‘Gentlemen, Before You Go . . .’
FOR MANY YEARS, virtually the only black faces seen on Channel Nine belonged to West Indian cricketers. And they were seen often—too often for the ripe health of Australian batsmen. Even Allan Border found their bowlers close to unplayable and verging on unspeakable:
You’re out there batting, battling really hard, then they get that good ball through you and you think, well, I’ve spent two hours getting 20. Whoopee-do! To stand at the other end of Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall and these people . . . Watching from a distance, you can’t pick up the variation in bounce or sideways movement. And the pace they’re bowling at makes it very, very difficult. It’s just . . . well, I can’t properly explain it in words.
A batsman’s nightmare was a TV mogul’s dream. ‘Kerry was in love with them,’ says Merriman. ‘Just the attractiveness of them; I think Kerry himself loved watching them. So we finished up with these programmes, agreed to by the board, which saw them here pretty frequently.’ From 1977–78 onwards, Clive Lloyd-led West Indian teams pitched camp down under six Christmases out of eight. The five Tests of 1984–85, coming so soon after five on their patch, threatened to be the ones that broke the Australian cricket team.
Gore was summer’s unofficial theme. A series logo decorated promotional brochures: two red balls slamming into each other, seams splitting and blood spurting on impact. Rod Marsh, no longer at risk of getting sconed himself, bestrode the National Press Club podium preaching violence. ‘Plan A,’ declared Marsh, ‘is to fight fire with fire . . . Try and crack a few skulls.’ Some batsmen tried hypnotherapy. Schemes to lengthen pitches by half a metre aroused serious discussion. Lloyd’s firing squad was fresh from terrorising Englishmen. Ageing off-spinner Pat Pocock, awaiting his turn at Old Trafford, divulged to the physio that he had brushed teeth and gargled, lest the kiss of life be required.
Kim’s teeth and smile were intact and everywhere. He and celebrity chef Peter Russell-Clarke fronted a twelve-minute instructional video for Kanga Cricket, whose butter-coloured bats, stumps and balls would soon invade 93 per cent of primary schools. Kim hammed it up with a plastic bat—‘might be able to score a few runs with that’—and said down the barrel: ‘Playing cricket as a boy we had a bat, ball and tree trunk. That was about all we needed to have a lot of fun and play Test matches in our imagination.’
Kim was the latest star of Ashley Mallett’s Master Cricketer series of children’s mini-paperbacks. Previous subjects included the Chappells, Lillee, Marsh, Walters—and, after considerable negotiation, Bradman. ‘Bradman knocked me back the first time because I don’t think he wanted to be associated with the Chappells and Lillee,’ Mallett explains. ‘That was the inference.’ Mallett would write to him, ending each letter with a question, however silly, thus guaranteeing a Bradman reply. ‘In the meantime I’d done the Doug Walters one. I think he identified with Doug: country New South Wales, no coaching, self-taught sort of kids, naive. And some of Doug’s innings were Bradmanlike. So he agreed to do it so long as it was in much the same tone as the Walters book.’
Through his traditionally rose-coloured glasses, Kim was having visions of purple. Michael Holding, he reckoned, bowled mostly ‘half-pace’. The West Indian speed department lacked depth. Their batsmen were bouncer-shy. The middle and tail looked iffy. Seeing off Garner and Marshall was the key. ‘West Indies have been winning because of those two bowlers—it’s as simple as that!’ His vice-captain was a fellow believer. ‘We’re thinking of beating them,’ trumpeted Australian Cricket’s ‘Borderline’ column. ‘Laugh all you want . . .’
Old foes delivered untimely knees to the solar plexus: the September publication of Gloves, Sweat and Tears; mid-October’s Over and Out! Old friends still wished to see Kim unshackled. Wayne Clark sat him down on the WACA’s public benches, two men gazing upon a field. ‘Give the captaincy away,’ Clark pleaded. ‘Just play cricket. Just go and play. You’ll play for another five years.’ Again—Kim reacted calmly. Clark remembers:
I honestly believed that if he backed off then he would become one of the great players. But he’d set his mind. He wasn’t listening . . . When you’re under that mental strain you don’t believe or trust anybody. It builds and builds and builds and it’s going to explode at some stage. He ostracised himself. I don’t know who he actually talked to—probably Jen, and that’s about it. He didn’t know who to trust. And in the end he said: ‘Fuck it, I won’t trust anyone, I’ll do it my way.’ He would go down a path, right or wrong, and wouldn’t waver.
