Glenn McGrath Line and Strength Page 2
And yet there were times when he was out in the paddock that the boy wished that Kevin would offer some fatherly advice. McGrath was not to know that out on the road, as the kilometres rolled by, Kevin’s thoughts were always with his boys and how they were going.
‘I knew they’d do a good job,’ Kevin says. ‘I knew they’d work well together.’ Although the boys planned their time so that one worked for an hour while the other took off on the motorbike, somehow they got the work done. ‘Glenn handled the job very well, though Dale was more farm-minded – even as a little kid he would run into the sheep yard, get knocked over, and get straight back on his feet. Glenn was more into playing his sport.’
Against the setting sun McGrath prepared to push himself one last time before calling it a day. The dirt from the back paddock was still on his hands and in his boots. This last job of the day wasn’t a chore like feeding the chickens or tending the lambs – and it was as much a passion as an escape. He picked up the scuffed, red leather cricket ball from the ground and prepared to bowl at the 44-gallon drum that bore, like belly wounds, the numerous dings and dents from deliveries that had found their mark over the years. When Glenn’s mother, Beverley – better known as Bev – heard the regular bang of leather ball thumping into steel drum, she knew exactly where he was – behind the shed that housed her husband’s machinery. She accepted as a healthy obsession her son’s afternoon ritual of perfecting what the respected television commentator Richie Benaud would one day call a ‘nagging line and length’. ‘He’s not hurting anyone or himself,’ she’d say.
McGrath was a child of Australian cricket’s last great depression. In the summer of 1986/87, the Australian Test team was still recovering from the void left by the retirements of Greg Chappell, Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee two years earlier. In the absence of these great players, the Australians were bullied, particularly by the West Indies, whose fearsome four-pronged pace attack was cricket’s answer to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. They’d starve the Aussie batsmen of runs before leaving them battered and bloodied, humbled and humiliated. So desperate was their plight that after Test player David Hookes had captained Joel ‘Big Bird’ Garner for South Australia (when Garner played there in 1982/83), Hookes urged the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) to consider tempting young West Indian pace aces to pledge their allegiance to the baggy green cap, the most sought-after prize for an Aussie cricketer. But as it turned out, the ACB didn’t need to look that far, because the answer to Australian cricket’s numerous prayers was in the wheat belt of western New South Wales, bowling his heart out at an old fuel drum.
McGrath remembers the ascendancy of the West Indies during the 1980s, but it was the grit of the opposing Australian captain that inspired him. ‘The Windies was an awesome team, and while I remember the ’80s as a tough time for Australian cricket, I also remember listening to the radio as we’d drive along and Allan Border was batting,’ says McGrath. ‘He was brave. Border stood up to numerous challenges and my dream was to play alongside him. So I trained and I dreamed.’
Bev was her son’s greatest supporter, but there were others who believed he should concentrate on basketball. He was certainly built for it – skinny as a garden rake, he already stood well over six feet. Very few people in Narromine thought the lad had much ability, if any, as a bowler. Indeed, his summer Saturdays playing cricket were whiled away deep in the outfield, well away from the action. Shane Horsburgh, McGrath’s first captain at the Backwater Cricket Club under-16s, joked that a broomstick had more talent than Glenn. McGrath had a strong throwing arm and an ability to slog the ball, but the boy’s main role in the side seemed to be simply to make up the numbers. Almost 21 years later, Mark Munro, the star bowler from that under-16s team, reminisced over a cold drink about the nature of those long-gone games and McGrath’s wayward bowling. ‘Glenn was just too erratic,’ he says.
Glenn McGrath, the boy who couldn’t bowl. But the boy learned to bowl, improving his accuracy during his lonely training sessions, never bothering to tell anyone – Bev included – that the reason he spent those hours finetuning his style was that he knew one day he’d play for Australia. It was as certain for him as the fact that the sunrise would bring the promise of even more back-breaking labour. His long hours were inspired by some words of wisdom the South African golfer Gary Player once offered a supporter who wished he could hit the ball like Player. ‘Go hit a thousand balls a day and you will,’ was the champion’s reply.
