DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 7

The Approved Kind of Ability

The crowd was in a state of absolute delirium, which was impressive considering none of them existed. I had just scored in the corner, diving over an invisible try line somewhere near the edge of the paddock, having beaten at least six imaginary defenders and one of those heroic cover tacklers who appeared only when my own commentary required late drama. He had missed by the width of my imagination, which was generous when I needed it to be and suspiciously narrow when I needed the match to stay alive.

The ball was not always a proper football, because childhood on a property was not organised by sporting catalogues or the neat expectations of people who had shops nearby. Sometimes it was a football, if one had survived long enough without going flat, being chewed by a dog, or disappearing into some patch of grass where balls seemed to go for retirement. Other times it was whatever could be made to serve the purpose, because a boy with a paddock, a restless mind and a reasonable supply of loneliness does not wait for perfect equipment before staging a grand final.

The try, of course, was only half the job, and any fool could score in the corner against nonexistent opposition if he was prepared to provide his own referee, crowd noise, defensive line and post-match analysis. The real test came next, when I had to walk back to the sideline, place the ball with the solemn care of a man carrying the hopes of a nation, and study the posts as though an entire season had arrived at my right boot. I had to allow for the breeze, ignore the abuse from the imaginary hill, pretend not to hear the imaginary commentator doubting my nerve, and then kick the conversion.

There were posts of a sort, though not the kind any respectable rugby league ground would have admitted to under oath. They were homemade jumping fence supports from the equestrian trials, with wattle trunks stuffed down through the tops to lift the height, leaning grotesquely into the field of play as if the whole structure had been designed by someone with a grudge against childhood pleasure. To me they looked like withered fingers from the hands of goblins, bent over and waiting to snatch away whatever joy might come from being alone with a ball, a paddock and a grand final inside my head. If the kick passed cleanly between those miserable wooden claws, I had won the match, and if it missed there was usually a perfectly valid explanation involving wind, loose footing, the pressure of the occasion, biased refereeing, or the fact that the ball had sat up badly at the last second.

This was not wasted time to me, although I doubt it would have looked terribly productive to anyone watching from a distance. It was rehearsal, escape, competition, fantasy and training, all rolled into one dusty, uneven and slightly ridiculous performance. I was Terry Fahey when I needed to be, or some other player of the time whose name carried enough force to be borrowed by a boy outside the fence at home, but never Graham Langlands because he came from the enemy, St George, and even imagination required some moral structure. I could turn space into a stadium, silence into a roar, and a patch of ordinary ground into the sort of place where a boy might briefly believe he belonged to something larger than the afternoon.

There is something about playing sport alone that adults probably underestimate, perhaps because they have forgotten the generosity of a child’s private theatre. They may look out and see a boy mucking around in a paddock, chasing a ball he kicked himself and calling a try no one else witnessed. Inside the boy’s head, though, there may be a premiership, a state final, a last-over run chase, a miracle tackle, a packed hill and a roar coming from a grandstand that only he can hear. It is lonely, certainly, but it is not empty, and sometimes it is the fullest place available.

That was where a lot of my skill began, if skill is not too grand a word for what was mostly repetition, stubbornness, loneliness and the need to occupy myself. Cricket, in particular, required a fair amount of engineering when there was no one available to bowl, because the game loses some of its romance when the bowler and batsman are the same person and both are becoming resentful. I would propel the ball onto the roof so it could run back down at me, pretending for a few precious seconds that someone had actually sent it my way. It was a poor imitation of being bowled at, but it was enough to create the feeling of response, of reaction, and of having to make a decision quickly rather than simply stand there imagining greatness with a bat in my hand.

The yard itself became the field, but it was a field full of laws, hazards and punishments. Shot selection was not governed by elegance, coaching manuals or the sort of freedom commentators discuss after dinner. It was governed by what could not be hit without consequence, because a boy can invent a crowd easily enough, but he cannot invent away a broken window, a dented tank, a damaged wall, or the sound of an adult discovering that sport and destruction have once again formed a dangerous partnership.

