Making the pitch
He battled his way out of a dead-end town, but alcohol and gambling almost destroyed him. Now Ricky Ponting is the world’s best batsman. His next challenge: to regain the Ashes
Malcolm Knox
Sunday October 29, 2006
Observer Sport Monthly
The Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar, in Sydney’s red light district, never closed. For a start, it had no doors. Opened in 1968 to attract American GIs on leave from Vietnam, it was the city’s nocturnal destination of last resort, as popular with pimps and crooks as with tourists and office workers out on the town. One Sunday night in January 1999, Ricky Ponting dropped in at the Bourbon after another poor performance against England in a one-day international. He was 24 and in his third year in - and often out - of the Australia team (he had been dropped and reinstated four times). His confidence was fragile after a wretched season. He was gambling more than he should and drinking too much. There was a feeling that he had risen too fast and that the team management could not keep protecting him from his worst excesses.
That Sunday night Ponting had been drinking with team-mates when he met a young, dark-haired woman. She was not Kellie Sainty, his long-term girlfriend from Tasmania. Together they went to the Bourbon where, later, Ponting tried to hit the dance floor with Carlotta, a famous drag queen. The details of what happened next may have remained hazy were it not for the presence of an off-duty photographer from Sydney’s Sun-Herald newspaper, Julian Andrews, whose photographs of Ponting stumbling out of the Bourbon with one-and-a-half black eyes were published later that week. It emerged that Ponting had been punched by a bouncer following an altercation. Carlotta said the cricketer had taken exception to a barman refusing him a drink. As he left the bar, supported by his ‘mystery date’, Ponting looked every bit our Tasmanian George Best. The most talented young batsman in Australia seemed set on self-destruction.
With the efficiency of a bank securing its investment, the Australian Cricket Board hauled Ponting in, showered him down and paraded him as a repentant AA convert. At a press conference in the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Hobart four days later, Ponting, his eyes still bruised, conceded that he had an alcohol problem and would seek counselling. He uttered all the required bromides, apologised to his state and country, and then went to cricket practice. It was a sad and unconvincing performance from a troubled young man. We had seen this kind of flawed character before, it was said. Nothing could save him. You could take the boy out of working-class, asbestos-clad Tassie, but you couldn’t take Tassie out of the boy.
I met Ricky Ponting in 1996 when I became cricket correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. Our relationship, at best, can be termed ‘professional’. I didn’t like Ponting and he didn’t like journalists. During the next three years, I can’t recall exchanging a single word with him outside formal interviews and press conferences.
My first impression of him was a reminder that many great batsmen, from Bradman to Lara, are small men. Ponting seemed shorter than the 5ft 10in the stat sheets gave him and he couldn’t have weighed more than 11 stone. He was still a boy.
Every team has its careerists and its wild boys, and Ponting, whose love of the racetrack and greyhounds earned him his nickname ‘Punter’, gravitated to the latter. He was soon a member of the Australia team’s ‘in’ group. Led by Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, this clique shared a set of attributes - risk-taking, flamboyance, cockiness that verged on arrogance - that was buoyed up by their remarkable sporting talent. Talent was their insurance against the consequences of misbehaviour. As Warne has shown repeatedly, self-belief on the field can blur into a kind of sociopathy off it.
When I met Ponting, he was still a fresh arrival in the team. A teenage prodigy from Tasmania, he had scored 96 on his Test debut against Sri Lanka in 1995 before being given out leg before by the Pakistani umpire Khizar Hayat, who had his own colourful history (he had been the second umpire, with Shakoor Rana, in Mike Gatting’s notorious Faisalabad flare-up in 1987).
In his second summer, the boy was given a man’s job: the number-three position vacated by the retiring David Boon, the pioneer Tasmanian player and Ponting’s spiritual guide. It was a sign of respect for his talent that he should be expected to fill such an important position against West Indies’ ageing but still potent Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. He failed. Within two Tests he was dropped, the wonder boy sent back to finishing school.
It was the first real setback Ponting had experienced. As an 11-year-old he had scored centuries against men at the Mowbray club in Launceston, a town in northern Tasmania. A working-class suburb of mainly public housing, Mowbray was rough-edged even by Tasmanian standards and had the archetypal blue-collar cricket club. Mark Ray was an imported first-class player from Sydney in the 1980s who represented the Riverside club, in Hobart. He describes himself as ‘the perfect target for Mowbray to hate and destroy’, and the rivalry within Tasmania, particularly Launceston, was as fierce as any he experienced during a decade of top-level cricket. ‘Mowbray were rough and tough, aggressive, and liked a scrap,’ he says. ‘But there was a substance behind it. They played good cricket and I liked to have a beer with them after the game. Once I suggested going into the Mowbray dressing room and the Riverside boys said, “You’ve got to be kidding!” So I went on my own. By the time I left Tasmania, we had a booze-up and I think 10 Mowbray blokes turned up and only one or two from my own club.’
