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The ball was pitched on a line outside off stump and Australia A batsman Matthew Hayden stepped away from it to give himself room to cut Glenn McGrath’s delivery square. The ball sped past the fieldsmen and Hayden felt great satisfaction to see it crash into the advertiser’s sign for four. He jogged slowly between wickets, his eyes fixed on where the ball finished its quick journey. And that was when he smashed into something – bloody McGrath, who stood in the middle of the pitch with his hands on hips also watching the ball. The Queenslander didn’t appreciate it, as McGrath soon discovered.
‘I didn’t know Matt, he didn’t know me,’ says McGrath with a grin. ‘He thought I’d barged him on purpose and he growled a few threats at me–“If you ever do that again, you so-and-so, and I’ll do this and I’ll do that.” He was right behind me and breathing down my neck, so I pushed him away – it was a decent enough shove – and we got on with the game.
‘The Australia–Australia A games were always good, tough cricket. The Cricket Board introduced them into the triangular series in place of a foreign team and it was competitive, because the A players wanted to get into the Aussie team and we had to keep them down. We won all our games, but they were always close. What also made playing against Australia A tough was that they were the underdogs, so the crowd always got behind them.’
ICC match referee and former New Zealand international John Reid demanded McGrath and Hayden attend a meeting straight after the match to explain themselves. McGrath noted that Hayden looked very relaxed as he turned up with a beer in hand. He was certain that Hayden shared his view on the matter: it was a nothing incident.
‘The first thing Reid said was Matt could get rid of the beer because he wasn’t on holiday,’ remembers McGrath. ‘It turned out Reid didn’t have the authority to dish out any punishment, but he made it clear he would either have fined or suspended us if he had. We were put on notice. After the meeting Matt and I shook hands and became mates. Jane is now godmother to his daughter. I was always of the impression I got on well with Reid, but I received a surprise in 1999, just before the World Cup, when I heard he’d told a few people that if Warne or I stepped out of line during the tournament he’d wipe us out. I was shocked. As I said, I thought we got along.’
Had David Hookes – and not Reid – been in that meeting room, there is every chance he would have congratulated Hayden for barging into the bowler. While Hookes found McGrath to be what he called a ‘good bloke’ on the tour of the West Indies in 1995, by 2003 he admitted there were aspects of the bowler’s on-field persona that grated on him. One was what he called McGrath’s tendency ‘to stand, hands on hips, in the middle of the pitch’ when things didn’t go to his liking. He referred to it as the ‘angry teapot’ stance. The other was what Hookes called McGrath’s almost divine belief that the batsmen had to run around him. These traits annoyed the former Test batsman so much that he even raised them as issues for the ACB to investigate. Hookes, however, insisted his complaint wasn’t lodged to land McGrath in hot water; he was merely campaigning for batsmen to be allowed the same right as fast bowlers to show some emotion when they were frustrated.
‘I don’t like Glenn’s “teapot” action,’ said Hookes. ‘He gets hit for four and he walks back to his mark shaking his head. It’s probably a habit for him now and he probably doesn’t even realise he’s doing it. However, a batsman is allowed to hit a four; a batsman is allowed to hit a good shot or even a lucky shot. If he plays a lucky shot, tell him he’s a lucky so-and-so and walk back to your mark.
‘But this teapot attitude and shake of the head – and Glenn is one of many bowlers who do it – I think it is very unfair. When a batsman is given out when he’s not out, he might stand there for quarter of a second, throw his head back, mumble something as he walks off – and he gets fined 25 per cent of his match fee. Glenn McGrath and many bowlers do that six times a day. What is the difference? It gets under my goat. Look, I’m happy bowlers react like that, but batsmen should be allowed to as well. It’s incongruous bowlers can do it six times a day.’
McGrath does not agree with Hookes’ ‘teapot’ accusation and regrets that fate denied him the chance to debate it with the left-hander.
