Bucking the Trend Read online

  Arguably John’s major achievement at the WACA was to coauthor a report that outlined how much money the game was generating for Packer and the pitifully small dividends for the ACB. That report started a process that led to a richer television deal for Australian cricket, a fully-equipped administration and far better-paid players. Those benefits were just starting to appear as Chris found himself drawn to the game in his teens, beginning the path towards something only barely imaginable for an Australian cricketer on that late August night in 1977: the life of a full-time professional.

  Watching Chris work his way through junior cricket and tennis ranks, John Rogers saw a shy, introverted son who possessed plenty of fighting qualities. These came to the fore when playing sport.

  ‘It showed on the tennis court most. Essentially he was a little kid, battling as hard as he could. In cricket it was more that as a little kid, he was difficult to get out, made more noticeable by the fact that his talented elder brother somehow did get out much more easily.

  ‘In the backyard against his brother and various friends, he could be very showy, but when competing against other teams, he was much more concerned at staying in the contest. He was very shy; very conscious of his lack of height, and did not like his frizzy hair one bit! But there was a quiet self-confidence there too that showed in sport – he’d keep battling.’

  Though he had experienced something like the top of the game as a first-class cricketer for New South Wales, John never pushed great expectations upon his son. He simply wanted to see him do his best. John saw plenty of young talent – some progressed, others didn’t. What he saw in Chris was a player capable of working his way through situations, and a determination to keep working.

  ‘I never ever talked to him about playing for Australia. It was only ever about doing as best as he could. The kids in older years always looked much better, as did the WA cricket team as he started doing well in grade cricket and WA youth teams. I’d seen a lot of good kids do well from my own playing days in so many different ways, and I reckoned he had something.

  ‘When he showed he was keen on cricket, it was more a matter of me hoping he would get as much out of cricket as I had – and just as I had never really thought I was anywhere good enough to play for NSW let alone Australia, I held no such specific ambitions for him and never talked about it – it was more about doing well at the level he was at.

  ‘Of course the personal characteristics stood out. I’ve seen hundreds of kids in a range of sports who have stood out clearly from the rest. Usually they are quicker than anyone else, strong and well-balanced, are very competitive, read the play much quicker, and often they have a pleasing way of doing it that attracts attention immediately. Until he turned 15 and started to grow, Chris was always one of the smallest in his year group, lacked strength, was not a fast runner and had no particular charisma – so attracted little attention.

  ‘For some reason even as he got stronger, that perception by outsiders continued. It was only those people who took an interest, and teammates, who noticed that he had something few others had. Essentially this was his capacity to persevere, to keep his cool, to do his own thing in his own way, to not be fussed by a situation nor by his opponents.

  ‘It took some time even for me to realise, that for every team he was chosen for, he’d mostly start quietly, yet by the end of the season he was the most consistent performer. Mostly he’d be chosen a little reluctantly, and by season’s end would have made himself a candidate for the next level – junior teams, school teams, club teams, under-age rep stuff – and then into senior teams, and eventually the WA team. The same process happened in England in all his club teams and then his county teams. And so too, eventually, the Australian team.

  ‘Until he turned 16, I had no expectations of him other than that I thought he’d do pretty well. There were lots of times when he simply couldn’t hit the ball off the square, and looked quite awkward, and even lacking in talent – if talent means the ability to hit the ball effortlessly.’

  John remembers the two days of his son’s 279 in 2006 for Western Australia against a Victorian side featuring Shane Warne at the WACA as the day he thought the family had an Australian Test cricketer on their hands.

  ‘That required a lot of composure. Up to then the top players in that top Australian team seemed on a different level. His 194 against NSW [in 2002–03] with both the Waugh twins scheming to get him out, had been pretty good, but this one against Warne, even though he did little other against Warne than nurdle singles on the leg side, meant he could stand up to the best.

  ‘There were plenty of setbacks – WA dropping him, Victoria contemplating removing him from the contract list, Middlesex rejecting him initially, and Australia regularly telling him he was on his last chance.’

  SPORT WAS ALWAYS going to form a key ingredient of my childhood. Dad – or JR as he is well known – was an accomplished sportsman in his own right. He played four first-class games for New South Wales in the late 1960s, some decent rugby for St George and was a pretty good tennis player as well. He tells people he even beat Tony Roche as a child (but fails to mention he had a few years on him). His family had always been into sport, especially cricket. He tells me my great-great grandfather was the president of the Gosford Cricket Association in the 1880s, after arriving in Australia as a child from Nottingham in 1850.

  Dad’s love of sport was passed down in particular to his two sons. David, my older brother, tried his luck as a leg-spinner but succeeded in that department about as well as I did. He preferred rugby and still goes by the nickname of ‘Dancin’ Dave Rogers’ at the University of Western Australia Rugby club. Without the influence of my father and brother, I doubt I would have played first-class cricket … let alone for Australia.

  I was a pretty lazy kid without a lot of motivation, but it was my competitive nature that drove me on the sporting field. Dad pushed me to train every day with the words ‘If you’re not doing it, you can guarantee others are’. Dave made sure his little brother had to work hard to beat him at anything, and these were two magic formulas for me. That evolved into a strong tenacious streak. I didn’t like losing anything and would fight hard, not so much at training but whenever the first ball was bowled, the first whistle blown or the first serve delivered.

