by Brad Haddin
At the time, beyond those occasional conversations with Dad, I didn’t think too much about this aspect of my game. But even though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it, I recognised that only a handful of the many other players I saw in action in schoolboy and state rep teams had a similar sense of inner focus. For instance, Brett Lee, even at 16 or 17, stood out from everyone around him, even though some of the other kids were very skilled. Phil Jaques did too. Drive was a big part of it, but it was more than that. The way they looked at the game and handled pressure was different from other people. From a young age they had the mental capacity to stay focused, no matter what. Physical ability is the base-level requirement for achievement in sports but it’s nowhere near enough. If you don’t also have exceptionally strong mental control you won’t get much past ‘promising’.
In December it was time for the 1993 Under-17s national championships. Having only turned 16 two months previously, I still qualified for that age group. Not only was I once again chosen as part of the ACT squad, I was named captain. I headed down to the carnival, held this time in Adelaide, with two things at the forefront of my mind: leading the team in a way that would do ACT proud and performing well enough to win a place in the Australian Under-17s development squad.
As a keeper, getting into this ‘merit team’ posed the usual problem: numerous contenders for just a couple of spots. Once again it was a matter of being strategic to ensure I made an impression. I took decisions during games based on what would produce the best results for the team I was captaining. But I also made sure I knew who all the selectors were, and if one came near when we were fielding, whenever possible I brought on my medium-pace bowlers and told them to send balls down the leg-side — giving me the best shot of making a stumping or two when it mattered.
It all worked brilliantly. The previous year the ACT had come seventh out of seven teams, just as expected. This year we made it to the semi-finals, coming fourth. As well as that, I got offered one of the coveted merit team spots and so did two other players from the team, batsman Paul Gambale and bowler Jesse Edwards. It was the first time the ACT had ever managed to have so many players selected. Everyone involved was over the moon.
Being chosen not only put the three of us on the national cricket talent radar, it also offered us the invaluable experience of a week at the Australian Cricket Academy when the season was over. There we would get to meet and be coached by some of the biggest names in the history of cricket in this country, including Rod Marsh, who was chair of the selection panel for the development squad in addition to running the Academy. I couldn’t wait to get back down to Adelaide and pit my skills against the very best of my peers.
When the time came it was just as much fun as I’d hoped it would be. They worked us quite hard, which I loved. Much of the week was devoted to the specific skills that had earned us our place, with a ‘camp’ for each speciality. I was keen to test myself against the most talented keepers from around the country and when I did I thought, Hang on a minute, I’m not out of place. Objectively I saw that I was as good as, if not better than, anyone there. It was a significant step in making the mental shift from being one of those thousands upon thousands of kids daydreaming about wearing the Baggy Green cap to realising that, although there was a hell of a long way to go, it was a realistic goal.
Apparently other people also saw my potential — well, that was the point of the camp, after all. Many years later I was talking to Paul Ryan, who played in the NSW Second XI and in first grade for Sydney club St George. It turned out he had been in Adelaide for the wicketkeepers’ camp too, although I didn’t know him at the time. He asked me if I remembered the experience. When I said yes, he said, ‘You made quite an impression. I went back to the NSW team and said, “I’ve just seen the next NSW keeper. He’s a young kid from Canberra.”’
Back home I continued to go from strength to strength with the ANU first-grade team. I learned so much during my time there, including how important senior players are in setting the tone for any team, knowledge that would turn out to be crucial for me years later with both the NSW and Australian sides. I honed my skills with every game and learned about the unmatched satisfaction of delivering solid performances and earning the respect that comes with that. Both Greg Irvine and Peter Solway had told me not to worry too much about the lack of power in my batting. They knew that would come as I developed physically. In the meantime, they said, I should just focus on technique. It was great advice. Over the course of that first season I moved from bottom of the batting order up to number eight, having only got out something like three times. The following season started strongly, and I was keen to push things and see what I could really do. But my summer was not the one I’d planned.