‘It’s about dedication,’ McGrath says. ‘When you know what you want to do, where you want to go, it’s up to you to put it all in place.’
On that distant evening, the 16-year-old McGrath limbered up in the near-darkness. While his every muscle screeched in agony at the prospect of more physical activity, the boy walked towards the mark from where he’d start his long run-up. Many thoughts swirled through his head, including the jobs that were still ahead of him and his brother, and, more despairingly, the ever-widening cracks in his parents’ marriage. There was little he could do to change the course in which his mother and father were headed. Donna, McGrath’s younger sister, says their parents’ eventual divorce made the three children stronger. ‘And it makes you stronger in many ways because you have to live with it.’
When McGrath finally turned to face the 44-gallon drum, he entered a world in which he was dressed in pristine cricket whites and standing on the hallowed Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) with the likes of his hero, Dennis Lillee, and champion wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh. He had only ever seen the SCG on television, but it was there before him in the Narromine paddock; his mind’s eye marvelled at the large, Aussie-flag-waving crowd in the stands. McGrath imagined that he gripped not a war-weary ball but a shiny red Kookaburra six-stitcher. The order from Allan Border to get an early breakthrough against the West Indies rang in his ears. As he commenced his run from the Bradman Stand end, his head buzzed with commentary by Richie Benaud.
‘The debutant prepares for his first delivery in Test cricket. Desmond Haynes on strike; the rookie from the Australian outback versus the West Indian master. I must say, the newcomer looks confident. He was known as ‘the boy who couldn’t bowl’ when he lived in outback Narromine ... Let’s see what he’s got...’
McGrath was oblivious to the dust blasts his feet kicked up with each strong and measured step that carried him towards the popping crease. He didn’t see the remnants of the wheat crop bow in the breeze or the kangaroos in the top paddock. He didn’t even hear the screeches of the cockatoos as they scrambled back to their trees, the cicadas’ chant or the bull belching and bellowing. His focus was fixed firmly on the target 22 yards away. But as was always the case, the boy didn’t see a simple drum: instead Haynes stood before him, sleek and elegant as he tapped his bat on the pitch in anticipation of that first delivery. Soon it would be the great Viv Richards on strike, and then the frightening fast bowler Michael Holding would be trying to keep the Windies’ tail alive in the face of the boy’s one-man assault on the ‘Calypso Kings’.
Benaud’s commentary continued. ‘He bowls a beautifully pitched delivery. It’s bang on target ... BOWLED HIM! My goodness, the middle stump is cartwheeling back towards the wicketkeeper. I haven’t seen that since the days of the great Wes Hall. A wicket with his first delivery – welcome to Test cricket, Glenn McGrath!’
Destiny dictated that, in time, Glenn McGrath would single-handedly take the fight to the great West Indians; he would become the game’s most successful fast bowler; his name would be revered in Australian sport and at cricket grounds around the globe; and he would one day destroy England at Lord’s, the home of the noble game. But in the meantime, he continued to dream and prepare himself for the day opportunity knocked.
And on this particular evening, Australia’s latest backyard cricketing hero was snapped back to reality by the sound of his mother calling out for the umpteenth time that dinner was
on the table. It was dark but he picked up the ball for one last delivery. ‘The Master Blaster’ Viv Richards was on strike. It was up to him – the boy who couldn’t bowl – to tame him before tea.
2
A Skinned Rabbit
My, he looks like a skinned rabbit!
Poppy Don Watts on first seeing his
grandson, Glenn, in 1970
On Monday 9 February 1970, Glenn Donald McGrath, destined to be cricket’s most successful fast bowler, arrived in the world. It was a time of insufferable heat in the New South Wales outback, and a time of darkness for Bill Lawry’s Australian team, which was touring South Africa. The future pace bowler should probably have been kicking and wailing. Instead Bev noted her son – born with his head resting upon his arm – appeared to be at peace with the world. In later years McGrath would joke that his arm being positioned behind his head at birth was a sign he was born ready to bowl.
