9

IS THERE MORE TO LIFE THAN CRICKET?

Having hit my mid-20s, and with little to show for it other than a rapidly declining metabolism and a blacklisting on the National Tenancy Database, I began to wonder whether there was more to life than just cricket.

I still loved the game, but was starting to feel like the game didn’t love me back. I’d turn up to training at 4pm twice a week to help set the nets up, but I don’t remember ever being thanked for it. Normally, I’d take delight in serving up 15 yorkers and an ‘accidental’ beamer to help a teammate get his eye in before an innings. Now, any bloke who asked me for throwdowns would receive a begrudging set of half-hearted, emotionally distant fullies. Even my cordial ratios were a bit off, perhaps the clearest indication that something was awry. At one drinks break, an opposition batsman actually spat out his beverage, loudly proclaiming it ‘the worst fucking mix’ he’d ever had. I had accidentally put too much cordial syrup in the mix, rendering it almost undrinkable. I suffered a tremendous loss of face and was immediately dismissed as chief cordial pourer.

My mind was wandering in other aspects of my game, too. For example, there’s this unspoken rule in grade cricket: whenever a moderately attractive woman happens to walk past the ground, the bloke who sees her first is contractually obliged to draw the team’s attention to her. In many cases, the game will halt to a standstill as both teams — including the two batsmen at the crease — stop to stare longingly at her. Only once she has passed the ground and out of eyesight can the match continue. However, I was beginning to find this simple objectification somewhat unfulfilling. I began to wonder more about her. Who is she? Where is she going on this beautiful summer’s day? Is she off to a farmer’s market to meet her friends? Maybe she’s on her way to Gorman, searching for a sundress to wear to her best friend’s engagement party? Inevitably, my skipper would snap me out of this daydream. ‘Come on mate, where’s your chat? Support the bowlers. Plenty of talk out here, lads!’ God, I needed
a girlfriend.

These thoughts were perhaps a product of the literature I was reading at the time. As a teenager, my literary diet consisted solely of cricket autobiographies. Viv Richards’ Sir Vivian: The Definitive Autobiography; Dean Jones’ My Call, Ian Healy’s Hands and Heals; David Boon’s Under The Southern Cross; Steve Waugh’s countless Tour Diaries. I once consumed The Bradman Albums — two thick volumes of selected excerpts from The Don’s personal scrapbook collection, each 800+ pages in length — over one rainy weekend as a 13-year-old. I was the Jeffrey Dahmer of cricket autobiographies. Insatiable.

For quite a few years after I first moved out of home, I barely read at all. The only time I read anything was on a Sunday morning, when the paper arrived. I would flick to the back pages and search for my name in the Saturday cricket results. While this technically comes under the ‘non-fiction’ genre, I could hardly classify this as ‘reading’ or ‘literature’. I was just seeing whether my contribution to the match had been published; whether I was, indeed, relevant. Basically, I was just looking for any sign that I existed. It was only when I moved back in with my parents that I re-discovered the simple joy of reading. I tentatively branched out from cricket autobiographies — although I did re-read several of them, of course — and into fiction, mostly mid-twentieth century literature. I devoured everything from Burroughs to Bukowski; Faulkner to Fitzgerald. I pictured myself road-tripping America alongside Jack Kerouac, an untamed thrill-seeker with the wind in my hair and the world at my feet. In reality, the most dangerous thing I’d ever done in my life was set an 8-1 field in an U12 rep game.

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was also on my reading list. The book, according to scholars, is commonly seen as a challenge to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘eternal recurrence’, posing the idea that each human life is finite, carrying with it an absence of burden, and therefore insignificant. Paradoxically, this insignificance is what weighs us down the most. I saw great parallels in Kundera’s novel to my own grade cricket experience. My weighty decision to switch clubs was, upon reflection, insignificant and meaningless, yet at the time utterly unbearable. However, to remain out of duty would have given me a sense of heaviness; to depart was to pursue a path of lightness and freedom. But what did it all mean? What did anything mean? Kundera’s book opened my eyes to the Unbearable Lightness of Being a Grade Cricketer.

