ABC Grandstand's Unsung Sporting Heroes

by ABC Grandstand

  Of course, traditions always trump fads. Football between Grades Four to Six had lasted since the dawn of time, or at least since we started Prep. Netball had only been going for four weeks, when tragedy struck. Through some freak accident, the netball ended up on the roof.

  Getting balls off the roof wasn’t allowed. Usually the teachers would wait until at least five got stuck up there and then they would get them all down. Sometimes you could be waiting for weeks. Footballs were easy to replace — everyone had one. Netballs, unfortunately for Terry, were not as common.

  Of course, during this waiting period, everyone got bored. Netball had lost its flavour. Everyone went back to footy.

  Soon Terry was back playing four square with the little kids. However, his small success may have awoken something inside him.

  After a careful observation period, Terry noticed us boys were missing something. The next day, he brought in something that changed our world.

  A whistle.

  Terry started umpiring. For a while, his presence was not respected, as he often made the wrong decisions and his theatrical hand gestures confused everyone.

  But Terry persisted, and eventually people did what he said. Terry would blow his whistle and pin the toughest kid in the whole class, and though he would be threatened, he was never hurt. Within a few weeks, Terry was a fully fledged and respected umpire.

  He made my job a lot easier. After each kick he would signal whether he believed it was a goal or behind. Whatever he said went. He even looked at me when he signalled, as he knew I was counting. There was no longer arguing about what had been a goal, or about who deserved a free kick, and there were no mid-game blow-ups due to ‘kicking in danger’ incidents.

  This might seem like a trivial story; Terry might not be in the same league as parents of Olympians or people who have made egg sandwiches for their soccer club for fifty years.

  But what he did was resolve arguments by making key decisions. Despite being low down on the social pecking order, he rose to the challenge and had the last word.

  What I should also mention is that, despite my praise, I spent every afternoon disputing just about every decision with Terry. I remember vividly the time I was pinned for throwing the ball, when I clearly hadn’t. I went blue arguing with him.

  But that’s not the point. Umpires will never get everything right, and their mistakes still make me angry in my lounge room every Friday and Saturday. But what I will always admire is that the men in white front up every week to do a job that no one else wants to do, and they do it well. Just as Terry did.

  A man for all seasons

  by Craig Hamilton

  EVERY SPORTING CLUB needs someone like Bobby Gray. The bloke who hands out the gear, looks after the valuables (wallets, phones, etc), collects the social club money and turns up for training and games every week to help out in any way he can. The guy that runs on with the water bottle and a sponge every time a player goes down with injury (there have been some truly miraculous recoveries made after some of the magic water has been splashed on a sprained ankle or twisted knee over the years). The person who loves being involved and making a difference, who genuinely cares about the people they deal with on a day-to-day basis, and whose contribution is made with little or no fanfare.

  I met Bobby when I was playing cricket with the Belmont club in the Newcastle competition. He would have been in his late seventies. I was in my late twenties. It was during a cricket match played at the Adamstown Rosebud soccer club’s home ground, when I strained a hamstring muscle midway through a bowling stint. I left the ground immediately and went looking for an ice pack. Under the grandstand, in one of the treatment rooms, was a short, stocky massage therapist with an infectious laugh. A bloke named Bobby Gray.

  Bobby was already working on one of the Adamstown Rosebud soccer players, all the while talking about sporting teams, his family, injuries, life and the importance of breathing properly while competing. Apart from being fantastic masseur, Bobby was a great talker. He saw me hobble in, introduced himself, and said that he would have a look at my hamstring when he was finished with the bloke who was already on the table. When it came to my turn, he worked on my leg for about forty minutes. Then he told me to rest it, continue to use ice, and then begin light stretches after forty-eight hours or so.

  As he worked on my damaged hamstring, I found out a bit about him. His wife had died and he missed her dreadfully, loved her with all his heart, and in some ways dealt with the loneliness of a solitary life by staying involved with sporting teams. He went to that little room under the grandstand every day of the week, and to travel there he caught a couple of buses at his own expense. He was there whether anyone turned up or not.