Wood made multiple, less formal approaches: ‘Just play. Why put up with all this bullshit?’ Same response. ‘He was hellbent on it,’ says Wood. ‘I think he thought about it but in the end the desire took over.’
There was no finer moment to not be captain. Ever since Tony Greig of England vowed to make Lloyd’s men ‘grovel’, opposition captains had become the favourite bits of meat dangling off the end of West Indian speedsters’ forks. Botham had already been chewed up and spat out: stripped of runs, deposed soon after. Howarth, Gower and Vengsarkar would all follow. Greg Chappell, after seven ducks in fifteen innings, kept his job but lost some of his aura. As Holding put it: ‘The theory was, once the head goes, the body must wither.’
•••••
STILTS AND FLYSPRAY should have been presented to visiting batsmen upon landing in Perth. For the opening stanza of the hyper-hyped Showdown for the Crown, John Maley’s WACA pitch was not merely bouncy but green-specked, a consequence of rare spring rain. ‘We’ll bowl,’ said Kim with glee. Openers Greenidge and Haynes, supremely unflustered, batted two hours. After much deliberation Kim posted himself at an extremely short short-cover for the last over before lunch. Haynes wafted the ball straight to him. Tipping forward, unbalanced, Kim dropped it. Everyone stumped off to gnaw at their food, everyone except Kim, who had politely agreed to open the new Prindiville Stand with state governor Gordon Reid. For twenty-two minutes Kim stood out there while people laughed at him.
Rod Marsh got to the ground early, bringing his thirst with him. It was fourteen Novembers ago that he’d woken to the news of his Test selection and cracked open a celebratory 7 a.m. bottle of beer with WA room-mate Derek Chadwick. Now he wanted to be sipping a beer at the moment the first ball was bowled, to savour that feeling. Another earlybird was Terry Alderman, playing his first home Test in two years. So enthusiastic was Alderman that a policeman cautioned him for speeding on his way to the ground. He bent balls around and away from horizontal bats, West Indies sliding from 0–83 to 5–104. Then began a footloose riposte to Kim’s taunts of middle-order feebleness.
Larry Gomes and Jeff Dujon erected hundreds. Nine catches went astray. ‘Somebody hit a huge skyer down to fine leg,’ remembers twelfth man Maguire. ‘And I’d just come on the field and dropped it—of course. Never played again after that.’ West Indies amassed 416. In late afternoon sunshine Wood, listed at No. 3, slipped on his left pad, then his protector, then draped over his leg a too-wispy thigh pad:
I sat up in the old WACA seats. First ball was to Wessels. The ball hit the bat; bat didn’t hit ball. And I thought, well, I’ll be in soon. Then Dyso nicked one and I was in at the start of the second over. I remember looking back at Lloyd and the slips cordon—forty metres away. It was incredible. Then I nicked one. Clive came forward, caught it and I wondered how the hell did it get that far back. I couldn’t possibly nick it that high. That night was as quick as any bowling I ever faced.
Wood wasn’t imagining things. ‘One of the most brilliant’ passages Holding ever experienced; the most sustained ‘high pressure cricket’ Tony Cozier ever witnessed. The colours heightened the drama. Red ball flying, green helmets bobbing, outstretched black arms prising half-chances from mid-air in a dazzling yellow light. Kim entered at 3–28, nineteen minutes before stumps, and survived. Two not out.
He was fresh from slaughtering Patrick Patterson and the Tasmanians for 183, balls clunking into gold Benson & Hedges signs and rebounding metres back. As well as weeding the garden over winter, Kim hacked at his technique. Feet were splayed wider, bat between them, so he could move faster into position. Before the Test he showed Greg Chappell. ‘You always looked perfectly balanced, Kim, feet closer together,’ said Chappell. But Kim felt confident. He’d learnt from Border’s Caribbean successes. Grind, eliminate risk, score in front of the body. Reporters fishing for pre-Test quotes were informed: ‘I won’t be hooking at the WACA unless it is the second innings, I am 150 and we are 3–330.’
On the day Kim passed his nineteen-minute nose and throat examination, Xavier Herbert died. Herbert, author of Capricornia, was born in Geraldton and the town’s most celebrated export. He gave his last interview under a gum tree outside Alice Springs. ‘There are two kinds of Australians: Australians and West Australians,’ Herbert told the National Times that day, and ‘We are a nation of liars and rogues, generally.’ Kim told no lie, but the effect was the same. Holding, suspicious of pre-Test pledges rogues couldn’t possibly keep, set a deep leg trap and waited. Twenty-eight minutes elapsed next morning before he offered his prey a bouncer. Kim hooked. Wonderful shot, thought Garner in the gully. It rocketed flat and hard. On the fence, the force jolted Marshall, who kicked one leg out high to stay upright. In modern times with roped-in boundaries it would be six. Instead it was out.