Another book that really got me thinking was John Steinbeck’s powerful 1939 work, The Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family makes its cross-country journey from Oklahoma to sunny, prosperous California in search of employment and a fresh start, only to encounter hardship after hardship. The labour market is saturated and migrant workers are being exploited. Meanwhile, the family, beset by tragedy, is gradually falling apart, unable to pull together in a time of crisis. The final scene in Grapes, where Rose of Sharon, still grieving over her stillborn child, breast-feeds a starving old man in a barn, haunted me for months. That said, I cried after reading about Dean Jones’ premature retirement from test cricket. I was — and I remain — an emotionally delicate person.

Obviously, I could never tell my teammates that I was reading this rare literature of my own volition. The only bloke who I might have actually been able to discuss this stuff with was Tezza, but he’d recently moved interstate with his fiancée. Last I heard he was working at a big corporate, playing futsal on Tuesday nights and from all reports really embracing the ‘café culture’ of his new city.

Grade cricketers rarely speak of their hobbies outside of cricket. I’m sure that a lot of my teammates do take interest in things other than cricket, but I’m yet to see any evidence of this. The occasional bloke might play a bit of golf here and there, but really, that’s about it. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to a cerebral hobby was when Nuggsy took up Spanish for a few months, but that’s only because he was trying to chop some South American backpackers. He later tried to convince me to sign up to Salsa classes on Wednesday nights for similar reasons, but I declined the invitation. Apparently the class was 90 percent blokes, anyway.

I wasn’t sure what my hobby would be, but I knew my life needed a bit of balance. It was certainly something that my Mum had been telling me for the past decade or so. Pinning all my hopes and dreams on cricket was something I’d grown accustomed to. Over the years, I had little to show for my time spent playing cricket, other than my friendship with Nuggsy and the sun damaged skin of a 50-year-old. But was there more to life than just cricket? Could there be anything more fulfilling than a 34 not out in third grade?

I went online and researched things I could be doing with my life. Suggested hobbies included learning a language, playing a musical instrument, woodwork, and reading. I went through these one by one, ranking them in terms of viability. A language seemed like it’d be a bit pointless. Aside from my English summer, in terms of international travel, I’d only ever been to Bali and Thailand (twice) — and I didn’t need to learn a language for that. I’d always wished I’d learned the guitar, but I hated the idea of being shit for several months. As for woodwork, the only experience I’d had in this field was back as a kid, when Dad and I used to sandpaper my old V100 Slazenger after games. I’d heard reports that men who undertook woodworking had lower stress levels and an increased degree of patience. Perhaps this would be good for me. For a bloke with zero responsibilities in life other than to set the dinner table every night, I was surprisingly uptight.

Then, there was reading. Something I already loved, but had neglected for some time; something that I was good at. Perhaps I could join a book club, or something? I remembered a conversation I’d had once with my teammate, Starkers. He was talking about how he had to pick his missus up from book club on Tuesday nights after training. At the time, we joked about it, but now, slightly older and a bit more discerning, I thought differently.

I’d like to get into something like that.

Training was on every Tuesday and Thursday. The book club started at 7pm on Tuesdays, which meant I’d have to get away from training a bit earlier than usual. Fearful of being branded a rare unit, but nonetheless interested in pursuing a non-cricket related hobby, I told Starkers of my plan.

‘You’re fucking kidding me! You’re joining my missus’ book club? Can’t wait to tell all the lads about this one!’ Starkers laughed.

‘Yeah, I am. But mate, you have to keep this to yourself. Sophie too. No one can ever know about this.’

‘No way — this is too good.’

I had to step up my game. But what could I leverage over Starkers? All of a sudden, it came to me.

‘Mate, if you don’t keep quiet on this, I’ll tell everyone the real reason you’ve never showered with the rest of us after a game...’

Starkers’ real name was Andrew Jenkins. He joined the club six years ago as a promising 22-year-old quick, thrust into second grade, touted as a ‘player of promise’. Over time, he slid imperceptibly down the grades — mirroring his own physical decline — to occupy a safe spot in fourths. Here, playing against frightened teenagers and hungover adults on drastically under-prepared pitches, his 110km/h wobblers verged on the unplayable. As a 22-year-old kid in second grade, however, Starkers was subject to a great deal of banter from his teammates. Most of this revolved around Starkers’ unflinching refusal to take a post-match shower. While all his teammates looked forward to this convivial event, Starkers found it somewhat uncomfortable.

