The Bulldozer Theory
‘THE SHOP STEWARD’ was Geoff Lawson’s private nickname among some board officials. It was a hangover from those tumultuous few days when he and Kim called time out and the lawyers in. Lawson remembers precisely where he was during the most famous press conference in Australian cricket history. He was on a dressing-room bench, peeling off his boots, tired but cheerful, reflecting on the most promising day’s toil in several Tests, thinking how with fewer dropped catches and more batting grit not so much separated Australian and West Indian cricketers after all. That’s when Border muttered: ‘Oh, Claggy’s resigned.’
Angry indignation was Lawson’s first reaction. ‘What? He didn’t talk to me.’ Then, wistful regret. ‘Oh shit, I wish he had spoken to me. I’d have told him not to do that.’ The two have not discussed it in twenty-four years since. To this day, Kim is unaware of what Lawson would have done if only he’d known:
I would have held you back. I would have held you in that dressing room and not let you go. Why did you resign? Why did you not ask me? You idiot. Because that was the wrong thing to do, mate.
After indignation and regret came suspicion:
I thought, he hasn’t talked to anybody about this. There’s got to be more to it. And I thought of all our contract negotiations. He put his head on the block—and it got chopped off. He was pushed. He didn’t jump. My gut feeling was that this has got bugger all to do with playing cricket. This is about a captain backing his players and being difficult for the board. They’ve got a reputation. For a hundred years they have operated like this. Players cannot have any power. Players cannot be treated reasonably. A stand was made, led by Kim Hughes. And Kim Hughes, quite rapidly, was no longer captain of Australia.
The constant criticism, speculation and innuendo. Speculation and innuendo had it that there was more to this than speculation and innuendo. Those doing the speculating did so privately, their innuendoes spreading no further than the front verandah. McFarline, on the front page, was one who hinted publicly at skulduggery. ‘Kim Hughes did not give up his beloved Australian captaincy voluntarily,’ McFarline wrote. ‘He was pushed into Monday’s painful announcement as surely as a bulldozer would push him over a cliff.’
According to McFarline, Kim was warned that his leadership lacked Test polish and might not survive the series. This was said to Kim over five days in Brisbane by ‘men associated with the running of Australian cricket’. Were the men acting independently? Or conspiring? That, McFarline did not know. Presumably, Kim was his source. Presumably, Kim was vague. For McFarline, till the day he died, never named names or elaborated, aside from a 1991 allusion to ‘unremitting pressure’ imposed by ‘at least one’ selector and ‘other officials’.
Bill Lawry’s effervescent persona in the Channel Nine box used to grow a few extra decibels when Kim batted. Lawry loved an entertainer. He’d delighted in the 213 Kim took off Doshi and Yadav. Guest-speaking at the weekly gathering of Adelaide’s Rotary Club, Bradman’s club, Lawry declared: ‘The demise of Kim Hughes in Brisbane in a manner equal to being dragged down like a dingo in the pack and devoured by your own, within and without, is a disgrace . . . If the Australian captain is not performing it is simple. You do what Sir Donald Bradman did to me in 1971 and you drop the captain. You do not pull him down from within.’
This was uncharacteristic. Lawry’s volume generally rises in inverse proportion to his outspokenness. He is not, never was, a controversialist. Mentioning his own inglorious exit was also unlike him. The two eldest Chappells said ‘Phanto’ was dreaming. Australian cricket moved on.
Peculiarities from that Gabba Test dangle hazily. Two nights beforehand Greg Chappell addressed the team at the Sheraton. Motivational giddy-ups were in vogue that summer. Richie Benaud delivered one in Perth. Bradman yarned with the players in Adelaide. Chappell likens his Brisbane pep talk to one brother Ian gave in the Caribbean in 1973. You’ve been run over, now get up. As Merriman recalls it: ‘Greg strongly supported Kim and really nailed a couple of players who he didn’t think were doing the right thing by the captain. Greg, at that meeting, showed a helluva lot of support for Kim.’