A wall created what we would now probably call an electric wicket, though I doubt I used the term with any great legal precision at the time. Anything that struck it was out, and its reach ran all the way around to point, which meant cut shots never really went behind square unless I wanted to lose my wicket to timberwork. Drives had to pass through the approved corridor between the house and the tank stand, or else be placed wider with enough care to avoid catastrophe. The straight drive, noble as it looked in my head, had to be negotiated with the architecture of the place and the knowledge that damage could bring the whip into the game in a way no cricketing authority had properly contemplated.

Flicks to leg were even worse, because the angle was small and the penalty for getting it wrong was not always immediate but was certainly inconvenient. Hit it too fine or too square and the ball could disappear into the wrong patch of yard, under something, through something, or beyond the easy reach of a child who had only wanted to feel, for a moment, as though a real bowler existed. Then came the long retrieval, the walk of shame across my own private Test arena, bat in hand, crowd silent, innings interrupted by geography. It is difficult to build a fluent innings when every second scoring shot sends you on a search party.

So I learned without knowing I was learning, which is probably the best way a child learns anything that later becomes part of him. I learned control because wildness had consequences, angles because the yard allowed only certain answers, patience because the ball did not always come back cleanly off the roof, and loneliness because I had to create the whole contest myself. I kicked until the leg worked out what the head wanted, bowled at things, hit things, chased things, marked imaginary balls, stepped off one foot and then the other, and slowly absorbed the quiet physics of paddock and backyard sport without ever thinking of it as physics.

The paddock did not care that I was from out of town, which was one of its great advantages. It did not care where my name sat on a class roll, whether I had arrived late, or whether some room had already decided how its furniture and children were meant to be arranged. It gave me space, rough ground, silence and the right to repeat something until it improved. That was a rare kindness, because not every room in childhood allowed improvement without first requiring permission to exist.

By the time I carried that ability into school sport, it had already been formed in a different kind of room. It had not been shaped in a classroom or a neat town oval surrounded by children who had known one another since birth, but in a rough private arena where I could be everyone at once and where the opposition was always available because I supplied it. I did not yet understand that this would matter, and I certainly did not have language for the way private loneliness could become public competence. I only knew that when a ball was involved, the world became less complicated for a while.

School, by then, had already begun sorting us into its small tribes, and it did so with the quiet efficiency of institutions that pretend not to notice what every child can feel. There were the town kids, whose lives seemed to join up neatly with streets, shops, teachers, local clubs, cousins, gossip and weekend arrangements that gave them a kind of natural ownership of the place. Then there were the rest of us, the out-of-towners, who arrived by bus or by some other form of distance and carried the faint smell of elsewhere. We were present, certainly, but presence is not the same as belonging, and children understand that distinction long before they can explain it.

No one had to announce the division formally, because children are quite capable of creating border control without a staff meeting, a policy document or a commemorative plaque. You could feel it in who stood with whom, who already knew the joke, who had played together on Saturday, who was expected to fit and who was required to prove that fitting was even possible. There was no cruelty in every glance and no conspiracy behind every group, but the pattern was there all the same. The town had its centre, and those of us beyond it had to find our way in from the edge.

I tried to soften that division in the ways available to me, though I would not have thought of it in those terms at the time. I did not have the social fluency to stroll in and become everyone’s natural mate, and I certainly did not have the sense to keep my mind from racing ahead at awkward moments. What I did have, or slowly discovered I had, was enough sporting ability to become useful to a team. Useful is not the same as loved, understood or safely included, but when you are young it can feel close enough to keep you moving.

Useful is a dangerous word in my life, because it has often been the doorway through which I was allowed to enter. It sounds practical and harmless, and in many ways it is, because usefulness has paid bills, solved problems, rescued messes and given me a place in rooms that might otherwise have had no patience for me. But being useful can also become camouflage, because people do not always have to understand you if they can find a job for you. That bargain began earlier than I knew, and sport was one of the first places where it looked almost innocent.

Sport gave people a version of me that required less explanation, and there was a mercy in that even if there was also a cost. In the classroom, ability could, and did, unsettle the room, especially if it arrived too quickly or looked too much like showing off when I was only answering the question put in front of me. On the field, ability had a more acceptable shape, because you could run, catch, tackle, bowl, kick or score, and the result was immediate enough for everyone to see without having to discuss it too deeply. A try did not require footnotes, and a wicket did not need me to explain the path by which I had anticipated it.

