God Was His Nickname
GEOFF LAWSON’S PREPARATION for the 1983 World Cup consisted of him arriving home from university on a winter’s evening, walking five hundred metres to Coogee Oval and bowling at a garbage tin in an otherwise empty net. There was no team get-together or acclimatisation camp in Maroochydore. No Greg Chappell either. Three days before the plane left for London, Chappell withdrew with a stiff neck that made batting uncomfortable and bowling unfeasible. Even this provoked discord. Kim wanted to take a ‘60 or 70 per cent fit’ Chappell. Chappell pronounced himself 65 per cent fit—‘and that’s nowhere near good enough’. Little did the Australians know it but they would soon rewrite the medical books. Pains in the neck were about to prove contagious.
Thirty-One Days to Power was the name of a new book charting Bob Hawke’s breakneck conquest of the Australian Labor Party and prime ministership. Eleven Days to Purgatory summed up the progress of another charismatic Westralian son. Kim’s World Cup campaign began on 9 June and finished on 20 June. A practice game at Arundel Castle—hailed out, not rained out—set the tone. This would be a tournament of extremes. World cricket was booming with an uncommon depth. Six countries were genuinely competitive and a seventh, Sri Lanka, rising fast. Never in one spot had so many current or soon-to-be giants clustered: Border, Botham, Crowe, Dujon, Garner, Gavaskar, Gower, Greenidge, Hadlee, Haynes, Holding, Imran, Javed, Kapil Dev, Lillee, Lloyd, Marsh, Marshall, Ranatunga, Richards, Roberts, Turner, Willis, Zaheer. None, promisingly, hailed from Zimbabwe, Australia’s first-up opponent.
Reputations counted nought. The cup debutants and 1000–1 nonentities were 13 runs too good for a team garrotting every one-day by-law. Australia bowled first, spilt catches, leaked extras, squandered wickets. Recent Young Australia tourist Ken MacLeay had warned against underestimating a side handy enough to bench seventeen-year-old Graeme Hick. Nonetheless Marsh, long since recovered from a 45-can hangover after the flight over, felt Kim’s approach too slapdash. Hogg was bothered more by the aftermath: ‘Next day we should have been running roads, or fielding, or doing a bit in the nets—or something. And we weren’t. It was a free day.’
Kim batted like a goose or a lord with nothing in between. Light was scant and the deck untrustworthy when he confronted West Indies at Headingley. Wood was already in Leeds Infirmary, en route to becoming history’s first man to retire hurt after having his head clobbered on three consecutive England tours. Wayne Daniel said hello with a bouncer. Kim just stared. ‘Sssssss.’ Another bouncer. Kim hissed at him again. Daniel’s wrath was foaming, his response predictable: two more at the skull. Kim deposited both over the fine-leg rope. ‘You’ve got to bowl better than that,’ he declared, ‘to stop me hitting you for six.’ He perished minutes later for 18. In the return bout he top-scored with 69 in the company of a runner and two strapped and battered thighs. Agony was the one foolproof way of making Kim concentrate.
Conceivably, Australia could cop a double drubbing from West Indies, take revenge against Zimbabwe, twice beat India and still reach the semi-finals as Group B runners-up. With one game to go the back-up plan was on track. India were pushovers in Nottingham thanks to two one-hit wonders: MacLeay’s 6–39 (he never again managed 3–for) and Trevor Chappell’s 110 (27 was his next best). A repeat victory in Chelmsford looked a formality. Lillee, out of sorts, was dropped. Kim was a late scratching, his barbecued thigh muscles stiffening on a pre-game jog. Marsh had again refused the deputy’s job so Hookes captained.
The gates were closed, the small ground crammed with 9000 Indians—‘loud-mouthed and in many cases sozzled,’ noted the Guardian’s Matthew Engel. The atmosphere was electric, sometimes toxic. When Kim, perturbed by Hookes’s field settings, sent twelfth man Kepler Wessels out with instructions, Marsh roared: ‘Tell fucking Kim Hughes that if he wants to captain the fucking side, fucking play.’ But Kim had sunny memories of Chelmsford. In his Scottish league days he once splashed a six into the nearby River Can for the Irish Leprechauns. India failed to last 60 overs, sputtering to 247. The pitch was flat, the sky blue.
