Keith Miller. They talked about captains having the final say. And the outcome? Kim won’t tell exactly—only that the name Kim Hughes lacked the aura and authority of the name Don Bradman. And that it did not work.

Allan Border called the Lillee–Marsh–Kim relationship a ‘cold war’. Opponents sensed it. ‘Something of a mafia,’ noted David Gower of Lillee, Marsh and the Chappells. Umpires heard it. Controversy-shy Peter McConnell umpired more of Lillee, Marsh and Kim all together than anybody. Lillee gave him a stump after Melville’s inaugural first-grade flag. McConnell likes all three, blames cricket’s rulers for their predicament and gets riled by umpires who indulge in histrionics. ‘The game is about the players, not umpires.’ But McConnell will say: ‘They were put into this, the three of them, but yeah, there was tension. You’ll always get people disagreeing with things a captain does. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’ll just walk away. Whereas here, there were a few things said.’

Those things they said entered one ear and swiftly exited the other. That was Kim’s way. It infuriated Marsh and Lillee. But it was a blessing. Because the words did not eat at him—not yet. A batting crease is no place for self-doubt and Kim had none. He was twenty-eight. The world was as round and tameable as Bay 13’s beach balls. Amid unwatered-down defamation from team-mates he produced the batting of his life.

Five sixes in five Tests against England were more than any Australian had clouted in a home summer since Keith Miller’s eight sixes off the 1947–48 Indians. More remarkable than their frequency was the process. Kim pounced when well-set. He responded to the delivery, not the voice in his head. He radiated total control. In big stands he played the passive partner. Every game he contributed. A 62 in Perth was vintage, freewheeling Kim. A vigilant 39 not out in Brisbane—in partnership with another reformed wild colonial boy, David Hookes—made a tricky late-afternoon run chase simple. In Adelaide, Botham felt for the first time when bowling to Kim that he might not get him out at any given minute. Hesitation between wickets cost Kim a hundred. So serene was his state of mind that he shook off his disappointment, told batting partner Border it wasn’t his fault and quietly departed for 88.

The team’s wellbeing preoccupied Kim in Melbourne too. He hit 66 and 48 in a low-scoring humdinger. Last man Thomson joined Border on the fourth evening with 74 hopelessly required. Hookes, Lawson and Marsh retreated to the downstairs dressing room, unable to watch. Also, six o’clock beckoned. ‘Time to tear the top from a can of beer,’ as Marsh put it. ‘It is as much a part of a day’s cricket to me as putting on the gloves.’

The batsmen survived: edging, grimacing, bunting, galloping. Next morning Hookes, teetotaller Lawson and Marsh superstitiously reconvened downstairs. Border and Thomson had 37 more runs to knock off. Marsh and Hookes knocked off eight beers each. ‘You could say we were drunk.’ Four runs shy of the impossible, Thomson snicked Botham to second slip Chris Tavare, whose muffed catching attempt fended the ball to within swooping distance of a crab-clawed Geoff Miller. Marsh, Hookes and several Australian cities missed it; Botham, heart aflutter, had taken twenty-five instead of thirty seconds between overs and the ad break ran over the top. But Kim followed every beat. On a manila envelope he re-sketched his ‘Mountain to Glory’ that had tracked Australia’s improbable Guyana victory of 1978. He crossed off every run and marked incisions up the mountain face. ‘Today,’ said Border, seeing the tattered, sweat-soaked scrap, ‘we stumbled at the peak.’

Needing to draw in Sydney, Australia were only 190 ahead when Border, the last specialist batsman, joined Kim. Miller and Eddie Hemmings were not over-endowed with inbuilt menace. But they were making the ball judder on an SCG turner, twenty-two yards so inhospitable to Kim that he’d never topped 48 there in first-class circles. Six hours it took England to dismiss him. He used his feet, whittled away time, let Border outpace him. If that seemed unfeasible, Bill O’Reilly’s first five words in the next day’s Sydney Morning Herald were unforeseeable:

Kim Hughes, Australia’s Mr Reliable . . .

He made 137—469 for the series.