Others saw it as career-changing, terminally so. McFarline mentioned days later that Chappell ‘fired a broadside’ at Kim; Lawry claimed Chappell ‘tore strips off’ him. Neither was present. Indeed McFarline and Ian McDonald were dining on the Gold Coast that night, chewing over what Chappell’s words could possibly be. But Kim would have enlightened McFarline afterwards. ‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ wrote McFarline, ‘that Hughes there and then began thinking about his role.’
Forty hours later came Ian’s dagger at Kim—the last in a conga line. Ian’s post-toss captains’ chats were preceded by Tony Greig’s pitch report and Dulux Weatherwall readings. ‘If you’re going to air live,’ says Greig, ‘there can only be one loser. The coin goes up, and if a guy says something like “you’ve got a problem with the hook shot”, then you say something like: “Yeah, a bit like you had against John Snow.” You can’t allow people interviewing you to get to you. The answer to selection is: “I don’t pick the team, the selectors do.” What you do is you attack.’
Opinions inside the commentary box split. Lawry considered the post-toss interviews ‘a PR job for cricket and country’ and Chappell’s Bob Holland query ‘completely out of order’. Chappelli’s Chappelli, the Australian players knew. Knows nigh on everything. Expresses nearly all of it. Deeply respected. Not to be taken to heart. Kim’s heart was big. That made it a big target. John Maguire recalls: ‘The Channel Nine commentary—we used to try not to listen to it—but it was this Chinese water torture dripping away at him, wearing him down.’ Kim’s loud, last words as he left Chappell pitchside were eloquent testimony to that. I’ll never do that again. And he never did.
Was that it? Did the only Australian captain to give up mid-series in puddles of tears do so to escape Ian Chappell? Friends hope not. ‘If that was a trigger point,’ says David Richards, ‘I’d be amazed.’ What would be more amazing is if it wasn’t. Kim was not invited into Chappell’s club during World Series Cricket. His membership prospects dwindled every year after. He publicly praised Chappell, batted a bit like Chappell, tried approaching his cricket like Chappell. Desperate, in the days before Brisbane he pleaded with the game’s highest authorities to reason with Chappell. That only brought more aggravation. It also brought a dead end. For Kim knew then that to stay captain would mean confronting unpleasantness again and again, all summer, every summer. The Bob Holland reference upset him. The subsequent sound of spectators booing him was something he’d heard in Pointe-à-Pierre, and on a few Caribbean islands thereafter, but not at home, not for him, who was the decent, chivalrous, honest, crowd-pleasing one. Wasn’t he? Ian Chappell was just a man, one bane among several. It seems probable that none troubled Kim more at the precise moment when going looked less painful than staying.
ABC television duties brought Bob Simpson to Brisbane. Simpson felt something sharper than sorrow. ‘Disbelief—that it should have gone to an open press conference. Obviously Kim wasn’t mentally up to it,’ says Simpson. ‘I thought Merriman, as manager, should have been very much aware of that. It could have been handled so much better. It didn’t have to be announced then. Kim should have been given time.’ A similar thought occurred to McGilvray. Hadn’t Botham been spared the trauma in 1981 of reading aloud his own death warrant?
With Kim, though, it could not truly have been otherwise. If he was not to be a gallant, rousing leader then he was determined to at least bow out with fine, stirring words. Captaincy was not a job or a burden, more a lover. He could no sooner slink away from it than he could let a long hop in the last over before lunch go unhammered. The possibility of him weeping, unable to speak, did not occur to him, just as he never thought the long hop might get him out.