Kim made 4 and Australia 76, ‘half-pace’ Holding’s figures 6–21. Assailed a second time, Kim was lbw for 37, offering no stroke, bat periscoping high in front of him like he meant to plunge the handle into his chest. Australia’s defeat was gigantic. A Mike Willesee interview felt like an inquest. File footage was overlaid. One second Kim was pumping iron, an excerpt from a PBL promo; the next second he was hooking fatally. An insulted Alderman fumed: ‘Willesee is a wizard in political and current affairs circles . . . But what right does he have to slip into the Australian side like he did?’
Cannier cricketing minds than Willesee worried about Kim’s belated installation of a gully despite Gomes’s countless airborne flutters. Kim had spent long periods at backward square leg. Hiding, was he? Even when he was around he wasn’t. His icy response to a one-handed catch by Phillips shocked Ian Brayshaw: ‘I watched in mild amazement as he walked slowly, head bowed, down to where some of his men were putting on a celebration party. His arrival and almost apologetic pat on the back for those concerned was a dampener, rather than an inspiration.’
And that was before Kim batted. Hooking was no sin. Hooking fetched you runs. But a public vow of abstinence was barmy. Greg Chappell remembered what he’d seen in the nets. With feet spread, Kim was sure to get pinned on his stumps. Also, he’d be driving off the back foot. The ball would balloon. ‘Your footwork is a mirror of your mental state,’ says Chappell. ‘Kim’s footwork was a muddle and his mental state was worse than a muddle.’
•••••
BOB HAWKE WAS in campaign mode and lodging at the Brisbane Sheraton, the Australian team’s hotel, on Gabba Test eve. He’d called the election eighteen months early. Mischief-makers reckoned it a ploy to get in before a 5–0 Windies whitewash and the torpedoing of national morale. In between ribbing Opposition leader Andrew Peacock and getting mobbed by his usual posse of elderly devotees at Redcliffe City Bowls Club, Australia’s prime minister found time to admonish Australia’s most embattled public figure. ‘Eschew the hook, at least for the first fifty runs,’ said Hawke. ‘And the other thing is spend all day today, and turn the lights on at night as well, Kim, if possible, and practise your catching.’
Five weeks earlier Hawke had been sporting an eye patch, his spectacles in smithereens, after an ill-considered hook during the Prime Minister’s Staff versus Press Gallery cricket match. But no one was too unqualified to take potshots at Kim, star attraction at the national coconut shy. Test new boy David Boon found it all quite surreal. At practice, recently appointed selector Greg Chappell belted slips catches while wearing a tie. The culture Boon entered was unrecognisable from the culture he would help sculpt over the following decade.
Kim was Chappell-addled, again. Ian had been itemising Kim’s latest shortcomings on Channel Nine while saving several salvos for his Sun-Herald column: ‘It is time for Hughes to stop talking about using a psychologist in the dressing room . . . To stop talking about the “new professionalism” . . . To stop talking about not hooking . . . To stop talking.’ This time, Kim took Chappell literally. He decided he had participated in his last post-toss interview.
‘Your contract requires you to do it,’ Merriman instructed.
‘Can’t Channel Nine get somebody else?’ said Kim.
Ian Chappell’s televised chats with the two captains in the middle of the oval had come to seem as much a part of Test match morning as the toss itself. Ian McDonald, media troubleshooter, tried sweet-talking Chappell. ‘How about easing off a bit?’
‘He’s captain of Australia,’ came Chappell’s reply. ‘He’s gotta be able to take it.’
David Richards confirms having ‘a dip behind the scenes’ too. Merriman came away believing an agreement had been struck. The post-toss interview would be ‘a reasonable interview’. Merriman urged Kim: ‘Go and do it. It’s all right. Nothing will happen.’ Grudgingly, Kim complied. ‘And the first question Ian Chappell asked,’ Merriman reflects, ‘was totally unreasonable . . . It was a boomer.’
Chappell had swotted up. Three months ago, Chappell began, you claimed Australia possessed no Test-worthy leg-spinner. So what, he continued, is Bob Holland doing in the XI?
