From ballboy in an SCG riot to the voice of summer

In 50 years as a broadcaster, Jim Maxwell has seen more action at the Sydney Cricket Ground than most.

Generally, the moments have featured willow and leather and Maxwell behind an ABC microphone, calling the play from a box at the back of the stand.

But one of Maxwell’s most memorable moments came a few years before became a commentator, and saw him smack bang in the middle of the action, on the SCG itself.

The setting was the Springboks’ infamous rugby tour of Australia in July 1971, when thousands of anti-apartheid protestors attended to disrupt the matches and demonstrate against South Africa’s racist policies.

For the fourth game of the tour against NSW, after chaotic scenes in Melbourne, Adelaide and during a game four days earlier at the SCG between the Springboks and Sydney, police ramped up their presence in readiness.

Barbed wire was strung up between the SCG field and the hill and 700 police were on hand, but with flares, smoke bombs, projectiles and pitch invaders expected, it was arranged for young adult referees to serve as ballboys. One of them was a 21-year-old Maxwell.

“They didn’t want young kids out there because it was absolutely mad,” Maxwell recalled.

One photo from the Fairfax archive from the day shows the young Maxwell, dressed in a white uniform, looking on as police arrest a pitch invader, but with the game going on behind him.

“There was barbwire around the hill, there were paddy wagons on the ground, all the protesters had whistles. Then they started throwing stuff: billiard balls, tennis balls, you name it, and people tried to get through the wire on the ground. They got through the fence and got chucked in the paddy wagons. It was absolutely mad.”

Less than two years later, Maxwell was back at the SCG for a far more genteel event – an Australian cricket Test against Pakistan – and via an audition tape produced that day, secured a traineeship with the ABC that set him on a path to becoming one of Australia’s most treasured sports broadcasters.

Maxwell celebrated 50 years of broadcasting last month and ahead of the Sydney Test – the 338th long-form cricket match he’s called – the Herald sat down with the ABC’s voice of cricket to talk through his history at the SCG, the early days of his career, major influences, his favourite colleagues and the future of cricket.

EARLY DAYS

Growing up in Sydney’s east, Maxwell first attended cricket with his father in the late 1950s, but he was more occupied with collecting empty glass bottles to earn enough to buy a soft drink himself. By the time he became a member of the SCG at the age of 10, Maxwell was watching the action and recalls Sir Garfield Sobers parking Ian Meckiff in the Sheridan Stand on his way to 168 in 1961.

A keen junior cricketer at Cranbrook, Maxwell would go to Sheffield Shield games with a scorebook and spend the day dutifully recording the action. That progressed to writing a cricket magazine while still at school, which his mum would type up and be sold for five cents a copy.

“I used to sit up in the stand every summer holiday with a scorebook with my mate, and [Donald] Bradman would be sitting over there,” Maxwell said.

“He was one of the selectors with Jack Ryder and Dudley Seddon. They used to sit in front of the old ABC box and you didn’t go near those blokes. Very intimidating. It was still fairly intimidating when I got around to being in the ABC box in ’73.”

Like many, Maxwell didn’t know what he wanted to do after school and started an arts degree. He didn’t finish it – playing cricket and going to races was more fun – but after a trip overseas playing cricket in 1971, he returned home and his mum had cut out an ad from the paper.

“It was an ad for the ABC – to become a specialist trainee [in sport],” Maxwell said. “I had a fly at it, for the hell of it.”

Maxwell got the gig, and along with other young contemporaries in the program like Gordon Bray, Drew Morphett and Peter Meares, began learning the trade. The ABC was the home of almost every sport at the time, on radio and TV, and the likes of Norman May and Alan McGilvray were in their pomp.

CALLING CRICKET

A nervous Maxwell was in the ABC box calling cricket as early as the end of 1973, watching and learning from legends like McGilvray and Lindsay Hassett.

Cricket quickly became his summer home, but the ABC deployed him across many other sports, too. Maxwell went to Olympics and Commonwealth Games, called Sydney club rugby for many decades, and plenty of rugby league too; be it country group finals or the NSWRL in the 1980s.

“Most of the grounds we were down on the sideline: Brookvale, Lidcombe, Belmore, Cumberland Oval,” Maxwell said.

“The table became very important because if it rained, you’d get underneath it. It was rough and ready in those days.”

