Macksville is a small but intense sporting community that cares for its kids and is often happy to put their sporting priorities above all else. The trips to Sydney, Cobram, Newcastle, Coffs Harbour and the like were demanding on Greg, particularly as Jason was still pursuing his cricketing dreams too. Fortunately, the banana plantation was not high maintenance so Greg could often leave someone else in charge. Virginia would sell raffle tickets at the Ex-Services Club to raise money for teams, and eventually the cricket club invested in a Bola bowling machine. Some in Macksville joked that the machine was purchased to save Greg’s arm.
‘FINANCES WERE OFTEN STRETCHED at home but Greg and Virginia put the kids first. Dad busted his arse on the bananas,’ Jason remembers. ‘You could see it in Mum and Dad’s eyes sometimes that we were struggling. You don’t make much money when you are a banana grower, but we never missed out on anything. Phillip put in a lot of work and without a lot of help, really, from anyone outside the family.
‘Dad’s real consistent. If he says, “When you get home I’ll have the ball machine on the back of the truck”, he’s going to be ready to go. That was good for us that he was on the ball. With the job he had, he could knock off at 3.30 pm and start at six in the morning.’
The Bola lived in the Hugheses’ shed during winter, and helped Phillip practise his batting year-round. Greg would drive it to the nets on the back of the truck and set up its legs and connect it to the car battery while Phillip got ready.
Standing nine-foot tall and spitting balls at fearsome speed, the skittish Bola bowling machine honed Phillip’s fighter-pilot reflexes as a batsman.
The bowling machine practice sessions became an institution in Macksville. ‘If Dad’s truck was at the nets, people would stop by to have a look at Phillip,’ Jason says.
Cousin Nino had moved to Sydney and remembers that he would turn off one street early on his way home ‘just to say hi to Greg and the boys – they were always there at the Willis Street nets’. All of Phillip’s mates knew where to find him.
Greg says he didn’t know a lot about batting technique. ‘All I really knew was about getting your front foot down the wicket, keeping the bat and pad together, that sort of thing.’
There are two broad types of cricketers. One is coached correctly but is often a little mechanical. The other, rarer beast is homespun, intuitive and often far better than his cookie-cutter peers. The downside is that if you don’t look technically perfect you have to make more runs, for every failure is evidence of a ‘flaw’.
The upside, as bowlers discovered, is that an unconventional player is hard to dismiss in conventional ways. Without planning, Greg had developed the second type. Phillip raised his bat higher than the textbook prescribed, brought it down in a sweeping outside-in curve rather than mechanically down the line of the ball, and opened his front leg to the on-side while slashing to the off. None of these idiosyncrasies was ‘correct’, but good judges would see through the surface eccentricities to the heart of batsmanship.
Warren Smith is a batting coach from Wagga Wagga who first encountered Phillip in NSW country and underage sides. Warren is legendary in the southern half of NSW for his creative coaching techniques and was credited with nurturing Michael Slater through the junior ranks. One day as an adult, Phillip, feeling gloomy about criticism of his technique, sat down with Smith.
‘Don’t worry, mate, you have got a special gift,’ Smith said. ‘The three worst bats I ever saw were Sir Donald Bradman, Allan Border and you.’
Confused, Phillip said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know how David Gower looks elegant and Greg Chappell looks elegant?’ Smith said. ‘Well, you don’t. You aren’t pretty to look at, but you have two beautiful things.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You have very good eyes and quick hands.’
Looking back, Smith says, ‘When Phillip hit the ball, it was right under his eyes. Look at Bradman. When he went at the ball he looked like he was all over the place, but when he hit it he was still. Border was one of the toughest and best I have ever seen. He was hard. If Bradman played today they would never hold him. They have covered the pitches and brought the boundaries in and he would be away. You look at Border, Bradman and Hughes, and they had a special approach.’
Phillip’s unorthodox approach and uncanny ability had some very good bowlers throwing up their arms in despair. In 2009, Andre Nel had retired from international cricket but found himself bowling for Surrey against Phillip, who was batting for Middlesex. The South African Test paceman gave up all hope of getting him out and even bowled a beamer in frustration. Phillip made 195 and Nel declared that Phillip, then 20, was the most difficult batsman to bowl to in world cricket.
Phillip developed his own style through years of practice in Macksville, but he complemented it with another great advantage that was also intuitive but, unlike his aesthetics, straight from central casting.
