4

LOVE AND ROMANCE

I’d had girlfriends in the past, but none of them ‘got’ me. They didn’t understand my true needs and wants, passions and desires. They didn’t know that I need a new stick every year. They couldn’t comprehend why on earth I wanted the same body fat percentage as 19-year-old Davo, or that I was passionate about producing the perfect cordial ratio at every drinks interval. And they certainly didn’t understand my unshakeable desire to play a slightly higher level of amateur cricket. 

No one in the past truly understood these things, but I remained forever hopeful that one day a girl would walk into my life and change me. A lot of blokes seem concerned that their girlfriend is trying to change them into something they’re not. I, on the other hand, would have loved a woman to make me their project. I was frightened of turning out like Mick in 10 years’ time — an angry divorcee with a terrible drinking problem and abominable skin folds — yet at the same time, worried I’d never get another taste of second grade cricket. It’s a cycle that has tormented my lovers (both of them) and myself. As a product of grade cricket, I never really had a good model when it came to maintaining a functional relationship with a woman.

Sure, I’d based my batting technique on stylish icons like Mark Waugh and Dean Jones — and that’s taken me this far — but I had never been shown an example of how to love. I remember Dad used to mutter under his breath when giving me throwdowns on
Tuesdays after work. He worked himself up into a fury, each throw harder and more aggressive than the last. I could never fully make out what he said, but I did notice he threw a lot more short stuff at me whenever he and Mum were fighting. That’s probably why I still hate the short ball.

Anyway, it’s usually pretty big news when one of the boys gets a missus. It wasn’t like this when I first started playing a decade ago, but now, it’s common practice to check out the new girl’s profile on Facebook just to see whether there’s a rig shot within her first five profile pictures. The best conversations, of course, occur in the stretching circle. Here, any player who claims to have established a successful interaction with a human woman will be accountable to his teammates’ questions.

This scenario is where the Chop King absolutely thrives. Firstly, the stretching circle is his domain. He needs 20 ears to listen to his various sexual adventures — in many cases, it’s the only reason he’s still playing cricket. The stories will almost always involve him drinking for eight hours prior to the moment he actually works up the courage to approach her. When another player mentions that he, too, has recently slept with a woman, the Chop King will immediately feel threatened by his new rival. Suddenly, he’s a mere spectator. He’ll probably pretend to stretch his hamstrings and yawn nonchalantly in order to effectively feign his disinterest.  But since the Chop King is likely the only person to have seen a naked female body in some time, he cannot resist the urge to ask the most obscene questions, despite his fear that the story will overshadow everything he stands for. Sure, we all want to know these details, but he’s the only one with the courage, confidence and swagger to ask the big questions. Whether or not these questions are even answered is entirely irrelevant, as he will finish the interview, every time, with: ‘Does she have any hot friends?’ Here, he is essentially asking: ‘does she vaguely know anybody who might let me see them naked?’

Bretty is our designated Chop King, but despite his numerous sexual encounters, I can’t really tell if he’s happy or not. On the surface, he seems happy. But I like to think of him like an onion: he has many layers, and he’s usually making a woman cry for some reason. Bretty’s a great guy to go out with because he’ll talk to anyone, but he’s pretty loose. I once saw him drink seven tequila shots through his eyeballs before snorting six lines of salt. He’s probably been the closest thing to a role model that I’ve ever had.

The story of the Chop King bares mild similarity to the titular character in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Here, the elderly monarch is preparing to handover his power and wealth to his three daughters, with the one who loves him the most set to inherit the majority slice. When the Chop King ‘retires’ — and by that, I mean he gets married, or is struck down by the HIV virus (whichever comes first) — he must find a successor. There will be no shortage of suitable candidates, but the one who has publicly shown that he is capable of taking up the mantle — verified ‘chops’ are key here — will be handed the throne. It’s more than likely that this fellow has served a lengthy apprenticeship as the Chop King’s wingman, perhaps having even participated in some form of group sex together. While others may dispute the Chop King’s decision, unlike King Lear, the team will abide by the leader’s call. There can only ever be one true Chop King at a time.

