Johnson v Warner? Pfft. Keith Miller v The Don was a real brawl

Harsh words said by one Test cricketing icon about another? It didn’t start with David Warner and Mitchell Johnson. Not only has it happened many times before but, as it happens, the most compelling interview I’ve done in nigh on 40 years at the Herald had some very harsh words at the nub of it. So let’s ease our way into it...

See, after three years of trying, in 1996 I finally got to interview the great Keith Miller – often regarded as Australia’s greatest all-rounder – in his home at Newport, when he was in his late 70s. Half his jaw and ear were gone to cancer, but the charisma, the sheer elan of the man at his height was fully intact.

“Miller’s career straddled the closing years of the Age of Bradman and the opening years of the Age of Professionalism,” one of his biographers, Mihir Bose had written. “He was easily the most distinctive cricketer of either age: to neither did he really belong. The Age of Bradman distrusted him because he refused to harness his undoubted gifts for the cause: ruthless, mammoth run-getting in pursuit of total victory. The Age of Professionalism feared him because it could not always curb those gifts.”

“Nugget”, as his teammates called him, was his own man, a manhood that had been forged in the furnace of service in the Second World War, flying bombers over Germany. But he didn’t really want to dwell on his heroics, only saying: “It changed me. All the death and the injuries and all the terrible things that go with a war. It means that when you come back, well ... you don’t want to muck around, you want to live it to the fullest.”

In terms of the effect the war might have had on his approach to cricket, the famous reply he once gave when asked why he never seemed to get too excited upon the taking of a crucial wicket, sets the tone: “I guess you don’t do those sort of things when you’ve known what it’s like to have a Messerschmitt up your arse.”

He did acknowledge to me the truth of the story that once, returning from a mission over Berlin, he’d broken off from the main protective pack of planes and gone for a burn up the Rhine on his own ’til he got to Bonn, then circled it a couple of times. Why exactly?

Teammates and rivals: Don Bradman and Keith Miller.Credit: Archive, Jamie Brown

“Because that was where Beethoven was born, and being a bit of a ratbag, I guess, I was just curious to have a look at it.” So he did. Then he flew back to join the rest of 169 Squadron, back on the ground at Norfolk.

After the war was over, he returned to Australia and walked into the Test cricket side. One DG Bradman was the captain when Miller made his debut in Brisbane, and each one established early that they were different kinds of men.

That was apparent from just the second Test he played. The Australians had batted first, amassing a score of some 600 runs over the first two days – including the usual 180-odd from The Don. Overnight, though, a Queensland tropical storm had hit, making the “sticky wicket” all but unplayable for the English when they took to the crease.

Keith Miller sends one down during a Test match.Credit: Archive

“All the England players were war boys,” Miller recalled, “and they were my best mates. I’m bowling, and there was little Billy Edrich facing. He was the toughest little guy you could ever meet, a lovely man, Bill, and he got a Distinguished Flying Cross flying over Germany in the early part of the war, when it was like winning a Victoria Cross.

“And I’m bowling ... and I keep hitting him ... bang ... bang ... and I thought ‘oooooh, that’s my mate Billy’, and so I started to ease up, started to slow down, fill in time, thought ‘we’ll win this anyway and that’s it’ ... so I slowed down.

“So Don came up to me, and he said ‘Nugget, bowl it faster, it’s harder to play this stuff on these pitches’. Well, that one remark ... I thought ‘here’s my mate [Billy]’ ... And then I thought were we playing cricket in England, where it’s a sport, a real sport it [would have been different]. Here we’ve got, the war’s just over, and we’ve got Don who was only in the war five minutes here – and here’s all these fellows, all been to war in the real tough parts of the war ... just come out here for a lovely trip ... and suddenly they run into this.”

I reeled. Did Australia’s second-greatest cricketer just say in the public domain, on tape, that Australia’s most revered cricketer Sir Donald Bradman had effectively let the side down by not serving on the front-lines of the war like he had, instead seeing service in Victoria giving physical training lessons in the army?

He had. And he knew I was taping it. But still, did he mean to say that? Because it was so sensitive, and he was so old, my editor, after listening to that part of the tape, decided the best thing was to read him back the story, with all the quotes I was going to use, and make absolutely sure that he wanted to say it.

Keith Miller in 2004.Credit: Getty Images

I called him the next day, and read him out the whole thing, pausing on the part where he said Bradman had “been in the war for five minutes”, ready to delete.

“Ten out of ten,” said Keith. “Ten out of ten.”

He knew exactly what he was doing, what he wanted to say. He made only one request: could we make sure that it didn’t have glaring, blaring headlines on it, making his comments more than they were?

Leave it with me, Keith. Before heading home that night, I got a firm promise from my superiors that we would do no such thing, only to see the puff on the following day’s front page: “Keith Miller: My problem with The Don.”

I immediately called Keith to apologise.

He didn’t particularly care. He had been a journalist himself for many decades and understood how these things happen. And the main thing was that he had wanted to say that for many decades, and had now said it.

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz

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