That was one of the great reliefs of sport, because it did not ask the room to follow the whole line of thought. It did not require me to slow down an explanation, soften a warning, reduce an idea, or clip off the branches so the conclusion could pass without causing offence. The ball either carried, or it did not. The catch stuck, or it did not. The tackle was made, or the try was scored, and for a boy already learning that thought could create resistance, that kind of simplicity felt almost generous.

There was honesty in that, even when the politics of teams and schools sat around it like old men near a boundary rope. You could still be disliked, ignored, teased or kept at a slight distance, but if you could do the job on the field, that job had to be admitted. A boy who was awkward in the corridors could become quite understandable once he was contributing runs, wickets, tackles or points. The acceptance was not always warm, but it was legible, and sometimes legibility is the first form of welcome.

I do not want to pretend sport was merely camouflage, because that would be unfair to the boy in the paddock and dishonest to the man looking back. I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it without needing it to carry a thesis about intelligence, survival or the social function of a well-timed tackle. I enjoyed the movement, the contest, the rhythm, the private ambition, and the little crackle of danger and possibility that arrived when a game began. There was no grand act being performed when I ran onto a field, because I wanted to play, and I wanted to be good.

The enjoyment mattered because sport did not feel like escape at the time. It felt like arrival, as though I had found a doorway into a world that made more sense than the one sitting behind a desk waiting for the next question to be answered in the approved manner. On the field, I was not just the boy who knew things too quickly or thought beyond the question. I was part of something simpler, louder and more immediate, where there was a ball, an opponent, a scoreboard, a boundary, a whistle, a start and an end. Compared with the strange social mathematics of the classroom, that felt almost merciful.

I can see now that I was being drawn into the world of sport in a way that quietly pulled me away from the world of schooling, not through rebellion but through emotional gravity. I was not burning textbooks in the backyard, refusing homework on philosophical grounds, or announcing from the tank stand that the education system had failed to meet my standards. It was subtler than that, and probably more powerful because of it. Sport gave me warmth where academia gave me measurement, selection where academia gave me marks, and a team where academia gave me reports, rankings and the slightly dangerous business of standing out in a way others did not always enjoy.

So, without quite realising it, I began to lean toward the place that offered the better emotional return. That is not the same as saying it offered the better future, and that distinction would become more important later than I could possibly have known. At the time, I followed the approval that felt human, the sound of teammates, the rough joking, the nervous energy before a game, the pride of being picked and the relief of being judged by something my body could do before my mind had time to complicate the room. Childhood decisions are not always made as decisions, because often they are just movements toward warmth and away from exposure.

There is a cost in that, although no one announces it while you are young and still half dressed in the borrowed confidence of a sporting team. No teacher stands at the front of the class and says, “Be careful, this form of belonging may influence the architecture of your later life,” and no coach pulls you aside to say, “Enjoy this, but do not mistake acceptance for direction.” You just move toward what feeds you and away from what leaves you feeling exposed. You choose subjects, habits, friendships, loyalties, ambitions and silences under the influence of feelings you have not yet learned to name.

Looking back, I suspect some of my later pathways were nudged by that early lesson, though I would not want to overstate it and turn childhood sport into the single villain or hero of the story. I had learned that the approved ability was the one that could be seen without being explained. I had learned that physical usefulness made me easier to include than intellectual sharpness, and that teams could open doors that classrooms only half-opened. None of that arrived as a clear thought, but it settled into me quietly, like dust on the shoulders after a long afternoon outside.

It would still be too neat to say I used sport simply to hide the other parts of myself, because life is rarely that tidy and childhood certainly is not. Sport was real enjoyment, real achievement and real belonging, even if it was also a simpler language through which other people could read me. The danger was not that sport was false. The danger was that it was true enough, warm enough and rewarding enough to make me take my eye off another part of myself that might have needed just as much tending.

Playing in the First XI in Year 7 had that strange quality about it, because ordinary school life usually makes a boy wait his turn even when he does not know who arranged the queue. Year 7 was a time when you were meant to know your place, and most of those places had been marked out before you arrived. Yet there I was, pulled into a higher sporting room, wearing ability like a permission slip signed by someone other than the usual authorities. It did not make me older, wiser or socially fluent, but it did allow me to stand somewhere I could not have talked my way into.