‘I admired Kim for staying there,’ says Merriman. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ McDonald acknowledges. ‘It probably made Chappell go harder.’ Kim trudged off distressed, filthy, yelling at the pair of them. ‘I’ll never do that again.’
Less than two hours later he was walking back out at 3–33. Sections of the Gabba booed him. That was a jolt. He cracked a few balls around, fleetingly at peace, rolling to 34 off 36 deliveries. Then Garner pounded short, predators loitering backward of square, and Kim did what came naturally. Chin jutting down, eyes could not bring themselves to monitor the ball’s flightpath. Even the bowler took scant pleasure in targeting this opposition captain. ‘It was a little depressing,’ noted Garner, ‘when it led to the total demoralisation of a player with Kim’s talents.’ Australia coughed up 175. Phillips got a standing ovation for 44.
On the second morning Kim spilled another sitter, Richardson on 40, which soon swelled to 138. On the third morning he caught Lloyd. Kim looked glummer than Lloyd did. He frowned, unclasping the ball from his right hand and resting it in his left. Joyful team-mates saw Kim’s face and adjusted their grins to something more circumspect and in keeping. In the afternoon he was lbw for 4. He had played five thousand sillier shots in his life but none so meek. He went out in a thigh pad as big as a saloon bar’s swinging door and a helmet with low-hanging earguards. They seemed to weigh him down, for his head was slumped rather than pointing up as he tapped away at the crease. He shuffled then jumped back. Both feet were in the air. His body twisted grotesquely. The bat jabbed down, a mile outside the line, and the ball stayed low. It got barely halfway up to his knee roll. He would not have hit it anyway.
Next day, 26 November 1984, Kim rang Merriman, who ordered breakfast to his room. ‘Kim was as clear as I’ve ever seen him.’ It had just gone eight o’clock.
‘I want to quit as Australian captain.’
‘Do you really want . . . Is that really where you want to go?’
‘Bob, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want advice from you. I’ve made my mind up. All I want you to do is get hold of Greg Chappell.’
Merriman phoned Chappell at home. Without being told exactly, Chappell guessed what was cooking. The trio met at the Gabba around nine in the Queensland cricket secretary’s office. When Kim started talking, Merriman left the two of them alone with a wall of Wisdens. Chappell felt relief mostly, and sadness. Quitting was sensible, he told Kim. ‘I can’t say it was the worst day of my life but it was certainly one of my worst days in cricket,’ Chappell recalls. ‘Something had broken the camel’s back. Until that point I think Kim hoped things would change. But he had no more fight left and no more hope left.’
After fifteen minutes Merriman returned. Kim was writing out his resignation.
‘I’ve spoken to Greg and he understands. I resign.’
‘Well, you better think about how you’re going to do this.’
‘I’ll probably go and tell people at the Australian Cricket Board.’
‘Well, let’s plan it out. Yes, you’ll have to tell them. But it’s a matter of when.’
Merriman reminded Kim of the game in progress and an afternoon sponsorship announcement with Fourex: ‘That’s a pretty important thing.’
Kim’s next words, according to Merriman, were: ‘Well I don’t want anybody, y’know, I don’t want anybody talking about it till, till I handle it.’
To which Merriman replied: ‘Greg and I will maintain the confidence.’ They mapped out a procedure.
The morning was humid. Queensland in November. Before play McDonald entered the Queensland Cricketers’ Club, where the Moreton Bay bugs wouldn’t be wading in ginger sauce for a couple of hours yet. A large window faced on to the field and the seats in front. Something surprised McDonald. ‘I just went in to say good morning to a few people. I looked out the window and on the other side, sitting, were Fred Bennett, Greg Chappell and Merriman, talking very earnestly. I had a view through the window. And I’ve often thought about it.’
Australia resumed at 5–134, still 115 shy of ducking another innings defeat. Phillips lashed lustily. Boon’s white-knuckle 51 made Marshall see red: ‘Boonie, I know this is your first Test, but are you going to get out or do I have to come around the wicket and kill you?’
It bought Kim extra scripting time. Border noticed that Kim seemed strangely chirpy. McDonald saw Kim sitting in the players’ dining room—writing. He thought nothing of it. Twice McDonald walked past the grassy patch out front. Had Kim called over, McDonald would at least have made the spelling shipshape: innuendo was spelt inuendo, credibility credability, see seem, gentlemen gentleman. But Kim didn’t call over.
