Phillip Joel Hughes seemed destined for greatness at a young age. It was a level of expectation and pressure that Hughes wore with humility and a path for which he prepared himself diligently.
“Watch Out Bradman”, warned a local newspaper in mid-coast New South Wales when 11-year-old Hughes passed the thousand-run mark in one junior season.
It wasn’t the last time he was compared to Australia’s greatest batsman.
His tragic death on Thursday following a blow to the back of the head in his South Australian side’s Sheffield Shield encounter with New South Wales on Tuesday is all the more harrowing for being witnessed by his family and many teammates to whom he was so loved, and also for occurring as he convincingly pressed his claims to regain Test selection.
Australian cricket has not known of such a tragic and distressing episode since the death at 23 of another young New South Wales batting prodigy, Archie Jackson. Like Hughes, Jackson was an unfussy and lovable character of boyish disposition and modesty. His passing left his family, peers and fans to cope with the heartbreak of a life ended so prematurely and a cricket career that must surely have reached greater heights.
So too does Hughes’s – and with the added pain that his life should end playing the game he loved.
Phillip Hughes subverted a lot of cliches about his generation of cricketer. Hard-working and modest, his strokes didn’t come from the textbook but they were endlessly-honed in the nets. With no small amount of chutzpah he’d moved away from his family’s Macksville farm at 16 to pursue his cricketing dream in Sydney grade cricket.
Hughes bore no entitlement complex and resisted an individualistic philosophy, patiently waiting his turn each time he was dropped from the national side and hoping with sincerity that those who replaced him did well.
No one before has batted quite like Phillip Hughes. Short in stature but possessing a wonderful eye and a compelling, homespun technique, his flaying of pace attacks often recalled the release of a coiled-up spring. Hughes would crouch low at the crease and then explode upwards and into action, deflecting short-pitched bowling over the top of gully and point with almighty flashes of the bat.
Sometimes he made batting look like something else entirely, something closer to golf only with a tennis racquet as his implement, perhaps.
The uniqueness and vulnerability of this approach was as central to his successes – that exhilarating and unforgettable twin demolition job at Durban, his belligerent 86 at Wellington in 2010 and the sadly-forgotten hand of 81 not out at Old Trafford in the 2013 Ashes – as it was to his fallow periods in the Test side. Each time he was dropped he worked even harder again to get back, not his only endearing trait.
When 20-year-old Hughes blasted a pair of thrilling sixes to bring up that maiden Test century against South Africa – his first of two for the game - Macksville locals crowded around the TV at the Nambucca Hotel and erupted in celebration before falling into an eerie silence at what their most famous son had achieved.
Before he was a cricketer, Hughes was a son, a brother and a friend and his passing will hit his hometown severely. It was there that he first learned the game that drew him away to the big smoke, whacking away at a ball on a string that hung from the balcony of the Hughes family home. Within eyesight lay the humble, unfenced field on which he spent his formative cricket years. Macksville locals called him “Boof” or “Boofa” on account of his childhood physique.
As the entire cricket community sweated on progress reports from St Vincent’s hospital this week, there was a communal feeling of nausea, disbelief and restlessness that something so frivolous as a game should jolt us do cruelly from life’s complacencies. Then there is the numbness, for the summer that will now follow seems so trivial, its participants and onlookers now bereft.
Doubtless Hughes’s death with stir in some a tendency towards the changing rules and regulations, but that would neglect the freakish rarity of his injury and perhaps even dishonour Phillip Hughes and his teammates’ deep love of a game that is neither riskless nor, in this sad instance, immune from life’s tragic twists of fate.
(Guardian service)