‘I knew Hookesy, admittedly not all that well, but I knew him,’ McGrath says. ‘When people form a perception or an idea, you wish they’d come and talk to you about it to hear your side of the story, so they don’t just have a biased point of view. I try to look at things from both sides; obviously it is hard to do that when you are emotional. I guess when someone works as a commentator, they have a greater opportunity of keeping their job by generating controversy. I respected Hookesy’s com mentating and enjoyed listening to him. But I would have loved to have talked to him about those points he raised.
‘The teapot, shaking my head: I did that only because I was unhappy with the ball I bowled,’ he says. ‘You see a batsman play a shot he’s unhappy about – he doesn’t hit it properly or whatever – and you’ll see he walks around and shakes his head. It’s exactly the same thing. I wasn’t getting stuck into the batsman because he hit me for four, I was hooking into myself. I hadn’t bowled the ball where I wanted it to land; it was just a sign of frustration. It wasn’t the same as a batsman getting out and going off. If a batsman plays a bad shot, he stands there shaking his head and gives himself a bit of a serve. If a batsman gets out and carries on, it’s exactly the same as a bowler reacting to an umpire giving a batsman not out when he thinks he should be dismissed. I really think Hookesy was off the mark with what he said, and I’m sorry to think we’ll never get to debate it.’
Hookes was also critical of the ‘new age’ batsmen for allowing bowlers to call the shots. He cited McGrath’s tendency to stop in the middle of the pitch and make the batsmen run around him as something he would never have tolerated during his playing days – he’d have followed Hayden’s lead in that Aussie A game.
‘I think this generation of bowlers is lucky that they’re playing in a subservient era of batsmen,’ said Hookes. ‘What Glenn does really badly, and he’s got away with it for ten years, is when he gets hit to fine leg, for example, he has it in his heart to have the batsman run around him. This is a reflection of the [current] batsmen’s attitude to bowlers, because I know he wouldn’t have got away with it against a Viv Richards, a Gordon Greenidge, an Ian or Greg Chappell, or Ian Botham and Sunil Gavaskar.
‘Now, if he’d done that to me, I may have conceded he’d stumbled. If he did it a second time, I would have said loud enough for the umpire to hear, “If you do that one more time, I’ll wrap this bat around your ankles.” Then I would have said to the umpire, “Did you hear what I said?” Glenn would have gone, “Waah, waah,” in a silly way and his NSW mates would have yelled out with him. But I would have said to the umpire, “If he gets in my way again, I’m going to hit him in the shins with my bat, and you understand that I have told him.” They [the umpires] would have sweated and panicked, but he wouldn’t have done it again. So, the game has reached [the stage] where Glenn can do that and it’s weak to think the world’s batsmen have allowed him to do that.’
McGrath, however, says he was permitted under the rules of the game to stand his ground.
‘I was entitled to keep the same line I ran, and that’s all I did,’ he says. ‘So, it was up to the batsman to go around me. It’s interesting coming from a batsman’s point of view. I think Viv Richards said that if we had played against one another and I ran in front of him during the follow-through or if I changed direction, he’d have run straight through me. And now I learn Hookesy would’ve smashed me around the shins with his bat! But that’s the way it was. I didn’t stand in front of the batsmen intentionally, but I did intentionally stand my ground, because bowlers are entitled to do that.
‘I have no problem to think David may have raised things as an issue for the Board to look at; that’s all fine, as long as it gives a fair perspective from both the bowler’s and batsman’s view. However, I am concerned that picking and choosing different parts of the game and having a go from a personal perspective can be ... tough, if not a little unfair. I don’t mind as long as it is across the board, that’s why the “teapot” and my shaking my head was pointed out, because I’m a bowler. It is interesting because batsmen do it and they get away with it.
‘When a batsman is out, he can go and release his frustrations and emotions in the change room. A bowler has nowhere to hide and when things go bad, the chances are his day will only get worse. Though it can get better, because he can bowl a heap of rubbish all day and finish at the end with two or three wickets to make it a great day. A batsman can look a million dollars playing one shot and get out the next. That’s the difference between the batsman and the bowler, and we’ll argue both cases until we are blue in the face.’
