In the Nets
The man who was captain looked more like a boy. He stood at the far end of the Sydney Cricket Ground practice nets, and as he waited for the bowler his bat banged the ground, impatiently, not nervously. His smile as he leaned forward revealed two rows of gappy, crooked teeth. Not a wrinkle lined his face. His cheeks and elbows had a pinkish glow, the price of playing cricket nearly every summer day for nineteen consecutive summers. He wore his collar upturned and his shirt unbuttoned to the breastbone, and here, in a triangle down his neck and hairless chest, the skin was crimson. His head was a bottlebrush of curls shooting out in so many directions that his green cap could not contain them. The curls were too dark to be blond yet the sun rebounded off them in a way that told you they weren’t brown. They were golden.
The bowler the captain was waiting for had seldom if ever been called boyish. His chest hair was ropy and black. His bald spot was round as a beer coaster. Captain and bowler knew each other well.
They first played together nine years earlier, November 1974, Western Australia versus South Australia at the WACA Ground. Back then, Kim Hughes was feeling giddy about his big-time debut and Dennis Lillee was on a private crusade. Doctors had diagnosed three stress fractures to his back. Critics—‘poison typewriters’, Lillee called them—had pronounced his career comatose. He had about him an air that would soon become familiar whenever he wished to prove doctors, typewriters or batsmen wrong, a kind of grizzly incredulity.
Hughes was named twelfth man. Twelfth man in those days was more like a butler than a professional cricketer. Bosses’ instructions were to be relayed, sweat-drenched gloves replaced, team-mates’ peskiest whims respected. But as Western Australia’s fieldsmen emerged from a hot morning’s toil, their endeavour blunted by openers Woodcock and Sincock, Hughes contented himself with organising a few cold drinks. He wandered off. Twelfth man was usually the last to be seated when the host and visiting players slumped round the same boxy lunchroom. Not Kim. He was one of the first.
‘Where’s the fuckin’ twelfth man?’ growled Lillee, bursting through the lunchroom door. ‘Come and do your fuckin’ job.’ Lillee flung back the door behind him.
That’s how it was, the first time Kim and Dennis were on the same team. This week in Sydney, though neither knew it just yet, was to be the last. Kim was weeks away from his thirtieth birthday. He had hung on to his teenage habit of cover driving the quickest bowlers off one knee, sometimes at inopportune moments, then loudly congratulating himself on his own ingenuity. ‘Shot, Claggy! That’s four on any ground in the world.’
Before an innings, he liked making outlandish predictions. ‘Today,’ he’d exclaim, ‘I’m going to hit two hundred before lunch.’ Mostly his team-mates laughed. They found it endearing. ‘That’s Kim,’ they would say. Sometimes some of them, the older and more experienced ones, would get a bit annoyed.
Over breakfast in Melbourne, his predecessor as Australian captain confided to him that most players hankered after a new leader. Over dinner in Perth, a senior board man advanced the notion that he give up the captaincy for the good of his batting. Four others, all friends, said he had it in him to be the next Viv Richards; but he could not possibly, they hissed, be the next Viv and be captain. One of those four well-meaning friends was fast bowler Wayne Clark. ‘If he’d just played cricket,’ says Clark, ‘just got on and played cricket, he would have gone down in the annals of fucking cricket history.’
Kim dwelt on this, resigned, slept on it, then cancelled his resignation. His vice-captain reckoned him ‘very naive’ and ‘liable to do silly things’. The stand-in vice-captain recommended Kim do an apprenticeship under ‘somebody everybody respects’. And as he tapped once more on the popping crease it was as if his cracked and scrubby SS Jumbo, so dotted in red cherry-marks that they blotted out the bottom S of the maker’s logo, was a barometer of his relationship with Australian cricket’s most powerful men.
But this was New Year’s Day, 1984, and great prospects lay in front of Kimberley John Hughes. Tomorrow the Fifth Test against Pakistan would begin. On the second evening Greg Chappell would announce that his wife Judy’s long-standing wish—for him to have enough spare time to sweep the leaves off the family tennis court—was about to come true. The next morning Lillee would follow Chappell into retirement. Then Rodney Marsh would let slip his unavailability for the forthcoming Caribbean trip, and spectators knew they were seeing ‘Bacchus’ devour outside edges, like a bushy-lipped Pac-Man in pads, for the last time in Tests.
After five days Wayne Phillips rolled his wrists over an Azeem Hafeez half-volley and yanked out one stump in celebration. Kim Hughes’s Australians had beaten Imran Khan’s men 2–0. It was his first series triumph in four attempts as leader. And the three revered legends who had done more than most to make life tricky for him were suddenly out of the picture. Just like that.