As Year 11 came to an end in 1994, I was one of two Queanbeyan schoolboy players who had done well enough in the South Coast Combined High Schools (CHS) competition to be chosen to play for the state CHS team. The other, Nathan Reid, borrowed a car and we went to Sydney together for the competition, splitting the driving. All the players were billeted out in accommodation that had been provided not too far from Penrith, where the games were being played. The two of us and a few others were being put up above a pub. The evening before the first game some of the guys wanted to go downstairs and have a beer. I knew that a couple of them had already turned 18 but I didn’t know about the others. I’d only just turned 17 and I felt really uncomfortable about the whole thing. I didn’t want to be a wowser, but I didn’t want be down there illegally drinking, either. In the end, two of the guys decided to go to Kings Cross, getting the okay from Nathan to borrow the car we’d driven up in. That gave me my out: I’d recently got my P-plates so I volunteered to be the designated driver (I had no idea it was 74 long kilometres from Penrith to the Cross).
My plan worked just fine for the first half of the night. The two of them had beers at a few different places but didn’t pressure me to drink. Finally, around 3 a.m. they were ready to head back. Forty-five minutes later we were still driving, but I was feeling fine, thinking to myself, Nearly there now. How good’s this? I’ve dodged a bullet tonight. At this point the windows started to fog. Even though I wasn’t totally familiar with the car, the central window controls were in the usual place. I pressed what I thought was the button for my window but one of the ones in the back went down instead. I looked down at the buttons, trying to get my finger on the right one. It was only for a few seconds, but it was just enough of a lapse of attention to send us off the road and down into a gully. The car smacked into a tree and the front end concertinaed in on me, snapping my brake foot back. Still careening forward, we skidded between two huge boulders. I have no idea how we didn’t smash into them.
Finally, we stopped. The entire crash had probably only taken a matter of seconds, but it seemed to go on forever. Incredibly, my two passengers weren’t hurt, but they were in shock and yelled, ‘Get out, get out, the car’s going to blow!’ They both jumped out and started running. I got my door open and stepped out to follow them, but as soon as I put my foot down I knew I’d done some damage. Still thinking the petrol tank might go up, I tried to take another step and felt the bones move inside my ankle in a way that was badly wrong. I sank to the ground. The other guys came back to help me and the next thing I knew everything was being lit up by flashing police and ambulance lights.
I was taken by ambulance to Nepean Hospital. I phoned Dad and didn’t get much more out than, ‘I’ve been in a car accident’ before he said, ‘Where are you? I’m coming now.’ The emergency doctor looked at my foot and confirmed it was a bad break. It was still pre-dawn so nothing could happen for a few hours, but they gave me more pain relief and scheduled me for orthopaedic surgery that afternoon, when two metal pins would be inserted to hold everything together. I must have slept for a couple of hours, then the nurses came in and started going through the pre-surgery procedures. That was, until Dad arrived.
Dad had already got onto our family GP
, an ex-sportsman himself. They talked about what was likely to happen in the hospital and came up with a plan to bring me home and have me treated by a specialist in Canberra. When Dad arrived at the hospital, the staff discussed what they were planning to do, but Dad said, ‘No, he’s not going to have that procedure. Could you please just immobilise the ankle; I’m going to take him back to Canberra for treatment.’ The doctor in charge wasn’t at all happy, but Dad was quietly insistent and eventually they did as he asked. He got me out to the car, not saying much. I really was not looking forward to the conversation that I knew was coming, so we were barely out of the car park before I pretended to fall asleep. I kept up the act for the whole three-hour trip home.
When we did finally talk, Dad certainly wasn’t pleased about what had happened, but he and Mum were mostly relieved the outcome hadn’t been much, much worse. They knew it was a genuine accident, with my inexperience behind the wheel mostly to blame. They never held the thousands of dollars they paid out for my share of costs from the accident against me.
