Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

occasion, after both sides had scored over 300 in their first innings the match produced an outright result. After a substantial first-innings lead West Perth failed in chasing 150 in the second innings, giving Midland-Guildford victory by 63 runs in the last hour of the last session. Ric’s 15 was ‘one of the better scores’. * * * * * The epic WACA final took place in March 1970, as Ric’s life was reaching a new stage. Acceptance into medical school at UWA meant that he had matriculated in the top three to four per cent of school leavers. He had very mixed feelings, both then and in retrospect, about what seems a remarkable achievement for one so fully involved in sport inside and outside school. He resented the increasingly narrow focus of his school curriculum. ‘My school days had been full of sport and passing exams,’ he wrote in 2001. ‘What richness there had been early on in middle school had been taken away when I, like my peers, was directed towards matriculation and career orientation.’ The need to study maths and physics and chemistry meant ‘there was no room for humanities’ including the history and geography he’d done well in and the languages he’d enjoyed. Choosing German as his last subject, his ‘earlier interest in the arts fell by the wayside’. Accompanying these enforced sacrifices – that he would only redress with his mature age BA studies many years later – was the absurdity of making a commitment to medicine the year he left school. His early pre-clinical years of ‘dry science’ as a medical student provided little compensation for what he’d given up: It was only in my fourth year that the relevance of what I had studied came into focus. I had to examine patients and communicate with them. Suddenly I, and my fellow students, were faced with illness and trauma and often with death. The raw emotions that can go with this can be overwhelming for those just out of their teens. 11 It was the early 2000s before his and many other Australian universities began to acknowledge that school-leavers were too 1952-1969 19 11 The Coach , pp 31-32.