The Gold Coast, a gaudy strip of fake marble hotels, theme parks and high-rise apartments south of Brisbane, is not a very Graeme Hick kind of place. So naturally he lives there, having left Worcester, which very much was a Graeme Hick kind of place, to take up an appointment as a cricket coach, coaching being, he once said, “probably the last thing I’d want to do”.
Graeme Hick, a man responsible for 64,000 professional runs, has lived with the ‘enigma’ tag for most of his adult life. Only now does it appear that he has attained some kind of closure, writes Jon Hotten in the Pinch Hitter.
Hick is the breakout star of The Test, Amazon’s docu-series on Australian cricket’s attempts at resurrection under Justin Langer. Okay, star may be pushing it. Over the show’s eight episodes, an accumulated 421 minutes of television, much of which is set in hotel conference rooms – my word, they have a lot of meetings, the Australian cricket team – Graeme Hick utters not one single word. By episode two or three it is noticeable. By episode five it is funny. By the time you reach episodes seven and eight, it’s mesmeric, haunting.
Why won’t he say anything?
The Google search ‘Graeme Hick enigma’ returns 17,300 results. The first piece I click on, by the Guardian features writer Simon Hattenstone, describes him as, “a broad-shouldered, silent hulk”. The next is by David Foot: “Hick has never been much for showing his feelings. He is a dutifully courteous and laconic man.” The third comes from David Hopps: “His batting often seemed inexorable.” Kevin Mitchell: “A shy and sensitive man who happened to be simultaneously blessed and cursed with a gift for scoring runs almost without thinking.”
Graeme Hick doesn’t need to go there anymore. He told Simon Hattenstone that he’d seen a psychologist who’d said that if he wanted to move on he’d “first have to admit to someone close to him that he’d failed as a Test cricketer”. He did it, quietly, and his friend didn’t hear and carried on talking. But letting go was enough.
His silence in The Test is no doubt down to waivers and contracts and so on, but it about much more than that. It’s a kind of closure, and not for him – that happened a long time ago. No, the closure is for us, a polite but firm reminder that’s what’s done is done, and that Graeme Hick lives in the sun now.
Jon Hotten is a freelance writer, reviews editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and the author of The Meaning of Cricket, among other published works. He runs the popular cricket blog theoldbatsman.blogspot.com
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