‘It’s nice to think I played a part in winning the Ashes back when a lot of people thought I stuffed up in England,’ said Kim. ‘But for a bloke called Botham who walked on water for three matches we could have won that series 4–0. Maybe now I can forget about 1981.’ Hughes enemies, even the persistent ones, said amen to that. ‘After this series,’ wrote Ian Chappell, ‘not only should Hughes’s conscience be clear but his slate clean in regard to the 1981 disaster.’

Fifteen hours after Kim’s SCG hundred, Greg Chappell rang Phil Ridings to relinquish the captaincy—for the subsequent limited-overs series, and for good. He did so knowing who would take over. Kim at last was in command of a full-strength outfit at home. Forty-five thousand Melburnians clapped him all the way out in that opening one-dayer, then all the way off when he dabbed the winning run. Australia won three straight, a rarity, for the men in canary yellow treated 50-over cricket with the reverence an alcoholic reserves for soda. Lillee was missing after a knee operation. Was there a connection? He returned mid-series at quarter-throttle. ‘Poor old Lillee trudging around,’ sympathised New Zealand prime minister Robert Muldoon. ‘He should be out to grass.’

The Kiwis met Australia in the first final in Sydney. Lillee was back—and fuming. He couldn’t believe John Wright was still batting. Second-gamer Steve Smith had dropped him at midwicket, a sitter. ‘Fot sort of went “Grrrr” and walked back to his mark,’ Smith remembers. Home ground jitters, that was all. But then he dropped another. ‘Kim just shook his head. But Fot blew up. I thought, oh no, what am I doing here? Is this ground going to open up and let me in or what?’

Playing for Australia was hard enough without antagonising Lillee. Smith had anticipated a welcoming nugget or two from Chappell. None was forthcoming. ‘I never found Greg all that approachable,’ says Smith. ‘And he didn’t go out of his way to help me. It was a fend-for-yourself-type job. That’s fine.’ Worse was the muttering when Kim made a field change. The wicketkeeper would shake his head. ‘Glove straight over the face . . . Here I am, a young fella expecting everyone to get on, and it’s completely the opposite. I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about three or four or five.’

The game continued. No more catches came Smith’s way. Trouble did. Lillee wanted him moved straighter. ‘Over ’ere.’

Kim was thinking the reverse: Smith should go squarer. ‘Nah, I want him ’ere.’

They were yelling. ‘I felt like a bloody yoyo,’ Smith recalls, ‘because this went on for a couple of minutes. And I was thinking, hey, any chance of you guys working this out?’ Lillee pointed, gesticulated, threw up his hands and thundered off.

Glenn Turner, a cultured shotmaker who knew it and thus qualified as Australia’s least favourite Kiwi, couldn’t help noticing Kim’s besieged, harried exterior at the crease. Champing, spitting, snorting—‘sticking out his chest like a pouter pigeon and pulling back his shoulders like a man being prodded from behind’.

Kim won a gold tray and goblets for being named man of the finals, then more golden goblets as Sheffield Shield player of the year. Here was a cricketer in his prime who demanded respect. High in the SCG members’ stand his picture hung above one of the dressing-room doors. The inscription read: ‘Kim Hughes, Australian Captain’. But someone, the whisper went, had got at it with a Clag gluepot and a felt pen. They’d stuck a ‘Clag’ label on top of the word ‘Kim’, and in front of ‘Australian Captain’ they’d scribbled the word ‘Pretend’.

•••••

SPECIAL TREATMENT in the nets was the other thing young Steve Smith found bewildering:

I always thought a team environment was supposed to be: ‘Good to see you, good luck, let’s have a few throwdowns.’ Uh-uh. Uh-uh, not happening. I remember Kim facing Fot in Perth, the day before my first game, and Fot nearly killed him. Then he’d bowl to me and was nowhere near as quick. Kim didn’t give a shit. It was part and parcel of what he had to put up with. If Fot bowled short Kim gonged him, the way he would in a game. Just in that one session Kim copped a couple on the shoulder—went to duck and didn’t get down early enough. But he never once flinched.

