Daniel Ricciardo and Marcus Stoinis: How our F1 champ got Aussie cricketer back to his best
DANIEL Ricciardo and Australian cricketer Marcus Stoinis have known each other since they were 10. Here’s how our F1 star helped change Stoinis’ perspective after a tragic family loss.
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THE phone in Marcus Stoinis’s pocket just kept buzzing.
As he sat in the empty MCG stands on a humid Friday morning, it hummed in the air like a fly he couldn’t swat away.
Finally, he checked the alert, chortled, and thrust his phone in my face.
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“Look, it’s him. Of course, it is,” the Australian all-rounder said, laughing.
It was one of those rock-back-your-head style laughs. A real big, enjoyable one.
Daniel Ricciardo, Australian Formula One ace, was the annoying fly.
“He wants to FaceTime. He always wants to FaceTime,” Stoinis said.
Of course, he does.
The elite pair have been friends since they were 10, when they hogged the tennis courts on family holidays in coastal Dunsborough, about 250km south of their houses in Perth which, as it turned out, were only separated by a street.
“He’s a legend,” Stoinis said of his mate, as a serene smile came across his face and he went still.
It became a moment of immediate contemplation for the big, bright-eyed Stoinis, just two days out from a national one-day cricket match against England.
In that moment, seeing Ricciardo’s message, Stoinis realised how important their friendship had been amid a recent period of significant upheaval in the cricketer’s life.
Last November, in the middle of a Sheffield Shield game Stoinis was playing for Western Australia, the 28-year-old got a tap on the shoulder.
His father, Chris, had died, after more than a decade battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The illness had consumed the whole Stoinis family for a long time, not the least of whom was Marcus, who was also trying to carve out a career as an elite cricketer.
Father and son were close, but separated often by big distances, particularly during Stoinis’s four years playing for Victoria.
Stoinis spent as much time in the air traversing the country as he did on the playing field.
With the support of his cricket family, he was in Perth as much as he could be.
Interruption was everywhere though, and constant. He twice came home early from the rich Indian Premier League Twenty20 tournament, once for a 10-hour operation Chris underwent in Sydney.
But as Stoinis’s star continued to rise, the travel only increased, and so did his anxiety every time.
It was at its worst last October when Stoinis was picked for Australia to play a one-day series in India.
“Then the day before I left, Dad passed out in the middle of the night walking down some stairs by himself; he knocked himself out for three hours,” Stoinis said.
“And I loved India, the chance to be put in those situations, to play for Australia, because I had been looking at them for so long.
“But also, it was just unbelievably sad, and I wanted to be home.”
To be an Australian cricketer is to be part of an extremely elite club. At any one time there are only 11 of them playing for their country.
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The small playing pool attracts a necessarily high degree of punditry, too.
Good or bad, the chosen few find themselves pulled apart through wins and losses, centuries and ducks, big-wicket hauls or ugly dropped catches.
There is nowhere to hide when you play for Australia.
They are human, too, fathers and sons, enduring battles like everyone else, physical and emotional. They have families, and issues, and do not live untouched by the tragedies of life.
Support from within is more often than not plentiful, as Stoinis found during the most recent years of his father’s travails. But that freedom to come and go as required, in a high-performance environment, created its own mental dilemma.
“It was hard because I felt a bit like the boy who was crying wolf,” he said.
“Realistically, Dad could have passed so many times. He was told he had three years to live 12 years ago. But it wasn’t happening.
“We were all thankful for that obviously, but it almost got to a stage where I was nervous people were not taking me seriously. Not that anyone ever said that.”
It was, indeed, the absolute opposite of what Stoinis was thinking.
“After the Shield game where I found out Dad had passed, the South Australian game, their team wrote me a card, sent flowers to the house, the teams wore armbands,” he said. “I’ve been unbelievably lucky.”
Lucky to have Ricciardo right there, too.
Stoinis lights up when he talks about the time they’ve spent together over what is nearly two decades. Most of it was during their formative years, before their careers took them in very separate directions.
The distance, though, has not stopped them being close.
“We used to go down to Dunsborough south of Perth as separate families, but that’s how we met. We stayed at the same place, but realised as kids we were both ridiculously competitive, like little s---s really,” Stoinis said, smiling.
“We were playing tennis against each other every day, and we didn’t want anyone else to play, we would hog the court for the whole day. Then we realised we lived a street away when we got back to Perth, so after school we would go to his place, play more tennis. We have been close mates ever since. I have been to Monaco a couple of times to watch him in the GP.
“He tried to play cricket. He was good, but we quickly stopped cricket because I would dominate, and he doesn’t like to lose. So we’d go back to tennis, where it was quite even.
“We joke about it, because he is quite a clean sportsman, very sportsmanlike. But in tennis, and with two mates playing, he would pull out all the stops. He was a good sledger. He loves it.
“And more recently we were in an all-terrain vehicle, driving around his farm, which was as good an adrenaline rush as I have ever had.”
It was also an adrenaline rush Stoinis sought out as an antidote to all the anguish he felt after his father died.
No one knows how they will truly react to tragedy, or how they are supposed to act either. There’s probably plenty of wrong ways, but is there really a right way?
Stoinis has spent the past few years seeking out all manner of help for his cricketing career, and that includes a mind coach. He is meticulous with his career planning, knows where he wants to go and how to get there.
Dealing with the death of his father wasn’t part of those conversations.
But, as it so often does, the reaction to such a circumstance tells its own story.
“You probably don’t realise until you get to this stage how you were feeling before. With Dad, and what he went through, it wasn’t a hard couple of months, it was a hard three years, or 10 years,” Stoinis said.
“And I felt like I was dealing with things OK, but you realise when you come out the other side that it was taking a big toll on me, and also that I wasn’t as happy as I thought.
“Initially, before Dad passed, maybe I was a bit emotional, but I was seriously thinking about not playing for a long time. At that stage there was too much going on in my head, too many ‘what if’ scenarios. I had a lot of questions about things, about the support I want to give to my mum and my sister. The place I was in, yeah, I just wasn’t sure.
“But since it happened, I have felt totally different about it all. I want to make sure I do look after my mum and my sister. But I’ve felt like, and I’ve said it to my family, I’ve felt like just being a boy.
I felt like getting adrenaline rushes, playing in front of crowds.
“I’ve been with Dan who has been in Perth and we have been driving these buggies through his farm and swimming in dams and I’ve needed that, to feel like being a bit freer, and that is the perspective change. He has been good for me.”
Ricciardo may have invented the “shoey”, when he celebrates by slurping champagne from his stinky shoes. But more than anything, he is known for his perennial smile.
It’s not fake, either, and his endlessly affable outlook has taken hold with his lifelong mate on the back of a time in his life which Stoinis endured, and came out the other side not better for it, but better.
“He is in as high pressure an environment as anyone in the world with what he does. And he spoke to me about a turning point in his career was that he needed to remember to have a bit of fun,” Stoinis said.
“He is living a beautiful life, and so are we. But you get so caught up in performance, selection, media, social media, you forget to make sure you enjoy it. Sometimes you don’t, which is a shame.
“You don’t want to get to the end of your career and realise you didn’t make the most of the enjoyment you could have had. That’s the perspective change I have had.
“There has been a lot of emotional energy spent, for a long time, too. Maybe that clearing up, it might give me a bit more freedom.”
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