When Merriman and Greg Chappell told no others of Kim’s plan they say that too was how Kim wished it, a broken man’s last desire. The ramifications were momentous. It meant there was no one to talk Kim out of it. Merriman had disagreed with Kim being captain fifteen months ago; Chappell had disagreed with it forever. McDonald, had he known, would have sought to change Kim’s mind. And if that foundered—‘I’d have gone and grabbed a few people.’ McFarline did not know. Head selector Lawrie Sawle did not know. ‘Lawrie was definitely a Hughes man and very upset by it all,’ says McDonald. Nobody told David Richards. And Richards could be persuasive:
I would have talked Kim out of it, or tried to talk him out of it. I would have wanted to understand what was driving him. Were those factors permanent, or capable of change? Was it really what he wanted deep in his heart? And if he was absolute—‘mate, this is what I want’—then we would perhaps have laid it out in slightly different circumstances. But I found out a couple of minutes before the press conference. No chance to intercede.
Kim informed Richards in the same breath as telling chairman Fred Bennett. Except that Richards sensed Bennett already knew: ‘I would say he did. Yep.’ Bennett had opposed Kim’s captaincy whenever it went to a vote. If he did know, he wasn’t about to protest Kim’s going. Merriman is firm: ‘I didn’t tell Fred.’ Bennett passed away in 1995. His knowledge or ignorance of Kim’s intentions went with him. He did, though, give reporters a line on the afternoon Kim quit, a line which suggested either an enigmatic approach to facts or that he lived in a cave. ‘I have not,’ said Bennett, ‘seen any unfair criticism of Hughes’s captaincy.’
Could people in favour of Kim’s leadership have been shut out for one simple reason—so that they could not talk Kim around? ‘Don’t know,’ says Richards. ‘I don’t know enough to suggest that when you flesh that out, the suggestion that people were acting collectively—I don’t know. If they were not acting collectively but were acting as individuals, they all knew me well enough to know where I was coming from. And if they felt that might have stopped the ship . . . It doesn’t matter. It’s the way it happened. I can’t change the fact that the sun rose at 6.10 this morning.’
‘My own feeling,’ says McDonald, ‘is they were keen to change the captain.’
Of course, one man could have altered history that day: the man making it. Maybe Kim kept quiet because he knew people would attempt to talk him out of it. Maybe he knew that if they tried, they’d succeed. Maybe he didn’t know what he wanted.
He did not tell Jenny. Richards rang her during the press conference. Jenny was grateful for the call and worried about Kim. The people Kim dubbed ‘the extended family’—the Parrys, his other Perth confidants—were not consulted. ‘I urged him to ring Jenny,’ says Merriman, ‘and suggested he might want to call Parry. I said “Jenny and the extended family”. He said no, he’d do that some other time. I don’t know what he meant by that.’
The end result was this: not one person who might have been inclined to talk Kim out of quitting knew what he was planning.
Snap resignations followed by more considered about-faces are not unheard of. Border, Kim’s successor, quit so regularly that McDonald learnt to say ‘OK, Allan’ and keep walking. Sawle joked that McDonald should store a resignation letter awaiting Border’s signature on permanent standby in his pocket. In February 1985 the limited-overs jamboree swept the Australians to Perth, where McDonald and Kim lunched long and thoughtfully. ‘We went through it all, whether things could have changed,’ McDonald recalls. ‘He said he’d made up his mind. But I sensed he could have been talked out of it.’
Not only that. McDonald got the feeling that Kim resigned expecting someone would seek to dissuade him, and expecting their attempt to work. ‘If he’d known what was going to happen I think he might have hung on,’ says McDonald. ‘I think there was every chance. It was a huge decision, not one you make in the heat of the moment at the end of a match you’ve lost. Better to cool off, talk to a few people. And he talked to the wrong bloody people.’
Who he talked to, however, was Kim’s decision, and Kim’s alone. It was not always the way. Sometimes it felt like there was a decision-making committee: soothing Kim, propelling Kim, distracting Kim. ‘The pressures of Perth, the pressures of home, not Jenny but others around him, saying you must continue to be captain . . . It might have been in the best interests of what they saw as his stature and standing,’ says Merriman, ‘but I don’t think it was in the best interests of his longevity in cricket.’ Merriman regrets flying home after dinner at Kim’s on that September night of 1983. He regrets not waking up in Perth next morning, the morning his phone rang.