There is always a certain pointlessness about a quick bowling at his own batsmen within a narrow net-rimmed rectangle. He must challenge without injuring while simultaneously polishing his own game. When Dennis bowled at Kim, it was something else again. At state training, Foster tried intervening: ‘Come on, mate, he’s had enough.’

‘He’s gotta learn,’ Lillee would reply. ‘He’s gunna get bounced in the game, little fair-haired prick, so therefore he’s gotta cop ’em in the nets.’

Foster felt it dangerous at times. Afterwards he’d say to Kim: ‘It was a bit overdone today.’

‘It’s all right. No problem. He’ll never get me out. Don’t worry.’

The Australian team had no coach, no permanent support staff, no outsider inclined to put a clamp on Lillee. ‘It was definitely not aired at team meetings,’ says Lawson. ‘It was whis- pered in corners of bars and hotel rooms. Because of the stature of Dennis and Rod.’

‘They were Chappell, Lillee and Marsh,’ says Mike Whitney. ‘Man, this was the fucking royalty.’

And Kim was never badly hurt—not badly enough for the hoi polloi to revolt. ‘It had a degree of amusement, like when someone gets hit in the box and their team-mates laugh,’ says Lawson. ‘When Kim got hit on the arm the day before the Ashes, we thought this is going too far. If Dennis broke Kim’s arm the players, I think, would have come down heavily on him. But he didn’t break Kim’s arm. There was never that one step to pull it all back into order.’

Kim never squealed. It never made the papers. Even now, the pressure to keep safe the team secret is strong. Dennis headhunting Kim? Some smile cryptically. Others talk nervously, and only when assured that they are not alone, not blabbing. ‘Someone should have sat them in a room,’ Wood believes, ‘and said: “Sort it out, or one or all of you have got to go.” I think now that would happen. You wouldn’t let it fester. But it was left to fester. There was this clique. You had the world’s best bowler trying to knock your No. 4 batsman’s head off.’

Without a coach, who could stop it? Of the three most experienced players, one was detonating the bouncers and another’s thwarted leadership ambitions were a prime cause. The third was a man everyone respected. ‘It used to disappoint me,’ says Wood, ‘that Greg at times pulled out of things.’ Chappell is initially wary of discussing Lillee’s bouncing of Kim:

There was never a point when you considered it inappropriate?

Oh, look, I wasn’t there on those occasions so I can’t really comment. The only time I was aware of any open dissent was the telecast from England [in 1981] when I saw Dennis and Rod openly disagree with Kim on the field.

Other players talk about net sessions in the ’81–82, ’82–83 and ’83–84 home summers when Dennis, ball after ball, would aim at Kim’s head . . . 

I didn’t see too many occasions. And to be quite honest, if I did see anything like that from time to time, when you have a bunch of highly motivated individuals occasionally there’s going to be a short circuit. We weren’t always all the best of mates. Teams often worked with some elements of dysfunction in them. Some personalities didn’t go with other personalities. But provided you had a blend of personalities, that little bit of electricity could actually work in your favour. Occasionally you had a short circuit or a bloody power rush and there was an incident within the group. But, you know, we’re not talking about a bunch of choirboys.

This theory is reminiscent of something Marsh told Playboy: ‘It’s not a bad thing when a little bit of aggro creeps in. If the people are big enough to bring whatever is bugging them out into the open, it’s one of the greatest ways to knit a team.’ Chappell continues:

A lot of them, all of us, had big egos and high opinions of ourselves. We had to. It’s a tough environment. It’s a survival of the fittest. There wasn’t a lot of time to stop and bend down and pick people up. You’d bend down and pick ’em up a few times but from then on they were on their own, because by then you’d found someone else who didn’t need picking up. There weren’t bloody team chaplains. There weren’t nurturing systems in place. There weren’t permanent team managers. There wasn’t a raft of fifteen support staff. The captain was it. You had a manager who joined you for each tour and most of those guys didn’t have a clue. We spent more time managing them than they spent managing us.