Chop Kings never hold the throne for more than three years. That’s not an official thing; it just seems to be the way it is. Kind of like how the NRL competition is cyclical. Anyway, the first Chop King I met was this bloke called ‘Chappers’. I never actually knew his real name — even though he played in a higher grade than me — because everyone always just used to call him Chappers. Even the police called him that. I was just 17, with only a few games of fifth grade under my belt, when Chappers took me under his wing. I don’t know what he saw in me, but he said I had ‘potential’. I was confused because he had been calling me Tim for about a season and a half. After a string of low scores, Chappers eventually ended up in my team one week. It was then that someone finally told him my name wasn’t actually Tim. Chappers looked me dead in the eye. ‘Yeah, I know.’ 

Anyway, Chappers was a real pants man. Doctors would later go on to describe it as a ‘serious and debilitating addiction to sex and pornography’, but gee it was great fun when he’d tell us about the women he’d ‘had’. In hindsight, he did have some very unusual, anti-social habits. He went through a rather obnoxious phase where he’d urinate on the bar whenever we were at a nightclub. He didn’t even really seem to have a reason for it. From about 2003–2005, I never saw him use a toilet. He would just unzip his pants and start pissing. What’s even stranger is that I never saw him get in trouble for it. Often, he’d manage to get a round of free drinks after explaining his honest mistake. As I was only 17 at the time, it was very confusing to see a 29-year-old man not only committing to this obscure practice, but genuinely revelling in it.

Another trick he had was to time how long he could chat to random women before they’d realise his penis was hanging out of his fly. It usually took about three minutes, but I reckon 15 percent of the time it actually led to a chop — and only twice were the police involved. Those are fucking good odds if you ask me. All of these things aside, Chappers had a lethal cut shot and was a good first slipper, so we brushed these incidents off as ‘classic Chappers’, rather than treating them as the serious psychological issues that they were.

Bretty used to have a pretty serious girlfriend until he decided to have a season overseas. All the boys encouraged him to break up with her because doing long distance when you’re an overseas pro is a bit like wearing a helmet when you’re getting throwdowns: completely unnecessary and will only get in the way. Besides, it was off-brand for the club’s most celebrated chopsman to be in a serious committed relationship. So he decided to break up with Mel and took off for a frivolous summer in the north of England.

As it turned out, he shouldn’t have listened to us idiots. Mel was a beautiful girl, a real stunner, and smart, too. I think her family was from money; they always used to look after Bretty really well. But by the time he’d come back from the UK, having, in his words, ‘smashed half of England’, Mel had met a really nice man from the accounting firm she worked at. She was engaged six short months later and, before long, they’d started a family. In the years that passed, Bretty was chopping birds left, right and centre. He always claimed he was fine, but after 13 beers he’d start talking your ear off about Mel. I certainly couldn’t offer him any advice or perspective, but I did like it when he talked to me because there was always the off chance he’d introduce me to someone. 

As any Chop King will tell you, it’s rarely about ‘quality’. In fact, Bretty always said: ‘It’s a numbers game.’ Of course, he was referring to women, not his batting average. After about 30 beers one Friday night, Bretty once slurred in my ear: ‘I’d rather have sex with ten “3s” than three “10s”.’ To me, he’s got that entirely the wrong way around, but it fits his personal maxim of just trying to sleep with as many women as he could. He followed that bit of insight up with this grotesque statement: ‘The ugly ones always do way more stuff.’ He vomited five minutes later on the dance floor and scored the worst 7 off 42 I’ve ever seen in my life the next day.

Another thing Bretty always spoke about was group sex. Specifically, his desire for ‘roasting’. Roasting, essentially, is a consensual act where two men sandwich a willing woman between each other during a threesome. Other lurid names for this despicable act include ‘spit-roasting’, ‘Eiffel-towering’, ‘gangbanging’ and, among cricketing circles, ‘bowling in partnerships: pressure from both ends.’ It was the zenith of sexual activities and Bretty dearly wanted it — more so, I think, than he wanted to move out of his parents’ basement. 

