The World Series Cricket newsletter to players on 10 October 1978 by new publicity director Bill Macartney put a brave and brazen face on it. ‘On behalf of all of us ... I welcome Jeff to our field of play and wish him the very best of luck on the track,’ it read. ‘Jeff has told me that he is tickled pink to be back playing with his old mates—and against his old foes—and believes that with things being equal, he will bowl as fast this year as he has ever bowled.’ Unfortunately for Jeff Thomson, things were far from equal.
Len Pascoe had called Andrew Caro in the last week of May. ‘I’ve just had a drink with Thommo, Andrew,’ he said. ‘Reckons he doesn’t like playing under Simmo much. Reckons he’d rather play with us.’ And though Thomson had torn up his first contract, he and WSC had no quarrel. John Cornell had dissuaded Packer from hounding Thomson through the courts: fast bowlers had few seasons at the top, every one precious.
Thomson lived to bowl fast, but he also lived to be with mates like Pascoe. He missed them. Nor had Ian Chappell indulged in the lectures and tirades of the fogeyish Simpson. Thomson, moreover, was an undischarged bankrupt beneath debts of $23,000 from his All Sports stores. He’d then been caught and bowled by a $24,000 provisional tax assessment as his 1977–78 income surged after a cricket-less 1976–77.
But what Thomson would rather do was distinct from what he could. WSC discovered that a change of ownership at 4IP seemed to have annulled Thomson’s contract there, but the Australian Cricket Board had cuffed Thomson three days after the last of the Indian Tests by contracting him for the 1978–79 Ashes series. There was no way Thomson could play WSC that year. Unless ...
The proposal of Allen Allen Hemsley lawyer Jim Thynne was for a dubious story in which a jaded Thomson ‘retired’ officially, and was then spontaneously reanimated by the chance to play WSC. Caro agreed it was worth a try, and a letter was duly forwarded to the ACB on 9 August. Chairman Bob Parish had been chasing Thomson retirement rumours since June. All had been denied. Now he called his lawyers.
On Wednesday 21 September, Thomson’s lawyer Frank Gardiner called a Brisbane press conference where the player disclosed his wish to play merely for Queensland and his club Toombul, and to be ‘released’ from Tests. Reanimation was to begin the following week when Thomson, staying at Pascoe’s Bankstown home, was to sign for WSC.
But the closest the hapless Thomson and his mates came was that Sunday, 25 September. He and Lillee paired up again for Ian Chappell at the Drummoyne Oval in the Spastic Centre’s annual match. Thomson took a wicket, hit a six, and that was it. That day, in fact, was the specified day from which the ACB had exclusive call on his services.
By the time Macartney was welcoming Thomson to WSC, the ACB was inviting him to a NSW Equity Court witness box. For twelve excruciating hours his testimony was held to the light so its WSC watermark showed. Despite WSC’s thundering QC, Tom Hughes, Thomson was a terrible witness. As his biographer David Frith wrote: ‘It was an agonised chapter of details forgotten by him, of places and people unfixed chronologically and contracts and schedules and declarations signed without having been read and with no copies left with the signatory.’
Asked if he would sign a letter written for him without reading it, Thomson told the court: ‘I have written very few letters on my behalf in my time.’ Asked if he’d lied to Parish, he said: ‘At that time I’d had a million people bothering me ... and I was just glad to say yeah, yeah, yeah ... I’m not quite sure what I said to be absolutely correct, because I was just sick and tired of every Joe Blow ringing me up.’ Asked if he’d lied to a journalist, Thomson spat: ‘He rings up every blasted day just about. Him and all the rest... They get on my goat most times ... I would’ve told him anything to get rid of him.’
Caro tried to talk lawyers out of prolonging the ordeal. ‘We’d decided we’d try it on and see how far we got,’ he says. ‘And it wasn’t working. In the end I was saying: ‘This is stupid. Tom Hughes is just costing us a lot of money”. That didn’t make me very popular.’
Thomson was reading a fishing magazine when, on 3 November, Justice Kearney ruled the cricketer’s WSC contract ultra vires, null, void, empty and pointless all along. Destined for a summer of fishing, he even picked up a speeding fine on the Gold Coast road home that night.
WSC had otherwise wintered wisely. Crucially, Packer had relocated its management in Sydney and, where Vern Stone had been a functionary as ‘general manager’, redefined Caro as managing director.