  One of the first questions he asked me was who worked with our team each weekend treating injuries? Who provided massage therapy to loosen up tight muscles and helped prepare players to perform at their best before and during games? I replied, no one.

  Our club had a professional approach to most things: training, facilities, player recruitment and junior development. But we didn’t have a physio/massage therapist working with the team on weekends. Bobby said we needed one, and he was the man for the job. All he wanted in return was for the club to pay for his massage oils, heat rub, strapping tape and bus fare from his flat at Windale to the game each week. Bobby was a pensioner, lived in a tiny one-bedroom flat and didn’t have a car. He was also one of the most content and positive people I have ever met, even though materially he had very little.

  After I got off the table I asked Bobby how much I owed him for the treatment. He said, don’t worry about it. For Bobby, it was never about money. There were people who had no money, and Bobby helped them. You could not get Bobby to charge what he was worth. If you offered him sixty dollars for a session, he would only accept twenty, and most of the time he only wanted ten. As long as he could afford to eat, pay the rent and cover his bills, it was enough. He had long worked out that his health and happiness were more important.

  I was training three times a week at that stage of my playing career and, with weekend matches, it was pretty full-on. There were always niggling injuries, strains, muscle tears and general soreness. Bobby became my first-choice therapist, not only because he understood sport but because he loved it, and we could talk about pretty much anything. He was a wise old owl and didn’t mind sharing what he had learned throughout his life.

  It was this special relationship that Bobby had with the players that saw him become our club’s official masseur, as well as the Newcastle representative team’s masseur, and that eventually led to him working with the New South Wales side when they played Sheffield Shield games in Newcastle. There he worked on many of the game’s very best players, including Australian Test captain Steve Waugh. I remember him telling me that he worked on Steve Waugh’s troublesome back for a number of hours one day to get the skipper back on the paddock. Steve at that time was nearing the end of his playing career and needed to keep his body in shape to get through the demands of four- and five-day cricket.

  You could ask Steve Waugh or many of the other Blues players of that time if they remember the short, balding masseur from Newcastle, and I reckon they all would. He had such an infectious personality and was always upbeat. He also had a wicked sense of humour that saw others happy to spend time in his company, even when he wasn’t putting their bodies back together. Bobby Gray loved the camaraderie that the dressing-room environment offered. He was not only a gifted therapist, but a confidant, friend, and someone who always left you feeling better about yourself and the world.

  In the time I played at Belmont I occasionally opened the bowling, but more often than not I bowled first change. I remember well the time during a match at our home ground, Cahill Oval, when I was struggling with my run-up, my action, my rhythm, my fitness … In other words, I was just struggling. I came into the dressing room during the lunch break frustrated and angry at the way I was bowling. No matter how hard I t
ried to fix the problem, it wasn’t getting any better.

  Bobby knew nothing about pace bowling. He knew absolutely nothing about line and length, and even less about how to bowl an outswinger. When he approached me in the sheds that day, I was sitting on the bench feeling sorry for myself. Bobby told me to relax, and breathe properly. Things would sort themselves out. I had become so worked up that my breathing was rapid and was increasing the feelings of frustration, not lessening them. He told me my breath should not be shallow and quick, but deep and slow. He said to practise while I was sitting in the dressing room and between overs.

  This was a simple yet profound message. In short, switch on when you need to, but learn to relax and breathe deeply when you don’t. Cricket is a game that gives you a window between balls to do that, and this lesson had been given to me by a bloke who had never even played.

  When other teams saw that we had a masseur working with us, they couldn’t believe it. But Bobby was so generous with his time that many opposition players ended up receiving treatment from him too, even though he was meant to be working with our side. As word got out about Bobby’s work, he was asked to travel with the Newcastle representative team, and he kept the boys in tip-top physical shape before and during games. He loved it, and the boys loved having him around. For the players, Bobby was part of the furniture and part of the fabric of their club.

