Clark overlooked, except by batsmen

Going mild … Stuart Clark's not your average fast bowler.
Photo: Dallas Kilponen

FAST bowlers usually conform to a type. Cranky. Skittish. Nutty. Fast bowlers scowl and swear and mutter and sulk. Only one Test player in history has been hanged. He was a fast bowler. "No doubt they are nutty on the field," says former Test opening batsman, Justin Langer, who got hit in the head again and again. "They're bullies, really, throwing a little red hard ball at 140-160kmh at poor innocent batsmen like me."

Stuart Clark, the fast bowler, goes against the type. He's not nutty, even if he claims to have a temper. His evidence is weak, buried in hazy tales of red cards on soccer fields as a teenager, or snippets of on-field abuse that fellow players cannot recall. He says he can unleash a rage that "just comes flying out", but no one seems to have witnessed it.

Clark alleges that he is impatient. This, too, rings hollow. He took almost a decade to break into the Test team last March. He was 30, an age when fast bowlers' spines creak and crack from years of twisting and jarring. He had appeared doomed to miss out. He had never been anointed as the next big thing. He had projected no aura of entitlement, boasted no cheer squads or flashes of glamour. Despite the sheer bastardry of the outcome, it seems Clark was easy to drop when the World Cup squad was announced on Tuesday.

A jumble of hinges and straight lines, not unlike a Meccano model, he took 26 Ashes wickets this summer at an average of 17. This followed a man of the series award in South Africa, his debut series, when suddenly his manager was calling to demand he shave for his "corporate image". Clark did not engage batsmen in gamesmanship. He smiled occasionally, an expression steeped in irony, a nuance unknown to fast bowlers since English paceman Frank Tyson battered batsmen with Shakespeare quotes.

Clark had looked certain to go to the World Cup. His wife Michelle was pondering a Caribbean holiday. "If I was selecting the squad, I'd be in it," Clark joked a few days before the announcement. He admitted he would be "devastated" to miss out. But if he did, he would be freed up to complete an extra subject for his commerce degree at the University of Sydney, which he undertook to qualify for a law degree.

Clark may play county cricket this winter. He may take an exam in "mergers and acquisitions". This helps explain why he is different to most quicks, who don't stack up as studies in wide-eyed wisdom. Long ago, he realised sporting success was no shortcut to enlightenment. Much of the thinking he applies to cricket has been gathered through experiences away from sport.

"To play cricket is something I love doing," he says. "If I'm not playing for Australia it would be with NSW or Sydney Uni or whoever it may be. Now I'm doing it at the highest level and getting paid for it - what is there to be worried about?"

Last weekend, Clark bowled a hat-trick in a state game and snared eight first-innings wickets. There was no stronger statement for inclusion, and he had typically delivered it without saying a word. But it wasn't enough: in hindsight, it appears the decision was already made.

Such disappointments date back 15 years, when he got dropped from fifth grade cricket but kept turning up to training. He meets adversity each time with a sort of awakening. "I go out into the field with no fear," he says. "They pick me because they know what I can do. If they don't pick me, then they don't pick me. I'll go to uni, I'll do life and do other things. That's what I can do. If people don't like it then too bad."

FOR someone a tick under two metres, Clark seems adept at blending into his surrounds. For the past two years he has regularly planted himself at a University of Sydney coffee shop or park bench. He has learnt more than business theory there. Many students seem to start a degree and "never leave", he observes with child-like wonder.

Lectures remind him of the classroom - smart kids at the front, dopes down the back. A few days ago, three boys presented cricket bats for signing while he waited for Michelle outside a shopping centre. Clark finds the recognition "weird". Even his biggest fans speak of his ordinariness. "He is a very unnoticeable guy in a lot of ways," says coach and former Test bowler, Geoff Lawson. Another close friend, David Givney agrees: "He's a person you do not notice."

