Sport

Miriam Sved’s début novel is a structurally innovative portrait of élite Australian football as a juggernaut that leaves lives scrambling and spent in its wake. Its fourteen stories, each told from a different narrative perspective, form a prismatic study of a single season in the lives of Mick Reece and Jake Dooley, two first-year recruits at an unnamed, present-day AFL club. The novel’s true focus, however, is the internal worlds of those around them – parents, older teammates, club staff, self-identified WAGs, supporters, journalists – caught up in the trick of fame which has ensnared these young men.

The Commonwealth Games, like the Commonwealth of Nations, often seem irrelevant. I intended to declare my bias in this review when I found author Brian Oliver saying the same thing on the first page of his introduction. But, as the author points out, the Games have survived the political, cultural, and sporting odds for more than eighty years and have a rich sporting history.

In his The Art of Wrist-Spin Bowling (1995), Peter Philpott remarks: ‘If there is one factor in spin bowling which all spinners should accept … it is the concept that the ball should be spun hard. Not rolled, not gently turned, but flicked, ripped, fizzed.’ Richie Benaud agrees: ‘Spin it fiercely. Spin it hard.’ The intensity of the grip that produces ‘fizz’ will also often result in the ball either floating high and free in the air or thumping into the pitch a few yards ahead of the popping crease.

At last, new Bradman territory to be conquered: the Don 1939–45 or, if we discount the ‘phoney war’ (‘Business as Usual’, as Robert Menzies said of that first phase in World War II), perhaps 1941–45. I imagined a slim volume. Not so! Instead, there is a catch to the subtitle of Bradman’s War: How the 1948 Invincibles Turned the Cricket Pitch into a Battlefield, which indicates that we will be on more familiar terrain.‘More familiar’ because this book is an attempt at revisionist history. Questioning the Bradman idolatry and the invincibility of the Invincibles is a suitable aim. However, the main task for the revisionist historian is to provide either fresh new evidence or a powerful reinterpretation of existing evidence as part of formulating a balanced argument: Malcolm Knox does neither.

Communities, extended family connections, and role models have been keys to Aboriginal participation in Australian sport. Other factors – racist exclusion among them – have limited the appearance of Indigenous athletes in professional running and boxing. The high proportion of Aboriginal footballers now playing in the Australian Football League and both rugby codes inevitably begs the question of absences in other major sports.

A favourite quiz question for cricket history buffs has been ‘Who is the only Nobel Prize winner to play first-class cricket?’ Answer: Samuel Beckett. A question for cricket bibliophiles now might well be ‘Which Nobel Prize winner contributed an essay to an Australian cricket book?’ Answer: J.M. Coetzee.

Practitioners of real (or royal) tennis have with their game the special relationship that comes with being a small group of initiates. There are probably fewer than ten thousand of them in the world, gathered in the four countries where the ancient sport survives on no more than fifty active courts. Individually and collectively, they appear to feel, beyond the passion with which they master the complex rules and techniques of the actual playing, a responsibility for protecting, maintaining, and extending detailed knowledge of the six centuries or so of the game’s history. It is indeed an unusual microcosm, but it is full of intriguing connections with some major historical figures and moments.

A book’s title should indicate its subject and, even better, its approach to its subject. Basic dictionaries define a companion as one who ‘accompanies another’, is an ‘associate in’, or a ‘sharer of’. A secondary definition is a ‘handbook or reference book’; a thing that ‘matches another’. I anticipate that a book called a ‘Companion’ will be company, will allow me to associate, to share, refer, and be matched as though with a real-life companion; a partner. Given that the book is published by a major university press, it is expected that the companion may be more of a mentor than a guide, but still present information in a lively, accessible style.

In the early 1990s the cricket tour book, like the western movie, seemed dead and buried. The formulas played themselves out around 1970, though the genre had a strong structure which allowed for fitful new interpretations. Direct telecasts of Test cricket and video highlights of series appeared likely to kill the tour book. Who needed to read about it when, having witnessed the games ball by ball, judgement could be passed again with the aid of electronic recording equipment? Yet a Test series offered a strong structure on which a skilful author could make interesting variations.

In an age when cricketing biographies predominantly lionise one-dimensional and vacuous individuals, this is a pleasurable reminder of an earlier era when even test players had regular jobs and a better sense of balance about life’s priorities.