To me, Kim was torn very deeply between what he knew the ACB wanted of him, what he wanted to do himself and what his extended family wanted of him. He was in a three-way tug of war. I could see a person who I thought was a terrific bloke being destroyed. And you were helpless to do anything, because every time you talked to him about things it was the opposite to what somebody else was putting to him. I think there were too many people in his ear.
Graeme Porter saw Kim and Frank Parry most Sunday mornings in the late sixties and early seventies. ‘I often think back,’ Porter reflects, ‘and I can’t understand why Kim pursued the captaincy. I always felt he got the wrong advice. Frank, and maybe Rob, I got the feeling they were encouraging him.’ As lives grew cluttered Porter saw them less, and hardly at all when Kim was trying on the king’s crown. ‘He should have focused on his own game, on being part of the team, on being the best player in the world. I think we would have seen Kim Hughes as a genius. And I really do think Frank should have seen that. Look, maybe he did. Maybe he did and maybe Kim was driving it. I don’t know.’
Key men of influence dismiss any connection between Kim standing up for his men and falling down himself. Nine months separated those two landmark happenings. During that period Merriman became Australian cricket’s first full-time home and away manager. That was the board trying to help Kim. Why would the board help an irritant? ‘It’s a long time ago,’ says Alan Crompton, ‘but I have no recollection of any conscious desire on the board’s part to get rid of Kim. I’ve no memory of anyone being pleased or delighted or glad when he resigned.’
As for The Shop Steward, he took 8–112 in the next innings in Adelaide. His star twinkled a little duller ever after. One Test later Lawson was fined for refusing his sweater from umpire Steve Randell after having two lbw shouts rebuffed. Lawson maintains he was merely hot and so elected to leave the sweater with Randell, yet was denied any right to appeal the fine. ‘Discredit Kim Hughes, discredit Geoff Lawson,’ was how he read it. The following season his overworked back gave out. ‘I bowled thirty per cent more deliveries than I’d ever bowled in a year. AB kept saying: “Here’s the ball”.’ Lawson’s reward was a board reluctant to fly him to Perth to see his preferred chiropractor. ‘I was doing all this bowling, treated like a piece of soap and thrown out.’
The winter of 1989, and Australia’s 4–0 Ashes conquest, loomed as a time of rebirth for the national team and Lawson. He returned shrewder, the late kick of his cutters undiminished, reaping 29 wickets in six Tests. Nine at Old Trafford, scene of the urn’s handover, had him toasted man of the match. Three Tests later in Perth he was nearly the game-breaker again. But first slip Alderman dropped Mark Greatbatch, nearing the end of an eleven-hour blockathon. Keeper Ian Healy reprieved Martin Snedden. Lawson was the bowler both times. New Zealand drew. Then it was to Melbourne for cricket committee discussions about money and to Brisbane for a Test match. It was a stirrer’s forty-sixth— ‘I would have played another twenty-odd, for sure’—and last. Sri Lanka batted once. Lawson’s figures read 33–10–51–1. He was dumped for Greg Campbell.
There might be a degree of paranoia, I’m not too sure. But to me all these things are related. I mean, for Kim Hughes to resign when he never should have, when there was no good cricket reason, and for all those things to happen in that particular sequence . . . Kim wasn’t the kind who jumped. He wasn’t the kind of guy who ran away from a challenge. Ever. He stood up face to face to Dennis. In 1981 he tore clothing off Dennis. Kim wasn’t a quitter.
A conspiracy? Impossible to say. But on 26 November 1984, and in the days before, they could not possibly have done less to stop him.
•••••
THE BRONZED, MUSCULAR ALLROUNDER from Queensland cried uncontrollably after wrenching the ham- string that struck him out of the First Test against England in November 2006. Shane Watson really wanted to play that match. People sympathised. Sympathy flowed two decades earlier for the captain who cried at the vanishing of a dream. But sympathy had to jostle with ridicule, shame, mirth. ‘It could be that Kim’s cricket box was too tight,’ theorised Barry Humphries. Australians of old, Humphries went on, ‘would simply chunder’.