In 38.2 overs Australia capsized for 129. The destroyer was Roger Binny, taking out a litter of transfixed Australians with mild-mannered floaters that swung sharper in imagination than through the air. First man overboard, Trevor Chappell, caught the spirit. After edging a Balwinder Sandhu straight ball to gully he performed an altogether more elegant sweep stroke upon entering the pavilion, sending an afternoon tea set flying. Next, he picked up a coffee cup, aimed for the window and instead shattered a drinks machine, unloosing rivers. Wood recalls:
It reached a crescendo in England in ’83. That’s as bad as I’ve ever known a team environment. We should have at least made the semi-finals. You’d walk into a bar at night and there were definitely two factions. I tried to surf down the middle because, you know, they were all my friends. It’s disappointing when you look back. You go away on a World Cup, which should be a great experience, but this wasn’t. There were whispers and mutterings and it wasn’t enjoyable. And at Chelmsford, it was as bad as it ever was.
Books by Marsh and Lillee materialised in shop windows, like twisted power cables after a cyclone. Blame was apportioned: Kim wouldn’t talk, couldn’t listen, didn’t mix well, wasn’t one of the boys. ‘If you saw him at the back of the bus leading the singing you knew he had scored runs,’ wrote Lillee. ‘If he was down the front sleeping you knew he had failed. (The team beer was at the back).’ Ifs piled on top of ifs. If only Kim hadn’t batted at three. If only he’d played that last game instead of saving his leg for a hypothetical semi-final. If he’d just shown some respect. ‘A few guys,’ claimed Marsh, ‘were talking behind his back and muttering things about what they’d like to do to him if they caught him in an alley on a dark night.’
Wood says: ‘I definitely didn’t hear that.’
Hogg says: ‘I wouldn’t even go down the path of talking like that . . . Australian cricket was crying out for a coach . . . It wasn’t Kim’s fault.’
Lawson says: ‘It’s not my recollection.’
Marsh’s fiercest gripe was the pensioning off of Lillee. Twice it happened. The last time against India, dropping a champion matchwinner for a must-win match, cut deepest. ‘Dennis left the ground, as I recall,’ says Wood. ‘Didn’t get a game, didn’t get picked and actually left.’ Marsh’s version of his mate’s whereabouts was more charitable. Lillee, he said, went for a run to work off his anger and ran so far he got lost.
Men not only defended mates. Men returned favours. Lillee had long blown down houses in protest at Marsh’s treatment. Now Marsh huffed and puffed. But Lillee’s knee was troubling him. At Arundel Castle he let fly an estimated twenty-two bouncers in twenty-four balls at Glenn Turner yet still went for six runs an over. No trace of menace had been sighted since. ‘Maybe Rod thought that because Dennis was a senior player everyone should be loyal,’ says Lawson. ‘Oh, your name’s Dennis Lillee, it doesn’t matter then. But you had to divorce the name from the guy out there bowling.’ Lawson saw dropping Lillee as proof of Kim’s strength. Mutterings quite different to the ones Marsh heard were reaching Lawson’s ears:
Everyone in the team agreed Dennis shouldn’t be playing. He was the greatest bowler I’ve ever seen. Pain was no issue and he wanted to get out and play, but he just wasn’t physically capable. Conversations I had with guys went along the lines of: ‘God, Dennis has been dropped, he won’t be happy.’ Which he wasn’t. But it was the right thing. We wanted to make the World Cup finals.
In the Age, Peter McFarline advocated that Lillee, at thirty-three, never be selected again. ‘Pardon the unforgivable, but Australia looks and is a much better team without Lillee and Thomson. That is akin to suggesting Sydney Harbour is better without the bridge.’ India’s giant-squashing passage all the way to Lord’s soothed nobody. Dire days prompted dark ruminations. Even McFarline’s favourites weren’t exempt: ‘In a leadership career not exactly studded with memorable decisions, Hughes’s decision not to play [versus India] was lamentable . . . A collection of individuals without plan or forethought, this Australian team does not have a capable leader. Many older players have little faith in Hughes, whose communication lines within the dressing room are definitely Boy’s Own stuff.’
Round the Waldorf bar, the players were drinking to get maudlin. The captain appeared at the entrance in his green blazer and tie. A function? ‘No, I’m going home.’ Kim hoisted his luggage and boarded a cab for Heathrow. It was either the night of the Chelmsford catastrophe or the day after; memories differ. But he’d secretly booked himself on an early flight to Perth. And he hadn’t necessarily intended saying goodbye. ‘He wants to put his side of the story to the ACB before we get back,’ grizzled one player. For Hookes, it was ‘the most staggering thirty seconds’.