There is a great deal of pressure on everyone to have a shower after the game. But one must get completely naked in the shower: no half-measures. Those who wear undies (or worse, board shorts) are immediately seen as insecure and therefore weak. Here, confidence is everything. Even if one has an exceptionally small penis, he can still win the respect of others by ‘owning it’. It’s all about bottling your hang-ups and being ‘alpha’. That last sentence is pretty much the key to succeeding in grade cricket, and western society in general.

Cricket has taught me many valuable lessons over the years: the most valuable being the need to secretly chub up in the cubicles before the post-match shower. It’s a strange but necessary activity for all cricketers who aren’t naturally ‘packing’. Another popular option is to clip your pubic hair on Friday night before the game, just to get that extra ‘optical inch’. They say that cricket is a game of inches. It literally is. While a few considerate players will desperately strive to maintain strict eye contact in the shower, most will unashamedly size each other up. The biggest penis will be crowned the champion — and word will carry to the selection panel.

To those who are unfamiliar with the team sport environment, this homoerotic behaviour may come as a shock. Why is penis size so relevant? Why does anyone care? What the fuck is wrong with grade cricketers? These are all extremely valid questions, none of which I have the answer to, yet.

Anyway, there wasn’t a shred of hard evidence to suggest that Starkers had a small penis, but the implication alone would be enough. By planting the seeds of doubt in everyone’s mind, Starkers could be done for. His cricket wasn’t good enough to move up the grades at the moment; he was averaging around 72 runs per wicket that season. That statistic, coupled with rumours of a small penis, could send him straight to grade cricket purgatory.

My threat of blackmail hung heavily in the air.

‘Mate, you know the reason I don’t shower is because I have tinea,’ he finally responded, voice quivering.

‘Just seems a bit convenient, that’s all,’ I slyly countered.

‘Fucking hell. Fine, I’ll keep quiet on your little book club. I always suspected you were a bit of a rare unit, but a book club? That’ll fucking do me.’

Starkers knew that in the dog-eat-dog world of grade cricket, I had his number. The grade cricket social order is subject to ninteenth century Darwinian theory: natural selection, better known as ‘survival of the fittest’.  Any rumour about Starkers — baseless or otherwise — would devastate his standing at the club. It’s a feeling I knew all too well, having left my last club in shame after a moral indiscretion.

Having blackmailed Starkers into secrecy, I was now free to go to book club on Tuesday nights.

‘What does LBW mean?’ she asked out of the blue one morning.

Luckily, I had a great deal of experience in explaining the LBW law. It’s actually quite surprising how many times I’ve been called upon to answer this question in my lifetime.

‘LBW stands for Leg Before Wicket,’ I started. ‘The LBW rule was first invented in the late eighteenth century to prevent batsmen from blocking the wicket with their pads. According to Law 36 in “The Laws of Cricket,” the ball must first pitch in line with the stumps and/or strike part of the batsman’s body in line with the wickets.’

‘That sounds pretty subjective. So if the batter gets hit on the pad and the umpire thinks it’s going to hit the stumps, then he can give him out LBW, even if it’s clearly going to miss?’

‘Yes, that’s right. However, the batsman may also be out LBW if, having made no attempt to hit the ball with his bat, he is struck outside the line of off-stump by a ball that would have gone on to hit the wickets.’

‘God, how confusing!’ she quipped. ‘Getting a bad umpiring decision must totally ruin your day.’

I sighed. She didn’t know the half of it.

Her name was Lara, like the West Indian cricketer. I’d met her at book club, where fleeting eye contact and a shared interest in Beat literature had led to a couple of dates over coffee — and soon, a relationship. On this occasion, Lara and I were at the local café, easing in to a pleasant Sunday morning brunch. I enjoyed the casual, yet intellectually stimulating conversation that we were able to have. It was certainly a change from the typical dressing-room banter. We discussed weighty topics like religion and politics; we laughed over the works of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais. There was no power struggle, no ever-present fear of being ‘champed’. She didn’t mock me for living with my parents like most people did. She had a significantly higher income than me, too, but that didn’t seem to worry her. But most importantly, she respected the fact that Saturdays were off-limits, that I’d be spending the entire day on a cricket field, with a strong likelihood of post-match beers and circuit to follow. She didn’t understand it, but she respected it.

