From the pain of Packer’s cricket revolution to Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech, Pat Cummins dives into the challenges of leadership
The deeply personal toll on cricket’s biggest stars from one of the sport’s most seismic moments is laid bare by Pat Cummins, after an extraordinary series of conversations with key figures.
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Ahead of the summer of cricket, Australian captain PAT CUMMINS is releasing a book – and it’s no standard sports memoir. Instead, Tested features a series of conversations with individuals who have inspired and influenced the sportsman. In this edited extract, Pat talks to Julia Gillard, Dennis Lillee and his own wife Becky.
‘WE WERE TREATED LIKE LEPERS’
Cricket legend Dennis Lillee tells Pat how Kerry Packer helped save the sport – and reveals the personal risks involved.
Media titan Kerry Packer had been watching cricket’s television ratings go up and up, and he badly wanted the rights for Nine. Meanwhile players like Dennis Lillee were increasingly dissatisfied with their pay, conditions and treatment. Starting with Dennis, Packer started secretly signing cricketers for a breakaway competition set to begin in 1977.
High-profile players in Australia and overseas signed up; Dennis told me that he doesn’t know of any who refused. ‘I couldn’t hold down a full-time job and play cricket, so for me it was [about] security. I had only a few more years, and we needed some sort of security.’
All up, fifty players were signed to what was to be called ‘World Series Cricket’. Planning began for six Tests and six one-day matches, all of them to be broadcast on Nine.
Then, in May 1977, as the Australian team prepared in England for the first Ashes Test, the story broke. The players who had signed a contract with Packer were nearly immediately banned from any cricket venues associated with the Australian Cricket Board or the International Cricket Conference (the international body governing the game). For players like Dennis, there was a real prospect that the breakaway competition might die on the vine and preclude them from ever playing first-class cricket again.
Across the world, the media screamed about the cricket ‘circus’. With establishment figures and Packer’s media enemies steadfastly, loudly and ideologically against the idea of World Series Cricket, initially there wasn’t a lot of public support for the players.
‘They thought we were being selfish and chasing a dollar,’ said Dennis. ‘That was how people saw it.’
He explained that this perception spread to players who were outside Packer’s largesse, describing a moment after the story had broken when he bumped into the wicketkeeper of his club side in the supermarket; the man wouldn’t even meet Dennis’s eyes
when the player approached him.
‘That’s how raw it got,’ Dennis told me. ‘It wasn’t a good time, but we believed in what we were doing.’
Dennis and many of the World Series players wanted to change their own circumstances, but they also wanted to protect the future of the sport. Dennis was worried that some of the best players might simply leave the game.
‘We thought of the game and also players in the future, because it was going to benefit players like yourself,’ Dennis told me. ‘It was going to be tough, but we knew we had to do it.
‘We were treated like lepers by all the establishment. Not just cricket but [the] establishment generally, people on the street, for a couple of years. Every current player should bear a thought for Packer and the players who stuck their necks out and were originally banned from all cricket.’
Success was largely down to Packer, who was hands-on in every aspect of the competition. No stone was left unturned in launching World Series Cricket, no question unanswered, no dollar spared but no cent wasted either.
Dennis told me about a time when a game was abandoned during a rain shower, and Packer personally berated the umpires because the match ball was left to be waterlogged.
‘He was a hard man but a good man,’ Dennis said. ‘He was good to me, anyway, and good for cricket.’
‘I COULD HACK IT’
Former prime minister Julia Gillard on sexism, THAT speech and what needs to change in Australian politics.
One of the most overtly adversarial parts of Australian politics is Question Time. It’s also a model that Julia Gillard told me ‘has increasingly run out of road’.
‘There’s been a change in the trust equation, and I think we do have to find more ways of interacting with the public, and some of those old models are inappropriate because people just don’t want to see people acting like that.’
She added that in the time since she left politics there has been a rising ‘lack of trust in democracy and … in institutions’ and that Canberra should consider reforms to address this slide of legitimacy.
But we’re not at that place yet, and we certainly weren’t in that place twenty years ago. Back then – and still today – if a representative wanted to thrive in politics, they needed to have sharp elbows, a sharp tongue and the ability to go on the offensive when needed. That was the game that Julia entered and wanted to master – and not only for herself.
‘I wanted to show, in my political career, that women could thrive and come to dominate that adversarial environment. It’s a proposition that was doubted then: whether women could hack it as hard as things get in Question Time. One of the things I showed was that I could hack it.’
**
Another infamous incident occurred in 2012. After remarking twice that Julia should be put in a chaff bag and ‘thrown out to sea’, the radio broadcaster Alan Jones said at a fundraising event that her recently deceased father had ‘died a few weeks ago of shame’. Julia told me, ‘I was angry at a time when we as a family needed to be in our own zone, grieving in our way. I knew it would be a big, big thing, so I needed to contact my sister so she could tell our mother before all of this rained down from the media. I didn’t know if the media would seek her out for comment.