Staggering times, they were. Kim didn’t know it yet, but twenty-four hours after Australia’s Zimbabwean meltdown Yallop and Wessels had dinner with the South African Cricket Union’s Dr Ali Bacher. The day after Chelmsford six Australians—Yallop, Wessels, Wood, Hogg, Hookes, Thomson—slunk off to see Bacher at his brother-in-law’s Mayfair flat. Nobody mentioned that either. Kim was fighting a losing war in which the boundaries kept changing.
•••••
BEING A GRACIOUS LOSER was not so appealing a characteristic after all in a leader who lost so regularly and spectacularly. Kim’s early return home was time spent shrewdly. He rang Bob Merriman complaining of several bothersome anachronisms in Australian cricket. Merriman arranged a meeting with two board grandees, Bob Parish and Fred Bennett, each old enough to be Kim’s grandfather. They were thoughtful men, Parish a timber merchant and Bennett an ex-ABC personnel officer, with eighty-one years of cricket administration between them. In Parish’s downtown office Kim proposed what he called his ‘masterplan’: a national coach, support staff, player contracts, practice sessions with a whiff of verve and purpose, the way Daryl Foster ran things in WA. Bowl at garbage tins and you’ll get rubbish on the pitch. ‘An outstanding presentation,’ recalls Merriman. ‘Those two ACB chiefs were very impressed and hellbent on taking a lot of Kim’s recommendations to the board.’
Alas, Kim was not the only one with a vision. And some people’s visions did not involve Kim. Home from London, Jeff Thomson shuffled up to a TV microphone and went whang. No, he conceded, the leadership wasn’t terribly inspiring. Yes, Marsh must be disappointed not to be captain: ‘I’d like to see him there. Put it that way.’
More withering was Hookes on Ken Cunningham’s 5DN drivetime show in Adelaide. Hookes was contracted to the station and knew his interrogator well. Years earlier, ‘KG’ had sledged the budding West Torrens wonderboy, inciting a flash of Hookes’s blade and the retort: ‘Listen old man, continue bowling those wobbly seamers and the next eight will go over the fence.’ When KG asked Hookes to choose between Marsh and Kim he anticipated the deadest of bats. ‘Maybe,’ went Hookes’s unexpected reply, ‘Kim has got to be an apprentice to somebody everybody respects.’
If lazy feet were Hookes’s supreme cricketing flaw, a whipcrack tongue cost him just as dear. Honesty was his unbending policy. ‘Have you swallowed a pig?’ he’d say by way of greeting Kerry O’Keeffe. Kim had irked him during their matchwinning Gabba stand against England, remarking to Botham after one hazardous Hookes hook: ‘It’s about time one of our players had as much arse as you.’ Hookes never forgot it. He was also utterly convinced of Marsh’s capabilities. Fined $1200 for his frankness, Hookes was flown to Perth under an alias—‘I felt like Paul McCartney’—on a secret peacekeeping mission. He and Kim chatted in Kim’s dining room and over beers at the Sheraton. Yet Hookes played not one Test against Pakistan that summer. Viral pneumonia would have kept him from the start; but the First Test team, minus Hookes, was picked days before sickness struck. In the previous six Tests Hookes had averaged 69. In his last knock in Kandy he blazed a century in a session. By the time he got another chance—against West Indies on their wickets—his moment had passed.
Kim was paying too. Abject disappointment had driven him on to the first plane out of Heathrow. But that didn’t make it right, or popular. Bob Merriman copped ‘a decent earful’ from tour manager Phil Ridings. Two players came to Merriman brandishing misgivings. ‘Then, to see where the hell it was at, I spoke to two others. They questioned Kim’s leadership, his methodology of dealing with people.’ Meanwhile Greg Chappell led Border around Royal Queensland golf course. He chipped away at Border’s well-known reluctance to be captain. If board delegates would not countenance Marsh they might contemplate Border, but only if he had some experience. That meant captaining Queensland.
Chappell teed up an orderly transition. He felt entitled to do so. With Chappell, the grandness of the office of Australian captain was no myth. Sometimes he really felt like his country’s second most powerful citizen. He’d say so to people. Reporters used to ring him.
‘What do you think of the situation in Pakistan?’
‘We’re not touring Pakistan.’
‘No, but what do you think?’