Some of McGrath’s behaviour in the early stages of his international career angered some purists enough to send him critical letters, while others aired their disapproval on talkback radio. He clearly remembers the spidery writing of an elderly man who described in his letter the salad days of his youth, when he’d join thousands of others at Sydney’s Hurstville Oval to watch St George as Don Bradman batted and Bill O’Reilly bowled for the club. The correspondent noted that Bradman was a gentleman and declared that McGrath was not, because he swore too much on the field. The man had never met McGrath and the fast bowler was amazed a stranger could form such a strong opinion on him based merely on what they saw.
‘I should have followed Merv Hughes’ lead and kept all the hate mail I received and based a book on that, because there was some lively stuff,’ says McGrath. The elderly critic who remembered Bradman as a gentleman but condemned McGrath for possessing what he called a ‘foul mouth’ signed off with the remark: ‘McGrath, stop making a c**t of yourself.’
‘As soon as he put that there, he lost all credibility,’ says McGrath. ‘That letter annoyed me because I knew it wasn’t me. But he was someone who’d never met me, he had no idea of the person I was, yet he felt the need to write me an abusive letter. It would always get under my skin, but I found if I waited a while and calmed down, I’d think it didn’t matter. The person they saw as me wasn’t me.’
McGrath does not swear much in general conversation, but he did when he was with his team-mates or out on the field: ‘I did find in the team environment and sometimes out on the field there were plenty of times where I’d use blue language. I think that’s an Australian thing: when you’re with the boys, you slip into it. I went into the dressing-room during the SCG Test against India in 2008 and I let fly with a few, as did the players, and then I realised my son James was with me. I thought, “Oh, no!” And while I didn’t quite cover his ears, I was mindful of my tongue.’
Like many sportspeople, McGrath discovered athletes carried a higher level of expectation than most other people in Australian society – and his behaviour was mostly exemplary. After all, he wasn’t a big drinker, he abhorred drugs and didn’t smoke. He signed autographs, posed for photos with fans, offered aspiring pace bowlers his hard-earned tips of the trade, and provided the media with his insights on aspects of the game. And very few athletes have matched his level of commitment to charity work.
‘We don’t ask to be role models, but my approach was just to be myself,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t do any better than that. I refused to go out of my way to be something I wasn’t. I do think athletes need to be given a bit of leeway, because we are still human and we’re going to make mistakes, though most of us don’t go out to cause problems. My only advice to any athlete on the job of being a role model is to be yourself.’
But Jane was often left feeling shattered to think people who’d never met her husband judged his character solely by what was written about him in the paper – or said on the radio or shown on television. Didn’t the world know he was her knight in shining armour? she’d wonder. Didn’t they realise he was the man who didn’t bat an eyelid when she’d offered him an ‘out’ in the early stages of their romance and she was diagnosed with breast cancer?
‘I’ve never had to defend him, as far as I’m concerned,’ she says. ‘And because of the relationship he has with me, most people think he’s Saint Glenn, anyway. They know what we have been through is bigger than cricket. It was frustrating to hear things over the years, but I love him more than anything else in the world ... he is a great and loving husband and father and man. He has an incredible strength and a great capacity for compassion; it’s a shame if there are people who didn’t – or don’t – see that.’
However, in this age of celebrity where athletes have profiles that rival those of movie stars, McGrath has long appreciated that the public’s perception of many high-profile sportspeople is based on how they’re portrayed by the media, even if the reports are based on nothing more than unproven rumour and innuendo. And he is adamant the media must accept responsibility for the way athletes and other people in the spotlight are viewed by the public.
