Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

most difficult skills I became accustomed to performing them. There was no special magical quality, just superior practised skill. * * * * * Vital hockey training would have curtailed Charlesworth’s 1979/80 cricket season in any case. But the defining moment of the whole year – and in a sense of his whole life to that point – was neither the hope nor the eventual frustration preceding the Moscow Olympics in July. Preoccupying him much more than his hockey career, and the political controversies that were to surround Australian participation in Moscow, was the sudden death of Lester Charlesworth on 15 January 1980, at the age of 63. Lester had been a hard-working dentist who went to work before Ric got up and often came home after dark. After he retired from cricket, golf was his only relaxation. Unaware that he’d cancelled golf in the weeks before Lester died, Ric has written of his feelings of guilt that, as a doctor, he hadn’t ensured that his father had a rigorous check-up. ‘How many times had I persuaded reluctant patients to go for further medical investigation by saying that if they were my father I would insist they did it immediately.’ But his explanation, in 2009, of the circumstances suggests he has done himself an injustice in his account in The Coach . When his father mentioned one evening at Melvista Oval in Nedlands that he had felt chest pains, Ric told him he must see a cardiologist. Assuming that his father would do so immediately, Ric then flew to play hockey in the Champions Trophy in Pakistan. After returning to Perth on a Sunday he discovered that his father still hadn’t followed his advice: he died suddenly on the Tuesday. As a new father himself – daughter Kate had been born on 1 March 1979 – Ric was ‘increasingly appreciating how good a man my father was and how much I could learn from him. Just when we were getting really close he was taken away.’ He realised that if his father had lived longer ‘my choices in later life may have been flavoured by his experience. He was someone whom I might have listened to.’ He knew he’d already been greatly influenced by the man who was his harshest critic but also ‘most loyal ally’: 1976-1981 47