Chappell had a sense of certainty. It went with him everywhere. It was so rock-solid it verged on Bradmanesque. He’d ponder what was best for Australian cricket, decide, then organise it. He has an uncluttered mind, a pernickety memory. Those qualities made sculpting Chappell’s memoirs pure pleasure for Adrian McGregor. ‘You’ve just got to be around Greg long enough,’ McGregor adds, ‘and you start to believe him.’ Eighteen holes did the trick on this occasion. According to Chappell, Border gave in with the words: ‘Having seen the cock-up Kim’s making of it, I might as well do it myself.’
On 18 August 1983 Border succeeded Chappell as Queensland skipper. On 26 August the ACB’s cricket committee met at Melbourne’s Hilton Hotel. Chappell represented Queensland. Kim, now a deposed committee member, was there as Australian captain. Also present were the five other state representatives plus Ridings, Bennett, Richards and Merriman. Chappell, with that customary certainty of his, arranged to room with Kim.
Circumstances meant Chappell had seldom experienced or even witnessed Kim’s captaincy himself. But others’ gripes came as no surprise. He remembered that 1977 night with the overboiled waitress in the hick New Zealand town. Recent telephone interactions unsettled Chappell. ‘Kim would agree to something then the next day we’d have a conversation as though the previous conversation hadn’t taken place. Alarm bells were ringing for me. This guy needed help.’
The way Chappell saw it, to be a Test cricketer was to lead a tenuous existence in an uncoddled world. Certain personalities were required, special training. ‘Batting against my brother—five years older than myself—as a nine-year-old, getting bounced with a hard ball, helped develop me to the point where I could stand up to a West Indian pace attack. We competed with our mates in parks, backyards, streets. That’s where we got the tools and coping skills to deal with each situation, to make decisions in real time that were akin to the decisions we had to make in Tests and one-day internationals. And if you missed bits of that . . .’
Chappell’s meditations culminated in a room-service breakfast for two at the Hilton. He did not want to risk interruption. It was 7.30 a.m. on a Friday. Chappell told Kim the team was not united. Players were ‘at breaking point’. Most wanted a new leader. Marsh would be perfect—or, if the board kiboshed that idea, Border. It cannot be you. Stick with the captaincy and you will most likely lose it. Runs will dry up. Then you’ll get dropped. The pressure is more than you can stand. If you truly care for Australian cricket, do as I say. Declare yourself unavailable. ‘Do yourself a favour.’ In a couple of years, maybe, you’ll get it back.
Saying these words did not come easily to Chappell—‘a terrible situation to be in’:
Christ, I wasn’t a counsellor. I was a bloody cricketer. I cared for the individuals. And when I say ‘cared’, I wasn’t professionally trained to sit down with them and give advice. I could only give them advice from the heart and from my own life experiences. And what I told Kim was he needed help. He needed to get away from cricket, get some professional help and hopefully be able to resurrect himself and his career.
Chappell’s wish to not be disturbed was fulfilled. Even Kim said nothing, ate nothing. Chappell spoke for half an hour. He feels Kim ‘took it on board pretty well’. He believes Kim considered it well-meaning advice intended for his own good. He thinks Kim trusted him.
Yet when Chappell finished talking Kim stayed silent. After thirty seconds Kim got up. ‘I’ll go and see if Bob and the others are ready.’ And with that, he left.
Chappell was dumbstruck. ‘He either had to hit me or agree with me. But to just walk out of the room—it was his room. He was a shattered man. He was gone. He was an emotionally wrecked individual and it was tragic to see.’ Items on that day’s committee agenda included the World Cup wash-up, the itinerary, fluorescent uniforms, coloured balls. Emotionally wrecked or not, Kim said his bit. People could upset him but he would not cower. And in all the years since, other than the things he tells his family, he has never mentioned what hap- pened over breakfast.
What Chappell did took bravery. And brazenness. He thought it the right thing for Australian cricket. But doing what you think is right is not quite the same as doing right. And how do you ever know the difference? Even when you do know you don’t really; you only think you know. In Chappell’s case, additional complications abounded. By no leap of anyone’s imagination was he objective: Marsh was his mate. And he was Greg Chappell. ‘God’ was his nickname. Knowing God was not entirely on his side maximised Kim’s degree of difficulty, should he persist.