‘So, tell me this: why do you still play cricket?’

The question was delivered in good humour and with genuine curiosity. There was no hidden agenda; no malicious intent. But nonetheless, it disarmed me, thoroughly.

‘Cricket? Well, I’ve always played cricket. I’m good at it, champ.’

Over the years I had developed a worrying tendency to apply the suffix ‘champ’ when speaking to my friends, family, and now Lara, too. The responses were never favourable but it always gave me a feeling of dominance. But Lara’s question had triggered a defensive reaction. Was I good at cricket? No, I wasn’t.  But I had been trained to hide all my insecurities under a protective alpha sheath. Grade cricket had taught me that. When threatened, one should always react with extreme aggression. A pre-emptive strike is better than a late strike. In the grade cricket world, it’s champ or be champed.

The day before, I’d been dismissed for 24 off 89 balls in arguably the most depressing innings of my life. I must have played and missed 25 times — including one horrendous over, where a 42-year-old slow-medium bald-headed trundler beat my outside edge on six consecutive occasions. In the end, I was genuinely relieved to edge one to first slip, tuck my bat under the arm and get out of there; the sound of 11 ‘fuck offs’ providing the soundtrack to my brisk walk to the pavilion.

A hirsute barista popped up to disturb our conversation. ‘Can I start you guys off with any coffees?’

I looked at the bloke standing there, notepad in hand, exuding a casual confidence that easily matched his aesthetic. Tattooed, sinewy. The kind of guy who was definitely in a band — possibly even several bands. His wrists were adorned with colourful string bracelets, which suggested he’d spent years of his life backpacking around the world, working as a volunteer in developing nations, falling in and out of love in the most exotic of locations. Accumulating valuable life experience that cannot — and will never — be found on a cricket field. At the very least, he looked like someone who might know how to correctly pronounce the phrase ‘Yosemite National Park’. He also looked like someone who might ask during a cricket match, perhaps deliberately (just to be subversive): ‘which team is winning?’ He looked defiantly anti-sport. God, someone else to be threatened by.

We made our order. I looked around the café, an old converted warehouse with just the right balance of grit and charm. The furniture was made of classic industrial materials and evoked the feeling of an old factory. Local art hung from exposed brick walls; bearded baristas grooved to the earthy sounds of Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes. I even spotted a Singer sewing machine next to the coffee machine.

Fuck me, what would Nuggsy make of this place?

The conversation continued. ‘It must be great hanging out with your friends every Saturday,’ Lara posed.

I stifled a snigger. These blokes are not my friends. They’re more like my cellmates, if anything. Every Saturday, we report to jail for six hours before being sent home to our families. Grade cricket is essentially periodic detention. The communal showers are only the half of it.

It’s incredible, really, the amount of pain cricketers are prepared to put themselves through. Say you’re an opening batsman who gets out for a duck in the first over on day one. What compels you to hang around for the rest of the day, let alone turn up the following Saturday for day two? Yet you do, lest 10 blokes who you don’t even like think slightly less of you. You retain a sense of loyalty to the club, to your teammates, even though those same teammates will not hesitate to rate your girlfriend a ‘six out of 10’ in front of your face. During the time I’ve spent watching my teammates bat after getting out cheaply, I could have learned a language by now. I could be speaking Mandarin. Instead, all I’ve got to show for it is a career average of 13.6 and a 10 percent discount at our local pub.

‘Yeah, we have a good laugh,’ I finally responded.

Minutes passed. Nursing a mild headache from the five post-match beers I’d consumed in the sheds following our 146-run loss, I flicked through the papers to check the results from the day’s play, looking for my name out of habit.

‘What are you looking at there?’ Lara chirped, perhaps wondering what on earth I was doing in this section of the paper, squinting anxiously.

‘I’m looking at the third grade results. I’m checking whether my name is in the paper,’ I answered, blankly, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

‘But you know how the team went, so what’s the point of seeing the results again?’

