5
For all his gun-slinging boldness at Lagoona, when it came to school Glenn McGrath was crippled with shyness. Bev was happy to hear her elder son’s Year Five teacher comment at the annual parent–teacher night on his good manners, quiet nature and the steady progress he was making in class. However, in the same breath he mentioned an action he had taken to help Glenn overcome his acute shyness, which disturbed her. As was the way of the era, Bev kept her thoughts to herself for fear of offending the teacher.
The teacher told Bev that Glenn didn’t mix well with the girls in his class, so he sat Glenn next to a girl. But Bev didn’t agree with this approach.
‘I didn’t think it was the teacher’s place to do that because Glenn was just a normal boy, shy, but he was like most of the other boys who hung around with each other, just like the girls would stick together.’
The experience didn’t scar McGrath, but his acute shyness made school a challenge. ‘I was an A-student, but I was painfully shy and I allowed it to build into something it should never have been,’ he says. ‘I struggled to speak in front of people; I would have done just about anything to get out of it. Even when I knew the answer or might have had something worthwhile to add to the class, I couldn’t express what was on my mind. It was awful, but I was like a lot of teenagers and conscious of what the others thought of me. Stupid really.’
Narromine High School’s Year Ten English teacher couldn’t possibly have realised the torment she put McGrath through whenever she’d ask him to read a passage from a novel or answer a question about a sonnet by Shakespeare – or she’d have left him in peace. While McGrath was both a clever and good student, he would be overwhelmed by what he described as a ‘dread’ whenever he was forced to participate in the lesson. McGrath would hope against all hope not to be called upon to speak in front of his peers because he’d choke with nervousness at the thought of how his classmates might judge him. As he stammered his way through the latest task, McGrath thought he could read their thoughts: He sounds stupid; What does he know?
The shyness that plagued McGrath in the classroom would remain a problem for years to come. It would even prevent him from making the most of some early opportunities he had to gain a media profile as an aspiring fast bowler at Adelaide’s Australian Cricket Academy, where he’d run and hide from a camera crew or avoid journalists as if they had a contagious disease. When McGrath eventually overcame his shyness, he realised the last thing that would have been on his classmates’ minds as he mumbled his way through John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would have been thoughts of him – let alone judgements about him.
Even so, McGrath’s fear of talking in front of people was so deep-seated it had a bearing on his decision to leave school after Year Ten. He was spooked – not by the increased study and workload required to obtain the Higher School Certificate (HSC), but by the graduation ceremony. The mere thought of having to attend the Year Twelve leaving ceremony terrified him. Year after year McGrath would watch the HSC students stand on the stage in front of an auditorium crammed with other pupils, parents, extended families, local politicians and anyone else who cared to applaud them and wish them well for the future. He’d squirm miserably in his seat at the mere prospect of one day being among them.
‘I couldn’t think of anything worse than having to speak in front of the crowd – put me in front of a firing squad instead,’ McGrath confesses. ‘One very real reason I left school in Year Ten was to avoid all of that.’
However, his school days in Narromine were mostly enjoyable. He made some firm friendships, gained good grades and was in the A class every year of high school, but perhaps the greatest legacy of McGrath’s state-school education was his love of reading.
‘When I was on the farm I’d read a lot because I found it a great escape from reality. I still read quite a lot of fiction.’ McGrath’s favourite authors include Wilbur Smith and Jack Higgins, and Australian authors Matthew Reilly and Tony Park, who has written a number of books set in Africa. ‘On the 1999 tour of the West Indies I ploughed through 12 books because of the amount of free time we had,’ McGrath recalls.
Melinda Gainsford-Taylor, a year behind McGrath at Narromine High, remembers him simply as a ‘quiet boy’. He was a quiet kid, happy to keep his nose clean. While McGrath was popular enough, he didn’t have what he would call a ‘best mate’ in the playground. His cousin Craig had been his best friend, but he was sent to boarding school at Bathurst, which left McGrath feeling a sense of loss.
‘That was tough,’ says Bev of Craig’s departure. ‘They did everything together and then he was gone.’
‘I was one of those guys who moved about groups,’ says McGrath. ‘We had a tremendous bunch of blokes in my year. I could name my entire class.’
McGrath’s physical education teacher Chris Harding (who once played rugby league for the famous English team Featherstone Rovers) remembers his school’s most famous student for being, well, remarkably unremarkable.
‘Glenn was a nice kid,’ Harding recalls. ‘He was well behaved, never in trouble. He came from a good family and was good at all the sports he played. Back then it was golf, volleyball and basketball. However, he was very, very shy. I always thought Glenn would make a better basketballer than cricketer. I think I’m right in saying he was never picked in a schoolboy cricket team, but I remember he was quite a good bowler. He blossomed later and we are proud of what he has achieved.’
Bev was always pleased to read Glenn’s school reports because the teacher’s comments simply reinforced what she knew: her elder son was growing into a mature, well-mannered and rounded young man.
Photographs in McGrath’s old school magazines show he was a gangly, enthusiastic member of the school’s basketball and golf teams. He also ran in Narromine High’s cross-country team. While he had no trouble running kilometre after kilometre around flat-as-a-tack Narromine, McGrath was ‘cooked’ early in the inter-district meet at Oberon, where the hills took a heavy toll on his skinny legs.
The school rarely played his favourite sport, cricket, because there weren’t enough teams in the district to compete against.
McGrath’s height and natural hand–eye coordination allowed him to adapt easily to life on the basketball court, and his talent was recognised early when he was picked to compete in the then-burgeoning State League. One trip that made an impression on him was when the Far West representative team competed in Sydney and was based at Kings Cross, the notorious centre of sleaze and spice.
‘It was a shock for a group of kids from the bush,’ McGrath recalls with a laugh. ‘We’d never seen anything like it. There were plenty of what I guess you’d call “colourful characters” hustling out on the street. There were also, um, working girls, but none of our parents needed to worry about our moral fibre because I think we were all scared of them. I know I was. Anyway, I was safe because my mum drove the team mini-van – there was no way she was going to let me misbehave in any way during our time in Sydney.’
In the summer of 1986, McGrath had to make a decision about his future: he wanted to leave school after his Year Ten exams but he wasn’t sure of his career path. That year was also significant because, after 16 years of his parents’ favourite country and western songs, he heard rock music for the first time on a compilation tape. He was hooked after hearing the first few notes of ‘Manic Monday’ by the Bangles. It was a new world, but he had to make a decision about his future. McGrath realised that despite his great love for the land, his heart wasn’t in farming. Four of his classmates were joining the police force but that didn’t appeal to him either.
‘I toyed with the idea of joining the force, but it was only fleeting,’ he says. ‘What turned me off that as a job was the prospect of having to deal with things like domestic violence and telling a parent their kid had been killed in an accident.’
Instead McGrath enrolled in a carpentry course at the local TAFE. As he threw himself into the theory and practice of the course, he became excited by the prospect of one day becoming a builder. When he couldn’t obtain an apprenticeship, however, he got work as a labourer on a cotton farm. Toiling under the blazing sun was hard yakka. As his hands blistered and his back became sore, opening the bowling for Australia from the Paddington end of the SCG seemed a much better career option.