It felt almost absurd in the way childhood glory often does. One minute you are just another boy trying to work out where to stand, and the next you are in a team that carries status, history and a slightly larger shadow. I have sometimes thought of it, dryly enough, as my Harry Potter playing Quidditch moment, though without the broomstick, the castle, the scar, the merchandising rights or the useful advantage of magic. The comparison is ridiculous, of course, but childhood memory is entitled to the occasional ridiculousness when it is trying to explain the size of something that looked small from the outside.

There is a particular intoxication in being chosen for something older than you, especially when you have spent enough time feeling that the room has not quite made a proper place for you. It gives you a temporary passport into a room you had not expected to enter, and for a while the awkwardness of being out of step is replaced by the cleaner fact that someone thinks you can play. Not everyone has to like it, and not everyone has to like you, but selection has a way of silencing some arguments before they begin. It is a crude form of justice, perhaps, but at thirteen or thereabouts crude justice can still feel like justice.

That did not mean I suddenly belonged without question, because belonging is not a switch that gets flicked on because someone hands you a cap or puts your name on a team sheet. It is more fragile than that, especially when the old lines between us and them are still there, running under the grass like irrigation pipes. Still, sport gave me a bridge, and it allowed me to cross into conversations I might otherwise have watched from the edge. It softened the out-of-towner label, not because it disappeared, but because there was now something else attached to me as well.

I was not only the boy from beyond the town’s natural orbit. I was also a boy who could play, and in school life that small addition could change the way a person was received. It did not remove all awkwardness, but it complicated the easy sorting that might otherwise have been done. A child will take that complication when he can get it, because being harder to dismiss is sometimes the first stage of being allowed in.

That was a different thing to being the boy who knew the answer, because knowing the answer could make people suspicious in a way a good cover drive rarely did. The answer could arrive too quickly, carry too many branches, or suggest that the room had been moving at a pace I had already left behind. Playing well did not carry the same accusation. A decent tackle, a hard run, a clean catch or a shot placed where the field could not reach it did not sound like cleverness, even when it came from hours of private practice and a mind that had been analysing angles without knowing the word analysis.

Academia did not always get the same courtesy, and I suspect that became one of the quiet injuries I carried without quite recognising it. It could be tolerated, rewarded, measured, praised on paper and then quietly resented in the room, which is a confusing lesson for a child who thinks doing well is supposed to be the point. Sporting ability, thankfully, had a lower entry cost. Even a modicum of it could go a long way because it fitted the accepted mythology of school and town life, being visible, physical, tribal and useful on Saturday.

The rugby league teams carried their own version of that mythology, and many of the local boys were already representatives of something, or at least seemed to be. They came with the natural confidence of boys who knew the grounds, the coaches, the fathers on the sideline and the order of things. To walk into that as one of the out-of-towners was to walk into a room with grass instead of carpet and goalposts instead of blackboards, but it was still a room. It still had its rules, its loyalties, its assumptions and its quiet tests of whether you belonged there.

I could feel the hierarchy there too, though I could not have drawn it as a chart and probably would have been mocked if I had tried. It was not written on the wall, but it lived in the passing of the ball, the choice of positions, the assumptions about who should lead and who should wait. Town sport had its own established families, its own names, its own history, and you did not simply wander in from the paddock and expect the gates to swing open. You had to prove yourself in the only language the room trusted.

Yet the paddock had prepared me in ways the town did not see, and perhaps could not see because private preparation is almost invisible until it produces something public. When you have played one-person rugby league long enough, you have already been the halfback, winger, fullback, front-rower, captain, coach and disappointed selector. You have practised beating defenders who never get tired, kicking goals under pressure from crowds who never existed, and scoring tries in corners that require a generous interpretation of both geography and fact. The absurdity of it did not make it useless, because the body still learned what the imagination kept demanding.

So when I found myself among boys who had been trained through club systems, streets and weekend games, I was not as empty-handed as I may have looked. My skills had been honed alone, outside the fence at home, where repetition did what formal coaching had not yet done. I had brought the paddock with me, along with the roof, the wall, the tank stand, the narrow leg-side angle and the invisible crowd. In certain moments, that rough apprenticeship was enough.