‘The one thing that has worried me about the media is that some of the people in that industry comment on things they know very little about,’ he says. ‘However, many members of the general public form their opinion from what is in their articles. In many ways, I’m as qualified to write an in-depth article on what it’s like to walk on the moon as some blokes are to write on cricket – and their word is taken by a lot of the public as gospel. I didn’t have any trouble with journalists, and I never minded criticism, but the critics or journalists lost me when the facts they used to support an argument were wrong.
‘I found that when you’d ask one or two of them why their story went to print the way it did, they’d blame the editor or someone else back at the office. Rather than do what a few other blokes did and “wipe” certain reporters, I kept an open line of communication because I thought that was one way to help enlighten them. I do think credit must be given to the cricketing public who really know the game and see through the poor stories. It annoyed me when people who had no idea about cricket would say a certain player was a disgrace and deserved to be sacked, yet they had never watched a ball get bowled in their life.’
Sports psychologist Gavin Freeman, who worked with Australia’s 2006 Winter Olympics team, says many members of the public live their lives by taking ‘ownership’ of those athletes they cheer – and loathe.
‘Look at the reaction when Ian Thorpe retired – it was almost a case of, “How dare he?” ’ says Freeman. ‘People are basically selfish. Some live their lives through their favourite athletes and others define all that is wrong in the world by another athlete’s actions. If a fast bowler puts his hands on his hips and is perceived to be mouthing abuse at a batsman, they mightn’t like it and a negative reaction forms when they watch or talk about that cricketer. The cricketer in question might be the nicest man in the world in his everyday life, but those people I’m referring to fixate on what they perceive to be an aggressive, negative image. And when an athlete does something they don’t agree with, they really turn.’
While Mark Taylor identifies McGrath’s tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve as a reason he may have upset people over the years, he says it wouldn’t be fair for him to be remembered as anything but a champion.
‘You just knew when he wasn’t bowling well,’ says Taylor. ‘You knew when he was getting frustrated. Through his career, he was one of those players who walked the fine line between disappointment and dissent. And that is exactly what you want from your fast bowler – you want him to walk that line but not to cross it. You want them on the edge. You want them to give their all, all the time, but when something goes against them you don’t want them to lose the plot. It’s not easy, but I think Glenn handled it well. Occasionally he jumped that line, but as captain I could understand. I think people should know Glenn McGrath is a lovely bloke. It’s a tough line to walk as a fast bowler: to get yourself fired up and to do what your country wants you to do in terms of your cricket. It must be so hard to be smashed by a bloke you thought you had just got out, but the umpire says no. I think most people understand that.’
Geoff Lawson knows firsthand what Taylor means. He also laments the fact an individual’s entire sporting career can be defined by what people see on a television screen. Fast bowling, he explains, is as much about spunk as it is about speed. However, Lawson says it’d be impossible for anyone outside the fast bowlers’ union to understand the reasons for the aggression, the surly expressions and the body language.
‘Bill Lawry [Channel Nine commentator and former Test captain] used to say I looked as if I hated being out in the middle, but I loved every second,’ Lawson says. ‘I loved the game. I was intense; I had a job to do. I was a fast bowler, so I hated the batsmen – I had to get them out. People who view any sport through their TV set get a narrow view of what goes on in a game. If a player takes 5 for 40, they’ll think he shouldn’t be shaking his head and slapping his cap back on his head when he gets it back off the umpire. But that was just Glenn. On the field he might have appeared a bit snarly, but you need to be that. I think 99 per cent of people play sport like that.’
If McGrath loathed bad calls by the umpire or the batsman enjoying some good luck, the spectators who tried to give him grief when he fielded on the boundary discovered he would not tolerate fools. During the 1997 Ashes tour of England, he gave a group of English spectators ‘the bird’ when they offered mock compliments about his bowling after he’d taken some punishment from a local batsman.
‘Most of the time I would have a bit of fun with the people in the outer,’ he says. ‘Even the Barmy Army in my last summer was great – we swapped banter and it was all light and breezy. But those blokes in 1997 were absolute pains in the backside. I didn’t appreciate their sarcasm and I let them know it. There were also a few families sitting around them and they were using terrible language – it wasn’t right.
