Smith abandoned boy lost in Neverland
Peter Smith is the father in the background. He is the big body who stepped forward and laid a comforting arm on his son when Australia’s cricket captain wept in public. It is Peter who kept loading balls into the cricket machine when his son, Steve, was wandering tearfully through the long night of the soul.
It is a strange image. There is Steve Smith, the disgraced captain of Australia, the man whom then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called ‘‘a shocking disappointment’’, quite broken, a world in ruins. And his father starts loading balls into a bowling machine. Come on, son, this will take your mind off cricket for a moment.
Looking back Peter Smith said, ‘‘You work on what you can control, what you can do to help. Putting balls in the ball machine, things like that. You have to work on that only and that’s what we did. Worked on what we could control.’’
I wonder about the Steve Smiths and the Tiger Woods of this world. They’re still playing games. They seem to be eternally caught in the twilight of their childhood. Like Peter Pan they never quite grow up. And that is all very well, but unfortunately the world is full of Captain Hooks, louring father figures who will tear them apart when things go wrong.
Cricket Australia systemically and ruthlessly infantilised Steve Smith. There was a talent manager. They invested in youth. Promising players were coddled at a young age and brought up to know nothing but cricket. They were taught that there was ‘‘an Australian way’’.
The baggy green was sacred. And so these young men grew into what their masters had made them. Winning was everything. Cheating was a word that became flexible. Professionalism, cheating, what’s the difference. So long as you’re winning, lads. The only boundaries that young Steve Smith knew were on the edge of
the cricket pitch.
And then the inevitable happened. One day the television cameras caught Smith and his mates doing something that someone from long ago said they weren’t supposed to do. Lots of cricketers had done similar things before, but this was a moment in time when the world was into moral outrage, trumpety, trumpety, trump.
So Smith was publicly shamed. And all the people who had taught him not to know right from wrong ran for cover. The corporates were saving their own skins. Prime ministers were standing on soap boxes. So poor little Smudger tells the world, ‘‘It was a failure of my leadership . . . I will regret this for the rest of my life . . . I hope in time I can earn back respect and forgiveness.’’
Sixteen months later Steve Smith cover drives the ball to the boundary for his second century of the match and raises both arms in the air. Commentator Nasser Hussein tells us that redemption is well and truly complete. And perhaps it is, perhaps Smith has fled his demons like Tiger Woods outran his chasing Furies at Augusta in April.
The crowd still had their fun with the 30-year-old Aussie. Some wore masks of Steve Smith crying. The masses in the Hollies stand sang, ‘‘We’ve seen you cry on the telly.’’ But there was nothing vicious about it. There was even a playful empathy. The yeomen from the Shires knew that Smith was just a boy who had made a mistake. It wasn’t his fault he could never grow up.
Even now Smith practises his cricket shots in the shower, shadow batting against a bar of soap. I imagine he has a coffee, picks up his teaspoon and starts fine glancing sugar cubes down to fine leg.
Steve Waugh, the former Australian captain, says, ‘‘I’ve never seen anything like him. He hits more balls than I’ve ever seen anyone and when he goes out to bat it’s almost like he’s in a trance-like state . . . He analyses every ball and it’s like a computer, he spits out the answer.’’
But is it much of an answer to live your life by. Has professional sport infantilised these young men?
I think of the late Brian Lochore and of the man he was. Lochore was a giant of a rugby player but he was also a giant of a man. When New Zealand was at odds with itself, a country ripped asunder by rugby’s relationship with South Africa, Lochore put the pieces back together again. Before the Rugby World Cup he had a group of players who didn’t trust each other. So he took the players out into the rural rugby heartland of the Wairarapa and billeted them with ‘ordinary people’.
Who in Australia thought to do something like that when their cricket world was falling apart. There was plenty of strategic planning and performance charts, but not so much in the way of good old common sense. David Warner and Smith might have done a lot better out on a parched cattle station than in front of a lot of TV cameras and microphones.
Are these people ever going to grow up or have we let them down? Have we created a mythical sporting Eden of professionalism that is really a wasteland of arrested development?
Author Gideon Haigh wrote that when the current Australian cricket coach Justin Langer visited the team as a visitor in 2017; ‘‘he was shocked at the dressing room’s degeneration, its inward focus, its pervasive hauteur. Yet that was a brittle cockiness, masking weakness and unease.’’
It was a grown up kindergarten. And has any of it left Smith, even now, in this moment of triumphant redemption. He touches his toes on the way to the middle as the crowd boos. He fiddles, and breathes, and scrapes at the dirt. A cover drive hurries to the boundary and Smith rolls his shoulders at Ben Stokes and has a few words. Oh, if only he could spend the rest of his life out in the middle of a cricket pitch, away from the cares of the world.
‘‘There were times throughout the last 15 months where I didn’t know if I was ever going to play cricket again,’’ says Smith. ‘‘I lost a bit of love for it at one point.’’
But what else is there. Without cricket Smith would have to leave Neverland. And how would he find his way out when none of the other lost boys know the way?