The Rules of Backyard Cricket (23 page)

There's a photo you can find if you go through the
Sydney Morning Herald
's archives: me in the rooms at the SCG, propped on a bench with my back to the lockers. In my whites, barefoot. I've got that scuffed and saturated look you only get after a long day on a hot ground, but more than that, my whole physical demeanour screams defeat. I've looked at it long and often—head in hands, hair poking exhaustedly through my fingers. Tangles of strapping tape on the floor. And no one within reach of the contagion. You can't tell how a photo is cropped unless you're the creator or the subject, so let me tell you that change room was packed: players, support staff, families and hangers-on, even Craig. But either side of me it's just discarded gear and timber benches.

We've lost the one-day competition in embarrassing style. I've made a duck. Big fat blob. And before the bails have hit the ground, the Board have got a press release out.

Director of Cricket Operations, Tully Welsh, told a media conference on Tuesday afternoon that management had been dealing with disciplinary issues surrounding Darren Keefe for several years. This has included offers of counselling and welfare inputs to address his issues. However, he has failed to observe the standards expected of him
.

The Syntax of the Living Dead. Who writes this drivel?

Welsh described the situation as extremely disappointing. ‘The Board has high expectations of its players and staff: we expect them to uphold certain standards. Victorian players and staff receive education on the Code of Conduct on a regular basis
.
We have attempted to offer Darren multiple forms of welfare and support in recent times. Again and again, however, he has fallen short of the standards expected of a senior player. Darren's failure to address these issues has left us with no other choice but to take this course of action: accordingly, Mr Keefe's contract is terminated forthwith.'

So let's see: the ‘multiple forms of welfare and support' was Welshy gate-crashing my drive out to Weymouth last year. The ‘education on the Code of Conduct' was a yellow sticky note affixed to a
stapled sheaf of papers, on which was scrawled PLEASE READ. It all feels predetermined, because it is.

I've been cleaned up by a very good delivery tonight, but others have dropped catches and tried ridiculous shots. It doesn't seem fair of them to play the ill-discipline card when today was a comprehensive team failure. I'm not the oldest guy in the side, and most of the time I've been in form. Not like the old form, not the days of great plunder. But I've adapted to my weakened grip: changed my game to do away with the big hitting and just live on a bit of chip and run. Yes, there's been trouble along the way, but minor stuff, silly stuff, and not recently. Jesus, I've even done the pointless recovery sessions at the beach, shivering like a twat with my arms folded across my tits.

The players in the rooms that day, they have their various reasons to shun me. The younger ones have their own friendships, and also the political smarts to avoid me like a turd underfoot. No debt to a broken-down troublemaker. The older one—and as I say there is only one—can't even make eye contact for fear he'll be next. So him I understand. But longevity, experience, craft…these things have to count for something. Don't they?

Instinct and love. That's what inspired all those hours against Wally. Then I'd wanted to be in this side, then that side, then the side that selects the best from those sides. The pursuit was relentless and it all led to this place. No matter how carefully a player might try to consider the reality of retirement ahead of its occurrence, it's a blindside, and a savage one, when it hits.

There are other changes that take place around the same time.

Little things at first.

A routine trip to the physio to get a bit of work done on Squibbly's knuckle. But at the counter the pretty girl says
cash or card?
and
I do a little double-take because there's always been some clacking on the keyboard and a smile and a
thank you, that's fine
.

‘The, ah, the Board picks that up…'

This must be how it feels when the family cash card fails at the checkout. People on the waiting-room couches trying to look without looking. She makes a show of double-checking but she already knows the deal.

Then I'm asked to return a phone I've had on ‘promotional loan'. A nightclub membership ‘lapses' though I'm unaware of it having had any kind of term.

A handful of tiny gestures of sympathy. The feeble kind of support that will later be perfected by Facebook. One or two former players pick up the phone, wanting to talk as much about their own tortured passages into retirement as about anything I'm experiencing.

I head down to the MCG one fateful Thursday, park the car in the ample space that characterises domestic cricket, and wander through the eucalypts to the grandstand. Deep under it, at the dressing-room door, there's a security guy. Shorter than me but a lot heavier. Ten years younger and dressed in black, scowling.

‘How are ya mate.' I reach for the door handle beside him. He shuffles across slightly and taps my hand away from it.

‘Can't go in there. Players' area.' His mouth barely moves.

‘That's cool,' I say. ‘I'm a player.'

‘Nah mate.'

Don't make me do this mate.
I smile. I wrestle with those words, the ones you never want to use because they signify all kinds of defeat. I nudge forward.

He stops me.

Here it comes.

He's got a hand on me.

Here it comes; I'm gonna have to say it.

Yep, I'm saying it.

‘Do you know who I am?'