The first sign that WSC’s luck was changing came when it took advantage of hotly disputed Wran government legislation stripping the New South Wales Cricket Association of its dominant rights to the Sydney Cricket Ground by offering $200,000 for its use on seventeen days of 1978–79. So critical was a ‘dinkum cricket ground’ to a successful circuit that Packer was also willing to budget $1 million for having the ground floodlit.
Not only was the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust a willing collaborator but, as Caro discovered on signing the deal in April 1978, it insisted on paying for light towers itself. Caro could hardly wait to phone his employer with the news. ‘Kerry,’ he chortled. ‘I’ve just saved us $1 million.’
Doors previously closed were suddenly ajar. After WSC closed a deal for use of the Gabba, WSC was even offered the Adelaide Oval by its trust, whose members included Sir Donald Bradman.
The Don and the sporting Packers went back a long way. They had even, in 1932, been aligned against the ACB during one of Australian sport’s crazier disputes. On that occasion, the board had threatened to omit Bradman from the Test team because of a writing contract the cricketer had signed with Kerry’s grandfather Robert Clyde at Associated Newspapers. A miffed Bradman had threatened to quit in order to honour the deal. It had been Robert Clyde who had prevailed on Bradman to play.
The knight now attended four successive meetings with WSC executives. ‘A man with a steel trap mind,’ Caro concluded, ‘who simply wanted as much as he could get from Kerry Packer.’ In fact Caro was uninterested in Adelaide Oval: WSC could use neighbouring Football Park, if it went to Adelaide at all.
The plan was to concentrate on Sydney and Melbourne. Night cricket had been WSC’s solitary first season dividend, and market research commissioned in the two cities indicated that sport followers were less implacably opposed than had been suspected. They wanted, at least, to see the ‘experiment’ continue.
Caro, who at Reckitt had steered its Samuel Taylor division into WSC sponsorship, wooed the promotional dollar with plain speaking. He told a July lunch of the Australian Institute of Management: ‘The fact it is cricket is incidental. WSC is a product and over the last two to three years the attempts to market it as such have achieved very little. Our audience will increasingly be one which chooses the Bee Gees instead of ABC concerts.’ Past patrons McDonalds, Goulburn Valley Canners and Qantas renewed their support, and new supporters Email, GMH, Goodyear and Waltons liked the Bee Gees market, too.
WSC games would be pitted against an England–Australia Test series in the 1978–79 season, and promotion would be crucial. Witnessing the success of baseball in selling itself as ‘the family day out’, Caro and Cornell proposed the concept to Packer in August.
Packer was stonily indifferent. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘I want patriotism. I want people turning up to see Australia win.’
Cornell cringed. ‘Are you joking Kerry?’ he asked. ‘This is an Ashes series we’re fighting. It’ll never work.’
Packer wasn’t listening. His mind was made up. With misgivings, Cornell had to turn the last refuge of a scoundrel into the first refuge of the spectator. He looked up some old friends: brothers Don and Alan Morris, and Allan Johnston who ran the hot-shot creative consultancy Mojo.
In 1973, Johnston had made Paul Hogan’s catchline ‘Anyhow’ into a tobacco endorsement for Winfield. Their latest success was a series of commercials for the brewer Toohey’s with the slogan ‘I Feel Like a Toohey’s or Two’ featuring sporting titans. These would include Dennis Lillee, standing tall in the middle of the SCG, to the narration: ‘You’ve been an inspiration to Australia and your mates / And you’ve written chapter and verse in the cricket book of greats.’ Cornell wanted to inspire something similarly anthemic. It became ‘C’mon, Aussie, C’mon’.
The press remained a perplexity. The John Fairfax and Herald and Weekly Times newspaper groups would always be nemeses. Cornell hired Bill Macartney, a livewire thirty-year-old journalist from 2UE and another Perth Daily News old boy, as a press officer.
Packer at the time was also negotiating with Rupert Murdoch and Robert Sangster to form Lotto Management Services—which won a partnership with the Wran government to run NSW Lotto—and persuaded the former to have the Australian dedicate WSC a full-time follower, Phil Wilkins.