There is a deep satisfaction in discovering that something formed in loneliness can survive in public. The step that had beaten imaginary defenders could occasionally beat real ones, and the kick that had sailed through homemade posts could sometimes travel properly between visible ones. The boy who had supplied his own crowd noise could now hear actual voices, even if they were not always cheering for him. That did not make him safe, but it did make him harder to overlook.

I do not want to exaggerate the glory of it, because this was school sport, not the Rugby League Grand Final, and most of the great moments of childhood athletic triumph are remembered by the participant far more vividly than by anyone else. There were probably fewer witnesses than memory would like, and some of those witnesses may have been thinking more about lunch than history. But to the child living them, those moments mattered. They were proof that the private world could connect with the public one, and that something grown in isolation could be accepted on a wider field.

Cricket carried a different rhythm but a similar relief, and it suited the mind in ways I probably did not understand at the time. It is a game of patterns, patience, calculation, nerve and sudden consequences, where you can spend half the day waiting for one ball and then have everything decided by what happens in less than a second. That combination appealed to me because it gave thought somewhere to go without making thought the obvious centre of attention. Field placements, angles, pace, spin, bounce, timing and the temper of the game all had to be read, but no one accused you of overthinking if the ball ended up where it was meant to go.

Cricket allowed analysis to wear whites and look respectable, which may be one of the kinder tricks the game plays on boys like I was. Football was more immediate, more physical and more forgiving of bluntness, giving the body permission to do what the mouth often had to avoid. You could run into a problem rather than explain it, which is sometimes an enormous advantage when you are young and full of unsorted feeling. Athletics, too, had its own strange purity, because a race strips away nearly everything except the body, the distance and the clock, though people will still find room for an argument if sufficiently committed.

Sport did not remove loneliness, but it interrupted it, and interruption should not be undervalued. It gave me structured belonging, which is not quite the same as easy friendship, but it is not nothing. When you stand in a team, even briefly, there is comfort in being part of a shared task where everyone wants the same immediate outcome. That comfort may not survive the walk back to class, but for the length of the game it can feel solid enough to stand on.

That may have been one of the earliest lessons I learned about rooms, though I was learning it with boots, bats and bruises rather than with words. A room will accept parts of you more readily than others, and it may clap for your run, respect your catch, laugh at your joke or ask for your help while still not knowing what to do with the full machinery of your mind. The approved kind of ability is the kind that does not threaten the room’s idea of itself. In sport, my ability could be celebrated because it served the team and fitted the story everyone already understood.

A boy who played well was not a problem to be solved. He was a handy inclusion, which is a modest phrase but a powerful thing when you have spent time wondering how to become less foreign to your own school. Academic ability could be different because it could carry the faint suggestion that you were moving too quickly, taking up too much space, or making the question larger than the room wanted it to be. Even when you meant no harm, the speed of thought could arrive like bad manners. Sport, by comparison, gave the room an answer it already knew how to mark.

I began to learn, without anyone spelling it out, that different forms of ability required different disguises. Sporting ability could be worn openly, within limits, because it came with a jersey, a position, a scorebook and the useful illusion that everyone had agreed on its purpose. Academic ability needed editing, emotional sensitivity needed burying, and pattern recognition needed careful packaging, especially if the pattern involved someone else making a mistake they were not yet ready to see. The lesson was not cruelly delivered, which may be why it took so long to notice.

Sport, then, became both freedom and instruction. It freed me because it gave me an accepted way to excel, but it instructed me because it showed how conditional acceptance could be. The room was not saying, bring all of yourself in here. It was saying, bring the part we know how to use, and when you are young, lonely and eager enough for a place, that can sound close enough to welcome.

At the time, I would not have put it like that, because I was not walking around school with a notebook marked Early Evidence of Social Conditionality, though it might have saved some later confusion if I had. I was just trying to survive the usual business of being young, out of town, capable, uncertain, proud, embarrassed and occasionally convinced that the world might make more sense if people would simply listen to me for five uninterrupted minutes. That last hope has caused me some trouble over the years, and not always because other people were being unreasonable. There are few rooms improved by a boy, or later a man, arriving with the full five minutes before anyone has asked for them.