  The other great innovation he brought to the cricketers he worked on was the soap scrub. If you had been slogging away on the field in forty-degree heat for a couple of sessions there was simply nothing better than getting onto the treatment table for the soap bath. During the twenty-minute tea break, the bowlers would have a two-minute shower and then get scrubbed down with a coarse-haired brush lathered in soap. That was repeated: a two-minute shower, and back into the cricket creams just in time for a cup of tea and a cake before taking the field for the last session. You had to experience one of these scrubs to believe how they could lift a tired body and mind. Having a treatment like this gave you a new lease on life, and helped enormously in reviving tired legs, back and shoulders. The bowlers had the benefit of this treatment when we were fielding — the batsmen didn’t deserve it!

  Bobby Gray knew his stuff. He was pretty much self-taught, but had a gift that was refined through hours and hours of working on bodies of all shapes and sizes. Yet if you search for Bobby Gray on the internet, you won’t find him. He never made the social pages, or a newspaper story, as far as I am aware. In fact, I think the only people who have ever heard of Bobby Gray are those who were privileged enough to meet him. I remember the day I first met him at the Rosebud home ground as though it was yesterday, even though it’s close enough to twenty-five years ago.

  Bobby died seven years ago, and his funeral was held in a small church at Wallsend, a suburb approximately fifteen minutes’ drive from Newcastle’s CBD. At the funeral service there were Bobby’s friends, family and soccer players and officials. And, I’m proud to say, there were plenty from the Newcastle cricket fraternity in attendance as well.

  I met Bobby’s son Ross that day for the first time. Bobby often spoke about Ross and about how proud he was of all his family. I told Ross what his father had meant to all of us, and how we were improved as people through meeting and spending time with his dad. Believe me, Bobby may have gained a lot through his work with the numerous players he treated in teams over the years, but the players who met him will never forget the impact he had on them.

  I know I won’t.

  In praise of Slasher Mackay

  by Robert White

  FOR ANY AUSTRALIAN cricket lover — more specifically for any cricket lover now on the wrong side of fifty — 1960/61 was a memorable summer. For some it will be remembered as a new dawn that led eventually to the thrills of one-day cricket. To others, for more or less the same reason, it was the sad swansong of that golden age of cricket, the 1950s, a decade when the old foe was indisputably England, and when a draw was appreciated as the most dignified and appropriate closure to five days of intense, absorbing play.

  I will come to the national events, but they were merely a backdrop to events in my own career as a schoolboy cricketer. At the beginning of that season, I was an accomplished opening batsman and wicket-keeper, even selected to trial for the New South Wales under-fourteens squad, which I did unsuccessfully. I still have a small trophy, now lacking its base and tarnished, but still sporting the proud words, ‘Best and fairest 1960’. By the end of the season, I was a burned-out has-been, lacking all confidence.

  My demise hinged on one fateful innings in 1961. As the season had progressed, my scores declined like one of the graphs we did in maths class, heading down towards zero, then defying the laws of calculus by actually reaching that point, more than once. However, towards the end, the candle of my talent flickered, and I played an innings whose memory I covet.

  I had batted all afternoon — four hours in all — and remained undefeated at the end on twenty-two not out. Our maths teacher, a very kindly and quiet man, was also the umpire and coach, and as the afternoon wore on his remarks turned from the encouraging (‘You’re defending well, son, now you might try a few shots’), to the slightly admonitory (‘I think it’s time to have a bash’), to the frankly abusive (‘Just get out and give somebody else a go, for heaven’s sake’), which was shockingly against the grain of his patient character. I was serenely indifferent to his increasing rage, however, knowing I would be vindicated by history in this gallant comeback innings. As lobbing full toss followed slow long-hop, I knew exactly what I was doing, and who I was — my hero, Ken ‘Slasher’ Mackay, courageously weathering the storm of vicious bouncers from the West Indies’ Wes Hall.

  It was afterwards in the dressing shed that an even more vicious bouncer was bowled at me by our teacher. Red in the face but trying to maintain calm, he hissed through gritted teeth, ‘Look son, can you actually see the ball?’