Greg and Phillip believed that ‘there are no runs in the grandstand’, but it took a special patience to hang in there and keep batting as Phillip did. That innate temperament, between the ears and in the gut, inherited more than learnt from Greg, was Phillip’s key edge over bowlers and his batting rivals.
Shariful Islam remembers an intimidating calm confidence. ‘I can only talk about this now because I have learnt the game a lot better than back then, but at that age he had this maturity to dominate all bowlers. He was already ten years ahead of his time. That’s what really amazed me.’
Matthew Day, who would become Phillip’s flatmate and close friend when he moved to Sydney, first saw him bat in a Polding–MacKillop primary schools match. What he remembers best is not the technique so much as the mental application.
‘He ebbed and flowed with his innings. He could take an hour and a half to make ten runs, then score 20 or 30 in a few minutes, then go back to slow. He was always a boundary hitter, so when he was grafting it was a lot of dots and then a lot of boundaries. He knew how to wait.’
It was Phillip’s patient defence that had him picked as an opener when he was barely stump-high, and Greg insists that he was seen as an orthodox batsman until commentators became distracted by the way he played on the off-side. Sam Robson, the England opener, played in representative underage sides with Phillip and remembers he was ‘solid and orthodox . . . As Phil got older, he would be remembered as being unorthodox. Less was made of that when he was young. He played pulls and hook shots off the faster bowlers. Compared to him, the rest of us were run of the mill. We were ducking or getting out of the way of short balls, but he was hitting them for four.’
Matt Day thought the same. ‘Early on, he was never the most orthodox but he never stood out as being unorthodox either.’
Stan Gilchrist had Phillip and Jason up to a camp in Lismore when the younger brother was around 12.
‘Boy, oh boy, he was an incredible talent,’ Stan says. ‘Absolutely awesome. He just shone. Jason was good, but Phillip was something else. Not a great technique, but I had seen Allan Border as a young kid and he wasn’t textbook and technically wasn’t great, but his grit and determination and timing and absolute focus . . . A lot of the kids would come to those camps and have a good time. They would do the cricket things and then muck around. Phillip was just focused. He’d ask for extra minutes on the bowling machine . . . I never asked Adam [Gilchrist] to practise. He always asked me to come down and feed the machine. Phillip would have been exactly the same.’
Having a father willing to give that time and support was critical. Part of the reason Steve Smith developed into a Test cricketer was a similar relationship with his dad Peter, who was at home every night after school to take him to the nets or for throwdowns in the yard, and who was there at every turn. Michael Clarke, the Waugh twins, the Chappell brothers – it is almost an essential ingredient for greatness. Adam Gilchrist had the same fortune.
‘I’ve always said that the commitment is not only that of the player, but also that of his support team,’ Stan Gilchrist says. ‘Greg and Virginia gave the boys whatever they required to get where they needed to go and that needs to be applauded as well.’
Nobody has done the maths, but it wouldn’t be surprising to discover that Greg Hughes drove 1000 kilometres for every century his son made.
•
PHILLIP HAD SET HIS mind on playing for Australia very early, and at carnivals he and Shariful Islam spent hours discussing exactly how they were going to do it. The Sydney all-rounder would develop into a handy cricketer, but admits that Phillip, who was always a class above him but might not have realised it yet, became something of a mentor for him.
Phillip always took pride in his appearance. Before a match he followed a careful routine of laying out his equipment and rubbing the marks off his bat. Virginia always made sure he took the field in freshly washed whites.
‘He always had so much to give to everyone, even at that age. He genuinely cared. When we were batting he would say, “Watch this guy, bro, he is trying to do this or that”. I never had much advice for him.’
Jason eventually found himself in a similar situation. ‘I used to worry a bit about my technique and what people thought of me, but Phillip just backed himself. He didn’t care what anyone thought about him, he just backed his own ability and he used to tell me to do the same.’
When the boys moved to Sydney, the tables would turn; Phillip would become his elder brother’s guide and advisor, encouraging him to come to the Western Suburbs club and make a life. Like Shariful, Jason would be good but not great, yet in Phillip’s eyes that did not matter – nor did it stop him caring.
Cricket, for Phillip, had always been embedded in his family life. As he improved, the Hughes home in Macksville developed a cricket rhythm, with rituals and processes that comforted the young batsman, and eventually, by having Jason move in with him in Sydney, he would try to reproduce that comfort.