Think of it not as the end of an old era, Kim would say in the days to come, but the dawning of a new one. First things first, though. Somehow he had to get through this net session.
•••••
MURRAY BENNETT almost had to remove his dark-tinted spectacles and rub his eyes to believe what he was seeing. The specs gave him the appearance of someone more likely to drive taxis to the airport than batsmen to distraction courtesy of a handily disguised arm ball and some delicate pace variations. But the specs were working fine. A week had blown by since Bennett’s unexpected call-up to the squad. Now he found himself bowling in the same net as Dennis Lillee. Except that the moment Kim Hughes arrived for a hit, Lillee stalked away in the opposite direction. Previously he’d been jogging in and unloading off a few yards. Now he crouched far away, roughly two-thirds the length of his full run-up, ball in hand.
Lillee’s first ball spat off the pitch and zoomed at Kim’s head. So did the second. ‘I was thinking: Jesus!’ Bennett recalls. ‘I couldn’t believe it. The two blokes were on the same side. And Lillee seemed to be taking some cheap shots at him.’
Lillee continued. His third and fourth deliveries put his own toes in graver peril than Kim’s. ‘Every ball was short,’ says Bennett. ‘I thought, there’s something missing here.’ Bennett peered around at faces familiar from years of studying them on TV. A few little smiles, maybe. Otherwise nobody seemed to notice. ‘I guess I was a bit disgusted. Lillee was a great hero of anyone who had grown up in the game and I was just getting to know him on a personal level. For a bloke of his stature I thought it was way out of line. I didn’t think it was very impressive at all. I was thinking to myself, I’m glad I’m not batting in here.’
If Bennett’s new team-mates appeared blasé, that was only logical. They had seen it before—not twice or three times, but often. Geoff Lawson was still wincing at the memory of the previous summer’s Perth Test against Bob Willis’s Englishmen. ‘Lillee nearly broke Kim’s arm,’ says Lawson. ‘Just ran in and bowled lightning at him in the nets and Kim had to go off for an X-ray, as I recall. Got hit in the forearm the day before the Ashes started.’
The summer before that, Graeme Wood felt the same mixture of panic and unease pollute an Australian net session. Again it was Test match eve: Pakistan at the Gabba. ‘Oh, you know,’ says Wood, ‘again it was on. I remember Kim getting hit, got him right near the elbow, sort of, the forearm. He had to get ice on it and there was doubt over whether he’d play. Not the great morale booster you need before a Test. Because it’s such a bony area, there was concern.’
Other times Wood, a mate of Hughes and Lillee, would joke that he himself was safe in the nets because he and Lillee played for the same club side, Melville. That didn’t mean Lillee laid off him completely. ‘But you could tell,’ says Wood, ‘that he wasn’t trying to knock my head off.’
Craig Serjeant, former Australian vice-captain, tells of one net session where Lillee let fly his customary bouncer at Kim, followed through, retrieved the ball and looked remorseful.
‘Sorry.’
‘Oh, that’s OK.’
‘Sorry I didn’t fuckin’ hit ya.’
Invariably, though, not a word would be uttered. And Kim would never flinch or grouse. Instead he hooked or ducked or fended away. It made for exhilarating private viewing. During some of the drearier early-eighties interludes, while Kiwi workhorses chugged into seabreezes and subcontinental off-spinners whizzed down their darts, the real spectacle unfolded out of match hours and out of sight. Fiercest were the duels on the WACA practice pitches. There, the bounce was steep—and therefore lethal—but also true, so Kim could trust the ball’s trajectory and back himself to hook. Sometimes, say team-mates, the green nets could not seal them in. Lillee would drop short, Kim would skip on to the back foot and top-edged skyers would fizz out of the ground, beyond Nelson Crescent and orbit Gloucester Park trotting track.
The scene at the SCG on New Year’s Day 1984 was not dissimilar. ‘Kim was fantastic,’ Bennett remembers. ‘He hooked them off his nose or ducked. Then he picked up the ball, threw it back to Dennis and didn’t say a word.’
Bennett was not the only newcomer feeling overjoyed to be there yet slightly puzzled. John Maguire debuted alongside Greg Matthews in Melbourne the week before. Two less alike joint debutants Australia has never known. Medium pacer Maguire was gentle, modest and superfit, a Kangaroo Point cartographer. Allrounder Matthews strummed air guitar between deliveries and wore calf-high black suede boots to the team’s pre-Test gathering. He’d happily represent Australia for nothing, he proclaimed, so Greg Chappell ripped up Matthews’s paycheque as penance. In Sydney, the dressing-room telephone lingered in Maguire’s mind. Some players wrapped it in red electrical tape, dubbed it the rebel-tour hotline and announced: ‘We’re waiting for the call from South Africa.’