After a couple of days, when the swelling had gone down, Dad took me to the ankle specialist the GP had recommended and explained that I was a wicketkeeper showing enough talent to get me noticed at the national level. We talked about the specifics of how I needed to be able to crouch and move and the surgeon came up with an approach that still used two pins but placed them in such a way that, if I did the post-surgery physical rehab as prescribed, I would have no problem continuing as a keeper.
I took what he said very seriously. The surgery went well and then I threw myself into rehab. It was the school holidays but I really didn’t have time for my mates or the girl I’d started seeing, I was too focused on getting my ankle right. I needed to build up strength and flexibility without too much weight-bearing. Hydrotherapy was the answer and I had a bright idea about how to make it happen. Friendly neighbours across the street had an above-ground backyard pool which they agreed to let me use. I woke at 6 a.m., got myself across there on my crutches and walked around that pool for hours. I’d come home to get something to eat and do different physio exercises, then I’d head out again for yet more pool walking.
This went on for the entire six-week summer break. I didn’t have to be talked into doing it and I didn’t complain. It was me pushing myself, driven by my need to get back to cricket at the level I’d been playing at. Looking back, Mum and Dad said something changed in me after that accident. I became not ruthless exactly, but laser-focused about what I wanted to achieve and what I was willing to do to get there. The fear that I might never get full movement back in my ankle drove me to push myself as hard as I could to make sure that didn’t happen.
The accident ruled me out of the annual national youth teams’ competition, which felt like a terrible blow at the time but turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Because I’d been doing so well, the ACT selectors had been keen for me to go up to the next age division, the Under-19s, even though I was eligible for one more year in the Under-17s. Going to the higher age group would have given me three years in the Under-19s, which seemed like a wonderful opportunity to advance. But, as it happened, the players in that age group at that particular time tended to be more interested in partying than playing, or at least playing at the level I wanted to. And when it comes to team sports you can only achieve your individual best when you’re part of a team that shows hunger and commitment. Missing out on becoming a part of that peer group turned out to be a good thing for me.
Eight or nine weeks after the crash, the surgeon checked the ankle and pronounced it healed and indeed it felt pretty good again. ANU had suggested I return in second grade to give me time to get back up to speed. I said no, I would rather take a bit more time, tell them when I was completely ready and then go straight back into first grade, and that’s what happened. I found form very quickly on my return. Having started that season as eight on the batting order, the combination of the match experience I’d accumulated, the extra power delivered by an adolescent growth spurt and my intense post-crash single-mindedness saw me rise to become one of the side’s best batsmen, playing at number four. The whole team lifted that season and we ended 1994–95 as winners of both the twilight and one-day competitions as well as minor premiers and overall premiership winners — the first time ANU had held the trophy since 1986.
By the start of my third season with the club I felt like I was firing on all cylinders, and I found I’d developed the ability to change the rhythm of a game. In the process of coming into my own with the bat and finding how far I could push things, I definitely made mistakes, taking chances that wiser heads might have resisted. But I also scored at a rate that got people talking, and my teammates were happy to let me go for it. We would go up against teams with players who had given me a hard time a year or two earlier and they literally didn’t recognise me now when I came out to bat. One of them was a bowler who looked at me in surprise when I whacked one of his first balls for four and said to him, ‘Payback time. I’m not that kid anymore.’ He had no idea what I meant. He turned to his keeper and asked, ‘What’s this guy on about?’ The keeper just shook his head, so I answered instead, ‘Today we’re going to play,’ and proceeded to hit him all over the ground. It was a powerful feeling and I wanted more of it.
CHAPTER 5
BACK FROM THE BRINK
DAY 7 IN THE hospital with Mia brought us terrifyingly close to losing her, although we had no idea at the time. All day there had been signs that her condition was deteriorating dangerously. Her stomach, for instance, was huger than ever. In fact it was so big it was becoming hard to get her nappies done up. She didn’t have much interest in anything; she just slept for hours at a time, barely moving. But in the context of how sick she was already, none of these symptoms especially stood out to me. Even Karina didn’t realise just how bad things were.