Chappell says he consulted widely before ordering breakfast in on 26 August. ‘I brought in the whole selection panel, Bob Merriman. Bob’s background as an industrial advocate meant he had some experience in that area.’ Merriman says he knew what Chappell was planning but not exactly when: ‘He told me afterwards.’ David Richards only found out later. It is possible that Chappell was no dispassionate observer of his own actions at this moment; that he was in the wrong headspace to distinguish between being right and thinking himself right. Adrian McGregor, with nearly a quarter of a century’s hindsight, suggests:
I think he felt really guilty about not being there for the team in England. And I think that coloured his reaction. I think he had an overreaction. He’d ditched the team for his own good reasons, they suffered and he felt it incumbent upon him to right this wrong. The way he went about it was probably a bit over the top. I don’t think he was undermining Kim in a malicious way. Greg was acting out of his own sense of guilt, or something like guilt.
The guilt could explain the haste. Still soft was the kiss of the Chappell family’s blessing—Ian’s thoughtful praise, Greg’s bequeathing of the captaincy—two lovely and surprising sequels to Kim’s Ashes-sealing 137. After that Kim led Australia in the limited-overs games. They polished those off. ‘Go to it Kim,’ wrote Greg in his newspaper column. ‘Get stuck in and make it one of the greatest winning eras . . . I would like to see Kim captain the side in every match and on every tour from now on. I hope he captains for the next umpteen years—for as long as he wants.’
That was on 6 February 1983: 201 days earlier. Since then Kim had led Australia to three defeats in five one-dayers, none of which Greg played, all of which he followed from 10,000 miles away. Declare yourself unavailable. Do yourself a favour. Wasn’t that advice a little impetuous? Impetuosity was the trait they despaired of in Kim.
Kim could walk out. But he could not walk away. Other people at the country’s opposite end were puzzling over his welfare and arriving at the same answer as Chappell. ‘We have to try to do this for Kim,’ Daryl Foster told Sam Gannon. They made an appointment to see him. A week after the Hilton breakfast the three men met at Gannon’s Outram Street office in West Perth. It was mid-afternoon. Gannon, respected in business and liked by all, did most of the talking. ‘Concentrate on your batting,’ he said. ‘Become one of Australia’s all-time greats. Score 8000 runs. Forget the peripheral stuff.’
Bluntness and flattery were Gannon and Foster’s two prongs. With Marsh or Lillee they’d have camouflaged deepest thoughts and tiptoed through the back door. With Kim they knew he wouldn’t slam it in their faces. ‘You could be the equal of Viv Richards,’ proclaimed Foster. That wasn’t just flattery. ‘There were innings,’ Foster believes now, ‘that even Viv couldn’t have played.’ He recalls Kim listening politely, attentively. ‘We virtually had him convinced,’ says Gannon, ‘to stand down as captain.’ Kim departed at 5 p.m.
By chance, Merriman was dining at the Hughes household that evening. He was in Perth on Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission business. There were four at the table: Kim, Jenny, Merriman and Rob Parry, Frank’s son and Kim’s friend since their teens. Rob managed his accounts and guarded his affairs—‘business adviser’, Kim called him. The higher Kim went in cricket, the deeper Rob’s influence.
Merriman arrived determined to discuss the complaints gathered from team-mates in England. The conversation started there and didn’t stray far. They covered Kim’s inconsistent batting as captain, whether he was happy, the inability of some players to support him. ‘Rob was probing,’ says Merriman. He cannot remember Jenny’s feelings. This time, Kim spoke. For a week he can have pondered little else but the words he did not want to hear of men who said they cared. ‘It was a night of a lot of thought and a fair bit of self-examination by Kim,’ says Merriman. ‘No angst or anger or untoward feeling. Just Kim talking about a problem confronting him.’
Four still sat round the table when Kim began writing. Merriman recalls: ‘He comfortably worked through a letter explaining his concerns and where he felt he was going, saying he still wanted to serve Australian cricket. But he had come to the conclusion, very firmly, that it was in the best interests of his form and enjoyment to not have the responsibility of leadership.’
Do not consider me for the captaincy this season, Kim’s letter said. He addressed it to the board and entrusted Merriman with delivering it to the chairman. Merriman left Kim’s house late, with the handwritten letter, catching the red-eye to Melbourne and driving home to Geelong. He had a site inspection near Colac in the afternoon. His phone rang that morning:
There’s no doubt that after I left Kim had conversations with Parry—and maybe Frank, I don’t know—and obviously with his lawyer. Because the next morning’s phone call wasn’t a ‘Hi Bob, how are you?’ It was a very clear, precise, fairly legalistic statement. ‘I will be captain of Australia. My family says I will be captain of Australia. My family includes my friends over here. I will be captain of Australia.’ He said that if he didn’t get the captaincy he would be changing his phone numbers and he wouldn’t be giving them to me.
