Dean Jones (1961 - 2020)
I met Dean Jones when I was about thirteen years old.
At that time, I was cricket-obsessed and a member of Geraldton's Country-Week team for that year. Jones was in town to play golf in the Geraldton Open and to conduct this clinic.
Jones was an Australian cricket star. He'd not long returned from Australia's unpredicted Ashes triumph in England, where he'd excelled. He made hundreds in two of the One-Dayers that preceded the test series, and a flawless 157 in the third test. I'd been allowed to put our little telly (the one that doubled as the monitor for the Commodore computer) into my room, and I'd sit up at night and watch as much as my eyeballs could handle. I'm fairly certain I saw every ball that Jones faced in that innings. By the end of that series, Jones ended up making more than 500 runs at an average over 70.
Not long after the series' conclusion, I bought a souvenir issue of a cricket magazine. In it was a portrait of Jones. Of all the images that the magazine contained, it is the one that has remained in my memory.
In beautiful black and white, Jones stood with the bat resting upon his shoulder, the incline of the blade passing over it. His gaze was directed past the lens of the camera, out into the distance. On his face was a look of knowing confidence coupled with a clear sense of restlessness. He looked impatient to be somewhere else, which gave the image the sense of a man caught in a moment between moments. He wanted to be back out in the middle, batting with the kind of determination and focus few ever attain.
He was the rarest of cricketers; a genuine enigma. His arrogance - and he played with lots of it - was an incarnation of memory. It was a throwback to the era of Lillee, Marsh and Chappell; players who retired before he first donned the Baggy Green. It was a bold ploy at the time. Australia was greatly weakened after the retirement of its titans, and sides like the West Indies - whom it felt like we played twice yearly, such was their market appeal - were at the height of their powers. Even 'lesser' sides like New Zealand forced our batsman to try and cope with the likes of Richard Hadlee, who memorably destroyed Australia, taking 9 for 52 in a test in 1985. Most of the batting line up - Boon, Marsh, Border - played with a gritty stoicism. Not Jones. He played his own game.
The West Indies in particular, were beyond formidable. Their four-pronged pace attack was like a mutant trident, skewering our top six time and time again with the force a thrown spear. But Jones did his level best to stand up to them, even going so far as to taunt them, sometimes with spectacularly bad results. (Taunting Curtly Ambrose at the WACE was not wise.) But he kept on doing it. And he made runs. Lots of them. He averaged 46 over 52 tests against some of the greatest pace attacks the world has ever seen. He made hundreds against the likes of Holding, Marshall, Garner, Walsh, Ambrose, Hadlee, Imran, Wasim, Waqar and Kapil Dev. The great Australian sides of the Waugh and Ponting eras faced no such challenges. Frankly, I'll take an 80 against the Windies in '88 over Hayden's 380 against Zimbabwe any day of the week.
Jones batted like a man riddled with ants. He fidgeted at the crease. He batted outside of it. He lofted over infields and played shots now considered regulation, but which were profoundly unorthodox for the time. And he turned running between wickets into a feat of athletic cunning, taking single after single that batsmen resting on their willows at the bowler's end frequently viewed as suicidal. Undeterred, he made them run, and slowly but surely, he changed the game. He combined science, art and daring in his one-day batting, and when he left the game, had a record comparable to Viv Richards, arguably the greatest one-day batsman of them all. (Yes, many make more runs today, but with hyper-engineered bats, shorter boundaries and many fielding restrictions, it's now a lot easier to do.)
And let's not forget; Jones played arguably the greatest innings of all time, when he ground out a superhuman double century in India. In doing so, he pushed his body well beyond its physical limits. Beset with vomiting, diarrhoea and blurred vision, he defied the Indian attack for ten hours with the temperature at the crease exceeding fifty degrees. Given what is now known about hydration and dehydration - compared to what wasn't known at the time - it's almost certain that such an innings will never be played again.
When I met Jones, we chatted briefly about the golf he was playing (it had not gone well), and about his most feared opponent, who happened to be Wasim Akram. He was kind enough to say that my own bowling action reminded him of Akram. Whilst it was true that we were both left-handers, in reality, it was only in the nose department that we were kin of any kind, with both of us possessed of probosci that one might diplomatically call over-engineered. But for a kid of thirteen, that comment was pure gold. I still cherish it, even though I no longer believe it.
When Jones was playing, and for many years after, I loved cricket with a deep and abiding passion. Playing it, watching it, thinking about it. My mind still swims in arcane cricket statistics and trivia. Australia were genuine cricketing underdogs when I was a kid. Jones, Boon, Border, McDermott and others slowly raised us back up to the top. And they had to fight every inch of the way to get there. Their triumphs were celebrated and deserved. In the end, though, it became impossible for me to love a side that thought winning a birthright. Cricket lost its lustre for me. But the there's still a glow underneath the tarnish that I know will never disappear.
Jones has left us too soon. 59 is a terribly young age to leave the crease and not return. But the memories he's left inside of me and many others will endure like that glimmer of gold.
When I met him, Jones signed my bat, the trusty GM that I lovingly over-oiled. He signed the back of it in blue pen. Over time the ink faded away to nothing. But I know it's there. Like my memories of Jones - be they personal or gleaned from afar - they will stay inside the part of me that remains a boy, forever.