Mia had gone in for the CT scan at 3.30 p.m. and was out by 4.30 p.m. It was the fourth general anaesthetic she’d had in less than a week but she didn’t recover from this one the way she had done after the previous scan. She was in the Post-Operative Recovery ward for two hours, far longer than expected. When she did finally start to wake up it took ages and apart from opening her eyes she didn’t move. She’d had to fast all day before being put under, but she showed no interest in food. Instead, she fell back into a sleep so deep and motionless she looked like she was still anaesthetised. She also had a rash on her body that the doctors thought might have been a reaction to the ‘packed cell’ blood transfusion she had received earlier in the day.
I’d become aware over the previous 24 hours that I was coming down with something, most likely a bug picked up on one of the legs of my journey home. I knew that Karina would have company and help from her dad, Phil, and sister, Danielle, and my brother Chris and his partner, Jenna, who were coming to visit over the course of the morning, so I’d taken the opportunity to go to our family GP. He confirmed that as well as a head cold I had a throat infection, for which he prescribed me antibiotics. I felt the lurgy really take hold over the course of the day. Even though I’d started wearing a face mask in the hospital, I was still worried about the possibility of passing my germs on to Mia (and maybe even to other vulnerable children in the ward). So Karina and I arranged that I would sit in the car park for the evening and she would keep me updated by phone.
But when Mia didn’t respond the way she should have in Recovery, Dr Luce asked Karina where I was. She told him and he said, ‘Do you want to get him in here?’ She explained that I was unwell and didn’t want to take the chance of making Mia sicker. Dr Luce then said to Karina, ‘How do you think Mia is at the moment?’ Suddenly starting to feel nervous, she replied, ‘She’s not waking up properly, is she?’ ‘No, she’s not,’ he said. He knew what we didn’t — that our daughter was already as sick as she could possibly get. He said kindly, ‘Why don’t you ring Brad and tell him to come in?’ She phoned me and I started to repeat my concerns. Karina said, ‘I know, Brad,
but Dr Luce said just come.’
Even at this point we still didn’t realise how dire Mia’s situation was. The doctors and nurses were so professional and so caring that we felt that whatever was going on they would handle it. We figured they knew what they were doing and anything that could happen would be something they’d seen before. We were worried, but no more than we had been a few hours earlier. We were still in the mindset of assuming there was a way of treating every problem that could arise. When he’d told me and Dad a few hours earlier that hospitals weren’t nice places, Dr Luce had said specifically, ‘Prepare yourself for the idea that things don’t always go to plan.’ I’d listened and nodded and thought I knew what he meant: not every cancer can be cured, not every single child will make it, so despite all the treatments they were going to throw at Mia over the next few months, they couldn’t guarantee the outcome. I was oblivious to the real warning in his words.
While we were still in Recovery, with Mia unable to stay awake, we got a visit from an interventional radiologist called Dr David Lord. Interventional radiologists do complicated invasive treatments within the body without the need to open up the patient as in traditional surgery. They inject a special dye to ‘light up’ the blood vessels and then, using scans and x-rays to guide them, insert a needle into an artery and push tiny tubes through the blood vessels until they get to the part they’re going to treat.
It’s an amazing process, but Dr Lord was very matter of fact about it all. In strict technical terms, people in his job aren’t classified as surgeons but he had the same off-hand manner surgeons often have. He said, ‘Mia is bleeding internally. Her abdomen is filling up with blood. I’m going to try to stop that by doing a procedure called an embolisation.’ Karina was familiar with the process but for my benefit Dr Lord explained that it involved trying to find the origin of the bleed in order to block up the leaking blood vessel or vessels. This is sometimes done with a special kind of glue or putty or even miniature metal coils, but in Mia’s case he was planning to use tiny plastic beads. He drew a sketch to demonstrate how the beads would be placed in every affected vessel.