Oddest was this: not once did Kim say he had changed his mind. ‘Is that really what you want?’ asked Merriman. Kim repeated his message. Merriman ripped up the letter. He delved no deeper and told the board nothing. As cricket committee coordinator he felt an obligation to the players.
But something sinister had happened. Form and enjoyment were suddenly lesser considerations. Years earlier, Kim had left schoolteaching behind with visions of a cricketing afterlife in finance. He was a promotions officer with City Building Society, then an assistant manager of business development for Town & Country Building Society. The job involved marketing duties. And he’d ring big investors to tell them when their investments were coming up to maturity. ‘One of the loyalest people I ever had working for me,’ says Ray Turner, the Town & Country general manager who brought Kim to the firm. ‘He was a great player, well presented, good-looking. He was a family man. He fitted the Town & Country mould admirably.’
In Network News, the in-house staff newsletter, one item went: ‘Kim Hughes? The Australian Cricket captain? Yes, that’s right. In “civilian” life Kim Hughes is a Town & Country WA executive.’
He posed with shirt unbuttoned, bat upraised in Town & Country ads. They gave him time off for cricket. He lent them pizzazz, prestige and wholesomeness. Only one cricketer in the land could possibly offer all those qualities. ‘Town & Country wanted to be seen to be employing the Australian captain,’ says Sam Gannon. ‘He was told in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t stand down.’
Ray Turner is a man Kim used to confide in and respect. ‘He would only have been given advice,’ says Turner, ‘if he sought it. And I honestly can’t remember whether he did seek advice . . . Even if I could recall it I wouldn’t be disclosing the details of it, because that’s pretty personal.’
Kim banned Rob Parry and Stephen Owen-Conway, his lawyer, from being interviewed for this book. Frank Parry died in 2003. Kim had let a lot of men into his life, men who watched him bat and saw possibility. His coach and his coach’s son and his lawyer. His employer and his cricket board barrackers. His father. Too many men.
•••••
IF SECOND-GUESSING KIM’S true wishes was tricky, the intentions of the fourteen Australian Cricket Board delegates posed another mystery. A vote on the captaincy was scheduled for 2 November 1983. So began two months of front-bar prattle and newspaper tattle. Chappell ruled himself out. Border was too raw. That left Kim and Marsh, a re-run of last year’s wild west showdown. The continent divided in two. Fifty-two per cent backed Marsh and 19 per cent Kim in a Sydney newspaper survey. Over in Perth a Daily News cut-out coupon beckoned readers to scrawl an X beside their preferred head. Kim polled 77 per cent, Marsh 16, Chappell 5, Hookes 2, Border zero. ‘It is not easy being stabbed in the back by people who are supposed to be your mates,’ noted letter writer Jerry Roberts of Highgate. ‘Hughes has a quality not evident in those mentioned as successors. The quality is class.’
The WACA seemed to agree. A fortnight before the ACB vote, Lillee was unveiled as WA vice-captain. Was that a hint? Marsh, Test captain in waiting, was apparently unfit to be his state’s second-in-command. On the first morning of Western Australia’s new leadership regime, Lillee refused a newspaper request for a photo with Kim. Lillee was suspicious of media entrapment. Also, they had been tiffing again. He was still frothing over a one-on-one meeting at which Kim had flagged his desire to bowl Lillee first-change and into the breeze. Lillee promptly drove home, donned joggers and ran twelve kilometres. Asked by 6PR’s Bob Maumill about the significance of him accepting the deputy’s job, Lillee replied: ‘If I go into a bar and have a drink with a bloke, it doesn’t show my sexual preference, does it?’
Kim rose early on 2 November, boarding a train for the wheatbelt hub of Northam. Town & Country was sponsoring a WA Country XI against Pakistan. Kim wore a Town & Country hat. A waiting car propelled him to the company’s Northam branch. There, he waited for new ACB chairman Fred Bennett’s 10.45 a.m. phone call.
In Sydney, Ian McDonald watched fourteen faceless men debate who should be the public face of Australian cricket. McDonald was surprised they let him attend. He was coming to the end of his first week as the board’s inaugural media manager, having previously performed the same trailblazing role for the Victorian Football League. ‘I thought the board blokes were all nice gentlemen compared to the footballers. But Christ, they played the footballers on a break,’ says McDonald. ‘I didn’t realise how much bloody politics there was, how much state rivalry.’ The New South Wales faction lauded Marsh’s attributes, again. Rigg and Sawle of WA were pro-Kim.