‘He was a good baby, all my three children were, so I was pretty lucky in that respect,’ Bev says. ‘I was only 20-and-a-half when I had Glenn and while I was fairly young, I never regretted it because Glenn was the only one of my three kids my father, Don, saw before he died, so that was special. He was a proud grandfather, too. My dad loved cricket and while he didn’t see what Glenn grew up to become because he died before Glenn turned two, it was really good he got to spend that time with him.’
Kevin McGrath, a hard-working 24-year-old share farmer, was sweating as he paced up and down the waiting room at the Dubbo Base Hospital. He wasn’t perspiring from nerves at the prospect of the new responsibilities that awaited him. He was excited about becoming a father. Instead he was sweating buckets because the state’s far west was gripped by a fierce heatwave, and even though the hospital’s ceiling fans were at full bore, they couldn’t shift the heat that hung over the room like a thermal blanket. The unrelenting nature of the heat forced many in Dubbo to desert their homes at night to try to find some relief – and sleep – on their front lawns.
But Bev defied the heat to remain relaxed through the final stages of her pregnancy. Indeed, before going to the hospital at midnight for the birth, she’d whiled away the hours by playing a game of quoits against Don in the back yard of his house in town.
Kevin and Don were filled with anticipation when they laid their eyes on the baby boy for the very first time.
‘It wasn’t like it is today because fathers weren’t allowed in the delivery room,’ says Kevin. ‘So I waited outside with Bev’s father and I remember feeling very excited about what was happening. We saw all the babies lined up in the nursery and Don and I looked at them lying in their cribs and not knowing which one was Glenn. We were saying, “Oh that’s a nice baby. There’s a nice baby.” We knew the nurse in there and she waved to us and showed us where Glenn was. He was on his own away from the rest. Who knows, he must’ve been annoying the other babies just like he used to do the other cricketers!
‘The nurse wheeled him over to the window, Bev’s father and I looked at the little fella, then we looked at each other, then we looked back at the little baby, and I can still remember Don saying, “My, he looks like a skinned rabbit!” His legs and arms were that skinny! As it turned out he grew into “Pigeon” as a cricketer because of those skinny legs.’
While their son’s arrival was the most significant event to have occurred in the couple’s young lives, the world didn’t stop that day, as the local paper – The Daily Liberal – duly noted. McGrath was born as a total fire ban was enforced throughout the region. As if to emphasise the stupidity of ignoring the warning, the paper ran on its front page a photograph of a Jubilee Street housing commission house that was razed in the early hours of the previous Saturday morning. Family loses possessions in house – two hurt, screamed the headline.
The Liberal also reported that a major retail company planned to open a store in Tralbagar Street, and the editorial welcomed the promise of more jobs and added prosperity in the area. A local grazier was bound for India as a member of a three-man team to develop a sheep-breeding program there. Two 18-yearolds hooked a 45-pound cod while drifting down the Macquarie River in their small boat. The battle that was described could have been lifted from the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. A local identity declared the whopper to be the biggest he’d seen in his 40-odd years of fishing the local rivers and estuaries.
There was plenty for The Daily Liberal to say about the Far West Cricket Council’s competition: Dubbo pace bowler Bruce Warwick had been selected to play for Country Firsts against City at the SCG; minor premiers Nyngan had been bundled out of the finals series by Gilgandra; and the Rugby Union XI had been hammered by Paramount. Kevin McGrath’s cousins Graham and Eric Shanks were mentioned after Graham belted 81 for South Dubbo against Coalbaggie and Eric scored 60 before being run out.
While Bev lovingly nursed her newborn child, Bill Lawry’s Australians were reeling after the third day of the Second Test against the Springboks in South Africa. The AAP-Reuters cable, published in The Daily Liberal, pulled no punches:
‘Humiliated and humbled, Australia can only look to Durban’s cloudy skies to save them from an innings defeat at the hands of the Springboks today. The Australians lost their last six wickets for the addition of only 109 and were all out for 157. It was the fifth successive time that they had failed to top 200 in the first innings of a Test against South Africa.’
