‘He took it as a personal affront’: How David Hookes became cricket’s provocateur

What prompted David Hookes to become the most quotable cricket figure in the country? His friend and longtime radio co-host, Gerard Healy, believes he has the answer.

In 1995, Hookes had just moved across from Adelaide to Melbourne to take up a gig with 3AW. Before the pair were handed the reins of the Sportsday drive show in 1996, Healy and Hookes started with a Saturday afternoon slot.

Six hours of continuous talkback and interviews, broken only by “15 minutes for Clarendon’s fish and chips” for lunch, as Healy recalls. Amid the many minutes of space to fill, Healy made a quip about cricket that Hookes took personally.

Then Victoria coach Hookes watched on as Nick Jewell batted in the nets in 2002.Credit: Getty Images

“When we first got together in 1995, I was very new to it and he’d had seven or eight years’ experience in Adelaide,” Healy tells this masthead. “He always used to say, ‘For this to work it’s got to be fun and you’ve got to have something to say’, and I’d say, ‘Well, how come no one ever rings up about cricket?’

“Everyone in Melbourne used to ring up about footy, and it was an innocent observation from me, and it seemed as though he took that on as a challenge. So he immediately came with these topics that I think he thought would generate talkback.

“He took it on as a personal affront that people weren’t ringing in about cricket, and I said, ‘Well, there’s got to be things to talk about because everybody barracks for Australia, it’s not like there are different clubs here.’ So I think he went looking for these sorts of things, which fed into NSW and the brown paper bag.”

By 2003, when Hookes made his famous assertion about Test caps going hand-in-hand with selection to the NSW side – “When they give out the baggy blue cap in New South Wales, they give you a baggy green in a brown paper bag as well to save making two presentations” – he was not only a radio and TV voice but the coach of Victoria, adding further gravitas to what he said. To mark 20 years since then, this masthead has looked at how baggy green caps have been distributed over the past two decades.

For Healy, there was always a mix of calculation and exaggeration to the Hookes persona – but no malice.

“Sometimes, I think it was calculated, other times it was off-the-cuff and he didn’t quite understand the repercussions of what he’d just said,” Healy says.

“He grew up originally working with a legend in Adelaide, Ken Cunningham, and Ken was one of the great ‘kick a Vic’ haters, and I think Hookesy saw NSW as his equivalent here, continuing to brandish that sort of comment around.

“One of them was when he started having a crack at Steve Waugh wearing the really old baggy green cap. There was this continual dialogue over a couple of years about Steve and that cap and whether he should change it.”

Another occasion, also in 2003, Hookes declared that in a Top End series against lowly Bangladesh, Waugh’s Australians should try to win the Test matches in a single day – win the toss, bowl the tourists out by lunch, bat until tea and then put them in again.

There were, of course, moments when Hookes’ remarks caused plenty of offence, seldom more so than when he rebuked Helen Cohen Alon, a South African who accused Shane Warne of sending her a series of sexually explicit text messages after they met on a 2002 Test tour, as a “dopey, hairy-backed sheila”. Alon was later found guilty of extortion in a South African court.

“It was only two or three occasions, but most of these things were never said with any malice and he was always trying to entertain,” Healy says. “He got it wrong occasionally but very occasionally – most of the time, he was entertaining.

“He got a few noses out of joint when he became coach, a couple of players who left Victoria and went elsewhere would never come onto the show, and there were one or two other casualties on the way, but Hookesy had a hell of a lot more people in his camp than the one or two outside.”

To Geoff Lawson, who battled with Hookes as rival state captains when they weren’t sharing the Test team dressing room together, his outspokenness was driven partly by knowledge of his own failings as a cricketer.

“He’s the exemplar of that thing about not being rounded enough to play Test cricket in different conditions when you have to play it everywhere,” Lawson says. “Hookesy is almost the perfect example of it, in that he played at Adelaide and brilliantly. He played square of the wicket, he hit the ball in the air, he hit through the line, didn’t use his feet – great hand-eye co-ordination.

“But he didn’t bother with technique because he didn’t need it at Adelaide. So when he got into the next level, you had to have the technique to go with it. He had times when he played well, but he’s a classic example of people who do phenomenally in Shield cricket but weren’t quite good enough for the next level because they didn’t learn to play on pitches that did enough.”