Kim hung up the telephone and headed to the local oval, Burwood Park, for a prearranged press conference in the ladies’ self-defence room. Twenty journalists gathered expectantly. Kim drifted in on a cloud of melancholy—‘as if he had just found weevils in his wheat silos’, observed the Australian’s Phil Wilkins. Instantly, Wilkins and the Daily News’s Robbie Burns guessed that Marsh’s long-cherished dream had been realised. Kim read from notes in a voice with the youth drained out of it: ‘The team is Wessels, Phillips, Yallop, Hughes.’ Pause. ‘Captain.’ The boy with a neon sign for a face had learnt a thing or two about poker.
Twice in nineteen months Marsh’s ambition had been slit by the skinniest of margins. Again Marsh had the chairman’s potential casting vote—Bennett’s, in succession to Ridings—but to no avail. This time he agreed to be Kim’s deputy. The First Test started in Perth on the 11th. On the 5th captain and vice-captain were to chat with Ian Chappell on Wide World of Sports. Kim pulled out on the 4th, via a telex message sent by his lawyers. The 8th was hectic. Bennett lectured the players in their Sheraton team room on the need for loyalty and unity. Then he handed over to the man from the Australian Wool Corporation, official team tailors, who previewed the new summer’s fashions before attacking the players with his tape measure. Mid-morning nets were followed by boat rides and a function at Royal Perth Yacht Club, the America’s Cup’s new residence. Notions of loyalty and unity got lost in a tidal wave of Swan Lager.
Trouble stirred over a trivial selection discrepancy. Kim and Marsh chatted on the clubhouse steps, in full view of players, scribes and assorted hobnobbers on the outside lawn. Chatting turned to shouting, gesticulating, jostling, shirt-pulling. ‘Break it up,’ David Richards ordered McDonald, who felt like saying: ‘Do it yourself.’ But it was only his second week. The players, he was learning, could be as ungentlemanly as the board dwellers. McDonald plopped himself between Australia’s captain and vice-captain. Fisticuffs were forestalled. ‘Instead of trying to punch each other,’ McDonald recalls, ‘I thought they were going to take me.’ The story didn’t seep out despite a full media contingent—and because of a full media contingent. ‘They were all,’ McDonald explains, ‘drunk.’ A giant marquee proved too giant for one reporter to navigate his way out. And Alan McGilvray’s evening ended with him creeping to the edge of the jetty and into a telephone box, imagining it to be a cab.
Five Tests against Pakistan promised nearly as many fireworks. Australia’s speed resources were rich and Pakistan’s batting long. Sadly Mohsin Khan, Mudassar Nazar, Qasim Omar, Javed Miandad, Zaheer Abbas and Salim Malik were more explosive on paper than on pitches conducive to swing. Worse, Imran was shin-sore and Sarfraz at war with the selectors. Queensland rain kept Australia to a 2–0 victory. As for Kim’s captaincy, even Greg Chappell—‘an uneventful, happy series’—had no complaints. In the last four Tests Kim carved half-centuries or better, his feet less cobwebby by the day in response to Abdul Qadir’s mischief and loop.
His best was saved for his country’s five hours of crisis in Adelaide, with Qadir tossing into footmarks, five close catchers hovering and Australia scrabbling for a draw. Kim’s chanceless 106 was a showpiece of circumspect precision. A week later he showed Queensland the flip side of his batting personality. Redheaded teenage gunslinger Craig McDermott—a long-time Kim admirer from the safety of his parents’ Ipswich living room—suffered second-game stagefright. Kim pillaged 130, twenty of them off one McDermott over, several dozen from cover drives off his quivering right knee. ‘As he hit the ball,’ a humbled McDermott recalled, ‘he said, “Shot, Claggy! That’s fucking four, young fella.” So in the same breath he was congratulating himself on a fine shot and pointing out to me where the ball was headed. He also called down the pitch more than once: “It’s not so easy up here, is it young fella?”’