The Australians, ordered to follow on, languished 365 runs behind the home team’s massive total of 9 (declared) for 622, thanks to local heroes Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards, who belted 274 and 140 respectively. All hope of restoring pride in Australia’s baggy green cap rested upon the shoulders – and nerve – of Keith Stackpole (who’d compiled 55 runs) and Doug Walters (8) before rain stopped play. A chance meeting with Walters 18 years later would be life-changing for McGrath, but meanwhile The Daily Liberal’s correspondent wasn’t at all confident of a rousing, backs-to-the-wall victory. He finished his report on an ominous note: ‘Unless the rain gods answer the Australian prayers it may well be over before tea.’
Glenn McGrath, the skinned rabbit, was the latest of a proud line of Australian pioneers, soldiers, farmers and athletes. The McGrath roots stretched back to Francis McGrath, who farewelled his native Ireland 118 years before Glenn’s birth to migrate to the new world – New South Wales – aboard the ship Irene. A free settler, Francis paid £3 10s for his family to make the long journey. On his disembarkment at Port Jackson on 16 October 1852, a customs officer noted that Francis was 38, a Catholic, literate and had worked previously as a butler.
Rather than remain in Sydney, Francis and his family headed west, travelling across the Blue Mountains in search of opportunity. In 1864 he was made postmaster of Merendee, a flyspeck on the map between the bigger settlements of Mudgee and Wellington. Francis held that respected position until his retirement in 1882, when he endorsed his granddaughter to look after the Royal Mail. The founding father of the McGrath clan in the New South Wales outback died a year later after ‘falling over a precipice’.
One of Francis’ grandsons, known as Jim, married Rose McLauchlan and bought a property named Stanhope near Cooyal, a bumpy 22-kilometre horse-and-buggy ride from Mudgee. While isolated, Cooyal had a grocery store, a hotel, a post office, two churches, a dance hall, a cheese factory and a butcher’s shop. Here Jim and Rose raised crops and three children, including Glenn’s grandfather, Carlyle, born in 1915 and known as Lyle. The family grew fruit and Jim built himself a blacksmith’s shed at the back of the house. (Jim’s niece Muriel M. Marks recalls his forge and bellows in her 1987 book Cooyal Stories.)
The family was devastated in 1921 when Jim died of Spanish Flu during a trip to Sydney aged only 37. He was one of millions of people worldwide to die from the strain of influenza which had been brought to Australia by soldiers returning from the battlefields of World War One.
Jim McGrath was buried in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, the world’s larges
t cemetery in the nineteenth century. The final resting place for over 600,000 souls, it covers 300 hectares, the size of modern Sydney’s central business district. Not long after his retirement from Test cricket in 2007, McGrath made a pilgrimage to Rookwood to search for his great-grandfather Jim’s burial site. While he found the area, it was overgrown with thick weeds and ancient shrubs. There were no headstones, making it impossible to identify his ancestor’s final resting place.
For McGrath, finding the exact position of his great-grandfather’s burial is important. ‘I want to find the plot,’ he says. ‘It’s important because it’s to do with my roots, my sense of belonging and my heritage. That is becoming even more important to me as I get older.’
With the help of relatives, Rose McGrath continued to run the property. But the pile of rocks Jim had intended to use for the foundations of a new home on the sunny side of their property became her stones of sadness. The widow eventually found it too difficult to live alone and, after selling Stanhope to a relative, she relocated to Dubbo to be closer to her sister and to provide her three children with a high-school education. In 1943, Rose’s son Lyle joined the Australian army as part of the 209 Light Aid detachment. Lance Corporal McGrath saw action against the Japanese in the south-west Pacific theatre of war. The only Anzac Day story Glenn ever heard his quietly spoken grandfather recall was of the time he was at sea and the ship he was on took a direct hit from a torpedo. Lyle married Vera Griffiths in 1944 and they had two sons, Kevin and Malcolm (known as Malc).
Glenn always remembers ‘Grandad McGrath’ out on the farm. ‘He was a kindly man who liked to smoke his pipe. When I was little I tried to help him do things,’ he says. ‘There’s a photo of me as a toddler trying to change a tyre. He died in 2000 when I was playing English county cricket for Worcester.’
Lyle’s wife, Vera, was the boss of the family – ‘a real matriarch’, as her eldest grandson recalls. Now aged 93, she unfortunately suffers from Alzheimer’s.