SPECTATOR SPORT
Hadlee's hybrid
Frank Keating
The first Test match I ever saw was against New Zealand. In fact, Brian Close and I made our Test match debut on the very same day, the last Saturday of July 1949. I was 11 years and 296 days old, Closey was 18 and 149 days, still the youngest cricketer ever to play for Eng- land. I had been allowed up from the West to stay for the week with a schoolfriend who lived near Old Trafford. The girl-slim Yorkshire colt took the field gawkily be- hind such giants as Hutton and Compton and Evans — but he can't have been more awestruck than I was, suddenly seeing my flickering, monochrome, Pathe-news heroes made flesh. For three days I sat quaking in wonder and munching plums on that rickety front bench at deep long-off alongside the Warwick Road sightscreen. Close got a duck, pretty hard to do in those days because New Zealand were Considered easy meat. Odd, looking back, as that side included such luminaries of the lore as the two lovely, languid, lefties, Sutcliffe and Donnelly. England's captain was that red-blooded side of beef and bluster, Freddie Brown; New Zealand were led by Walter Hadlee, an upright, stern-chinned chap in horn-rimmed specta- cles, who looked like our maths master. When they went out to toss for innings both casually wore a knotted white hand- kerchief round the neck, and both were puffing away at bulbous great pipes. You don't somehow expect such a severe-seeming, unsmiling mid-on named Walter to go home and christen his two first-born sons, Barrie and Dayle. Which he did, and they both grew up to play cricket for New Zealand. So did their younger brother, Richard — the finest player the country has produced in the 60 years since big Tom Lowry's side were first given Test match status. (Lowry, by the by, was an early 'overseas star': in the 1920s, Somerset were as desperate as usual and registered him on account of his birthplace — Wellington — omitting to tell Lord's it was Wellington, NZ, not Wellington, Som, Anyroad, it's still all right,' grinned the genial county captain, John Daniell, 'he once changed trains at Yeovil Junction.') Enjoy Hadlee this summer. One of the all-time hall of famers. Not that he seems to enjoy it himself, with his mournful, caged-fox phiz and world-weary walk back to his mark. But deep down he'll be on a high, his sweatbands gleaming just-so. He is a neurotic, obsessed about the game and his standing in it. He has taken more Test wickets than any man in history. Unflag- ging control, cunning, and concentration. He will be 39 on the eve of the Lord's Test in July. He has 'retired' more times than Melba or Sugar Ray Leonard. This final encore, he insists, was talked into him so he could ensure New Zealand's first Test win at Lord's. He is a mystic about `targets'. After his nervous breakdown in 1983, his therapist at home challenged him to perform the 'double' for Nottingham- shire the following summer. He did. The breakdown, he told me at Trent Bridge one day, had been the full works blackouts, dizzy spells, loss of memory, and 'a relentless preoccupation with thoughts of death'.
Steady on, old man, I told him, cricket's had too many suicides for comfort down the years, from Andrew Stoddart, who blew his brains out in Hampstead, to dear Harold Gimblett, who downed a cocktail of tuinal and amitryptaline in Hampshire. `No worries now,' said Hadlee. He retires to his new market garden to breed lilies enough to keep Kiwi undertakers in stock for years. He's working on a new hybrid strain he's named the Dennis lily. Funnily enough, Richard's mother, old Walter's missus, is called Lillius.
Previous page
