I watched sport from the best seats for 45 years. But it wasn’t always a good time

Just as you can never be sure how a sporting contest will finish, so you never quite know where you might end up as a sports reporter.

Here’s one place: a walled-off patch of incongruously green lawn at the top of the Khyber Pass, the barren landscape falling away in all directions, eating cucumber sandwiches with the uniformed commandant of the Khyber Rifles in their barracks. In 1994, I did that.

It was in a break between Test matches. Neither our minibus driver, nor our armed guard with a Kalashnikov on his lap said anything on the way up. But at the top, they shared a couple of big fat joints, which made the return journey terrifying. It was at dusk, down a sinuous mountain road, unlit, unmarked and with no guard rails, but any number of overladen and equally unlit trucks, looming out of the gloom like prehistoric creatures.

Our protectors thought it all uproariously funny, but the AAP reporter sitting behind the rear axle, unsighted and swaying wildly, failed to see the humour. “We’re all going to die,” he shrieked. Fortunately, we survived and in due course, he became a senior backroom boy at the AFL.

Our hosts treated us on our return to Peshawar by taking us shopping – in a gun bazaar. Finally, back at our hotel, we hastily retired to a room behind a smoky glass door that did not officially exist: a bar.

Dangers lurk everywhere. If not in the lawless North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, then in the stranglehold of Australian wicketkeeper Brad Haddin in a bar in Johannesburg late one night in 2011. Though Australia had won, I wasn’t sure if his hug was meant playfully or murderously. I don’t think he was either. There had been friction.

Then there was a small-hours shout with David Boon in a bar off London’s Regent Street. You might think that was as perilous a place as any other I’ve been. But he’d made a big Lord’s hundred and Australia had won handsomely and all was well in the world, or only a little unwell when I woke up later that morning.

In Mick Malthouse’s sight line after a loss, beware. In Merv Hughes’ sight line after a win, beware.

I also survived a ball from Michael Holding, the West Indian who was not known as Whispering Death for nothing. OK, it was a tennis ball on a beach in Antigua, where Holding had come across a ragtag group of Australian journos, and asked for a bowl, and delivered it with a mercifully gentle roll of his arm, but still …

As life-threatening experiences go, these pale beside the pickles many of my long-term reporter colleagues in other fields have found themselves in. Apart from anything else, none were life-threatening. My upper threshold is merely hair-raising.

There was the time on the back of a motorcycle, clinging to the rider as he swerved through the dusty streets of Gwalior, trying to get me to a post office to plug the modem of my newfangled four-line display computer terminal into a phone before the dying battery carked it. I filed half a story, which was probably plenty enough.

It was not unusual at that time to file from laptops by jury-rigging connections between incompatible plugs. Once in Mumbai, my last resort was to hold two bare wires together between thumb and forefinger, close my eyes, pray and press “send”. It worked – and was not the first or last time a story slipped through my hands.

The wild frontiers are not all far-flung. In 1990, I found myself on a bus with Collingwood’s newly crowned premiership players, travelling from the Southern Cross Hotel to Victoria Park through backstreets because the main roads were choked with euphoric fans, who mobbed the bus, causing it to rock. Staring through the windows at the sea of supporters stretching off into the dark, coach Leigh Matthews self-mockingly repeated his finals-long mantra: “We’re not talking premierships.” Then he added, sotto voce: “We’re accumulating them.”

Another time at Waverley Park, a team manager invited me to step outside to settle some differences. His nickname was Middy, short for Midnight. As it happened, I preferred daylight and quickly put it between him and me. The enmity did not outlive the night.

Sports reporting does take you to the damnedest places. At Junction Oval many moons ago, I listened as a podgy young leg-spinner, not yet capped by Victoria, canvassed opinions about what he should do with an offer to move to NSW. My two bobs’ worth was that he should do as his heart told him. As it happened, Shane Warne stayed in Victoria, and the rest, you well know.

About that time, it fell to me to inform a young NSW cricketer that he had been picked to debut for Australia. Long before mobile phones and the internet, the team was phoned through to my newspaper office and I tracked the NSW Sheffield Shield team down to a restaurant in Flinders Lane.

They had been well-beaten by Victoria that day.I was able to lighten the sombre mood, but only after one missed heartbeat. “Are you sure it’s the right Taylor?” the manager asked. Two years previously, when Mark Taylor had been widely expected to be picked, his little-known state teammate Peter Taylor was instead, prompting a Fleet Street newspaper to manufacture a quote from chairman of selectors, Laurie Sawle, admitting to a “clerical error”. Now, though, my notes confirmed that there was no ambiguity, and Mark was on his way to his illustrious career.

As you might imagine, nearly all the most improbable places a reporter might find himself are in Asia. There was the night in Sri Lanka when I was in a taxi with some administrators who compared notes about a new concern: match-fixing. One, realising he had spoken carelessly, warned me not to repeat what I’d heard.

