Review Corner: Bert Sutcliffe - The Last Everyday Hero

Bert Sutcliffe is one of New Zealand's greatest ever cricketers. Renowned cricket writer Richard Boock has penned the biography of our last everyday sporting hero.

By Brendan Telfer

Richard Boock’s credentials as a writer are well documented. As a sports writer he’s probably without peer in this country. He’s shown with this biography on Bert Sutcliffe that he’s capable of turning out more than just a fine column once a week. Graceful elegance marks his writing as much as cutting cynicism. Boock loves nothing better than to take his sharp verbal sword to the bloated puffery and empty rhetoric of our sporting bores (whose ranks, alas, appear to be swelling at an alarming rate). Rugby league buffoons, rugby louts, cricketing drunks and pompous self-important administrators are all fertile fodder for the redoubtable Boock. Those cliché-ridden exercises in idolatry which pass for ‘profile pieces’ which litter our Sunday papers he happily leaves to the ranks of the proletariat scribblers .

So how then would this commendably sceptical fellow approach the hallowed subject of Bert Sutcliffe, whose biography The Last Everyday Hero has just been released?

On the surface of it, ‘Suttie’ hardly appears a ripe subject for Boock. The great left-hander wasn’t just one of our most gifted cricketers, immensely popular with fans, teammates and opponents alike but his personal life stretching out to nearly eight decades was from all accounts beyond reproach. Would the feared Boock sword be rendered idle?

Sutcliffe’s life, for sure, wasn’t all beer, skittles and a ton of runs. Bert had to endure more than his fare share of sadness and struggles but scandals never appeared on the horizon. So would this worthy tome amount to little more than a 250 page cheer-leading public relations exercise extolling the virtues of old Bert? Well, yes, in a sense it does exactly that. Sutcliffe’s deeds were so wondrous (he was and remains our Bradman), Boock had little choice but to describe. To his credit Boock avoids anointing Sutcliffe’s extraordinary batting deeds with layers of soapy sugary rhetoric. At times you are left almost underwhelmed at Boock’s mundane descriptions of Bert’s batting deeds. Boock, I suspect, decided early in the piece, runs speak louder than clichés.

Let me say, straight off, this is an immensely enjoyable read. If ever there’s a dinner party in heaven for the very best New Zealand sportsmen and women of all time Sutcliffe will be seated at the table even if it sits only half a dozen - Snell, Lovelock, Meads, Sutcliffe, Halberg and whoever.

At the recent launch of this book at the Parnell Cricket one of Bert’s old cricketing haunts Boock spoke at length of the enormous debt he owed the late historian Rod Nye who, after years of meticulous research and preparation, died before he could pen the Sutcliffe biography. The family after long and careful consideration turned Nye’s massive research over to Boock and asked him to write the story of Bert’s life. They are, from what was said at the launch, pleased and proud of the final product.

Every stage of Sutcliffe’s career was marked by a prodigious outpouring of runs. There were the double centuries while a schoolboy cricketer, triple centuries in Plunket Shield cricket, his 2,600 run haul from the NZ tour of England in 1949 (second highest aggregate – surpassed only by Bradman) right through to his triumphant return to test cricket in his early 40’s complete with a blazing century in his first test back in the Indian heat. Sutcliffe was an out and out run machine. He batted with a beauty worshiped by his fans, his teammates and his overseas peers.

Boock and Nye have captured well the aura of adulation and heroism that accompanied Sutcliffe from the time he first shot to prominence until well in to his retirement and beyond.

The book begins with the gut-wrenching chapter of Sutcliffe’s and New Zealand teammate Bob Blair’s heroic stand in Johannesburg in the Wanderers test of that 1953-54 tour. The match, in hindsight, probably should never have been played on that treacherous pitch given the vicious vertical movement of the ball off the pitch. Wickets fell like ninepins. Unfortunately Sutcliffe suffered the worst, hit flush on the head with a bouncer from South African paceman Neil Adcock. The New Zealander collapsed immediately and, as one newspaper reported, ‘lay there without moving’. He was taken to hospital. Meanwhile back at the ground the NZ innings was folding fast at 81-6 they were still 41 runs short of avoiding the follow on when Sutcliffe returned his head swathed in bandages and strolled gingerly to the wicket where he then proceeded to carve up the South African attack. He hit an unbeaten 80 which included seven sixes and shared a last wicket stand with Bob Blair of 33 in 10 minutes. It was one of the most poignant chapters in all the history of NZ cricket. Sutcliffe a physically wounded soldier at one end and Bob Blair mentally devastated at the other end. Earlier that day Blair had been informed his 21-year-old fiancée Nerissa Love had perished in the horrific Tangiwai train disaster in the Central North Island on Christmas Eve. Blair was understandably left back at the hotel where he spent the day grieving for his fiancée but followed the match spasmodically on the radio. As wickets started to tumble, he felt he needed to be with the team at The Wanderers so got himself to the ground, to bat if required.

This tragic human drama framed the rest of the book. Fortunately the stories that follow are not as agonising as the Sutcliffe-Blair opening stanza- but equally as compelling.

This is an important and long overdue contribution to our literary history of New Zealand cricket. If you are a true Black Cap fan - read this. Our game, unlike Australia’s, is not draped in heroism. Sport needs heroes. In Sutcliffe we have a genuine hero – a rare cricketing hero. This fine book honours and salutes this great New Zealander.