‘You know when you’re in a side that bonds well together and hangs around together and practises together and everyone encourages each other,’ says Maguire. ‘It’s an intangible thing. But you know when it’s not there.’
After surviving his net ordeal Kim romped through the match itself with distinction. Chappell, Lillee and Marsh set about storming the few statistical fortresses they hadn’t breached already. Chappell’s 120th Test catch equalled Colin Cowdrey’s world record, and Kim hugged him tight from the side, fingers beating out a delighted drumbeat on Chappell’s ribcage. When Chappell turned and scampered a third overthrow to sweep past Don Bradman’s 6996-run pedestal, Kim was up the other end. He switched course, veered diagonally at Chappell and fisted the air as they crossed. Unwitting latecomers might have wondered which one had just eclipsed The Don. Chappell looked merely relieved, shoulders slumped, forehead soaked, like he had stepped out of a mine shaft and into a sunshower. Kim’s bliss as he clapped his bat knew no bounds.
Chappell and Lillee were the last ones to leave the dressing room on their final morning. They had been all summer even though administrators, suspecting mutiny, had urged them to please walk out with everybody else. Kim hustled his men into two ragged rows. The retirees were applauded on to the field through a guard of honour. It is possible that Kim resented Lillee for taking potshots at his captain’s head during his last full-length net session as an Australian Test cricketer. But the grudge, if it existed, was buried in the pit of Kim’s kitbag.
He carried himself with dignity and authority. He batted with his old daredevilry. Feet propelled him so speedily to the pitch of Abdul Qadir’s insidious turners that it hardly mattered if he wasn’t sure which way they were turning. Out for 76, his average over fourteen months stood at 65. That was better, quite a bit better, than Viv Richards. Who now reckoned him too brash, too impetuous, too immature, too cocky, too silly, too curly haired?
And who doubted his right to be captain? He had been thinking about the job since he was fourteen, not aimlessly like other fourteen-year-olds think about it, but as a realistic possibility, almost a probability, maybe even a certainty. Every Sunday morning, winter and summer, he and a mild-mannered young swing bowler named Graeme Porter would frequent one of three local parks and chuck balls at each other. Every second Sunday or so, their coach Frank Parry would say to the boy Hughes: ‘Not only will you play—you’ll captain Australia.’
That free-spirited 76 in Sydney was the last time he raised his bat to the crowd for a Test half-century. By the end of 1984, year of great prospects, he was out of the team.
•••••
AUSTRALIA’S CRICKET CAPTAINS, the late Ray Robinson taught us, have been plumbers, graziers, dentists, whisky agents, crime reporters, letter sorters, boot sellers, handicappers, shopkeepers, postmen. They have also been authors. Their book titles—Captain’s Story, A Captain’s Year, Captain’s Diary, Walking to Victory—have usually been suggestive of the content, straightforward snapshots of seemingly inevitable glory. Kim Hughes’s glories were many and multifaceted. But little about them was inevitable and far too many of them were overshadowed by disasters, disasters which were also many and multifaceted, and which were almost too terrible to mention, let alone write about.
Until now they never have been. Among regular captains of the last half a century, only Kim Hughes has not had a book written by or about him. If he is remembered at all, it is as the captain who cried when he quit at a press conference. All else has lain smothered under the ordinariness of a 37.41 batting average. Yet what a story beckons—the story of a country boy who would leap three, four, five steps down the pitch to bowlers fast or slow. He would go along with the umpire’s decision. He would wear a cap not a helmet. He would try to hit the ball out of the ground when within reach of a hundred because this put smiles on people’s faces, even if it meant getting out in the nineties, as it often did.
‘To create some memories for myself and for other people’—that was always the boy’s first aim. Only after accomplishing that would he set his mind to scoring as many runs as he possibly could. This is the reverse of nearly every other cricketer’s thinking. Runs and wickets are the thing, smiles and memories happy accidents.
Despite this, and because of this, Kim hit 117 and 84 against England in the Lord’s Centenary Test of 1980. For five days no ball was too wide to square cut, no medium pacer too respectable to be hoicked. A year later, Boxing Day 1981, he bludgeoned 100 not out against West Indies in Melbourne when no one else got past 21. He did it against history’s meanest speed quartet, on a pitch that alternately skidded and popped, in circumstances that demanded he pre-empt where the ball might land because standing back and waiting for the bowler was tantamount to surrender. It is possible to conceive Don Bradman, acme of batting foolproofness, playing one of these innings. It is hard to imagine any man—except maybe Stan McCabe, another son of the Australian bush—playing all three.
