Two Men in a Brewery

With a cautious nod and eyes wide open with suspicion he shuffled into the room, not like Garry Sobers or Dick Diver or the Great Gatsby but like the man he actually was, a man with a serious job at a brewery. His collared grey shirt was tucked tidily into his trousers. I half expected him to do what he’d always done and start jogging on the popping crease, knees climbing up past his bellybutton, pad-flaps and buckles shaking everywhere. But he was not wearing pads and buckles. Those days were over long ago, and when they ended they’d ended a little bit harrowingly, and with a batting average of 31.

Forgive me these few minutes of non-Ashes digression. For today is November 6, Graeme Wood’s birthday, and though my heroes now tend to be long-dead novelists or forlorn singer-songwriters, not a November 6 goes by without me thinking of the hero who came first.

Except I don’t, anymore, think just of him. I think also of the Friday afternoon, in a tiny side room in that brewery on a highway, when it was me and him.

I did not mention 31. He certainly didn’t mention 31. And yet it was as if 31 was the third person in the room with us. We’d barely begun chatting when Woody mumbled: “It probably annoys me a bit when you see the current Australian team and everyone in the top six or seven averages over 50.”

Both of us, at that exact moment, I was sure, were thinking of 31. And my heart, it drowned in warmth.

Never write about your heroes, they say, advice no writer ever heeds, although most have the street-smarts to pull away from actually meeting their heroes. But what choice did I have? No choice, that’s what. I was writing a book. Kim Hughes was the subject. Woody knew the subject. He and the subject had stayed in the same block of townhouses on Abbotsford Street, North Melbourne, when Kim recorded 0 and 0 in his last ever Test. Woody had toured with Kim, drunk with Kim, swapped sorrows with Kim, batted with Kim … And yes, he’d run poor Kim out, more than once, and most heartbreakingly of all in what turned out to be Kim’s final match at his beloved WACA Ground. Allan Miller’s seething contempt in that summer’s Allan’s Cricket Annual knew no bounds:

"The run-out of Kim Hughes at 5.31pm in extra time on the second day was tragic. He had padded away Trevor Hohns to gully in time-honoured, shutters-up defence and captain Wood, in one of his still all-too-common muddle-headed moments, decided to call for a quick leg bye."

Yes, Woody remembered it, when I brought it up.

No, he wasn’t about to apologise now, not 18 years later, not when he was still a bit cross with Kim for saying, behind Woody’s back, that run-out’s cost us the Shield final, words that soon found their way to Woody’s face.

“Yeah,” Woody said after a while, “you feel shithouse … You feel bad at the time about any run-out.”

And I remembered then why I liked him so. No pretence. No puffery. No it’s-all-about-the-team twaddle. Woody was Woody, and he knew he couldn’t help the team if he was out of the team, so that meant him doing whatever it took to score runs and stay in the team, and if that in turn meant him being a bit distant, a bit self-absorbed, not too pally or smiley, so be it. Smiling was for later. If he made runs in the first dig, he’d smile then. He’d come out in the second dig flapping his arms about, trying shots just for the heck of it, just because he could. His spot was secure. How could he not care a little less? He played 59 Tests, and in the last 55 of them he didn’t once get to 50 in both innings. An amazing statistic. Amazing in a bad way, some might say. But I liked it. Mostly I liked the way he’d keep hooking and hooking even when there were two men out in the deep. I liked it that he was called up to play whenever the Windies speed department came to town. I liked how he wore ’em on his knuckles and hooked ’em off his moustache.

Call it courage. Call it foolhardiness. It was a fine, fine line. But whatever it was it fired a boy’s daydreams.

I did not tell Woody any of this on that Friday afternoon at the brewery on the highway. For we were both of us, now, men on serious jobs. Only once did my old self’s awestruck state show.

Your third-best innings, I blurted out, apropos of not much and in a not very dexterous change of conversational tack, was that 91 in the second final of the 1982–83 World Series Cup. Remember, I trilled, how you kept front-foot pulling Snedden and Chatfield, one long stride down and the ball sailing up, up over midwicket’s head, clanging into golden cigarette advertising signs and rebounding metres back, Bill Lawry going bananas in the commentary box and Ian Chappell, sitting next to Bill, dipping his lid to you as well?

Second best, I ventured, was that 141 against Queensland in the Sheffield Shield final of 1987–88. Such a mighty attack. And you. You made hardly one false step. Except when you ran out Kim.

And nothing, of course, nothing could be finer than that 111 against West Indies, one summer later, when the light was a dazzling yellow and the ball scudded so fast across grass so green that it sticks in my head still, like a favourite painting. You played just one more Test after that. If only you’d quit opening and gone down the order earlier. Your technique, by then, it was foolproof, more watertight even than AB’s. Hands so soft. Footwork aggressive with intent yet centimetre-perfect.

Only a few days before our meeting at the brewery Woody had shaved off his moustache. Without it, his face looked wrong. But it meant that I could see his lip curl up.

Curl up with what? With surprise? With fear? With the realisation that he was in a room in a brewery on a highway with a stranger who seemed to know quite a lot about a 91 he’d once made?

Then the lip curled back down.

You’re right about those three innings, Woody said. And I imagined, for one instant, that something close to admiration for me might actually have crossed his mind. “As you say,” Woody nodded sagely, “that was a good Queensland attack. Botham, Rackemann, McDermott, Tazelaar … And that Windies one, well, I had my back to the wall. I probably knew that if I didn’t make runs I would be dropped. But it was a good wicket, the wicket was true, and Patrick Patterson was bowling. And on a true wicket I always thought Patterson was fodder.”

Courageous, foolhardy words.

And just like that something in the air, something in that brewery, shifted. Suddenly the Windies were back and Woody’s moustache was back and he was hooking bouncers off it again. At that moment – and we both felt it, I’m sure – 31 got up and walked out the room.