She was right. There was literally no tangible reason for me to check the score in the paper. All the results were already online. But the sense of satisfaction one derives from seeing his name in the paper — in print, no less, at a time when traditional print journalism is suffering from cascading revenues and circulation — is not easily explained to a 26-year-old female with no interest or background in cricket. In fact, it’s even harder to explain than the LBW law. In the paper, a terrible 24 off 89 simply appears, somewhat reductively, as just ‘24’. However, this lack of context looks good in print. Others reading the paper will see that I hit 24 out of a total of 164 and think to themselves, ‘shit, must have been a tough deck to bat on’. My hideous 24 suddenly takes on a new lease of life. It is no longer the worst 24 in the history of cricket; it was a stoic, brave-hearted performance against the odds. In seven years’ time, the mere thought of that majestic, chanceless 24 could be the one thing that gets me through a painful divorce.

For a brief moment, I wondered whether this was what my married teammates had to go through. I’d only been seeing Lara for a couple of months, but it was becoming abundantly clear that I’d need to keep my two worlds — ‘cricket’ and ‘Lara’ — separate from each other. Blokes like Wippa, Haynesy and Dazza (before the divorce) used to talk openly about how cricket offered them the opportunity to ‘escape’ from their wives — and in some cases, their children — for a few brief hours. These were blokes who were always a little too keen to stick around for a few beers after the match. Often, they had to be forced out of the change-rooms at day’s end. Here, within the safe confines of grade cricket, these men were free from the domestic ‘burdens’ that weighed them down greatly — the same things that bring unbridled joy to millions of normal people. Grade cricket was a safe place where a grown man could happily engage in hyper-masculine banter without being branded a misogynist, or negatively influencing his own five-year-old son. Cricket offered him a valid reason to extricate himself from all familial responsibilities.

Before the marriage, the kids and the mortgage, these men had played cricket. And before they fell head over heels for Suzy, Sarah or Sophie, they fell in love with cricket. Once upon a time, they were all energetic 12-year-olds playing backyard cricket. They had all once achieved great success at junior level and no doubt been told by family members and club officials, on oft occasions, that they were indeed a ‘player of promise’. And while they might now be 34 years of age, married, and working in a dead-end job as an assistant team manager at Officeworks, they were still able to live out these delusional dreams every Saturday. Cricket was literally a field of dreams for these desperate souls. Cricket was their first love — and boy, didn’t their wives know it.

Lara was a psychologist, which explains all the questions. Every day, people came seeking her help on all sorts of problems — depression, infidelity, drug-dependency — but she never took this negative energy home with her; an admirable trait, to absorb the troubles of others. This laidback attitude was in direct contrast to my own delicate equilibrium. If I got out twice during a net session, it’d literally take me days to get over it. Likewise, if I smashed the last ball of my net 120 metres, I’d dine out on that for weeks. Fucking weeks.

In book club, we’d been reading John Updike’s classic American novel, Rabbit, Run. In this book, Updike’s anti-hero Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a 26-year-old former high school basketball star struggling with the demands of modern life. Stuck in a loveless marriage to a heavily pregnant wife, Rabbit flees in search of something new, a different life. He visits his old hometown in Middle America and reconnects with his school basketball coach, who reminds him how good he was as a kid. He hooks up with a prostitute for a while, seeking some form of external validation; seeking freedom from the suffocating pressures of modern masculinity.

I wondered, for a worrisome moment, whether Lara thought I was Rabbit Angstrom. Whether I was a 26-year-old man who had peaked at the age of 14, yet still retained misguided, narcissistic delusions of grandeur. This trained psychologist, this expert on the human condition, had absolutely no idea why I played cricket. Why I allowed my performances in an amateur competition to dictate my emotions on a week-to-week basis. Why I was comfortable sacrificing half of my entire weekend to stand on a grim-looking cricket field in desolate suburban surroundings, subject to some of the most explicit and personal abuse imaginable, when I could be doing literally anything else.

‘You guys are crazy,’ she chuckled, shaking her head in mock-disbelief. She tucked in to her smashed avocado and feta on sourdough, which had just arrived, courtesy of the cool-as-fuck waiter.

Slowly but surely, I was beginning to think she might be on to something.