Clark grew up in humble surrounds, but seems in no hurry to blow his relative wealth on pretensions. He can be spotted pushing 10-month-old son Lachlan in a stroller around Cronulla. The search is on for something bigger than an upstairs apartment, where Clark pads around like a giant in a doll's house.

He lays out his hopes with thoughts that overrun one another, and the occasional flapping of an arm. His urgency to learn is simple enough: cricket allows him not to otherwise work, but cricket won't always be there. Yet Clark's curiosity goes deeper than practical concerns. "I want to know everything about everything," he says. "Michelle thinks I am a busybody."

He speaks of being "hopelessly curious" and of a fondness for Question Time. His conversation is broken with sing-song lilt each time Lachlan looks to escape down the stairs. The Dan Brown book jammed into a shelf is Michelle's; Clark's curiosity does not extend to novels. He reads newspapers, and not from the back page in, picking holes in economic policy spin for the fun of it. He totes his laptop everywhere. The stock exchange is a favourite website.

His "thirst for knowledge" dates from his early 20s, when he was averaging more than 120 runs a wicket for NSW. "I've always found cricket easier when I've had interests outside of cricket," he says. "For those couple of bad years, I didn't do anything else except play cricket, and I hated it. I love the game, and always will, but I didn't find it mentally stimulating enough for me. I needed something else besides cricket to keep me occupied." Clark tired of real estate when he felt he couldn't learn any more - anyway, evicting tenants was never much fun. He wants to work in finance, perhaps funds management. His degree marks have been strong, despite many stymied study attempts. Teammates wonder why he isn't studying photos of women.

Clark does not want to be a lawyer, but the unseen mongrel within growled when someone suggested he wasn't smart enough to do a law degree. "I don't like being told what I can and can't do," he says. "It's like when you're told you can't touch the hot plate - you go and touch the hot plate."

His dedication to cricket, and now study, is embedded. After NSW won the Pura Cup final two years ago, Clark was home by 7pm. He nearly yielded to schoolies week after year 12, but played cricket instead. Passing on weekend carousing was once tough, he says, but "10 out of 10 times" cricket came first.

Stress fractures kept him out of the game for two years, and later ankle and rib injuries hampered his progress. He gained a Cricket Australia contract in 2002, then lost it. He stopped trying to be something he was not. It was a "big kick in the guts". He forced himself to discard the "if only" whispers in his head. Now Clark will do it all over again. "I've drawn a line in the sand," he says. "I'll start again."

HE always wanted to play cricket. Clark's father Bruce umpired his son's matches; his mother Mary was the team scorer. Younger sister Susan recalls a sibling rivalry. Her brother once pulled the plug on the Commodore 64 computer before she could record her Olympic hurdles event record. "I was a bit devastated," she says. "I still am."

Clark was a good student, averaging marks in the high 70s, though no one remembers him trying hard. He maintains close friendships formed at school. They include a real estate agent, Tim Skelton, an accountant and a professional golfer. Skelton says golf-course banter tends to be more about nagging spouses, or cars, than cricket.

Clark was never the standout. Brett Lee is a year younger than him. Growing up in Sydney together meant Clark was never the fastest bowler going around. Now they play in the same Test team as pillars of contrast. Lee will celebrate a wicket, any wicket, with antics befitting a game show contestant. He is a sporting rock star. Clark is a sporting tradesman.

He has refined his pursuit of fast bowling by pursuing other things. The reasons for his cricketing success are the same reasons that cricket is no longer as important to him as it once was. Once, happiness was measured in wickets. Not any more. Playing in a World Cup final would have been a dream. Yet other visions, such as the smile of his son, will endure longer.
Being hit for four is "fun, to some extent". Being abused by an angry tenant is "hard work".

"Cricket isn't all that special after a while," Clark says. "When Michelle fell over at five or six months pregnant with Lachlan - that was more stressful than anything I've ever done in cricket. Cricket can't be that stressful. It's not life or death."

Patrick Carlyon