It corresponded with something I’d heard the previous night from an Indian journalist and punter who’d been cautioned not to waste his money on a certain match. Overhearing this, a Pakistani cricketer nodded mutely. A skeleton was starting to tumble out of a cupboard. But far from home and without internet or mobile phones, I could not add flesh to the bones at that time. In due course, the Herald’s arch newshound Phil Wilkins did. It was a story that ran for 10 years.

The best seat in the house comes in a range. For the spellbinding Freeman night at the Sydney Olympics, my media seat was directly aligned with the finishing line, maybe 15 rows back. I spent three hours in a poolside deckchair alongside Steve Waugh in Bangalore as he contributed generously and thoughtfully to an anatomical dissection of one Test innings; it became a Good Weekend cover.

A hunch led me rinkside at Salt Lake City in 2002 when skater Stephen Bradbury became, as an American commentator put it, a spectator at a safe distance to his freak gold medal. That story was like his skates; it ran and ran.

Where else? There was ringside at Festival Hall, looking down at my notebook and finding blood spatters on it. Oh, the glamour.

There was the achingly poignant moment in the Bulldogs’ rooms in 2016 as blubbering old men declared they never thought they’d live to see the day – and that was just the preliminary final. The grand final was something again.

There was the bus with a police escort at 3am in Colombo in 1996, where I stared silently at the floodlit site of a massive bomb the previous week that had spooked Australia into bypassing their World Cup match there. The bus was carrying the Solidarity XI, a hastily gathered troupe of Indians and Pakistanis who went to play a symbolic match there in lieu.

There was the cockpit of a Trans Australia Airlines plane flown by a cricket contact for a landing in Hobart. Qantas’s Presidents Lounge once, but I can’t tell you where or with whom.

There was a desk in a temporarily converted library in Cape Town in 2000 as the King inquiry laid bare the money-grubbing duplicity of South African captain Hanse Cronje and a barrister dismissed Cronje’s upstanding Christian alibi as “theological ventriloquism”. Judge Edwin King barred electronic media from the inquiry, so the world came to learn about each explosive revelation only as quickly as we could tap them into our rudimentary laptops.

There was The Lodge. I always knew I’d get there. It was for a PM’s XI reception, but I wasn’t the first or last to make it there without winning the popular vote.

Sportswriters dwell on courage, but generally don’t have to practise it – other than in the form of a question you don’t want to ask, but must. I saw courage of a different order in Pakistan in 1994. During a Test match in Rawalpindi, ABC commentator Peter Walsh’s father died back in Australia. Walshie thought to go home, but after a conversation with his mother decided to stay.

This was Australia’s last-ever tour behind closed doors. There was no live broadcast and the internet, as we know it, was still in the future. Fans in Australia could follow proceedings only through the scribblings of four print journos and the ABC’s hourly crosses to Walshie.

He was a mess, but at the top of the hour would dry his eyes, swallow hard, clamp on his headphones and deliver an update in an unwavering voice, then after switching off the mic dissolve into tears again. He was heroic.

Early morning a couple of days later, I found myself in yet another unlikely place, with Walshie and others in the long, cool shadows of Islamabad’s impressive Faisal Mosque. None of us were especially religious, but the place emanated peace.

In 2011 in Cape Town, death came closer still. Infamously, Australia had been bowled out for 47 and lost the Test match in three days. On the fourth evening, The Australian’s Peter Lalor and I were dining on the waterfront when I received a call from the ABC’s Jim Maxwell. There’d been an accident, he said. Peter Roebuck. Come.

Only slowly did I realise that Maxwell did not mean that Roebuck was badly injured. He’d gone over a fifth-floor balcony and was dead.

This is not the place to revisit all the circumstances, nor to again try to psychoanalyse the complex writer and broadcaster who was also a friend. For a couple of hours, Maxwell, Lalor, Geoff Lawson, Drew Morphett and I sat in the foyer of their hotel near the Newlands ground, trying to make sense of the senseless. The hotel manager dug up some beers, but we hardly touched them.

In the very small hours, I caught a taxi back to my hotel and tried to sleep, but was conscious of the time difference and knew all hell would be breaking loose in Australia. In the pre-dawn dullness of my tiny hotel room, I wrote an obit to run on the front page.

The next few days were a blur. I was offered the chance to come home, but did not. In a way that’s hard to explain, it made more sense to stay . Lalor, bless him, did the honours at the morgue. A walk up Table Mountain was arduous but cathartic, maybe like that mosque in Islamabad.

Jim Maxwell displayed courage, too, paying affectionate tribute to Roebuck in an unfaltering voice at the start of the broadcast of the next Test in Johannesburg a couple of days later.

To fill the special comments void, some of us pressmen were drafted in. It was the middle of the night in Australia – who would be listening anyway? Someone was, and on social media bemoaned my mumbling inadequacy beside the great Roebuck.

He was right, of course. That was the tragedy. It still is.

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