‘I’ve always had enough faith in myself to be different,’ the boy once said. ‘If I wasn’t a cricketer I’d be something like a deep-sea diver.’ What he meant was the idea of him being anything else was crazy. Cricket’s values, its traditions, ran through him. He was born to cricket. He belonged in cricket. But belonging in cricket, which is a culture, is different from belonging in the Australian cricket team, which is more like a club.
Kim went from captain of the club to out of the club in five weeks of elongated anguish at the end of 1984. Conspiracy theories abounded. What raw material this unwritten book promised. What riches. It even ended in tears. For a short, tantalising while the Kim Hughes story was cricket’s block-buster-in-waiting. ‘If he lets rip like he once did those cover drives, his book could be not only a real tear-jerker but wickedly and condemningly revealing,’ noted Frank Keating, grandmaster of British sportswriting, sitting poolside in Arabia during Kim’s last official Australian trip. At the subsequent press conference revealing his leadership of a rebel tour to apartheid South Africa, Kim declined to field questions. ‘Like most cricketers I have a book to write,’ he explained. ‘And I’m sure you’ll all want to read it.’
Sportsnight-goers at a Geelong sports store were warned of imminent skulduggery revelations in a forthcoming autobiography. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the book was ‘a few months’ away. A few months came and went. By October 1985 publication had been postponed a year. ‘I really feel everything will come out in my book, that things will come home to roost.’
Cricket moved on. Allan Border’s Australians won the 1987 World Cup. Kim’s book still hadn’t materialised. ‘Those days seem a long time ago. I’ll write a book about them one day and it will certainly be very interesting.’ That was in November 1987. The idea slid away again.
In 2006 I rang Kim. Yes, he’d read the letter I sent. ‘No, I’m not interested in writing a book,’ he said flatly. ‘I’m fifty-two and I don’t need the aggro. It would stir up a lot of people.’
But I had no desire to ghost his life and times. I said I wanted to write an unairbrushed tale of Australian cricket in the Hughes mini-era, told through his experiences, encompassing many voices. I also said there was more to him than a 37.41 average and history should be set aright. He sounded like he was in a hurry.
Five months later, we talked again. He wasn’t unhappy to hear from me. But he repeated that he did not want to be the one to ‘stir things up’. He had no real objection to me writing it. He just didn’t want to be involved. Any book about him would mean big names and controversy and reporters ringing him up all over again. If he were ever going to write his autobiography it would have been when Peter McFarline, the old Age cricket correspondent, was alive to help. He said McFarline understood the personalities. When McFarline died in 2002, the chance was gone. And now he had ‘turned the other cheek’. He would ask his lawyer, business adviser and family not to speak to me. Others could if they wanted to.
Others did: friends, team-mates, coaches, teachers, officials, close observers. Almost all mentioned Kim’s niceness. He addresses people by their first name. He loves being around and encouraging children. He likes being people’s best friend. In our second phone conversation, six and a half minutes of me trying to sweet-talk him round, he didn’t hang up and he said over and over, warmly, ‘It’s no slight against you.’
Sometimes affection for Kim came from unlikely sources. ‘I don’t say this about a lot of blokes,’ says Greg Chappell, ‘but I love Kim Hughes. I can tell you that now. I admire what he’s been through because my life’s been very easy compared with Kim Hughes’s life, and I think most of us could say that.’
Kim and Dennis and Rod all get along now, people say. You see them out having beers together. Several people add, in swallowed whispers: ‘If I was Kim I wouldn’t go out drinking with them. Not after everything . . .’
I remembered Kim’s own words: that he had ‘turned the other cheek’. How much pressure had he been under? How much hurt was there? Why did he never write that book? Was it because he finally felt part of the club—and was afraid of being expelled again?
Late in my research, I discovered a tape of a speech Kim gave at the Australian Cricket Society’s annual dinner in August 1990. ‘Yes, I’ve thought about writing a book,’ he said that night. ‘It would be a bestseller. I would make a lot of money. But I really don’t feel deep down that I’d be proud about it. Maybe I’m going to take those things to my grave. Maybe too many other people have made a mistake of getting rid of the old basic values that what was said within the changerooms should stay in the changerooms. Those basics went out the door for a while and people made a lot of money. But Australian cricket paid a price.’
I knew I did not want to ‘stir things up’ for him too much. I also sensed, more strongly than ever, that you cannot understand Australian cricket in the 1980s, you cannot understand the men who ran the club—the Chappell brothers, Lillee, Marsh—unless you understand what happened to Kim Hughes.
And to understand Kim Hughes, the first thing you have to appreciate is that here was a batsman who had every shot in the book, which can sometimes be a problem, because when you have all the shots you want to play them. And that can get you in trouble.