  I have a big sister also, who left home when I was pretty young and moved from Perth to Melbourne not long after, a move that became significant later in my career. Gillian and I are close, but I probably missed her female influence when I was coming through my teens.

  Last but not least is my mother Ros, who by choice I think took a slight back seat in my development, though she loved us playing sport. She’d argue that it would’ve been a bit hard having two parents who pushed you. However, I think I can say that the true characteristic that set me apart and enabled me to fulfil my dreams was what I inherited from her. As I worked out pretty quickly and was reinforced every time youth sides were picked without me in them, I was not viewed as being as talented as a lot of my peers. Bigger, stronger and more confident than me, I had to find another way to be better than them and as I’ll talk about later in the book, it was my mental talent that gave me the career I never dreamt I would experience. As Dad would agree, it was from Mum I mostly inherited this.

  Memories of renovating my first apartment with her in my early 20s are of seemingly hitting brick walls when it came to problems and Mum repeatedly working methodically through each of them while I stood by fascinated. There was never an issue that was too much for her and whenever someone talks to me about resilience, it reminds me of her. You’d have to be to be married to JR for that length of time. Dad might disagree slightly, but it seemed to me a case of she was the brains and he was the brawn.

  I don’t want to bore you with too many details, as childhoods in other biographies make for hard reading to me. Undoubtedly it’s what shapes you into the adult you become, but many of those decisions are not the writer’s choice. No doubt a fairly
simplistic outlook, but then it is my book.

  Born in Sydney in 1977, I lived in Chatswood for my initial two years. I’m the third of three children and have parents who at the time of writing are three years short of their 50th wedding anniversary.

  Recently I spoke at the St George 50th anniversary of the 1965–66 Sydney grade cricket premiership title. I followed up on stage a panel of three members of that side, Warren Saunders, Peter Leslie and Dad. All three are club greats, particularly Warren, who captained for many years and is still involved. Anyway there was a photograph of the side lined up as cricket sides do, displayed on all the ten or so screens in the room. At the back left was a fresh-faced JR, who at the time was 22. Next morning, at breakfast with my parents, I asked if they could find me a copy of it, to which Mum replied the day that the photo was taken the very day my parents met, at a rugby club lunch straight after, as Dad was late due to this photo. Pretty cool for a child to see an image of a parent on such a fateful day.

  Dad was originally a teacher but then a company secretary and a NSW cricket state selector – before moving the family to Perth in 1980 to take up his position as general manager of the Western Australia Cricket Association. What followed were seven years growing up in the south suburbs of Perth, first in Brentwood and then a year in Shelley. In December 1986, the family moved back to Gosford in the Central Coast of NSW, where Dad’s family is from. This is my first memory of playing cricket. I played for the Avoca Under 11 side, which was coached by my best mate Matthew Sawyer’s father, Brian.

  We lived on 10 acres of bush, in a pretty remote place that overlooked Copacabana Beach, where I went to school. I’m pretty sure life would have turned out differently if we had stayed there. But a year later we were back in Perth and I was back in Brentwood Primary. The merry-go-round didn’t stop and we continued to move houses, albeit in the same area – my parents realised a sure way of making money was to renovate and resell – something they were very good at. I think I moved house 17 times in the 21 years I lived at home. It never bothered me, and I do wonder if it gave me a taste for trying new places.

  But a tennis court was mandatory wherever we went and by the end, even a paved area was designed as a batting net against tennis balls. I must have hit a million tennis balls out the back of our various places. Often these sessions would end in heated arguments about the best way to go. Dad would have overloaded me with his thoughts, leaving me trying to sift through what worked for me and what didn’t. It was a curious development and what so many coaching manuals these days tell you not to do. Dad had so much information to impart that he felt he needed to do a lot at once. The manual says filter it in slowly and allow the student to focus on one thing at a time.

  Not long ago I worked with the Australian Under 19s in Perth against their England counterparts. I was advised that the players had their own techniques and it was more important to help them with match awareness. What a load of rubbish, I thought. Technique is something that keeps developing throughout your career. At 18, very few batsmen have a technique without a weakness. If one does then he’ll make it anyway because he will be another Ricky Ponting.

  Dad ended up throwing so many balls his body started to fall apart. One memory was of him bending over to pick a ball up and suddenly screaming out in agony. I honestly had a split second thought someone had shot him. As he was doubled over, he had to shuffle full pace to a low wall nearby to stop himself keeling over. Turned out his back had gone, so he retreated to the living room where he lay on his stomach on a number of pillows. His request of me to walk on his back was met with a fair share of pessimism but there I was with hands on the ceiling walking up and down his back. The next day at the chiropractor, the doctor asked him what happened and then after a check up asked if anything else had happened as his back was worse than the usual spasm. When JR told him about me walking on it, you could have knocked the chiro over with a feather. He thought it was one of the funnier and more stupid things he had heard – JR was always good for a theory.