Chappell’s otherwise meticulous 1985 biography made no mention of Lillee’s serenading of Kim with chin music. The lid stayed on the secret. ‘Maybe they’—Chappell, Lillee and Marsh—‘talked about it over their beers,’ says Adrian McGregor. ‘That’s the sort of friendship those guys had.’ It isn’t Chappell’s recollection:

Occasionally things bubbled over and burst out. And occasionally it was worthwhile sitting back and watching the outcome. It wasn’t a matter of stepping in: ‘Oh Dennis, don’t do that, that’s not very nice.’ It may have been just the thing the guy needed. If he couldn’t cope with it, he probably wasn’t going to cope on the field. We weren’t running a bloody kindergarten. We were trying to survive in a tough world. We needed guys in there with us who were tough and could survive as well.

That didn’t mean everyone had the same personality. There were softer individuals, softer in the sense that their personality was different. And Kim was certainly different. Kim would cry. His emotions he wore on his sleeve. You knew exactly where he was. That’s what we loved about him. There wasn’t a lot of ‘side’ to Kim, other than the downside of some of his personality traits. There was no nastiness in him. But there were times when we felt he needed toughening up. A good workout in the nets occasionally was probably a good place to start. And the thing about it was Kim loved it, generally, because he loved playing hook shots.

Lillee had been bouncing Kim for years, since long before captaincy shenanigans. The boy could have been a world-beater like them if only he’d tempered that flamboyance, if only he’d listened. But would he listen? Bouncers were an attempt to cut through where words failed. As Chappell puts it: ‘You’re not listening to the verbal message—try this one.’

World Series Cricket came then went. Chappell played. Chappell skipped. He was mentally knackered. ‘I needed those breaks otherwise I wasn’t going to be able to keep playing.’ Every time he abdicated he knew he may not return. ‘I’ve read in many places that I picked and chose when I’d be captain. I had no say in it.’ But the board kept reappointing him. ‘An unsatisfactory position,’ says Alan Crompton, later chairman, ‘but one we were wearing. Following the peace the ACB and PBL were desperately keen to make the peace work. From the ACB’s point of view we were more than happy to bend over backwards to accommodate the World Series players as they came back.’

Also, Chappell seemed the obvious leader. But so did Marsh in Chappell’s absence. Reasons for targeting Kim’s head grew more complicated. It was upsetting for Marsh. Fluffing his nest with Packer didn’t make him selfish. Future cricketers would thank World Series Cricketers. Yet Marsh felt like he was being flogged. There was more to it, as we know, but flogged was how he felt. And Lillee felt furious on his mate’s behalf. Men defended mates. Barely a cricketer in the country reckoned Kim likely to outdo Marsh in ingenuity or inspirational might. But there it was. The guy was captain. You were taught to back your captain. You got on with it. Proud as they were, tirelessly as they toiled, Lillee and Marsh did not always look like people getting on with it.

‘Dennis and Rod didn’t think Kim should be captain and probably had a logical view,’ says Lawson. ‘But to carry on about it was six-year-old’s stuff.’ Bob Simpson, still years away from the coaching reign that transformed the Test team’s culture, watched with concern from afar. ‘I certainly would have had an honest, open team meeting about it all . . . I remember being totally distressed by the situation.’ Craig Serjeant felt almost embarrassed:

Embarrassed’s not the right word. You felt sorry for Kim. You really felt sorry. Senior players should have had enough respect for the position to not make their thoughts on the field so overtly obvious. I felt really uncomfortable about that. That wouldn’t be tolerated at a lot of levels. But they were strong-minded, strong-willed . . . And it was Dennis more than anyone. If he were in the room he’d object to me saying that. But that’s a fact. For Kim to have to control these competing egos when deep down he knew they didn’t want him in that position . . . I don’t know what his answer would be, or how he dealt with it. But, God, it wouldn’t have been easy. Lots of people would have cracked and crumbled before he did.

Kim wasn’t cracking yet. He still had his sense of humour. Favourite magazine was one question asked in a Q&A for Australian Cricket on 4 March 1983. Kim’s answer? ‘Playboy.’ For the articles, presumably.