Drinks With Max Walker

Max Walker meets Queen Elizabeth. Image: Getty Images

Do you have Twenty20 vision, or are you a cricket purist?I’m a purist. I don’t dislike the other forms; I speak at a lot of conferences around the world, and my subject is change, reinvention. Played well, Twenty20 looks great. Score 170-180 off 20 overs, wow! But you see four bad shots and they’re 4/50. The ten-or-11-year-old kid suddenly thinks that’s the right way to play: wham, bam, thank you very much, tee-off on every ball, no dot balls allowed.

In Test cricket, while we’ve had blokes like Gilchrist, there aren’t a lot of guys who can successfully hit across the line at a swinging ball and be confidently successful. So, what you see is kids mirror-imaging the guys they see on telly, but you need to have a technique. It’s like a building

– you need a foundation for it to stand up, and if the foundation – or technique – is weak, then you can’t bat against a swinging ball with four slips, two gullies and a bat-pad. It’s a whole different proposition to no slips, the field spread out, an old ball on a flat wicket.

Your books were a popular part of an Aussie summer. Any all-time favourite stories from them which you still like to spin at barbeques or dinners?

Look, as a speaker, you get tagged with, “Oh, that’s a signature Max Walker story.” Year after year, I’ll try and come up with some new stuff, but then people say to me, “I brought three of my colleagues along just so they could hear this one.” And so you’re rolling out last year’s talk to

a new audience. Which is lovely. One of my signature stories is about my old man and me playing in a grand final in the middle of Tasmania on a Sunday afternoon. I was about 12 ‒ we scored 17 runs off the last ball! Only a Tasmanian could believe that was possible. It’s a long story, but I think it ended up in How To Hypnotise Chooks.

The bat handle of the only bat we had in the club had broken ‒ we were poor. So the old man goes out with a picket! We run 17, the grass is a metre high. I’m compressing the story, but the old man walks over to the opposition captain and asks, “Do you really want to know where the ball is?” He turns the picket over and nailed to the end of the picket with a dirty great big nail, is a cricket ball. “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” my old man said. You’re allowed a little bit of creative license, particularly at a barbeque. My old room-mate Kerry O’Keeffe turned it into an art-form!

You were painted as an out-of-control madman in Billy Birmingham’s famous The 12th Man episodes. Were you consulted before he unleashed? And what was your initial reaction to his comical character portrayals?

We weren’t consulted. Billy would sit down with a mate in front of the television, whether it was the cricket or Wide World Of Sports, over a slab of beer, and he’d try and make his mate laugh. When he did, that meant it was genuinely funny, so he took notes. Then they’d write a script, go into a sound booth and recreate the voices of Bill Lawry, Max Walker, Tony Greig, Richie Benaud. That’s how it was done ... no collaboration.It’s a form of flattery or notoriety when someone mimmicks you. I haven’t been in a commentary box for 21 years at Channel Nine, contrary to when Billy has me say “Give me my job back” ‒ that famous line in The 12th Man. It was a conscious decision for me to leave. But it’s very funny and Billy’s won more ARIAS than Johnny Farnham, Kate Ceberano and Jimmy Barnes for his very Australian take on humour. He probably doesn’t realise it, but he’s been my PR man for the last two decades. Guys still come up to me and say, “Maxy, you’re doin such a good job in the commentary box,” and I don’t have the heart to say, “Mate, I haven’t been there for 21 years!”