People do not always enjoy being given the wall before they can see it, even when the wall is real and even when the warning is meant kindly. They may not want the cost they have not counted, the weakness in the plan, the assumption that will collapse, or the mess that will need cleaning up later placed on the table before they have finished enjoying their confidence. In school, I was already learning the earliest version of that lesson, though sport kindly gave me a place where the warning system could be turned down. On a field, I did not have to explain the whole wall, because I only had to chase, tackle, run, hit, catch or kick.

The mind could still work there, but it worked through the body, and the body was easier for the room to forgive. There was humour in it as well, because childhood sport contains a great deal of seriousness wrapped in absurdity. We treated school games as if selection committees, national pride and the future of civilisation were all watching from the boundary. In reality, there were probably a few teachers, some parents, several bored students and at least one dog showing more interest in lunch than legacy.

The seriousness was real to us, even if the scale was not. The jersey mattered, the team mattered, and the choice mattered because to be picked, especially when you came from outside the usual circle, was a small act of recognition. Children are hungry for recognition whether they admit it or not, and they will often accept it in whatever form it arrives. For me, that recognition came with an odd softness because it did not demand that I explain myself before being allowed to contribute.

It did not ask why my mind ran the way it did, why I could be sharp one minute and withdrawn the next, or why I could be useful and difficult in the same afternoon. It simply said, you can play, so stand over there and do the job. There are worse bargains in childhood, although there are also better ones if you know enough to ask for them. I took the bargain because it was available, and because I genuinely wanted what it offered.

I wanted the game, the contest, the belonging and the moment when the townies and out-of-towners became less important than the scoreboard. That was the best of it, because a team properly caught in the business of trying to win can forget some of its borders. The boy from out of town can become a teammate, at least for the length of the match, and sometimes that is enough to let something human pass between people who might otherwise have stayed in their assigned corners. Of course, the borders returned, because after the game school resumed its sorting and the deeper structures of belonging did not vanish just because someone had taken a catch or scored a try.

Still, something had shifted, and I do not want to dismiss that shift simply because it was incomplete. Sport had given me a way to enter the room without knocking quite so loudly, and it had given others a simpler story to tell about me. In that simplicity there was both comfort and reduction. Being reduced is not always an insult, because sometimes it is a relief when the full version of yourself is too difficult to carry into every room and too difficult for every room to receive.

The problem comes when reduction becomes the condition of acceptance, and you begin to understand which parts of you are welcome and which parts are to be trimmed before arrival. You learn to present the version that works, and you learn to leave the rest standing outside with its hat in its hands. Sport taught me that I could belong if I arrived in the right form. It also taught me, quietly and without malice, that the right form was rarely the whole form.

The athletic boy could be included more easily than the analytical one, and the teammate could travel more safely than the restless mind behind him. I do not resent sport for that, because I am grateful for what it gave me in joy, confidence, pride and friendships or near-friendships that would otherwise have been harder to reach. It gave me places where my body could answer before my brain made things complicated, and for a boy already learning to measure rooms, that was no small mercy. But I can see now that it also became part of the apprenticeship.

It showed me how to hide in plain sight, not by disappearing but by becoming visible in a form other people approved of. That skill would prove useful later, far beyond school ovals and paddocks, in offices, client meetings, committees, family rooms and professional partnerships. I would learn again and again to present the part that could be used while quietly managing the parts that might alarm, annoy or exhaust the room. I would become the helpful one, the practical one, the one who could see the numbers, read the pattern, fix the mess and translate the chaos into something manageable.

The paddock, then, was not only a place where I played imaginary grand finals. It was where I began turning isolation into rehearsal, and rehearsal into a kind of public usefulness. The nonexistent crowd cheered because I told them to, but the boy kicking goals through homemade posts was learning something real. He was learning that ability needed a costume, that belonging often came through the doorway other people recognised, and that you could be accepted for what you did even while the greater part of what you were remained carefully folded away.

So I return to that paddock now with more tenderness than embarrassment, because the boy there was doing more than filling time. I can see him lining up the sideline conversion, wiping imaginary mud from a ball that may or may not have been suitable for the purpose, hearing a roar that was really silence and believing, for that one kick, that the whole world was watching. He thought he was playing rugby league, and in the simple truth of the afternoon he was. He was also practising survival, though thankfully he did not know it yet, because knowing too much too early is one of the things this whole book keeps circling back to.