‘England would get to me because while most of what they sang and chanted was quite witty, they would also go a step too far and sing things like you were a paedophile. It was sick, absolutely sick, and that would annoy the crap out of me. It was pathetic, and I’d look at those people chanting that and wonder how they could say that. There were also some people who thought that because they’d paid their price of admission, it was their right to abuse you.
‘You change as you get older, and probably towards the second half of my career I realised that if the crowd wasn’t giving a player a hard time, it meant they didn’t respect him; they thought he had nothing, you weren’t worth worrying about. The English were generally good-humoured, but no matter what they said in their songs, Australia normally had the last laugh on them because we were so successful. Any of the boys could pretty much ask them for the series scoreline–“Australia is winning 3–0, right?” – and it’d really hurt them. However, I am certain it would’ve been so much tougher to cop a lot of what they sang if we were losing.’
While the Australians had long agreed to adopt a turn-the-other-cheek approach to the abuse from the crowds and not to retaliate to any fans in search of trouble, McGrath found it impossible to follow that edict during a one-dayer at Wellington in 2005.
‘I had trouble with a security guard,’ he says. ‘Balloons kept coming onto the field and because they had the Silver Fern on them – the Kiwis’ national sports emblem – I thought it would create diplomatic dramas if I jumped on them to burst them; it could’ve been considered an insult. So I gathered them up and handed them to the security guard nearest to me – he wasn’t a New Zealander but he was a smart-arse, because he threw them back on the field when I turned my back so I’d have to pick them up. He called me a wanker when I told him off and I saw red. That was it.
‘It was a very close game. Binga was bowling and I had a choice to make. I could either ignore the bloke or I could give it back; I chose to give it back. I hopped over and asked the other security blokes to get rid of him – that the bloke was a jerk. I turned and ran back to my fielding position and as my foot landed on the field, the ball was hit my way. I was travelling at pace and as I charged in, the ball went over my head for four. It wasn’t good. Punter called me straight over because he wanted to know what the hell was going on down there. He thought it was someone else’s fault that I was caught out, but I took full responsibility. Adding to the problem in that game was that Simon Katich had also copped it – but from the crowd – and he gave it back to them.’
The Australians ended up winning the one-dayer by 10 runs and McGrath was named Man of the Match. After the game, the media wanted to know what had happened. McGrath regrets that in their subsequent reports the press misrepresented the incident, this time in his favour: ‘Unfortunately, the way it was written up in the papers made it sound as if the crowd had given me grief. But that wasn’t the case at all and it’s a point I stressed to the reporters. I had no problem with the Wellington crowd – they were great. The problem stemmed back to a security guard who wanted to be a comedian.’
Ricky Ponting refuses to accept the edict of media managers and spin doctors that says ‘to hell with what the mob thinks’ when a high-profile person’s character is attacked. Ponting is clear in his belief that natural justice says a person should be acknowledged for who they are – and not judged by the image of them manufactured in the often ill-informed public arena.
‘Glenn will be remembered as one of the all-time greats of cricket,’ says Ponting. ‘But he will also be remembered by some people as a player who was pretty feisty, sledged a lot out on the field, and in general seemed a pretty angry person. But that’s not the bloke I know; it’s not him at all. I think it will be disappointing if a lot of players are remembered in a way that is not necessarily true. Glenn has his charity, the McGrath Foundation, and through his and Jane’s efforts it is doing a great job of helping to fight breast cancer. He puts a lot of time into that. Most of the guys in the Australian team consider themselves to be in a position to try to help however we can, and it might be going to schools, interacting with younger people or doing our bit for charity.’
Ponting thinks McGrath’s retirement will bring a fuller picture of him to the public domain. ‘People will start to learn a lot more about him and some will be surprised, because it’ll go against the grain of some opinions.’