  And that, as they say, was that. Off to the optometrist I went, and in a week or two I was humiliated by a pair of unfashionable (especially in a boys’ school) black-rimmed glasses, and afflicted with a severely dented self-esteem from which I never recovered. It was the season that spelt the end of my father’s aspirations for me as future Australian captain. And, perhaps not coincidentally, it was the season that saw hints of the beginning of the end of Slasher’s Test career, although he too was to have his moments of glorious revival, before his autumnal retreat into retirement and obscurity.

  Slasher still holds a record, and it is one which will surely stand forever. Of all Australian top-order batsmen (Warnie doesn’t qualify) he is the only one who never scored a Test century. The reason for this failure? There was not enough time. And unless there had been a return to endless Tests, there never would have been enough time. Again invoking those graphs learned in calculus, he crept ever closer, scoring eighty-nine not out in his final season, but never quite making it to that coveted one hundred.

  This in itself robbed him of one record that must have been made in heaven for him: the slowest Test century ever put together by an Australian. This honour belongs to the craggy, lantern-jawed Jim Burke (six hours and eight minutes, against India). But Burke never attracted the same kind of affection as Slasher — Burke’s slowness, one felt, was deliberately calculated to provoke spectators rather than natural, as Slasher’s seemed.

  I recall attending a Test at Leeds in 1976 between England and the West Indies, where Gordon Greenidge and Roy Fredericks scored about 150 without loss in the first session of the first day. Standing in the queue for the toilet at lunchtime, I heard a thick Yorkshire voice behind me say, ‘Ay, Geoffrey would play for t’draw now.’

  That phrase encapsulated all the golden memories of a time that had already passed, not only in its reference to the incomparably tedious Boycott, but in the words that would promise another fourteen sessions of entertainment unfolding now that these calypso players were on centre stage. I could imagine an Australian voice at th
e Sydney Cricket Ground under similar circumstances muttering, ‘Slasher’ll ’ave to play for a draw.’

  The nickname Slasher was, of course, applied ironically in the laconic style of Australian wit. Slashing was something which could never, not ever, have entered the mind of this phlegmatic character. He was one of the most dependable figures ever to have graced a cricket field, completely uncompromising and unyielding in his slowness. His type has since been banished from the game, and will never be seen again, unfortunately.

  There have been other contenders for the mantle of the dourest battler ever in Australia. Bill Lawry’s hectic television commentaries have given the world many contributions to books of quotations (most famously, ‘It’s all happening’), but his excitable commentating style seems in direct contrast to his on-field persona. As his cadaverous figure stalked towards the wicket, one could be confident of one thing: that for the next few hours, perhaps days, it would not all be happening, at least not at Bill’s end, as the cobwebs slowly gathered around his pads, and the word ‘wait’ rang out repeatedly. But Lawry was not as reliable as Slasher, for every now and then a rush of blood came from nowhere, resulting in a spine-chilling, jabbed hook shot that astonished bowler and spectator alike. It seemed a premeditated ploy, timed to perfection, coinciding with the peak of vitriol hurled at him, and calculated to give him just enough credit for another ten overs of miserly crawling.

  Mackay, on the other hand, was entirely and modestly himself, the model of utter consistency. His monumental patience inspired a boredom that was profound and rich, withholding the secret of its mystique like an inscrutable sphinx. Where stasis was required, he was its quintessence. He had virtually no backlift, so no energy was wasted. It is said that he was the greatest judge of a ball’s line in all of history, since time after time he could remain completely immobile as balls shaved his off stump, missing it by less than a whisker. Where a draw was required, as it often was, the sight of Slasher at the wicket was, to any Australian, reassuring, even uplifting. Pot-bellied men could stretch out after tea in the afternoon sun, confident they could return and report to their wives, ‘Not much happened, Slasher saved the day.’ Their slumbers would be broken by no intrusions of unexpected and raucous applause; the only words heard would be an occasional friendly ‘’Ave a go yer mate,’ spoken with affection and respect. There would be no wickets, no boundaries, no runs for another two hours. Bliss.