Yet more comparisons were drawn with the unhappy hooker. Prime Minister Hawke had wept only weeks earlier for his daughter’s heroin addiction. ‘Australian men are not as cold-hearted as Englishmen,’ Germaine Greer decided. ‘They are great big softies underneath.’ Male culture was raked over, high-flying literary analogies proposed. ‘Kim and Mr Hawke felt immense personal anguish,’ commented the well-read rugby coach Alan Jones. ‘Shakespeare wrote sonnets about this kind of thing.’
Upon surrendering, Kim’s hurt went deeper and dragged on longer than he expected. He felt bogged, in limbo, forlorn. He grieved. ‘It was almost like losing your wife,’ he said. He couldn’t find his old self. Friends, in truth, had noticed his old self go missing some while ago. Nowhere was the boy who got the captaincy and laughed in the faces of seventeen kinds of doom in India in 1979. ‘He’d gone from an outstanding leader,’ feels Merriman, ‘to a guy continually being questioned and questioning himself, who was very much frayed at the edges.’ Old colts comrade Wayne Clark believes: ‘He got so paranoid about people trying to knock him off. He was paranoid and in the end I think he had a little breakdown. He was trying to run cricket, trying to set the rules—fuck, it’s my way or the highway. He wouldn’t listen to criticism.’
That was not so surprising. For no longer could he discern the constructive from the malicious. He couldn’t tell friends from enemies. Perhaps he is still unsure, so endemic was the muck-making, so overgrown were the protagonists’ trails. Soon he would take to discreetly recording and scribbling down phone conversations with officials. It might have been more extraordinary if he hadn’t cried.
Sportsmen and women cry rivers now after races, rounds, sets, finals. Winners weep for the enormity of all they have achieved, losers for the chance that may never be recovered. Often when they cry they are lauded for their sweaty knowingness, for the emotional maturity lurking in bodies so tender. That’s if their tears are noticed amid everyone else’s. Teardrops have become part of the sporting narrative.
Kim’s tears are still seen through a 1984 prism. He is a batsman to be reckoned with in the reminiscences of those who watched 1980s Australian cricket and valued exotic strokeplay. Among all others, if he is remembered at all, it is as the sook, the crybaby, the effeminate cricketer. ‘One inadequate captain getting life so out of proportion as to make a complete clown of himself’—so ran a recent line by British sportswriter Kevin Mitchell.
Kimberley. A girl’s name.
A secret has long been harboured by Australian cricketers. They cried too, even in Kim’s day, even the toughest of tough, sometimes when nothing was lost or gained, when there was no enormity, just a boy falling for a girl. This we now know thanks to a 2003 episode of Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope:
DENTON: You’re considered a man’s man. I think most men would say that. Do you ever cry?
LILLEE: Oh yeah. Um, I cried when I saw Love Story . . .
DENTON: Ahhh.
LILLEE: Nice story it was.
DENTON: That is.
LILLEE: And a few other times. I mean, I’m . . . I’m as susceptible as anyone.
DENTON: You’re a big gooey lump basically.
LILLEE: Yeah, I think so.
‘Don’t do a Kim Hughes,’ a father was once overheard telling his disconsolate boy, a harsh epitaph for someone whose real mistake was to do it in a room full of men with the lights on.
•••••
A MAN ON THE EDGE played out the rest of that 1984–85 summer. The Third Test was in Adelaide, where people were celebrating a century of Test cricket. A dinner was held in the Hilton ballroom. The stage was done up to look like the old scoreboard. Perched on the equivalent of the grassy mound that backs on to the bar underneath the scoreboard was compere Mike Coward, introducing twenty-two old-time Test skippers. Magic filled the room. Kim got a standing ovation. The visiting West Indians clapped hardest. People rose from their seats on the Sunday, too, as Kim strode out in sunshine. He had scarcely known failure beneath the spires of St Peter’s: 213, 53, 5, 84, 88, 30, 106. All were chanceless, all in a row. On his happiest hunting ground he became the unhappily hunted. He lasted one ball and seven balls, felled by a straight one and a shooter, for 0 and 2.