His first love remained cricket, though, and soon enough Maxwell became a familiar voice of the Australian summer. He saw the Packer pyjama cricket revolution come through and the proliferation of white-ball cricket, and with bigger and bigger sums of money in the game, the ever-improving standards of athleticism and preparation.

Maxwell is no olden-days romantic, mind you. He rates modern cricket as a better game than when he started, and he even enjoys Twenty20 cricket, or the quality games at least.

THE ART OF COMMENTARY

Maxwell tries to hold the line for tradition, though, when it comes to the similarly seismic changes in cricket broadcasting. The world is far different in the box, too.

“I asked Norman May one day, how do you manage the connection with the audience? He said you just have to imagine you’re in the pub with me, and just tell me what’s going on. What do I want to know? The score, what the expert thinks. That stuff. That was good advice,” Maxwell said.

“It was like the advice from McGilvray, which you didn’t get a lot of unless you asked. It was very pithy. Things like ‘you’ll never be any good unless you’re a good listener’ and in terms of broadcasting ‘copy technique and create your own style’.

“It was much more formal in those days. The tendency now, because the whole coverage of sport is more conversational, is to underplay the basic stuff. On the TV and the [Big Bash League], they’re mostly not talking about the game. It has changed dramatically.”

Maxwell sits in the ABC box for most of the day, even when not calling.

“When I get on, the first thing I do is grab the scoresheet and say ‘if you have just switched, the score is … xyz’. Because it is so conversational, it has lost a bit of that discipline,” Maxwell said.

It’s minor stuff, but important. But the irony lies in the fact Maxwell’s status as Australia’s pre-eminent radio cricket caller is because he’s a superb conversationalist, as well.

Many devoted listeners to the ABC cricket commentary are there purely for the light-hearted banter, storytelling and historical musings between balls. People bring cakes to Test matches to give to the ABC team.

“We have gone from not knowing if anyone was listening, to now we have interaction with the audience, with emails and texts, it connects you in a lovely way,” Maxwell said.

For some, the peak years of modern ABC cricket were Maxwell and Kerry O’Keeffe riffing off each other in the late 1990s and 2000s. Of the hundreds of co-commentators he’s worked with, Maxwell opts for O’Keeffe and former Herald cricket writer Peter Roebuck as the most treasured.

O’Keeffe was working for 2UE when Maxwell urged his ABC bosses to recruit the witty, but also deeply knowledgeable, former Test leg-spinner.

“In those days he wasn’t considered to be the ABC type, and all that stuff,” Maxwell said.

“But I said ‘he actually knows the game brilliantly, apart from all the shenanigans and frog jokes and all the rest of it, let’s give him a go’. So that’s how we started and Kerry had 13 years at the ABC. It was a good era. They were great years.”

Jim Maxwell on …

The best players he saw at the SCG

You are always connected to the more recent, so you just have to say watching Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath play for Australia was the absolute pinnacle. Two bowlers who consistently put a strangle on the opposition. There has been nothing like it in the history of the game, I am sure.

Just behind them was Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, and on our side, Ricky Ponting. Neil Harvey’s footwork, Bob Simpson’s catching at slip. And Gary Sobers was probably the greatest cricketer – total package – that we’ve seen.

The most exciting moment at the SCG

You’d probably have to go for the end of the game – everyone saw it or at least says they saw it – when Michael Bevan won the game (an ODI against the West Indies in 1996) on the last ball.

The most exciting Test series

(Maxwell has to go overseas for this category, opting for a tie between the 2005 and 2023 Ashes series in England)

This year, and that one, have probably been the most exciting to watch. In terms of the unpredictability of the contest. No boring sessions. This year probably moreso than 2005, if you look at all the other stuff going on, Nathan Lyon’s injury, the behaviour of the crowd at Lord’s, Mark Wood at Headingley …

The future of Test cricket

I think it is challenged, providing India stick with the IPL growth. They’ll have their own scheduling challenges, with more IPL franchises and competitions. How do you fit it all into the calendar year? That will be the squeeze for Test cricket – just fitting it in. I think Test cricket, outside the top teams, could struggle to survive because it won’t be viable.

Modern cricket change

McGilvray said when he was near the end, over a beer or whatever, he was asked what’s the difference between the game he was watching and the game he played before the war. He said ‘they’re athletes now’. And that’s only moreso from then to now.

So like golf balls, are we going to have rollback in cricket? Seriously, those bats are like trampolines. That’s the biggest change in the game in the last 20-30 years, the size and quality of the firesticks, the bats. These guys today can mishit a six pretty easily.

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