From an eleventh floor office at Consolidated Press, Macartney plotted a campaign of ‘constant wind-up’ and ‘wall-to-wall salesmanship’. To help with the former, Caro hired Patricia Daniels from Sydney’s Luna Park to put players through promotional hoops. For the latter, he recruited a Reckitt colleague, Margaret Harop, as merchandising designer. WSC products would range from beach towels to blow-up pillows, while nondescript T-shirt slogans like ‘Howzat!’ were phased out for the likes of ‘I’m Into Cricket, Balls and All’ and ‘Big Boys Play at Night’.
One could read about it: a first season book was published called Cricket Alive. One could relive it: David Hill rewound video highlights for a documentary The World Series Cricket Story. One could join it: membership of the children’s Cricketeers Club was $10. One could just about play it, or at least roll a dice, in the board game ‘Night Cricket’. And WSC had not bowled a ball.
The catalyst WSC craved was Australian success, and Lillee especially felt the expectation. Beery self-examination after the Sixth Supertest in the downstairs ‘noise room’ at the Old Melbourne had even prompted thoughts of ‘retirement’.
‘Shake me by the hand,’ he had said, solemnly calling Ian Chappell aside.
Sensing the reason for the ceremony, the captain had refused: ‘I’m not going to shake your hand. I only shake fast bowlers’ hands.’
Lillee had punched him in the stomach, and stuck his hand out insistently. ‘Shake me by the hand.’
Chappell had refused, and refused again after another boozy swipe. ‘Well you can get fucked,’ Lillee had said finally. ‘I’ll be back next season. Fitter. And I’ll take more fucking Supertest wickets than anyone else.’
Stripping his art to basics, Lillee asked Robertson’s father, Austin Snr, to ‘teach him to run’. The grizzled sprint star, considered ‘the fastest man alive’ in January 1935 after outpacing English and Scottish champions at a famous Melbourne meet, learned that Lillee had never even been taught to jog. ‘In short, as a sprinter,’ Robertson wrote, ‘Dennis was a great fast bowler.’
After straightening and tightening Lillee’s technique, Robertson drilled him in forty-yard sprints. When the fast bowler’s time from a flying start was reduced from 4.2 seconds to 3.7, Robertson thought him a Stawell Gift contender.
Lillee bolted from the blocks when all the Australians commenced a three-month pre-season training program that Ian Chappell had decreed. The captain had seen county-fit World and West Indians trample them the previous year, and also memoed players individually to advise them of specific technical flaws he wanted addressed.
Lillee’s old University of Western Australia fitness guru Dr Frank Pyke led work in Perth, while St Kilda Football Club coach Ross Smith, Dr Brian Quigley of the University of Queensland, Milperra College trainer Barry Ridge and Graeme Wright from Adelaide College oversaw state programs.
Training did not come naturally to Australian cricketers. Some smoked, all drank, and few ran when they could walk. Masseur Dave McErlane’s ‘programs’ had been individually tailored, even for Lillee. ‘I always thought it annoyed him if he couldn’t run this old bloke off when we went for a run,’ he recalls. ‘So when I sprinted with him, I’d just ease off on the last leg so he could feel he was going faster.’
Mandatory fitness targets were hard to face. ‘I reckon I worked harder than anyone in the nets,’ says Gary Gilmour. ‘But I’d never been able to run so I was “unfit”. I kept telling them that a Golden Slipper winner never won the Melbourne Cup, that Rob de Castella never took five wickets, but it didn’t go down too well.’
Gilmour scraped through WSC’s new standards by the skin of his calliper test, only escaping a $1000 suspended fine for failing to improve his fifteen-minute run distance between July and October in a circuit of King’s Park in Perth with Rick McCosker’s help as pacemaker and Ray Bright pushing from behind every time he stopped. The trio hailed a cab after the quarter-hour and, retracing their route, measured Gilmour’s distance on its tachometer. ‘It was a pretty rough measure,’ he recalls. ‘But I’d made it.’
Packer himself issued some personal instructions. Ross Edwards was ordered to take Doug Walters weekly to a Pennant Hills country club. On a rented squash court, Edwards was to bounce tennis balls at his colleague from close-range to improve Walters’ technique against short-pitched bowling. Packer would call the club at intervals to make sure the players were following orders, and at one point abruptly scheduled a test at Barry Knight’s indoor cricket school in Kent Street.
A pin-striped Packer was waiting when the pair arrived and, as they began their routine, removed his jacket to bowl and advance peculiar ideas on the subject. ‘I started arguing with him,’ says Edwards. Then I figured it maybe wasn’t such a good idea to be arguing with the boss, and just said “yes yes yes” and nodded. When he’d gone, Dougie and I just went back to doing it our way.’