Ponting’s parents - Graeme, an outstanding golfer, and Lorraine - enjoyed the club atmosphere of sport, a drink at the end of the day and a touch of class warfare. The cricket was tough. Troy Cooley, a Mowbray player and England’s bowling coach from 2003 until his return to Australia this year, remembers Ponting ‘hanging around outside the changing rooms’ as a young teenager. ‘We were the working-class club and Launceston was the private-school club,’ he says. ‘The rivalry was pretty hard.’
Nine years older than Ponting, 6ft 3in and then one of the fastest bowlers in Australia, Cooley says he can’t remember the kid ever backing away from him in the nets. ‘He was scared of nothing. He came to the club as a dasher, a risk-taker, and the batsman you see now was the batsman he was then. He was fearless, never scared to play his shots, never took a backward step. And he was extremely ambitious. He was one of those kids who lived for sport and was good at anything he tried: football, golf. We’re lucky he chose cricket because he would have succeeded to the same level in anything else.’
As a stylist, Ponting is an aggressor who loves to confront bowlers; superbly balanced, he has a strong array of shots to every part of the ground. His greatest strength is also his only weakness: he can be too aggressive.
Graeme and Lorraine Ponting gave Ricky nothing but encouragement. Graeme has told the story of how he promised Ricky a new bat if he scored 20 runs in a game as a tiny boy against older players. ‘He was only little and couldn’t hit the ball very far but he kept playing these straight drives and good proper shots that got him to 20. So I had to go out and buy him a new bat.’
As a student at Brooks Senior High School, Ponting was, like most sportsmen, in no way academic. The usual career path was from school to the dole queue. The fast track out of Mowbray was sport. Brooks Senior High fed the local cricket and Australian rules football clubs, and in the Ponting home sport gave Ricky a sense of purpose and structure. His talent was noted early. Tasmanian cricket commentator Neville Oliver told a reporter from Hobart’s Examiner newspaper: ‘We’ve got a 14-year-old who’s better than Boon - but don’t write anything about him yet, it’s too much pressure.’ At 16, Ponting was plucked out of Mowbray and taken to Adelaide to be nurtured by Rod Marsh at the Australian Cricket Academy. By the age of 17, he was representing Tasmania in the Sheffield Shield. It was 1992. Full professionalism was new in Australia. Ponting was among the first crop of teenagers who could aim at doing little else in life but play cricket.
The gilt of prodigy shone from Ponting, but the shadow of Mowbray followed him. After being dropped in his second year of Test cricket, Ponting returned with a triumphant century at Headingley in 1997. But he faltered again in Australia the next summer. His father was causing embarrassment, too. The then chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, the late Denis Rogers, was concerned about the number of times Graeme Ponting would get merry at cricket functions and rave noisily about how great Ricky was. Then, touring India in early 1998, Mark Taylor’s team lost their first series since 1994. For the clique to which Ponting belonged, the subcontinent was an unhappy place to tour. As one Australia player complained: ‘There are no TABs [Australia’s betting agency for horse racing] in the whole country.’ Nor were there the other standard perks of the job: eager groupies, in-house adult movies, good golf courses. The players were suffering acutely from what journalist Mike Coward called ‘the curse of insidious and self-defeating Indophobia’. Australia lost the first Test in Chennai and then, in the second, in Calcutta, suffered their biggest defeat since 1938. Ponting struggled in both Tests, scoring a total of 89 runs in four innings.
He liked the game to be played at pace, and India required patience. Frustrations piled up. The night the Calcutta Test finished, some of the players gathered in the bar of the Taj Bengal hotel and watched satellite coverage of the final of a pre-season Aussie rules competition, between St Kilda Saints, for whom Warne had played as a junior, and the North Melbourne Kangaroos, who were Ponting’s passion. Warne and Ponting both once had dreams of playing Aussie Rules, and, in some ways, each has brought the physicality of that contact sport to cricket. The bar - and particularly the two players - grew noisy as the game progressed. Ponting’s team won. Most of the team went to bed. Amid a dismal tour, Ponting decided to let off some steam and went to a local nightclub, the Equinox.
En route to Bangalore for the third Test, we heard that an Indian newspaper was carrying stories about Ponting’s bad behaviour in the nightclub. The team management met Ponting that same morning. The manager, Steve Bernard, told journalists that Ricky couldn’t remember doing anything wrong, but they fined him all the same.