Frustratingly, I could never verify any of Bretty’s stories since the woman in question was never seen again. Also, he didn’t even own a phone, so it’s not like he was getting their numbers and following up for a date that Friday night. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard him refer to a woman by her first name.  I wanted to believe these stories were true, though, so they were.

To be fair, all the boys lied about their sex lives. Even I did. One’s social stocks can rise dramatically on the back of a good sex story. Every dressing room that I’ve ever been in relies on someone getting pissed the night before and bringing back something to the herd as an offering. It’s classic hunter-gatherer mentality. You can’t have 11 blokes in your team who spent the night watching online porn in between stints on the PlayStation, even though that’s how I spend 90 percent of my weeknights. And that’s why lying is a critical part of any dressing room. To the expectant crowd, there’s no difference between fantasy and reality — only perception. On Saturday morning, no one cares if you stayed at home the night before, read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and went to bed at 9pm. If you tell them you had sex outside a kebab shop at 4am that morning, then that’s exactly what you did. When it comes to stories, it’s all about how it does at the box office.

I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 22. God, it feels so good to get that off my chest. I’ve been carrying that secret around for a very long time. Of course, no one at the cricket club knows this. As far as they know, I was chopping birds before I even hit puberty. But for the first few years of my grade cricket career, I listened intently as my teammates recounted thousands upon thousands of impossibly positive sexual experiences. And yes, I’m ashamed to say that I even told a few of my own, riffing on bits that I’d heard in the stretching circle over the years, changing a few key details to make the story my own. I was the Edouard Manet of the grade cricket sphere: borrowing ideas from my artistic forebears in a bid to gain acceptance in the Parisian art scene.

But deep down, I was scared of the opposite sex. Being among these hyper-masculine cricketers had distorted my ideal of the perfect female partner. If the stories told in the stretching circle were anything to go by, it seemed like everyone was having sex with porn stars. Meanwhile, I was still furiously masturbating to hard copy Penthouse magazines from the 1970s, which I’d stolen from my Dad’s secret stash. I guess there is something delightfully innocent about that. I’d been out on every circuit, but was yet to perform a publicly celebrated chop of my own. I was beginning to think that something was ‘wrong’ with me. I wondered for a fleeting moment whether I might even be a homosexual, but despite the constant exposure to naked men, I felt nothing. Sure, I was deeply envious of blokes with good rigs and quality ‘lids’, but I wasn’t attracted to them. I just wished I had their work ethic and genetics.

To be honest, I can’t think of a single openly gay bloke I’ve played with or against over the many years I’ve been involved with grade cricket. It’s possible they do exist at some of the more progressive clubs, but as with most professional sporting environments, I suspect many blokes are forced to mask their true selves in order to fit into the feudal system.  It really does beggar belief that there isn’t one single gay man in the competition. There was one bloke who opened the bowling for us for a season, who always used to criticise Bretty and others for objectifying women in the stretching circle. For a while we thought he might have been gay, but turned out he was just really passionate about gender equality.

Nuggsy once told me a story about a couple of ex-players who he’d suspected were secretly having a ‘thing’. Guiseppe Cataldo was a stocky right-hander; Richard Moreland a tall, stylish left-hander who still holds the club record for the highest individual fourth grade innings. They opened the batting together in second grade for several seasons, having struck up a great left/right combination at the top of the order. Following a devastating semi-final loss at home, the team decided to drown their sorrows in the dressing room for a few hours, as is the grade cricket custom. At one point, Nuggsy and Damo went to relieve themselves outside, when they spotted Guiseppe and Richard having an intensely private conversation over in the shadowy corner of the car park. All of a sudden, they leaned in for a passionate kiss, which lasted some three to four seconds. Nuggsy and Damo looked at each other, momentarily stunned. Did that just happen? They’d had about 13 beers between them, and light was fading fast, but they were nonetheless convinced of what they’d seen. They never mentioned it publicly, though, so the incident was eventually forgotten. Anyway, Guiseppe took an interstate job that off-season and was never seen again. Rick’s married with three young children and occasionally fills in for fifth grade when they’re short of players. I just hope they’re
both happy.