Caro hired Lynton Taylor’s secretary Irene Cave as a season co-ordinator. WSC had reproduced the bedrock of first-class cricket for a troupe swelled to sixty by off-season recruiting. The elaborate ‘Tour Two’ scheduled for rural centres—two dozen games winding a 20,000 kilometre route from Cairns to Devonport—was nicknamed ‘Packer’s Sheffield Shield’. A new team devised for fringe dwellers led by Eddie Barlow was named, with equal nostalgia, the Cavaliers.
The seeds for WSC’s next generation were also sewn. On their return from the West Indies, the dashing youngsters Peter Toohey and Graeme Wood were offered WSC places for 1979–80 after the expiry of their ACB contracts. They proved surprisingly mobile. Toohey visited CPH at the invitation of Caro and Cornell, and accepted an offer in principle, while Wood signed a five-year offer from Austin Robertson and Rod Marsh in Perth.
‘I said no the first time,’ Wood recalls. ‘But I had a think about it, and I went and spoke to some people in business I respected and, after deliberating a couple of weeks, I signed. Basically I’d had a great tour of the West Indies and I was looking forward to the next challenge.’
The challenge had not been lost on the ACB. It had worked fastidiously to produce an attractive wrap for the gift it planned to present. Its Benson & Hedges ‘Battle for the Ashes’ brochure was a slender document compared to WSC’s propaganda deluge, but its animated television commercial devised by advertising agency J. Walter Thompson proved relatively racy: England’s captain Mike Brearley, transfigured as a knight, clashed broadswords with an unidentified Australian. With Bob Simpson having joined the ABC radio commentary panel, Australia had yet to select a captain.
The ACB’s commercial awakening had also been reflected in its portioning of cricket telecast rights. The ACB’s 6 September 1978 meeting granted exclusive Gillette Cup rights to the 0–10 network. It had even mimicked WSC by agreeing a 50 six-ball over format, improving its commercial television economics by multiplying the available advertising slots.
The decision’s implication, with ABC’s Test rights expiring at season’s end, was that the ACB saw its long-term future with commercial networks, although apparently on its terms. As Shayne Quick observed: ‘To provide 0–10 with exclusive coverage of the Gillette Cup, the ACB had to buy back the TV rights from the ABC. An answer to why this was not possible in late 1976 when Packer initially approached the ACB has not been forthcoming.’ One explanation is that the ACB had taken stock of the nature of its rights and realised that such a step was possible; another is that it hoped for commercial spirits more kindred than Mr Packer’s.
The first day of 0–10 coverage of the Gillette Cup, Saturday 28 October was watched by Mike Brearley’s jet-jaded Englishmen in Adelaide. Brearley returned from a luncheon engagement with Bradman to hear that Thomson had taken 6–18 against South Australia at the Gabba. Between the commercials, he then watched the ACB’s rising star Rodney Hogg go wicketless. Thanks to the NSW Equity Court they’d see nothing, of one and a great deal of the other as the season unfolded.
Politics were tangible when Brearley took an exploratory net at the Adelaide Oval and glimpsed a familiar face. ‘Hookes said “hullo” shyly from the corner of the nets as though he did not want to come into the sunlight,’ Brearley wrote. ‘I asked him how he was, and said: “Shall we be seeing you a bit?” When I looked up again he was gone. It was a most peculiar encounter.’
Indeed, WSC and the ACB would circle one another all summer, like divorced partners trying not to meet. That was no mean feat considering the eighty-eight days of WSC, and the eighty-six days of first-class and one-day cricket involving touring Englishmen and Pakistanis. Not to mention a hundred days of Sheffield Shield cricket.
Both camps were anxious. The threat was of very thin audiences all round. Success for one side would obviously mean abject failure for the other. The five Supertests and six Test matches, in contrast to the first year, were interspersed rather than simultaneous in an attempt to spread the wear, but the television combat could not be avoided. The ACB had almost fifty days of televised cricket, WSC almost forty, and at least ten would clash. The SCG was destined to resemble a stretch of northern France circa 1916, tramped on by advancing and retreating armies half the days of November through February.
Athletes, rugby players and greyhounds had been the toast of Aucklanders at the Mount Smart Stadium. On the frigid Saturday morning that broke on 4 November, twenty-five jaded WSC emissaries would have been happier had they been left to it.