‘Nuh.'

Christ. He actually doesn't.

I'm reasonably accustomed to doing this routine outside a nightclub with a small crowd in the queue. This, this corridor under a grandstand in the middle of a weekday afternoon, is an away game for me.

‘Darren Keefe. I'm a former player. I'm…shit, I'm Darren
Keefe
, mate.'

‘Sorry Darren. Secure area.'

He's specifically enjoying the feeling of making me feel no longer famous. He's itching for a confrontation. And so am I.

‘Understand you have a job to do mate, but you're embarrassing yourself here. Of course I'm allowed in.'

As I'm talking I slip a hand round behind him and knock loudly on the door. He shoves me violently in the middle of the chest.

‘Didn't you hear me Mr Keefe? I need you to move back from the door…'

‘Not interested in your needs, number twenty-two.'

The door opens inwards and the puzzled face of the team property steward peers out. We both try to get the first words in, but the bouncer wins.

‘I'm sorry sir, this gennleman knocked on the door. I'm asking him to leave.'

No one's ever called the property steward—Max, I think it is—‘sir'. I give him a good-humoured shrug like
can you believe this tool?
and make a move forward. The bouncer's hand comes up again, blocking my path. Max looks pained.

‘Well, mate, if he's asked you to go, I guess…'

Oh for fuck's sake.

The bouncer's oozing vindication and I feel like smashing him. I feel like smashing fucken Max, whose apologetic look is only inflaming me. This must be the point when wall-punchers punch walls, but I'm accustomed to looking after my hands. And so, God help me, I throw a punch at the security moron.

I know, I know.

He catches my fist easily between his hands in a clapping motion and drives a knee into my groin. And that's all it takes. I'm on the ground at his feet whimpering as the nausea spreads through my whole being, balls-outward to the fingertips.

Max hurriedly shuts the door. Number twenty-two waits a decent while before hauling me up by the back of the shirt and working me down the corridor with an arm behind my back and one of his knuckles pressed excruciatingly into the side of my neck.

And just like that, I've been evicted.

I am an outcast.

No testimonial match. No invitation to the end-of-season gala. The enjoyment of privileges is directly proportional to the pain of having them withdrawn, and I make mental lists of those who've crossed me. I rehearse vengeful sound-bites for interviews but no one calls. There's speculation in the press that the game's administrators are keen to mark a new dawn, start afresh and so on. Cutting me loose is apparently a motif of the New Professionalism.

After weeks of invisibility I find myself profiled in a weekend liftout magazine. Not Darren Keefe the force of nature, the crowd favourite, but Darren Keefe the ‘troubled star': wayward brother of national sporting icon Wally Keefe. ‘Beleaguered'—Christ, that's only a short step from ‘disgraced former'. The piece is written for the non-sporting reader and does not carry Amy Harris's by-line, but it
contains plenty of things I've only said to her.

Like for example a throwaway comment to the effect that, like Peter Pan, I'd taken a long time to grow up. The story repeats that assertion verbatim, along with the observation that Peter Pan is not a redemption tale—that in fact the character never does grow up.

Also verbatim is an exchange I once had with Amy. She'd commented that I'm very close to my mother, and I'd agreed.
Why then
, she'd asked,
don't you hold all women in the same sort of respect you have for your mother?
I'd fumbled my way through some sort of an answer, but we both knew it was the question, not my answer to it, that mattered.

During these weeks, the gear sits in bags in a spare room, old sweat and sunscreen atomising into the room's stale air. The first time I go in there to get something else, I see the bags slumped there, and just look at them without composing a thought. The second time I sit down, take a few things out, handle them. Things that have been the detachable parts of me. I can see them now for their functional ugliness, but over as much of my life as I can remember, the shapes and small noises of these things—gloves and pads and other objects in yellowing shades of white—were integral to me. I take a selection of stuff and give it to the local cricket club to auction off.

The third time I go in, I've got three generous lines up my nose and I'm twitching. I pick up a bag and throw it in the car, head for Brewer's.

I book myself a net and a ball machine, wander in there under the fluoro tubes in an ordinary baseball cap and a T-shirt, unnoticed and lost in my thoughts. I want to feel the rhythm of repetition.

I set the machine for a bland line and length on middle stump. Dial in a hint of outswing, quickish medium pace.

The yellow balls streak through the air, one after another, and one after another I drive through the same arc and deposit each ball in the same square metre of the net. The hollow detonation of bat
on hard plastic ball echoes around the tin and wire whalebelly of the Brewer's nets, precisely every ten seconds. My shoulders are warming up. Stretching, striking, following though, I find I can swing with my eyes closed. Next I adjust my stance by a handspan towards off and start whipping the deliveries across my body towards the legside, targeting one square in the netting.