‘ The boy’ has come of age
STEPHEN O’Keefe was written off by so many in Australian cricket, he gave serious consideration to walking away from it all to set up a bar with teammate Peter Nevill in Thailand.
As selectors rolled through a neverending and generally underwhelming production line of 13 spinners after Shane Warne’s retirement, O’Keefe was consigned to the backwaters of state cricket, where his superior figures were flatly ignored by the most influential people in the game.
When O’Keefe’s mother Jann learnt of the thought her son was giving to packing it all up and moving overseas, she quietly “held her breath” and wished, “please no’’.
Yesterday, Jann was back in Penrith cheering on the Hawkesbury team which gave Australia’s newest 33- year- old star his start, toasting the achievements of “the boy” who fought all the odds and conquered the might of India.
The O’Keefes are a humble working- class family from Richmond in Sydney’s west, and Jann yesterday reflected with pride on the hours spent stuck on Parramatta Rd in gridlocked traffic, in a Ford Laser with no airconditioning, to get her son to the SCG — often on no sleep after her night shift at Hawkesbury hospital, where she worked as a registered nurse.
“He’s done the hard yards and he’s come back fighting, and that’s what he does,” Jann said. “That’s what we all do, don’t we.
“We’re from a working background like a lot of people and you make ends meet with what you’ve got and do what you can with what you’ve got.”
Warne’s criticism of O’Keefe, right up to the moment when the left- arm spinner broke through for his watershed 12- wicket haul in Pune, voiced publicly what so many other influential figures of that generation were saying privately.
O’Keefe and Nevill, NSW teammates both at a crossroads a few years ago, very nearly packed it all up and headed for a faraway land.
“We were both looking at the classifieds for our life after cricket,” O’Keefe told The Daily Telegraph at the time of Nevill’s Test debut.
“We even considered buying a shop over in Thailand and living over there for the rest of our lives. Thought it’d be an easy life, save up our last match payments we had and forget the world.
“It seemed like a pretty good option at the time.”
That experience of feeling he had reached the end of the line has, according to his mother, made him the cricketer and person he is. The man they now call SOK was affectionately dubbed “the boy” by his mother as a child because, born in Malaysia, the local women would get confused when they called out for Steve, and O’Keefe’s father, Stephen Sr, would turn around instead. With his dad often away on military postings as a chef in the air force, and Jann working around the clock at the hospital, O’Keefe was taught from a young age that the “world didn’t owe him anything’’.