The team was improving, flogged again but detaining their tormentors five days. Border’s ascension had been less straightforward than it now seems. The press wheeled out ten candidates. McFarline backed Hogg (‘has an extraordinary understanding of the game’). Coward and Wilkins liked Hookes. McGilvray pushed for Wessels and Mossop for Thomson. Greig, Blofeld and Burns nominated Inverarity. ‘I’d have loved it,’ says Inverarity. ‘But I was forty. I read the articles as if they were about somebody else and shrugged my shoulders.’ Rounding out the card were Wellham, Phillips, Hilditch and Rod Marsh, Old Skullcracker himself. And Border—judged favourite by all, yet the personal favourite of almost none. Too introspective, they fancied. Too unimaginative. For the next four years they were probably right.
Captain and ex-captain tossed immediately after Adelaide, for Queensland were hosting Western Australia. ‘You could see it in Kim’s face. He wasn’t the jovial fella,’ remembers Geoff Marsh. Perhaps Border contemplated donating some fraternal half-volleys. But it was hard to help a man determined not to help himself. Kim was run out for 1 then self-destructed for 14, unsheathing an outlandish pull at Jeff Thomson in the shadow of stumps. Worse than a trot, this was resembling a curse.
To drop a man in whom so much hope had so recently been invested would have felt precipitous and looked ungrateful. And so Kim headed to the Fourth Test in Melbourne, city of bright omens, scene three years before of the last West Indian Test comeuppance. Viv Richards, previously out of kilter, staged a two-day skyshow. Two-hundred-and-eight he butchered. The third-day hopes of a quarter-full MCG were crystallised in a Bay 13 banner: ‘IF VIV CAN DO IT, SO CAN YOU KIM.’
Two balls he faced this time. Courtney Walsh angled one away, and Kim made no attempt to leave it without ever looking like he wanted to hit it. Dujon, outstretched, caught it. Nought again.
Christmas Day was a rest day. Lunch was at Kim’s rented North Melbourne townhouse. Jenny, the twins and baby Bradley flew across. Wood and his wife Angela stayed in the same block. ‘A good place to relax, away from the hotel environment,’ says Wood. ‘Kim seemed OK.’ Murray Bennett remembers a fun afternoon and a high-spirited host. ‘But he had a ball and chain dragging along behind him, really. He was a shot duck.’
Australia managed 296, slightly better than half their opponents’ 479. Bashfully, Lloyd batted on fifteen minutes into the final morning until the lead was 369. Five and a half hours of survival didn’t sound so onerous. Less pressurised atmospherics might save Kim yet. Then Garner began a new over. The first ball would have had Wood playing pick-up-sticks to retrieve his ribcage, had he not nudged it to a low-flying Dujon. The stupendous fifth ball pitched outside leg and sent Wessels’s off stump somersaulting. Australia were 2–17 with five hours to go and Garner’s over unfinished.
Helmetless for the first time all summer, cracking hardy, out came Kim. To a ball neither full nor short he shuffled but went nowhere. He presented a high elbow and an impeccably straight bat. But the ball was thirty centimetres away, whistling in. A golden duck; a humiliating pair: what kind of an ending would that be? Something must have alerted Kim to the danger. Because across jerked his bat. Too late. As the ball rapped his front knee-roll he tipped forward like a tall man being backslapped. Of all the world’s cricket commentators, the job of describing it fell to Ian Chappell:
Garner really charging in. And it’s out. First ball. He’s got him lbw.