Whether you agreed with him or not, Hookes’ words had the desired effect on his team. While he may have been wrong about some of the Blues players in his sights, the message worked beautifully in terms of pushing his Victorian team to great heights that summer.

David Hussey remembered that Hookes had the emotional intelligence to separate coaching conversations – where he never referenced himself – and social exchanges over a beer, where he was more than happy to.

“Hookes was very smart and calculating, he always knew what he was going to do, very well-prepared,” Hussey says. “Even if he gave a rocket to a Victorian player for not doing the team thing or performing poorly, he’d give you a rocket face to face but the next day, he’d always follow up with you and explain the reasons why he did that in front of the group.

Hookes in action during the Centenary Test.Credit: The Age

“Some of my fondest memories were having a beer and talking about how they played in South Australia and how he went about getting the 100 off 30-odd balls against Victoria. But what he would do at training is say, ‘maybe you can think about playing this way’, rather than saying, ‘I would play it this way’ or talking about his own game.

“He was very modest when we were having those conversations around training, but if he was around the group at the bar, he would be the centre of attention and very vocal about how good he was. He read the room very well.”

Hookes had attacked Simon Katich for getting a Test spot ahead of the likes of Martin Love: “Love has got to be spewing to have Katich chosen ahead of him. What’s Katich done? He’s scored one century in two seasons for NSW. I reckon I could manage that if I played 20 Pura Cup games for Victoria.”

But Katich went on to have a prolific 2003-04 summer for both NSW and Australia, carving out four centuries including his first in Tests, against India at the SCG. Typically of Hookes, the episode ended with a gracious handshake after Katich made a century in the first innings of the two states’ meeting at Newcastle in January 2004.

“When he made the comments, I get where he was coming from, and I didn’t take it personally, I thought, ‘Fair enough, I didn’t score a Shield hundred last year’,” Katich says. “After those comments, I was just about at the peak of my game, pinging them everywhere. But credit to Hookesy, I remember he was one of the first to come up and say well played after the game, and I appreciated that.”

On the flipside, Victoria’s players were built up to a point where they achieved something like the impossible that week – a fourth-innings run chase of 7-455 against a full-strength NSW side. Hussey, who remembered plenty of harsh words from Hookes about not making the most of his ability, was the architect of victory with an unbeaten 212 that still leaves teammates in awe.

“I used to get runs in the first innings and then miss out in the second, and he’d regularly come in and berate me,” Hussey says. “Basically saying I was selfish and playing for myself rather than the team, and when I get out like that, I’m not doing the team any favours and letting everybody down.

“But the next day, he’d follow up – you’ve won the game so you’re happy but also feel you’d let the team down with your personal performances. But when you had a chat the next day and understood the reasoning, he was not only trying to do the best thing for the team, but helping you to understand how he wanted Victoria to play cricket that year.

“The way he just framed the theme for that week in Newcastle, us versus them, Australia v Victoria, he always had this inner belief we had such great batters that we could chase down anything. He was probably ahead of his time – there was a bit of Brendon McCullum about it in terms of the belief he gave us and the aggressive style.”

Unforgettably, this was to be Hookes’ last Sheffield Shield game in charge of Victoria. A week later, he was killed after an argument with a bouncer outside a pub in St Kilda, leaving a legacy of four decades in cricket, two in broadcasting and two crowded years with Victoria.

Healy delivered an eloquent, emotional eulogy on the air for Hookes a couple of days later. He now believes that Hookes would have gone on from Victoria to hold a role at national level as either coach or selector, not unlike the way Darren Lehmann found a way to the Australian coaching job a decade later.

In the new year, Healy will gather with Victoria’s former cricket manager, Shaun Graf, and others to mark 20 years since Hookes’ death, and recall the impact of one of cricket’s most distinctive figures.

“I do remember it really vividly because it was such an upsetting time, and I just made the point on air that I left the building most nights in a much better mood than when I got there, simply because I was working with Hookesy,” Healy says. “We were great mates off the field, we played a lot of golf together.

“He got it wrong occasionally, but 90 per cent of the time he was controversial without going too far. Most people saw him as a provocateur but an entertaining provocateur, doing it in good spirit.

“He was a great advocate for cricket, and a fine storyteller as so many cricketers are. I was one of the 570,000 people who saw him hit those consecutive fours at the Centenary Test that he kept telling me about. So it is incredible to think it is now 20 years since he passed away.”

This is the final instalment of a three-part series. Click here for parts one and two.

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