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Fitness expert Kevin Chevell stood under a gum tree with his mate Greg Fitzgerald at Caringbah Oval in 1993 watching as the state’s best talent contested a ‘possibles and probables’ warm-up game a few weeks before the Sheffield Shield season started. The one player who captured his attention was a bowler whose skinny frame was grossly out of proportion with his height. Unlike judges before him, Chevell instantly recognised something special in the kid’s simple action, even before he dismissed NSW opener Steve Small, and it crossed his mind that there was greatness just waiting to be tapped.
Fitzgerald, a stalwart of the Sutherland club, said the bowler was Glenn McGrath, a country kid whose potential had recently been recognised by the state selectors because they’d included him in the NSW train-on squad. Fitzgerald added that McGrath played for the mighty Sharks and was a nice, quiet young bloke who seemed determined to succeed.
‘All I said to Greg was if I ever got my hands on McGrath, I’d make him the best there ever was,’ says Chevell, who was then the personal conditioner for Test skipper Mark Taylor and Steve Small. ‘I was impressed by his approach, his delivery and his follow-through. It was something you could work on. But what also stood out was he was terribly underweight. I was concerned the rigours of fast bowling would tear him apart.
‘I thought of a bowler from a few years earlier, Bruce Reid, a great talent but his body just couldn’t withstand the punishment of fast bowling. Glenn looked as if he could have been susceptible to the same problems: constantly prone to injury because of the forces that go through a fast bowler’s body. I thought if I could get hold of that kid ... I would build him up so he’d be so strong and so powerful, and I’d combine that with his unique height and economical bowling action to make him the best ever. I thought I could teach him to be unbreakable and unbendable in mindset so he could fulfil what I thought I saw in him – being as good as, if not better than, Dennis Lillee.’
Chevell was a child prodigy. At 13 he was selected for Bankstown to bowl fast alongside the likes of Test bowlers Jeff Thomson and Len Pascoe. However, he took a detour on the road to cricketing stardom to pursue his other passion: motorcycle racing. He eventually returned to the game and played first-grade in Sydney and then in Perth, where he enjoyed one of his career highlights – clean-bowling South African batsman Barry Richards in a Western Australian Cricket Association club match. Richards, who had decimated the Australian bowling attack during their 1970 tour of the Republic, was so impressed by the delivery that he made a point of shaking Chevell’s hand for what he called ‘a job well done’.
Chevell knew about fast bowling and about fitness – and while he knew he could make McGrath a household name, he wasn’t one for chasing people.
Two years passed before the pair met, and Chevell described their meeting as a match made in cricketing heaven. McGrath had just conquered the West Indies on the 1995 tour of the Caribbean and Geoff Lawson had invited Chevell to train the NSW squad during the off-season.
‘At the end of the first session, this quiet bloke came from the back of the group and asked if I could help him,’ says Chevell. ‘It was Glenn, and when I asked what he was prepared to do to fulfil his dreams he gave the right answer: whatever it took.’
Chevell gave McGrath two weeks to prove he was made of the right stuff – and it was no picnic. He was pushed so hard in what he now laughingly refers to as ‘torture sessions’ that he found it hard to walk, his muscles screamed for mercy that was never given, and there were times when he was physically sick. But he didn’t give up, and that impressed Chevell. At the end of the fortnight’s trial he promised McGrath he had the knowledge and the will to make him the greatest fast bowler in the world, but whether he reached that height was up to McGrath.
‘I told Glenn I was prepared to do whatever it took to get him there and he could call on me at any hour,’ he says. ‘That was the agreement. And over the last 12 or 13 years I spent thousands of hours with him.’
McGrath embraced the teachings of Chevell and saw immediate results.
‘Kev trained me so hard – pushed me – that I was happy when the international season started because it gave me a break from him, because his training sessions were designed to be much worse than anything I’d experience in a cricket game,’ McGrath recalls. ‘What Kev taught me was that when you train hard you get stamina, you get strong and gain fitness – but the main benefit is the confidence it gives you. He believed the people who succeed consistently and at a sustained level in any field were those who believed in themselves, because they were the ones who kept it together when the world fell apart around them. That held me in good stead and I was lucky to get his messages in the early days of my career. And he became a trusted mate, someone I respected and someone I listened to, because when Kev spoke I knew it was from the heart.’