Then one night, it finally happened. I was out on the circuit with the lads after a dispiriting innings loss to our cross-town rival. One of the positives of losing by an innings is that you usually get to start drinking in the early afternoon. So by 6pm, I’d had about 13 beers and was up for anything. She was at least 15 years older, with a gruff, throaty voice that spoke of a life-long cigarette habit and a slight (but manageable) alcohol problem. Her skirt was short — dangerously so — and she had a thick mane of red hair reminiscent of Nicole Kidman’s ‘do in BMX Bandits. She looked good from 15 paces — and importantly, she had received the tick of approval from my teammates.

‘Red heads go off in the sack,’ Nuggsy whispered in my ear, as we ogled her from the bar.

To be fair, Nuggsy said the same thing about women of all hair colours, ages and races. Brunettes, blondes, dark hair, red hair; white, Asian, Indian — to Nuggsy, they were all ‘gagging for it’. I briefly wondered whether Nuggsy’s attitude towards women had been shaped by the fact his mother had abandoned the family when he was just eight years old. Whether this was the reason he was seemingly on a quest to have sex with every living, breathing female, as part of some misguided Oedipal revenge. However, this was not the time to be contemplating Freudian psychosexual theory. This was the time to lose my virginity.

Soon enough, we locked eyes over Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark, which Nuggsy had selected as his third song on the jukebox. I danced across to her, vibing the eighties classic, arms flailing, collar popped, sleeves rolled up in homage to The Boss. Feeling confident, I mimed the lyrics ironically — ‘can’t start a fire without a spark!’ — and she laughed. I liked that she laughed.

A few hours later, we arrived back to her house, drunk and disorderly. She directed me to the bedroom and ducked into the bathroom to ‘freshen up’, giving me a chance to gather my thoughts. Shit, what am I doing here? I scanned the room. I gathered that this was once a marital bed, a room of happy memories. Framed pictures of young children adorned the bedside table; the sheets were silk satin, soft to the touch, presumably expensive. This felt incredibly adult; naturally, I felt out of my depth. I hoped that she was divorced, or at least separated.

‘The condoms are in the second shelf,’ a voice yelled, coarsely, from the bathroom.

I took a deep breath and lunged my arm inside, grabbing a fistful of the things. I looked at them in my hand. I was not sure what to do with them, but I understood they were necessary and a pre-requisite for this specific act. Of course, when re-telling this experience to my teammates at training the following week, I would neglect to mention that I used protection. I’m yet to hear a sex story that involves the use of condoms. Wearing a ‘lid’ is seen as a sign of weakness and such conservatism will surely dilute the tale itself.

She appeared from behind the door, naked, determined. It became apparent that this was her show and I was merely a giddy participant. With Germanic-like authority, she ordered me to undress. I did, awkwardly. A few minutes of bumbling foreplay ensued. This was no different to the way I usually start all my innings: scratchy at the start, and never really ‘in’. The whole time, I was thinking about how I would describe this encounter to my teammates at Tuesday’s training.

And quickly, it was over, soon as it had begun. I had lost my virginity; shaken the bastard off. An incredible sense of relief swept over me as I hauled myself off this poor woman. I slept soundly, dreaming of how I would describe this encounter to my teammates at Tuesday’s training session. As I walked out the door the next morning — taking care to avoid her six-year-old son, silently eating cereal in front of Saturday Disney — I felt a new man. I was now — if only for a fleeting moment — the Chop King. I’d had sex with a woman. It was the most adult thing you could do, have sex with a woman — and I had done it.

I was finally one of the boys.