  I went to high school at Wesley College in South Perth. The first time I actually was taken there to get my uniform from the club shop, I overheard the only other kid in the shop telling his Mum he needed a cricket jumper. Coincidentally that other kid, Craig Ruthven, ended up becoming my best friend for about the next 15 years. I played three junior seasons for Ardross Cricket Club, plus my first appearance for Melville Cricket Club in the Inverarity Shield, the district junior competition for Under 13s. I tried bowling, wicketkeeping and batting up and down the order, before playing for the first time as an opening bat.

  I was never much of a cool kid. Bit hard when you are one of the smallest kids in the year, have a fuzzy red bouffant and terrible skin – clearly not the ladies’ choice! Nor was I fan of going to house parties and listening to the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and other grunge acts that were so popular at the time – I preferred old school hip-hop. Fortunately my sporting skills helped me out. Craig played cricket and ended up captaining the first’s soccer side and we also attracted another sportsman to our group in Nick Phillips, who was the best rugby player in the school.

  This was significant, as Nick’s father ended up teaching at the school around the same time as Dad did. It can be highly embarrassing having your father teach at your school, especially if he is somewhat extravagant, but as Nick was the biggest kid in school it gave me a shield of protection against abuse. I found myself caught a bit between the nerds and the jocks. This can probably be summed up by the fact I spent time playing in school chess tournaments – as well as tennis, rugby and cricket.

  Dad can be a little absent-minded and was not your usual teacher type. He’d fall asleep during class, and sometimes send people outside for punishment and then forget them. Not to mention his rather annoying choice in headwear. He’d alternate between the khaki hard hats beekeepers wear and black leather chauffeur caps that might be better suited at the mardi gras. I ended up throwing that one away.

  But he had an extraordinary ability to listen and be interested in what his students would say. I still have people come up to me asking if I’m ‘JR’s son’ and then telling me a random story about how they used to swap seats when he was writing on the board just to confuse him or something like that. I’d mention the person’s name to Dad and he’d be able to recall the student and what his parents did for a living.

  Perhaps my favourite story is when he took some of his older economics students to a farm in the country. Most of these kids were boarders and pretty grown up already. Somehow they’d managed to smuggle up some alcohol and were playing drinking games, which Dad stumbled upon. In true JR fashion he told them that’s not how you play drinking games and proceeded to show them his own, including the one where you put your head on a stump and spin around it after drinking and then run about 20 metres which inevitably ends with a dizzy sideways stack.

  The next day, with a slight hangover, Dad emerged from his digs to retrieve something from the bus he’d driven the boys down in. Head down and in blazing sun he shuffled to where the bus was left, only to lift his head and notice the bus was nowhere to be seen. The boys had managed to get in, take the handbrake off and push it round the corner of the building and out of sight.

  With a brief look left and then right, JR shrugged his shoulders and returned to his bed. The boys watched the whole episode. I still get told that one. Dad maintains they were a good group of kids, so he wasn’t fazed.

  As for school itself I was not a bad student – just easily bored. I ended up doing the two hardest math subjects, physics, economics, English and woodwork. I inherited my mother’s skill with numbers and her analytical mind – I’ve won every Sudoku challenge I’ve had in cricket and hear surprisingly only Glenn McGrath would beat me, though I’ll believe it when it happens. I don’t tend to think outside of the square that much, which can be a weakness, but this straightforward, problem-solving style of thinking helped me adapt to Dad’s method of coaching.

>   I was absolutely useless at woodwork and physics though and had no idea what I was doing in either of them. I still have the odd nightmare about having to go to a physics lesson and being so far behind with so much to catch up on. I finished up doing ok in general however, and got the marks I needed to do Commerce at the University of Western Australia. All that being said, my memories of school are on the sporting fields.

  Wesley won the cricket competition in my final year where I broke school records with three centuries and an average over 100. This record was shattered a few years later by a Year 10 student by the name of Shaun Marsh and then by his brother Mitch a few years after that. It was a nice moment years later when the three of us all played for Australia together.

  As memorable as the cricket was though, the rugby was just as good, and I managed to be player of the year for the first 15, which was a pretty good effort being the smallest kid on the team. I think my skill of being able to read the game and be in the right position as well as avoid danger was developing and crossing over to the cricket field. Nick, despite his size, played five-eighth, I played inside centre, and we developed a good combination. Despite winning player of the year I felt Nick was clearly the best player and I still have a memory of him carrying three players on his back as he surged over the last 10 metres to score in the corner. We didn’t win a lot but we had great fun.

  At school we would also play a mash-up version of AFL and rugby during lunch breaks. One day a kid called Ben Kaye lined me up for a solid hip-and-shoulder bump that put me on my backside. Later in the game I had the chance to tackle him and flung him with plenty of gusto. When he hit the ground I heard a sharp cracking sound, and the next moment he was screaming, as the others were lining up to jump on top. I took him to the infirmary, and interrupted the nurse to say ‘there’s something wrong here’. As the colour drained from Ben’s face, she told me to hang on while she helped another student with what looked like a runny nose. This was no fun for Ben, who it turned out was now carrying a broken collarbone, much to the nurse’s rather delayed dismay.