Chevell’s first concern was to address McGrath’s weight. In 1995 he hit the scales at 77 kilos. The trainer knew only too well that cricket is a sport potholed with stories of promising fast bowlers who snapped like dry twigs because they lacked the strength for the relentless job of bowling day in, day out. And he didn’t need to look too far for a program to help add bulk to his charger.
‘I was like Glenn when I was a kid; I had a lot of talent but I was very, very skinny,’ he says. ‘I was forever fighting injuries, mainly back problems, and I couldn’t accept the fact I couldn’t beat it or get around the problem. I was playing for Balmain at the time, and Greg Fitzgerald suggested I do weights with him during the winter because I was too skinny.
‘I went to Western Australia, and in my second season there I vowed I’d do something or kill myself trying. I promised myself I was going to be unbendable, unbeatable and unbreakable and that I was going to pick up two yards of speed. I didn’t really know what I was doing then – I do now – but I had lots of enthusiasm. I trained every single day for the 180-odd days in between the end of the season and the beginning of the new one, and I picked up two yards of pace. I was 12 kilos heavier, I was faster and fitter, and I had a self-confidence I’d never had before – and I carried that well. And that was when I realised there were more benefits – self-confidence and belief – to training than just physical ones.’
Chevell’s plan to pack bulk onto McGrath went against conventional thinking, because it challenged the belief that the more weight and muscle a fast bowler carried, the greater the risk of his losing his natural bowling action and skills. Chevell thought the theory was wrong – and he believes he has proved his point by adding 20 kilos to McGrath’s frame over the 13 years they trained together, which helped, not hindered, him.
To achieve their aims, Chevell placed McGrath on a program that he said would not allow him to make good progress like most fitness regimes, but would ensure ‘unbelievable’ progress. He introduced McGrath to super-foods and insisted he rest well throughout the day, because without that Chevell said no athlete would last under him.
‘A lot of times throughout his career he would come to Penrith and stay with my wife and me for many days at a time,’ he says. ‘We would do our exercise training a couple of times a day, and I would feed him up to five times a day around the clock. He’d sleep during the day and in the evening. I would set an alarm for 2 am, get up and make up a food supplement with oats and eggs and other ingredients, and I’d walk into his bedroom, wake him up, get him to quickly drink or eat it, and he’d go back to sleep. The idea was to help him consume food that would help him to grow and recover more quickly. No matter what I asked him to do – it didn’t matter how distasteful it might have sounded to him at the time or how much he might not have wanted to do a particular task – Glenn would do exactly what was asked of him ... and that sums him up.’
The time McGrath spent with Chevell prepared him well for the rigours and challenges of spearheading Australia’s bowling attack for 13 demanding years. The training he was put through was so much tougher than anything he’d experienced in the middle of the cricket oval – and the mental challenge to hang in and complete Kevin’s drills under duress taught him how to react to stressful situations. It provided McGrath with an overall toughness and ability to slog through nightmare scenarios when others might have found it so much easier just to curl up.
‘It’s having a plan and knowing what you want to achieve,’ says McGrath of the mental challenge. ‘You really have to try to stick to that. It also helps to get into a routine and just keep bowling and bowling. I wore a heart monitor a few times and the data showed it was in the 160–180 beats per minute range. I always thought real fitness was not how fast or far you ran but how quickly you recovered. At my peak fitness I was able to bowl longer spells and my recovery would allow me to still be effective in my second and third spells.
‘The one day that springs to mind is the 1999 Test against the West Indies in Barbados because I bowled 17 overs straight. I just kept going. Whenever Steve Waugh said, “This is your last over,” I’d take a wicket and get a few more overs. Courtney Walsh and Brian Lara got the Windies home that day, but I bowled 17 overs straight and while it was effective, Justin Langer said I looked skeletal I was so gaunt. But I actually felt fine ... I was a bowler and I was happy to bowl as often as possible.
‘And Jane helped me realise that whatever pain I thought I might have been in playing cricket, it was nothing compared to what other people endure. Sore feet, bad back or whatever didn’t compare at all to her battle. People talk about “heroics” on the cricket field, but I know what real heroics are because Jane is that. She was the reason no injury ever seemed as bad as what it may have appeared.’
Brett Lee, who assumed McGrath’s role as the spearhead of Australia’s pace attack when the Pigeon retired, attributes McGrath’s ability to plough through tough workloads – such as his marathon 17 overs in Barbados – to his strong muscles and mind.