Watching had stopped being fun. All but 11,325 seats were empty. The decade-old love affair between the Australian public and West Indian cricketers was up, never to be rekindled, not the way it was. Non-striker Hilditch looked mournful. He hadn’t played a Test in five years and would later that day rescue one. Away hurried Kim, in his cap and his gold-and-green wristband, through the dressing room and into the indoor nets to practise. Selectors Sawle, McCosker and Chappell did the only thing practical. ‘Your mind plays games when you’re not scoring runs,’ Kim would rue afterwards. ‘Against West Indies you don’t get a half-volley or full toss you can clip off your toes. The first ball’s a screamer.’
Within a week he was down among the cast-offs and hopefuls, just another fossicker in the fishpond. A 45-over arm wrestle featuring WA’s second-stringers and Sri Lanka’s medium pacers was too inconsequential even for Wisden to record. Passing motorists would not normally have turned their heads to peer through the gap in the stands. Yet 1484 turned up. Every run brought rapture. Kim’s third ball sizzled past point. ‘I felt like doing a lap of the oval when I reached 10.’ He danced and straight-drove Ravi Ratnayeke, twice. Forty-seven not out—a start. ‘I know my best years are in front of me.’
In Adelaide for the McDonald’s Cup, biffing a cover drive, Kim’s cap flew into the stumps. The bails stayed on. Had the curse lifted? He middled a pull. Midwicket Stephen Wundke swooped, knocked the ball up with his right hand, reverse-swooped, and plucked it on the way down in his left. An aeronautical miracle—so wondrous that it went on high rotation in that summer’s Classic Catches, rarest of honours for a domestic grab. Fate hadn’t finished fooling with Kim yet.
A 111 against South Australia in the Shield radiated enough of his old self for a call-up to Australia’s one-day squad. It was the WACA’s last game before its dread-inducing old white pitch was dug up. Kim’s twelfth man stint entailed more standing ovations, one for every change of hats and jumpers. A spot in the XI materialised when Steve Smith fractured a finger before the third final. Jogging Sydney streets in preparation, Kim stepped in a pothole, turned his ankle and withdrew on match morning.
What next? A place in Australia’s party for the World Championship of Cricket, a seven-nation extravaganza marking Victoria’s 150th birthday. Roy Abbott, the man who built the WACA pitch and thus had a hand in creating Kim, was flown over for the final by radio station 96FM. Abbott had never seen the MCG. No one ever saw it like this: clowns, skydivers and fireworks, black warpaint streaked along players’ cheekbones to ward off the glare from six new light towers. Australia and England opened festivities before 82,000. ‘COME ON KIM!’ pleaded the Sunday Times back page. Fifty-two days it was since Garner pinned him lbw. Border showed a mate’s faith and sent him out at three. The bowling was hospitable and Australia handily placed, 1–57 chasing 214.
He had bathed in grand applause all summer, this nigh-on runless man, but nothing like this, from the second the loudspeaker called his name until Richard Ellison pottered in to bowl. If only the mob could bat for him. He survived his first ball, so they stood and cheered again. He could do this. His third ball he pushed into the covers.
‘Yes,’ said Kim, and away he and young Robbie Kerr bolted.
‘Cripes,’ thought Kim, for there, a blur in blue, was Gower.
Kim panicked, turned, scampered. Suddenly two batsmen were headed for one end and Gower’s throw was missing the stumps and Chris Cowdrey was backing up and the bails were gone. ‘It’s just one of those summers for Kim,’ said Border. Except no one ever had a summer like this. Dab and run: Kim’s Kanga kids couldn’t muck up that.
Pakistan were next. First ball, Kim dabbed and kept running, a single, waving his bat to the crowd. The next twelve deliveries he defended. A real handful was Wasim Akram, a college student from a Lahore laneway wearing his first pair of bowling boots. In seventy Tests and more one-dayers than he could remember Kim had encountered few left-arm quicks: Lever, Ghavri, Gary Troup, Azeem Hafeez. Akram was something else. He was zigzagging it on a pudding. But Kim kept him out OK. Akram consulted mid-off. ‘A bouncer,’ suggested Imran. ‘He won’t be able to resist it.’ Kim spooned it as far as mid-on’s hands.