‘Alan Jones would not have wanted to meet my mother in that period,’ Julia added. ‘She was in her eighties, but he wouldn’t have walked away, that’s for sure.’
Julia said the gendered and personal attacks were not only attacks on her but also emblematic of how women can be attacked in ways men may not be. Many women in and
beyond Parliament raised this with her and her team because they were concerned the next generation of women would be put off politics.
‘With my team, this group started thinking about ways to put a spotlight on women and the impact of having a woman as PM.’ In addition, she said, ‘Because I hadn’t done any of the calling-out [of the sexist attacks] earlier it became harder to do it. If I did it then the media response would be, “She didn’t do it then, why’s she doing it now? She’s only doing it now for a political reason, not because she’s genuinely concerned about it”.’
Then, on one parliamentary day, an immediate and unplanned opportunity came to speak on the topic of misogyny. About that speech, Julia said, ‘If I had agreed to give a speech in a month’s time at the Press Club about sexism, it couldn’t have been the speech I ended up giving. It was really the happenstance of the day and the opportunity it gave me.’
The ‘misogyny speech’ went viral and global. It is an iconic moment in our political history.
‘SOBBING ON THE FLOOR’
Pat speaks with his wife Becky about the strength at the heart of their partnership
The hardest travel I ever did was without Becky, but while doing it I took on board a lesson she’d been trying to tell me for years. In 2021, as the world was slowly reanimating after COVID had frozen everything the first time, I went to India for an IPL season. The season ended prematurely after a wave of infections hit India and we were sent off for two sets of two-week quarantines.
It was tough, being away from Becky for that long, and while in the first quarantine, I received a call from my family that made the situation even more difficult. Doctors had found cancer in my mum’s brain, and she was not expected to live much longer than Christmas. ‘That’s when things got really hard,’ Becky said. ‘I could feel how tough you were doing and there really wasn’t anything I could do to help.’
I’m not ashamed to say that I struggled at times in those long days in quarantine, as so many Australians did. I learned a few things in those weeks, though, about the impermanence of life and the importance of each day.
Before then, I’d had this idea in my mind that I’d go through my cricketing career first and, afterwards, the rest of my life would happen. Becky was often reminding me otherwise. ‘That’s not how life works,’ she said.
‘There isn’t any part of life that’s just the path to the next part of life. It’s all your life, it’s all happening. You have to live all parts of your life now, because it’s all happening now.’
She’d told me that many times. But sometimes it takes a low to reveal the truth of a lesson. It was only during that quarantine, then receiving that news about my mum, and afterwards, that I understood this one. It was painfully earned but very important.
**
Our first baby, Albie, was born October 2021 and I had to leave Becky and our son four days after the birth. A few weeks later, I was named Test captain.
It was a difficult time, and one in which I felt immense pride for many reasons. As Becky says, ‘We arrived home from the hospital on the day you left and I remember walking in on you sobbing on the floor while you were packing your bags. All I could think was: “Why is he so emotional? We are going to be fine. It’s not a big deal.”
‘They say ignorance is bliss. When I look back, [looking after a newborn on my own for about a month] was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life at that point.
‘But I got through each day knowing I would be on a plane soon and reunited with you, so I clung onto that. That alone got me through some very lonely and tiring days and nights.
When I finally arrived in Brisbane in November for the start of the summer series, we had two blissful days together before you were made Test captain.
‘It was an amazing thing to happen, and so deserved, but also it felt like my world had just crumbled. I had no control over anything. This baby was supposed to be the most important thing in our life, and all I wanted was for us to be together to enjoy him. It felt like that importance, and that time, was being torn away from me. Your new role was all anybody was talking about. It was all over the news. And every decision and every meeting relating to the captaincy seemed so pressing. I was so proud but also felt a bit hollow.
‘You stepped up to the task and were absolutely amazing. I knew you were the best man for the job and this was your time to shine, but what absolutely shit timing. I often thought of how selfish it was for me to be thinking like that. I was only a few weeks postpartum and physically and mentally exhausted, but I will never forget the moment I realised that I just had to go home and do it alone. I had to, because if Albie and I stayed with him, it would break your heart and also your concentration. You couldn’t be captain and a young father in that moment and I felt the best thing to do was to let you captain.’
I recognise now that it’s only with Becky’s love, strength and sacrifice that I can continue touring, playing and succeeding as I have been. Recognition and acknowledgement of the other’s successes and sacrifices is at the heart of any good partnership. Thinking now about how I’d describe Becky’s – which are largely for the benefit of others and go mostly unheralded – I think the right word to use is courage.
This is an edited extract from Tested by Pat Cummins. It will be published by HarperCollins on October 30 and is available to pre-order now.
Pat will be doing one book event this year in Australia: a Dymocks Dinner in Sydney on November 14. Reserve your place at trybooking.com.
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