‘He was so mentally tough,’ he says. ‘There were times when he was suffering pain in his back or in his ankle but he somehow switched it off. He’d make a joke about it and imagine his little workers inside his body at the injured spot repairing the damage. He believed in that and it worked for him. But he was such an amazingly mentally strong person.’
To be a fast bowler, a person must have an incredible pain threshold, the stamina of a camel and a masochistic streak, because while they might end the day footsore, muscles throbbing, a big toenail hanging off and a lower back that won’t stop aching, they return the following day and commit themselves to sheer hell all over again. Jock Campbell describes the fast bowler’s lot as one of the most unnatural things the human body can do.
‘Fast bowling is so unilateral, it is so unbalanced,’ he says. ‘Every time McGrath bowled he’d come down on his front foot at over ten times his body weight. When you slow that down to 250–500 frames per second on the cameras that the biomechanical people have, you can see the force that goes through the ankle and see how unnatural it is. The wear and tear on the knees and the back is also highly unnatural – and it doesn’t matter how strong or fit or even how diligent the bowlers are, they always bowl with some form of injury because of their workload. Glenn was very strong – he was taught how to train hard by Kevin Chevell, and he liked to train hard in the gym and push himself.
‘My job “in season” was to maintain the players’ fitness, and in Glenn’s case we looked after his strength and power, his speed around the field. Aerobically he was terrific and that helped him bowl all day. The heat is normally the factor that determines how the bowlers perform. While I had no doubt Glenn could have bowled all day, the heat and the humidity make it difficult for anyone to do that. The soreness and the pain stems from the fact they always carry some sort of injury because of the stress on their body. The idea of the recovery session – swimming in a pool, taking ice baths and stretching – is designed to relieve their soreness. Glenn was diligent and adhered to those requirements. He had to – it was the only way he could survive because of the demands on him.’
One year after his retirement, McGrath’s early-morning reminder of his cricket career is a limp, courtesy of what he describes as a ‘dodgy’ ankle. However, he appreciates that there are many former fast bowlers much worse off than him.
‘Because I was a front-on bowler, and not a side-on, I used my stomach and side muscles,’ he says. ‘While that saved me from the stress fractures guys like Dennis Lillee and Brett Lee suffered, I tore my rectus abdominal, my inner costal and my side muscles – the “grunt muscles”, as bowlers call them. I had a scan on my back a few years ago and the team’s physiotherapist Errol Alcott called it “pristine”, because it looked as if I had never bowled a ball before in my life.’
McGrath attributes some of his back’s bone strength to good genes. During an osteoporosis-testing program which tested his paternal grandparents regularly over many years, his grandmother’s bones were found to be twice as strong as what is considered normal. ‘I think that was passed on to me. I think the fact my action was stress-free and my body was aligned also helped me.’
Despite inheriting strong bones, McGrath did suffer wear and tear from his role as the workhorse of the Australian Test side.
‘You don’t think about the future and the effects fast bowling might have on your body – you just bowl and push through whatever is bothering you at the time. I accepted years ago that there really is no preventative measure from future aches and pains, so I told myself I’d just deal with any problems down the track. However, my shins and knees are good, hips are fine ... The only problem, apart from a few small tears, was my ankle – and again, that was only due to the workload and the stress of repetitive bowling.’
Chevell fulfilled his promise to chisel McGrath into an unbreakable, unbeatable and unbendable dynamo – and plenty would agree he fulfilled his other vow to make McGrath the best there ever was. McGrath is adamant he could never hope to thank Chevell enough for his behind-the-scenes work, done well away from the limelight and the glories, though Chevell begs to differ.
At Christmas in 2007 McGrath arrived at the Chevell household with a large cardboard box cradled in his arms. When it was opened the hard man choked up with tears. Without a word being said, they embraced. In the box was a glass display case that contained one of McGrath’s most prized possessions – his much-loved baggy green cap, the ultimate trophy of any cricketer in Australia. McGrath had engraved on a plaque his heartfelt thanks for all Chevell had done. The fast bowler dismissed his trainer’s stream of protests about not being so bloody stupid as to give away what should be an heirloom for his children. McGrath and Jane had spoken long and hard about the gift, and both agreed it was a small way in which to let Chevell know the great impact he’d had on the bowler’s life.
‘I have no doubt the sessions with Kevin were the reason Glenn performed for as long as he did,’ says Jane.
‘It was also the best way to express what I feel without having to say too many words,’ explains McGrath. ‘But Kev is one of the reasons I succeeded ... he showed me the way by strengthening my body and mind.’