‘For goodness sake do not make me sound good or fine!’ Peter Roebuck wrote to us in an email a few days after the interview. ‘Strong and bad points battle here as elsewhere!’ It was a stark warning—which we solemnly promised to take on board—but not a surprising one, for battles are important to Roebuck. He has a dramatist’s eye for the ordeal.
In Australia we mainly know Roebuck through his commentary on cricket in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and through the airwaves on the ABC. His is a fresh voice, often stern and demanding but always engaging with the intricacies of the game at hand, with the plot of each day’s struggle as it unfolds for players and spectators alike.
It’s unusually broad stuff, for Roebuck brings the outside in, revealing the way our shared contexts and stories may illuminate the drama at hand. His writing is as eloquent on the politics of racial slurs as it is describing the wonder of Michael Vaughn’s pull-shot. In recent times he has likened Nasser Hussein to Napoleon—‘waiting around [in vain] for the arrival of relieving forces’—and Steve Waugh to a ‘bloke whose lawnmower has broken down again’.
Here is a mixing of intellect with sport, mind and body if you like. Many of us have dreams of making the two meet; Peter Roebuck has made a career out of it.
But how might such a career evolve, and where might it lead?
It began with cricket. Born in rural England, coming ‘from a struggling family in some ways’, Peter Michael Roebuck had a talent for sport. Soon a respectable school provided him with a cricket scholarship and his parents with jobs. Then, in the early 1970s, in his mid-to-late teens, life became a bit more complicated—it was discovered that young Roebuck had brains. Suddenly, after a youth filled with cricket and hard-fought games, academia beckoned. Oxford offered him a place to study law, but people there told him he should ‘keep quiet about cricket’, that it was best to put aside such childish things and concentrate solely on his studies. This was not to Roebuck’s taste: ‘I wasn’t going to bring my brain and not me.’ So Peter Roebuck accepted a place at Cambridge University’s law school instead. There he found the freedom to both study and play sport, a combination that clearly kept him enthused, as he went on