Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

In his fifty-seventh year, the quintessential amateur sportsman of the 1970s had found a career he’d never expected in a totally new professional sporting environment. The Kerry Packer-inspired revolution had transformed cricket. The Victorian Football League [VFL] had expanded to become the AFL, with two new clubs in each of Australian Rules’ outlying centres, Perth and Adelaide, and one each in the rugby league and union strongholds of Sydney and Brisbane. Most important for Ric – who would never command the huge salaries now available to elite cricketers, footballers and rugby players – was the development of national and state institutes and academies of sport, thanks to massive government funding following nationwide consternation at the country’s miserable performance at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. * * * * * Ric Charlesworth’s life in sport may have unfolded in a uniquely Australian environment. But it was also definitively Western Australian. Exceptional achievements in two fields were not without precedent in many places, when sporting calendars divided more clearly into summer and winter seasons than in the era of global television coverage and relentless international tours. In the rugby league stronghold of Sydney, Ray Lindwall had been a prominent full-back, while Keith Miller, in Melbourne, and Neil Hawke, in Adelaide (and Perth for a while), were notable Australian Rules players. 2 New South Wales batsman Brian Booth played 29 Tests between 1961 and 1966 after playing hockey for Australia in the 1956 Olympic Games. But the links between cricket and hockey were much stronger in Perth, where the game was played at the Western Australian Cricket [WACA] Ground until the end of the 1970s, even though Australian Rules was the major winter spectator sport. Western Australia long dominated the national hockey championships, especially since the late 1940s when the arrival of Anglo-Indian coaches and players, following Independence, helped to raise standards in a game already more popular in the West than in other states. From 1928 to 1992 – the year a new National Hockey League was formed – Western Prologue 7 2 And some readers may recall that in the fourth in this series of books, Bernard Whimpress reported on Ernie Jones’ prowess as a cricketer and ‘Rules’ footballer in South Australia.