Merriman read it. Two words were promptly inserted. Constant criticism from ‘the media’ became ‘sections of the media’. ‘Don’t bag the lot,’ Merriman recommended. ‘Put the word “some” in there.’ McFarline, Casellas, Coward and others had all treated Kim softly.
Something else bugged Merriman. ‘There’s too much there. It’s going to be tough.’ He meant it would be tough for Kim to get through it.
‘No,’ said Kim. ‘That’s what I want to say.’
‘Well, you know, just think about it.’
In the dressing room, Kim handed it to Border. ‘Mate,’ said Border, ‘what are you doing? You don’t need to. This is ridiculous. We’re playing a very good team. It’s not your fault.’
‘Mate,’ Kim replied, ‘I’ve had enough. It’s not working.’
Minutes before lunch Marshall got his man, Boon, who observed Kim—‘visibly upset’—in conversation with Merriman. West Indies sacrificed two second-innings wickets, their first in seven Australian encounters, in pursuit of 23. Haynes was seething, bowled by an exuberant Lawson and irked by Australian indifference towards the health of Dujon and Gomes, whose heads they’d banged with bouncers in Perth. After his dismissal Haynes reappeared with a large carving knife, stored in the Gabba dressing rooms to slice watermelons. ‘I was out front of the Australian room as twelfth man,’ Murray Bennett remembers. ‘And Haynes had a sharpening stone. He was sitting on the dog track, in the sun, sharpening this knife. Clive came out and yelled: “Desi, get inside. Get inside.” Desi walked past and I was the only whitefella within cooee.’
West Indies manager Wes Hall located McDonald. ‘I need to speak to your chief,’ said Hall. ‘One of my players wants to kill Geoff Lawson.’
‘You’ll have to wait,’ McDonald replied. ‘The chairman’s pretty busy with the captain.’
Kim was telling Fred Bennett and David Richards his news. Richards, pragmatic by nature, was shocked, disappointed and upset. He thought it the wrong thing for Australian cricket. Instinct told him to talk Kim round. But it was so late in the day. So much else was erupting. Kim strolled to a corner table in the players’ dining room, where twenty or so men had assembled for the end-of-match press conference. Tables were piled with fruit and crockery. Pictures of the Queen Mother’s 1958 visit adorned a wall. ‘We could have been in Benalla for a Country Women’s Association meeting,’ says Mike Coward. ‘Worn carpet and laminated tabletops. So different to the world we’re used to now.’
Sipping at a lemon squash, Kim was still in his fielding attire, creams and a sleeveless sweater. Someone asked would he do anything differently. ‘Yes, I’d win the toss, send them in and catch Richie Richardson when he was 40.’ Droll self-deprecation was an old Kim trait. Blind exaggeration was another. ‘Wessels,’ he went on, ‘will become one of the greats’—lavish praise for a man whose inverted stoop at the crease brought to mind a six-foot-tall platypus. Merriman sat to Kim’s right. McDonald hovered behind. A young reporter’s enquiry about leadership rumours was intercepted by Merriman and swatted away as board business. Small talk resumed. It could have been just another Kim Hughes press briefing.
Alan Shiell thought it was. So did McFarline. He skipped it, catching an early flight home to Melbourne. Coward expected something. ‘Don’t go too far tonight,’ Greg Chappell, cornered in a Cricketers’ Club corridor, had advised him. Questions petered out and the packing up of pads and cables began.
‘Gentlemen before you go I have something to read.’
Kim glanced at Merriman, then down at the two pieces of notepaper he had fished from his flannels. They were slightly crumpled by now, having visited several pairs of hands, and they said:
The Australian Cricket Captaincy is something that I’ve held very dear to me.
However playing the game with total enjoyment has always been of greatest importance.
The constant speculation, criticism and inuendo by former players and sections of the media over the past 4–5 years have finally taken their toll.
It is in the interest of the team, Australian Cricket and myself that I have informed the ACB of my decision to stand down as Australian Captain.
I look forward to continuing my career in whatever capacity the selectors and the Board seem fit with the same integrity and credability I have displayed as Australian Captain.
Gentleman I wish not to discuss
PTO
this matter any further and I will not be available to answer any further questions.
Kim Hughes
The closing signature contained squiggles through the K and H and a longer extravagant squiggle underneath, trademark flourishes. Kim made it halfway to PTO. He read three sentences in a voice which wobbled before cracking to a whimper.
It is in the interest of the team.
Silence. Merriman leaned in: ‘Go on.’
Australian cricket.
Kim was crying now. ‘You read it,’ he squeaked. He lunged for the doorway.