Arriving at their Logan Park Hotel twelve hours earlier, they’d found half the city discussing the All Blacks’ Test against Wales, the rest the World Rowing Championships. No wonder there were 1200 people to watch them fret and strut on a trapdoored stage. Instructions John Maley had left in April for pitch preparation had been read as far as the chapter on bounce. Locals had overlooked those on rolling and mowing.
Half the Australians’ runs came from the bat of Greg Chappell, who still cherishes his 74 and 89 in conditions that reminded him of those during his first English Test century five and a half years before. Mount Smart 1978 might even have been harder than Lord’s 1972: ‘It was not only seaming but swinging, staying down then bouncing. There was no rhyme or reason to it. You might on average expect to see one bloke hit a game, just through an error of judgement, but blokes were getting cleaned up every over.’
It was no use complaining. In a new-generation helmet he’d brought to face Lillee for the first time in two and a half years, Clive Rice resembled a Star Wars storm-trooper. The fast bowler had promptly broken his ribs. When partner Alan Knott asked his condition he merely gasped: ‘Fine.’
There was at least value for runs if you managed to hit the 400-metre running track that circled the ground. ‘You’d come off onto the track and it was like coming off grass onto the dance floor,’ says Max Walker. The ball’d hit the surface and go dwaaang over your head.’
But dwanging was minimal for the next two and a half days, half the wickets being hewn by Lillee (12–89) and the World’s special guest star Richard Hadlee (7–59). By Monday, even batsmen were admiring the Australian’s craft. Collis King, bowled by an away swinger that cut back between his bat and pad, applauded it all the way off.
Conditions were even harder at Tauranga, which promised ‘the most picturesque ground in the world’ and produced a pitch that Ian Davis remembers as ‘a mowed front lawn’. He made 30 while ten colleagues scrounged 53 more. The bowlers didn’t let up,’ he says. They wanted to get into rhythm more than us. It was probably the best I’d batted in years. Every time the ball pitched it’d take a hunk of wicket with it. I made 30 but I got about sixty-five bruises.’
Promises to Ross Edwards and his WSC co-manager Bruce McDonald of rich incentives and welcoming crowds flocking for Hadlee quickly proved empty. Rapport with promoter Roy Cox disappeared and, when John Cornell arrived in mid-afternoon from Australia with a promotional film crew, he almost had a stand-up fight to film between the organisers and the WSC managers over obligations to the local sponsor.
In a fortnight, in fact, enough mistakes and mishaps occurred to choke a four-month tour of England. ‘It was a total disaster,’ says Mick Malone. ‘Badly organised from start to finish, it rained all the time and no one turned up to watch. But I reckon that if they’d asked us to play from one in the morning to six then sweep the pitch we would have done it. It was all in or all out.’
The peculiar phenomenon that was New Zealand cricket was absorbed. Nobody, for instance, had seen a helicopter being used to dry a pitch before as it was at Pukekura Park. Nor had they seen a batsman wounded like the luckless King, his leg bleeding from a graze administered by the white ball’s razor-edge seam. Barry Richards had never had to replace a courtesy car driver behind the wheel before, but did when his female chauffeur fell asleep and drove off the road on a four-hour drive.
A radio breakfast program hosted from the hotel dining-room was also a first. But Radio 2ZB, broadcasting from Lower Hutt’s South Pacific Motor Inn on 16 November, did deliver WSC its best crowd of the trip: 4000. The trouble with the public is that it’s suspicious of something new,’ Cox told reporters in Auckland. ‘People won’t accept it until they’ve actually seen it.’ The minuscule crowds did indeed ensure well-kept secrecy until TV2 broadcast two hours of the final one-day match at Mount Smart on Sunday 19 November.
Scores brought back memories of school days. Davis, Bruce Laird, Ray Bright, Mike Procter and Bob Woolmer averaged less than 12, Tony Greig less than five. ‘It really ended up the opposite of what we’d intended,’ Ian Chappell concludes. ‘It was better if you had a ratshit tour. The longer you batted, the worse your form became.’
One beneficiary was Hadlee, who loved every confidence-building moment shooting out the cream of the world’s cricketers. New Zealand’s son of the seam took 25 wickets at 8.5 runs, while his 119 runs came at a heady 20. Richards recalls watching his jaw set as the tour went on: ‘I shared a room with Richard and he was only just growing aware of what he could do in cricket. I think that’s when he started realising he was up to what it took to be a top player.’