Kim’s first marshalling of a full-powered Test XI was his last. Chappell, Lillee and Marsh bade cricket adieu amid a statisticians’ nirvana of tumbling milestones. Marsh held nearly as many testimonial dinners as catches. At Sydney’s Sheraton–Wentworth, 637 high-fliers paid $50 a head. Marsh auctioned a baggy green, two sweaters and the gloves he wore—the ones with more clang than cling—on his Test debut. Smoky Dawson sang and two Chappells spoke, Ian paraphrasing country singer Jerry Reed. ‘Hughes got the goldmine,’ said Ian, ‘and Marsh got the shaft.’ Two days later Australia played a one-day final at the SCG. Kim didn’t inch towards Ian for the customary post-toss interview. Kim turned and walked off.
Ian Chappell recently summarised his approach to people who get on his goat like so:
I have found as I get older that if I come across somebody who annoys me, or someone I don’t like or respect, I don’t particularly want to have anything to do with them . . . You think, shit, I’ve got less and less time here, I’m not going to waste it mixing with people who bore the shit out of me.
People who know Ian well call it a mellowing. Back in the Hughes mini-era, he remained deeply influenced by his father’s chainsaw honesty. Martin Chappell once embarrassed wife Jeanne at a dinner function by advising the woman sitting opposite: ‘Your hairstyle’s terrible.’ Ian shared his father’s flair for verbal nunchukku. Often he combined pith, vitriol and a deadly analogy, as in the commemorative book Ten Turbulent Years. ‘Yallop and Hughes,’ wrote Ian, ‘were the worst choice as leaders since Robert O’Hara Burke. Burke’s expedition with Wills was a disaster and the only difference with Yallop and Hughes is that they got away with their lives.’ Around Ian, Border always tried, usually unsuccessfully, to duck the subject. ‘Ian and I got along pretty well but we argued a helluva lot about Kim . . . You could see Ian’s hackles rise.’
Border never understood it. And in some ways, as cricketers, Ian and Kim could have been brothers, right down to their habit of gazing skywards to adjust eyes to the light. Both were entertainers. Both pummelled spin bowlers. ‘Against the average guys I thought there was four coming,’ was Chappell’s philosophy, ‘and if I didn’t get one that over there would be two the next over.’ That was Kim’s thinking too. Chappell goaded Kim on TV about his risky hooking of fast bowlers. Yet that was Chappell’s own preferred strategy, his signature stroke. Did it reflect some subconscious, unspoken lament for the lost digits the hook shot lopped off his own batting average?
Sometimes you sensed Ian grappling aloud with their similarities, as in the SCG Test of 1979–80, their first together. Kim arrived in a fix, saw Australia to safety with a cool 47, then self-destructed with a mad dash at Willis moments before deliverance. ‘I admire Kim’s attitude of not playing for the average and looking to entertain the public,’ wrote Chappell. And yet . . . ‘Having seen out the hard part it was ridiculous to throw his wicket away. His motto should always be “aim to be in there at the kill”.’
Kim lacked killer. That was the problem. ‘Captaincy is a task best carried out by a dictator with a feeling for his comrades,’ Chappell once remarked. That wasn’t Kim. Chappell swore—sometimes on air. That wasn’t Kim either. ‘One thing I like about Kim,’ says Hogg, ‘is, he swears a bit now, but I’ve never heard him swear too much. I love bagging people, that’s my caper, but I’ve never heard Kim really say a bad word about anyone.’ Kim’s wholesomeness made certain others choke. Englishman John Woodcock wrote of Ian Chappell: ‘He was what Australians value most of all, a winner. His players swore by him. But, my hat, he was basic.’
At Marsh’s testimonial dinner Kim arrived late, missing Chappell’s goldmine sledge by minutes. His team-mates heard it though. Forty or fifty strangers tried to comfort him. He felt humiliated. But to stomp off from the microphone after winning the toss, a Channel Nine technician’s cries dying on the breeze, confirmed every bad impression the Chappells ever had. He stomped right back out there minutes later and constructed an eleven-ball duck. That settled it. The kid was soft. It was a repeat of his untouched Hilton breakfast with Greg. Anyone else would have agreed, nodded, thanked Greg, fought or swore. But to walk out, fly home, quit to somebody else then cancel your resignation? Nothing manly in that.
They reckoned him narrow, too. Australian cricket was in a lull between the advent of professionalism and the players being treated like professionals. The monkeys were on a better grade of peanuts. But peanuts, relatively speaking, they were. The gap between gate receipts and player wages remained a chasm. Players were overworked and underappreciated. Some weren’t even awake to it. Australian cricket needed a man who could walk tightropes, not walk away.