‘The statement continues, gentlemen . . .’ said Merriman.
Kim’s very next words would have been And myself. Those two words—the ones that admitted being captain of Australia did him no good—were the ones he found unutterable.
The players hadn’t all heard yet. Kim’s next stop was the dressing room, where he cried again. ‘Oh, look, fellas . . .’ he began. He did not finish one sentence this time. He bolted, for the bench, between Hogg and Murray Bennett. ‘He sat right next to me and he put his head in a towel and he sobbed,’ Bennett recalls. ‘I reckon he sobbed for over half an hour, his head in the towel.’ Border got up, gave a summary, talked of courage and grim luck, sat down. Then no one said anything. Wessels stared at Kim. Boon felt confused. Wood was reminded of the underarm aftermath, that feeling of being in the dressing room, normally your sanctuary, and not knowing where to look or how to react. After twenty minutes Hogg spoke: ‘It’s a fucking great game this Test cricket, Murray.’
At last an uptight man emerged from the dressing room, his jaw clenched and head bowed. A polo shirt was tucked into pale slacks. In his hand was a brown stubby of beer. He stopped for no one, skirting the Gabba outer on his way to the beer tent, where the players were guests of brewer Castlemaine Perkins. Once there he mingled and joked, laughing. Not long after, around five, Wood spied him moping alone in the Sheraton’s bottom-level bar. Kim was gutted. Wood hated to see it. For a couple of hours they sank beers. Wood chatted about the future, tried geeing him up. It was hard work. Slowly the melancholy budged. ‘Whether he was putting on a front, I don’t know,’ says Wood. ‘He seemed OK. But then you go to your room and you’re on your own again.’
Landing in faraway Melbourne was McFarline, spikiest and most evocative of Australia’s sporting pressmen. McFarline was gruff, blue-eyed, floppy-haired, a man of many opinions who propounded them with steel. His cricketing passions included Ken ‘Slasher’ Mackay and Kim, one a stone-waller, the other a wall-toppler, both somehow unfashionable, both middle-order members of the all-Australian XI McFarline would one day select to play ‘if my life depended on it’. He was nine years Kim’s senior. Kim would seek his advice. McFarline liked giving advice. They’d talk one to one, away from the other journalists. Reliant on no typewriter, McFarline could ring for the copytakers and spontaneously deliver fifteen muscular paragraphs. It was a handy skill to have when his wife met him off the plane that afternoon, filled him in on what had happened to Kim, and said something like: ‘You’ve got a bit of work ahead of you.’
Murray Bennett was sitting beside fellow New South Welshman John Dyson as the Australians flew out of Brisbane. Bennett remembers it well.
I said to him: ‘Mate, I feel so sorry for Kim Hughes.’
And he shot back: ‘Mate, I don’t. I reckon he’s a cunt.’
Bennett sensed that was not an unusual reaction, and he could see how Kim could be annoying. Personally, he liked Kim’s company. ‘I just went: “Oh”.’
While they were flying, after a 6 a.m. departure, Alan McGilvray was speaking ill of the vanquished on ABC radio’s AM. ‘He’s a little boy who hasn’t yet grown up.’ With more sleep McGilvray would have chosen a line less blatantly quotable. But Kim’s dig at the media had annoyed him. Inside Sydney airport the media bit back. Sprinting backwards up escalators were photographers and cameramen. Some were overseas freelancers, hoping to hawk a shot or grab. One was a crime reporter deputising for the squeaky-clean sports hacks. Alderman pronounced it ‘sickening’. A waiting car on the tarmac prevented more torture by flashbulbs in Perth. By afternoon Kim was in his backyard. There, Ken Casellas thought he saw relief—‘a man with a millstone cut from his neck’.
Should he wish to wallow he had mailbags in which to do so. The first goodwill messages had arrived, and would keep coming, something like 1700 in five weeks, from all sorts, stay-at-home mums to mining magnates. One, a previously unpublished telex, lies forgotten in Kudardup among 94-year-old Pud Challis’s belongings:
27/11/1984
FOR: KIM HUGHES, AUSTRALIAN CRICKET TEAM
Your gentlemanly and courageous behaviour in the face of constant undermining by several of your more recent team-mates, past players in the commentary box and ‘would be’ players in the press is a wonderful example to all young Australians in these days of declining moral standards.
Considering the fact that you have always been sent overseas to lead a virtual 2nd eleven your performance as skipper has been meritorious.
Congratulations,
Lang Hancock