Edwards’ report on the trip to Caro was trenchant:
Roy Cox and his organisation were regarded universally by local organisers with suspicion and at times with barely concealed mistrust. These feelings were so general it was hard to believe they did not have some basis in fact. On occasions it was necessary for WSC management to undertake additional commitments and responsibilities. This was necessary in order to maintain WSC’s credibility as a result of Cox making ill-considered spontaneous promises ... without consultation which, if we had not taken action, could have had serious media consequences ... Most wickets were dangerous.
When the teams touched down in Sydney, they learned that their boss had led a perilous life in their absence. While game-fishing 130 kilometres north of Cairns with Jack Nicklaus, Packer’s boat the Melita had been wrecked on a coral reef. WSC’s overlord had been forced to take to the lifeboats. At times during the preceding fortnight they would gladly have swapped places with him.
Sydney airport’s transit lounge on Monday evening, 20 November 1978, was for ten minutes a cricket capsule. As WSC teams hefted themselves from an Air New Zealand flight to an Ansett connection for Perth, they met Brearley’s English entourage, booked for Bundaberg after winning their tour match at the SCG.
It was easy to see who was on which side of the barricades. The WSC players were in jet-setting casuals, Brearley’s ambassadorial men blazered and necktied. But the divide was cosmetic. Cordial shoptalk broke out. The only wince was when Derek Randall playfully jabbed the tender ribs of his Nottinghamshire colleague Clive Rice. Even Greig, shyly removed with his family and Australian business manager Bruce Francis in the bistro, was included in the extended family affair. Geoff Boycott went conspicuously to shake his hand.
WSC now cast a long shadow in Sydney, with the SCG skyline pierced by its new light towers aka ‘Packer’s cigars’. Preparation for their first use—the Australians’ opening International Cup night match against the West Indians scheduled for Tuesday week—also raised a hell of a racket. Bill Macartney and Patricia Daniels had made Sydney reverberate. Top-rating radio station 2SM—owned by the Catholic Church—played ‘C’mon, Aussie’ until its needles were blunt. ‘They were the number one rock radio people in town,’ says Macartney, ‘and they really kicked ass for us.’
On the SCG No. 2 as the Englishmen had been playing, Jeff Thomson and Len Pascoe had bowled at a polycarbonate screen to promote the ‘Fastest Bowler In The World’ competition that Macartney and David Hill were trying to organise. They broke it. ‘Thommo hit a screw at the bottom with a full pitch,’ Macartney recalls. ‘So that was the end of that.’
In lieu thereof he introduced journalists to Kepler Wessels, a new kid on WSC’s block, who was going to play for the Australians. Two days later, Martin Kent walked into the bar at Perth’s Sheraton to find the youngster sipping a lemonade. Recognising him from the International Wanderers tour three years earlier, the Queenslander asked: ‘So, what brings you here?’
‘Don’t you know?’ Wessels replied. ‘I’m playing for you.’
Wessels was not insulted. He had not had the luxury of playing prima donna since arriving in Sydney in October to discover WSC’s red carpet rolled up. Lynton Taylor had spelt out his package. He had a hotel room for a week while he found a job and lodgings. Greig had booked him a spot at Waverley, and only runs there would earn him a permanent WSC place.
The sensation that WSC would make the South African army he’d served the year before look like the Salvation Army filled Wessels with despair. ‘Already my career had been put back a year through having to do National Service, and I shuddered at the thought of having to play only club cricket for a season,’ he wrote. ‘On top of this I was suffering a personality crisis. There I was, an immature kid lost in a big city and my whole world was about to collapse.’
He trained with a military discipline: There was only one thing I could do: work even harder than before ... in what had all of a sudden become a cut-throat business.’ The kindness of strangers helped. Caro got him a job with Allen Allen & Hemsley, and Wessels accepted a bunk offered by Waverley teammate Peter McKenzie. Failure in the first round of grade cricket left him nearly suicidal, but the phone call he coveted came after centuries against Penrith and Sydney. Packer said simply: ‘You’re in.’
Among the Australians, what’s more, for their team was short of new blood, especially top-order blood. When Packer offered him Wessels’ services, Ian Chappell snapped up the youth who had so impressed him as a South African teenager.