Megan remembers fondly the evenings before Phillip would set off to a tournament. ‘I remember every time, the day before the game, the night before and not too late, he would come home from whatever he was doing, have a shower and then take up the entire lounge room with his gear. It was like he wanted us to be part of it. I remember he would lay out the gloves, the pads, towels, the inners, the grips, the water bottles to be frozen, everything he needed. That was the routine. Every Friday night Mum would cook, and we would chill and talk about the game and the weekend and how he felt. I think that took the stress off his shoulders, knowing we were around, or that we were going [to watch him] no matter what. That was his routine. Mum and Dad, I feel, have built this family in this home on love and trust and we just bounce off each other. Phillip loved that and every week we would do that. I think Phillip loved us around on the night before his games.’
The rituals of preparation calmed the boy. They bordered on obsessive, but he found something soothing in paying attention to the process of packing for a game or a tournament. He would take the bats to the back veranda and, with a rag, set about taking the marks off the bats he would use the following day. Other days he would just arrange the century balls he had collected on the carpet.
‘The mirror got a good workout,’ Jason observes.
It wasn’t only for batting practice either; Phillip was renowned for the attention he paid to his clothes and hair.
‘He would say, “Come on Vinny, let’s get a double shot”,’ his mum recalls. ‘Next thing I know, he was changing out of his tracksuit pants because he couldn’t go down the street in anything but his best clothes.’
Virginia was kept on her toes. He had to have clean whites for every game and everything ironed. If he played two games on Saturday, he had to have two sets of whites. He would never take to the field in dirty clothes or to the streets in a crumpled shirt. Macksville is a town of farmers, flannel and muddy utes, but Phillip was particular.
‘He always had to be neat,’ Greg says. ‘If you saw us in the mud with the cows he was fine, but if you saw him out in public he was immaculate. When he went away, the first thing he had to learn was to iron and wash his clothes. He would never put on a creased shirt. Before then he didn’t know what an iron was or where the washing machine was. Virginia did it all for him. If we went up to the pub on a Friday afternoon, I could go as I was, but he would iron his clothes and make sure his hair was right. If he had time out, he would buy new clothes. He always liked nice clothes. If we were going out at five, he would have the iron out at ten to.’
The other ritual was the car rides. Father and son spent a lot of time on the road together, and Phillip grew particular about this too.
‘He wanted me to go all the time,’ Greg says. ‘You might think that was silly, but it was all the time.’
In the car Phillip would talk about his ambitions in cricket. Over the years, he started to talk to his dad about his dream of buying a cattle stud when he made it. The plan was for father and son to run the farm, with the others involved.
Greg developed his own rituals, too. He disliked anything that smacked of cricket politics. Greg watched alone on the other side of the ground. Being away from the scorers, Greg would sometimes tally Phillip’s runs with stones or twigs by his folding chair and check it during breaks.
‘He never liked me talking about their performances,’ Greg says. ‘Jason was the same – you would turn up at a rep game and parents would say how their son got a 100 or five wickets last week . . . Phillip didn’t like that, he didn’t like us boasting and he never boasted either. If he had made the state side, he’d walk up the street with his mates and get on their bikes and he would never mention it.’
Greg, who admits he has a bit of a temper, says Phillip taught him to be calm. They learned to deal with upsets by giving them distance. They’d talk in the car or at home. If Phillip kept calm about these things, so could Greg.
Another day, another drive. They reckon Greg clocked 1000 km for every century Phillip scored. On the road, father and son talked of cricket and cattle.
Nino Ramunno observes that Greg and Phillip were as much best friends as father and son. The relationship was remarked upon by almost everyone who encountered them in the cricket world.
The Hughes and Ramunno families had spread to the cities, offering alternatives to being billeted or paid accommodation. In Sydney were cousins Nino and Sharnie as well as Greg’s brother Ian to stay with. Sharnie had an apartment and a flatmate.
‘Greg and Phillip would stay with us,’ she says, ‘and we would sit there and watch him play cricket. He slept on my couch, the poor bugger, but he didn’t whinge once.’
Ian and Helen Hughes had a house in Lidcombe in Sydney’s west. At least there the boy got a bed – one of his younger cousins was moved in with Ian and Helen so that Phillip could have a good night’s sleep. The family remembers Greg and Phillip arriving tired after the long drive from Macksville, but the first order of business for Phillip was to get out a bat and have throwdowns in the backyard. They also had a ball on a sock on their veranda, and when the men grew bored or wanted a drink, the boy would do what he did at home. Helen says that after a game Phillip would come home and go straight outside and hit it into the summer night. The neighbours still talk about coming home from work and hearing that knock-knock-knock-knock deep into the night.