In seven innings for his country, spanning 38 balls, he had scored 4, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1. It made Greg Chappell’s blue period of 1981–82 look like a purple patch. Kim sat and he plotted. He was due to fly home with everyone else the next day. Instead, within fifteen minutes of the game’s conclusion, before the first beer, without telling his captain, he was out of the MCG and on the evening flight to Perth. Even Border was peeved. Few are so shameful as the boy who takes his bat and goes home.
The public’s loyalty was fraying. A letter to the West Australian asked: ‘How many times must Hughes be out for a duck before Ken Casellas feels his omission is justified?’ The pressmen could not imagine a 1985 Ashes squad without him. Almost all—Wilkins was an exception—had Kim in their personal seventeens. Ashley Mallett was working for Adelaide’s afternoon paper, the News. The squad was to be announced a couple of hours after last edition. Greg Chappell was sworn to secrecy but Mallett called him anyway:
Remember All the President’s Men and Bob Woodward ringing up Deep Throat? That’s the way I did it. I told Greg: ‘As I read through my list, you just say yes, and if you don’t say anything then I’ll know.’ And I didn’t mention Kim Hughes. I just assumed there’s no way in the world he won’t be in the side. I mentioned every other fucking bloke, I wrote the story and we had it on the front page. Kim was out and I didn’t even mention him. Greg must have been laughing: ‘Silly bastard hasn’t asked the obvious question.’ Looking back, I think it’s pretty funny too. But it wasn’t funny the next day when the editor said: ‘Greg’s done ya.’
It reads now like a vindictive, improbable trick. But on the day the team was named, Kim was packing his whites into his cricket coffin. He was bound not for England but Arabia: a one-day junket in Sharjah. ‘I could never come to grips with why,’ says Merriman. ‘For the selectors to pick him for Sharjah and drop him for England—for Dirk Wellham or somebody—was an appalling act to perpetrate on a great Australian servant.’
The rationale, whatever it was, is lost forever. ‘A short tour? One-day games? Nup, don’t remember,’ says Chappell.
Ten days they were gone. They sunbaked, swam, played squash and scoffed cheese, for the Australian Dairy Corporation were sponsors. They were paid in cameras, watches, gold ounces and cash, bewildering heaps of the stuff. They played twice, meeting England and India. Kim made 14 and 11. Neither effort was fluent. ‘Chose a bat with no middle,’ reported the Guardian’s roving scallywag Frank Keating. There was one boundary: one last exquisite cover drive. Apt was the ending, an uncertain stroke to an unthreatening medium pacer, caught and bowled Mohinder Amarnath.
When Bennett was run out without facing a ball, Kim blasted him. ‘Mate, you’ve got to look around before running.’ Bennett wondered what that was about. A gentle ribbing about Wessels always being injured ended with Kim bleeding above the ear, face rubbed in the grass, until he and Wessels were separated and exchanged sorrys. Watching Kim poolside at the hotel was Keating, an intrigued outsider. One unnamed colleague told Keating: ‘When the magnificent mafia returned Kim had to presume to be one of the boys, else he was a goner. He would join the mob in rubbishing the opposition in the bar and in being generally loud, raucous and overconfidently Australian. He turned into a rugby player, which he just is not.’
Around the pool he seemed like one of the boys. Keating tried for an interview. ‘Sorry,’ said Kim. ‘If I’ve refused one, I’ve refused a hundred.’ He proceeded to offer a hundred apologies: ‘No troubles? Fair enough? You see my point, don’t you?’ That was the old Kim.
At home, the longest summer ended in familiar sur- roundings, Floreat Oval, where Subiaco–Floreat were hosting Bayswater–Morley. The Ashes bombshell was still three days away. Kim made 9 and 7, bowled in the second innings by one of young brother Glenn’s harmless dobbers. Said Glenn to a team-mate: ‘I feel sick in the stomach.’