It was still an awe-struck twenty-one-year-old who stepped out at the SCG No. 2 in his new colours. An early visitor was Tony Henson, the C & D helmet-maker, who called in case Wessels was a potential sale. Initial reticence changed as he watched a Thomson bouncer clear the nets still rising. ‘Listen,’ Wessels paused. ‘About those helmets ...’
Henson’s customer base was widening. This season would be rapid. When the WSC players gathered in Perth, David Hill’s televised time trial at the WACA even gave them a few figures to work from: special guest Thomson earned a welcome $4000 when he touched 148 kilometres an hour, outpacing a tightly-bunched Holding (141.3), Imran (139.7), Croft (139.2), Roberts (138.6), Lillee (136.4), Le Roux (135.9), Daniel (133.5), Pascoe (131.6), Hadlee (129.8), Procter (128.6) and Sarfraz (121.7).
After the ordeal of New Zealand, the force was with Thomson’s kind. For Hookes, in particular, it had been a harrowing two weeks. ‘I suppose I’d buried it a bit when I’d come back after Andy hit me the year before,’ he recalls. ‘But in New Zealand, the pitches were so bad I started to get flashbacks about the ball he’d hit me with. He wasn’t even there, and in fact after a while it didn’t matter who was bowling. The spinners could be on and I’d see that ball again. And then I’d get out.’
Henson had refined his design over winter with a windscreen manufacturer, Cyklas, and a plastics firm, Cadillac Plastics. It now included a prestressed visor and temple guards. General West Indian disdain of hard headgear was maintained only by Viv Richards. Even Ian Chappell was among early shoppers.
Leaving a WSC opening bash at entrepreneur Michael Edgley’s Swan River mansion early, Wessels packed his new helmet. He was joining Eddie Barlow’s trialists in the Cavaliers and Clive Lloyd’s West Indians on an overnight rail journey to Kalgoorlie for the first match of the Country Cup. Five hours after pulling into the gold town on Thursday, 23 November, he was headed for a promising debut half-century as a full-fledged World Series cricketer.
WSC’s season took on its own breakneck haste as teams played one-day games for $10,000 staked by Swan Brewery at Gloucester Park while the Cavaliers hit the road and rails. Series co-ordinator Irene Cave and assistants Barbara Loois and Liz Herbert enforced punctuality with fines for laggards. When the Kalgoorlie party returned to Perth at 11pm on Thursday, the Cavaliers joined the World on a midnight flight to Bunbury for a match the next day.
No one was underworked. Playing duties were interwoven with coaching commitments. For Martin Kent, for instance, rain in Bunbury entailed his dispatch back to Perth by car for another train trip to Kalgoorlie where further coaching clinics had been organised. When the clinic ended late, Kent returned to Perth with just enough time to catch an Ansett red-eye that dropped him in Sydney at dawn on Monday.
It was possible there to savour the sense of excitement that Bill Macartney’s gang had incubated for WSC’s SCG debut. In a deal with Yellow Cabs they had made WSC the first advertiser to use hoardings on the back of taxis. Murdoch’s Australian featured a four-page advertising supplement on the forthcoming summer, while a balloon carrying the WSC logo floated above the city centre. The Chateau Commodore was festooned with posters, ties, towels, T-shirts, jackets, even soap in the shape of white cricket balls. In case the purpose of it all escaped attention, TCN-9 scrubbed its scheduled program at 9.30pm on Monday for Hill’s The World Series Cricket Story.
In his hotel room, Anglo-Australian writer David Frith watched with mingled horror and admiration. ‘It amounted to an hour-long commercial,’ he wrote, ‘some of it hypnotic ... some of it far-fetched. The montage of dismissals made it seem like the fastest game on earth, not the slowest, as legions of antagonists have always claimed. There seemed little purpose in trying to find a meaning for it all.’
Non-stop action, pulsating soundtrack and John Laws’ melodramatic baritone rammed home the message unceasingly: a cricketing Krakatoa would erupt the following day. Even the placement of a Benson & Hedges advertisement for the Tests beginning in three days—a mistake caused by the late program change—seemed Macchiavellian to journalist Alan Lee: ‘For a moment I wondered if the Packer network had made an unforgivable blunder by plugging the opposition ... Then I thought again. The Ashes advertisement, though adequate in its way, was totally overshadowed by the World Series commercials. Perhaps Packer wanted the nation to see it that way too?’