Sohini Sarkar, a woman who had been at the Equinox, spoke to me about how Ponting had been behaving in the bar. ‘With one woman,’ she said, ‘he rubbed himself against her. With another, he was pulling his zipper up and down, drawing attention to his zipper. One of the management asked him to leave and Ponting assaulted him.’
I wrote the story for the Sydney Morning Herald. As former Australia wicketkeeper Ian Healy once said, journalists were expected to be ‘part of the effort’. If you weren’t with ‘the boys’, you were against them. In giving the victim of Ponting’s behaviour a voice in the Australian media, my transgression was a major one. I was ostracised by the entire squad. But then an interesting thing happened. Two weeks later, after top-scoring in a one-day game against Zimbabwe, Ponting gave a press conference. It was the first time I’d been anywhere near him since becoming his tour-wrecker. We began tensely. If this was Mark Waugh, he would have refused to answer my questions. Shane Warne would have blathered emptily, without seeking to hide his contempt. Steve Waugh would have snapped sarcastic monosyllables. But Ricky Ponting, who was 23 years old and had just been embarrassed in the papers, looked me in the eye and answered each question expansively. He shook my hand and showed no sign of malice. It was, in that context, a more impressive performance than the century he had scored. It was at that point that I saw why people considered him a future captain.
His turmoil wasn’t over: the Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar, gambling problems and more form slumps lay ahead. Even today, the old Ponting isn’t completely dead. He rose during the 2005 Ashes with his on-field outburst at coach Duncan Fletcher, during the fourth Test at Trent Bridge, over England’s use of substitute fielders. He rose again in the first games of the 2006 season, in Malaysia, which everyone treated as meaningless one-day jamborees - everyone except Ponting, that is, who was twice in trouble for questioning umpires’ decisions.
Ponting is under constant pressure approaching a season in which Australia will strive to regain the Ashes that his own team lost. Former Test batsman Greg Ritchie recently said Australia couldn’t win the Ashes under Ponting, because his captaincy had been so poor ‘you wouldn’t expect it from … [an] under-14’. Ian Chappell, the 1970s captain who never lost a series, would rather that Shane Warne had the job. Chappell has said that while, in 2005, Michael Vaughan made ‘his players believe it was all under control … with Ricky you’d see a meeting of three or four guys and it would go on for three or four minutes. I don’t think he’s an indecisive person, but with guys like Warne, [Adam] Gilchrist and [Glenn] McGrath around him, great players, he didn’t feel comfortable telling them, “Piss off, I’m running this show”.’
Mowbray is not another country for Ponting; it is not even the past. He will never bury or escape the memory of the toughness of those early years and probably, like Allan Border, will get crankier with each new grey hair. Yet something did change in Ponting after the nightclub affrays. Perhaps he finally realised that he had too much to lose, too much talent to waste. ‘He was just growing up,’ Troy Cooley says now. ‘You knew he was going to fulfil his talent as long as the wheels didn’t fall off, and he just did a few things that would be typical of any young guy in his situation.’
Perhaps it was as simple as romance. Ponting used to be teased that his old Tasmanian girlfriend still clung to him even when he was an international star; but instead of following Warne down the path of excess, he found Rianna Cantor, a woman he adores. He extols his ‘beautiful wife’ and blows kisses from the field to her, rather than to the dressing room. When she met Ponting, in 2001, Cantor had no idea who he was - which, he has said, was the best thing for him. She was a law student at the University of Wollongong, graduating after they married in 2002. In his book Ashes Diary 2005, he wrote of her: ‘You are my inspiration, my love, and I am so proud to have you in my life. No matter what happens on the field, as long as I have you beside me then I know everything in the world is right.’
In his books, he thanks her family, middle-class and aspirational, rather than his own back in Tasmania. There is a sense, here, of a man who prefers where he is now to where he came from.
Rather than fulfil the template of uneducated working-class youth rising too fast and being destroyed by fame, he has more than fulfilled his promise and is acclaimed by many as the world’s best batsman - he averages 58 in 105 Tests, a record that places him in the all-time elite.
Since losing to England last summer, Australia have played 12 Tests, winning 11 and drawing one. In spite of the grumbling of Ian Chappell and others, Ponting has become an increasingly poised and respected leader, ‘a solid citizen’ as Cooley calls him. Ricky and Rianna have bought a big house on the southern Sydney waterfront, where their neighbours include the Waugh brothers and swimmer Ian Thorpe. They are settled and happy. In public, Ponting seems more at ease and serene than he has for many years, even if, on the field, the old rough edges are sometimes still exposed, which is as it should be for an Australia cricket captain. No one would like to think that he has gone soft. His mission now could not be clearer: to lead his hugely motivated team to victory over England and thus reclaim the Ashes.