Cricket, like comedy, is rooted in tragedy so it was natural for Adam Zwar to combine his two lifelong passions into a book.
For the 50-year-old comedian, writer, actor, podcaster and cricket tragic, his two passions combined like leather and willow to form Twelve Summers, a look back at his life and how his favourite sport has helped him through tough times, trauma and tragedy.
As the front cover of the book says – Being a lifelong fan of Australian cricket is harder than it looks.
Much like The Grade Cricketer has done via exposing the at-times brutal nature that cricket can have on a player’s psyche, Zwar revels in how its idiosyncrasies add up to a unique sport which allows players to dream big but to usually have those hopes crushed more often than not.
“It’s a very strange game. I really do see similarities between cricketers and comedy performers. They’re both superstitious, both massively in their own heads, weird, eccentric, loners,” he said.
“Essentially cricket is a team game played by 11 individuals, not a group construct like in the AFL, and it’s like in comedy where there might be, ironically, around 11 people on the bill doing five-minute spots.
“And you go out early and bomb then you literally have to wait for everybody else to do their spot and then you see them kill it, you’re sitting there hating yourself because everyone’s doing well. There’s nowhere to hide.”
He knows many stand-ups who take a lucky charm with them on stage just like Steve Waugh’s red hankie or have “Steve Smith-esque routines” before they go on stage. “All I can say is we are a bunch of weirdos and eccentrics, we’ve got that in common.”
The co-creator of a string of TV series, such as cult classic Wilfred, and the son of two professional writers, it was probably inevitable that Zwar would end up writing a book but the genesis for Twelve Summers came out of the blue.
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“I’ve always wanted to write a book. In my mind I’ve been preparing for it for 20 years,” he said.
“When the opportunity came, it happened through my agent who represents a lot of people you might want to buy a book from like Margot Robbie and Carrie Bickmore from The Project, so he said why don’t you write a book about cricket? Just write something down and I’ll send it through to the publisher and they went for it because there’s always a certain market for cricket books.
“No one actually tells you just how hard it is. It’s a big secret. In screenwriting you learn pretty quickly that if you don’t outline what you’re doing it will take twice as long so I did have a structure but that changed as I went through the book.”
Deeply personal in parts, Zwar goes well off the cricket topic at times, weaving in harrowing tales such as his private school upbringing with some light-hearted ones like hanging out with AC-DC as a young entertainment journalist and driving prostitutes around Melbourne’s suburbs as his second job in early adulthood.
Adam Zwar (right) on the set of Wilfred.
He manages to weave in the summers of cricket that intertwine with his life in the real world like the one-off 1995 home summer when Australia A caused a national civil war of sorts or the memorable 2001 series when Steve Waugh’s Test side tried to conquer India in one of the most significant series in history.
Like most cricket nuffies, Zwar has a very good memory for obscure numbers and incidents but realised “many times you are wrong” so he hired a cricket stats expert to fact-check his recollections after his own online research proved his memory was playing tricks on him.
“In his first Test did Justin Langer get hit in the head with his first ball? Well, no it was his fourth ball but that’s what everyone says because it’s a better story but it’s not right. You can’t have all the cricket nuffies come after you if you get that wrong.
“Cricinfo, Wisden, old newspaper articles, I exhausted the lot. I was loving do all that research, digging into the weeds to find out who did what when, revisiting those moments.”
Like the first international match he saw as a kid at the Gabba in 1985 when his main memory was Australian skipper Allan Border getting hit in the groin by a Viv Richards delivery and West Indies legend Clive Lloyd delivering a standing eight count like a boxing referee to his unimpressed opposing captain.
Growing up as an anxious kid in Cairns with dreams of wearing the baggy green cap but not possessing the talent to match, Zwar found cricket was a way he could mix in with the cool kids.
“It was always on in the background, my neighbours would be watching it, Dad had it on occasionally and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Then one day it clicked that this is the game for me.
“That first summer of 1980-81, I became obsessed with it, practised all summer in the backyard and it became a way to join in with other kids at lunchtime at school. They were like ‘you can bowl, you’re all right’.”
Zwar is also a documentary maker and has produced two on cricket’s greatest controversies – Underarm and Bodyline: The Ultimate Test.
The Bodyline doco uses modern methods to establish that Harold Larwood bowled roughly 147km/h when he was unleashes his thunderbolts toward the head of Australian batters in 1932-33.
He wanted to know how terrifying it must have felt to face that kind of hostile, short-pitched bowling with the archaic protective equipment of the time so it was arranged for modern-day speedster Brett Lee to play the part of Larwood and bowl bodyline style to Zwar wearing old pads, gloves and the baggy green cap he dreamt of wearing as a kid.
Adam Zwar preparing for the moment when he’d face Brett Lee wearing Bodyline era equipment.
The high-risk experiment was filmed a year before the Phillip Hughes tragedy.
Before he padded up for the over, no less than former Test opener Matthew Hayden told him he was mad to be doing it but Zwar pressed on.
“It was a stupid thing to do, probably,” Zwar said when asked how he reflected on that moment now with the benefit of hindsight.
“Everyone who plays first-class, elite cricket knows how dangerous it is” but he said the general public did not realise how damaging that hard ball can be if it hits you high at such rapid velocity.
Zwar referenced Australia’s skipper in the Bodyline series, Bill Woodfull, whose wife claimed that he died younger than he should have at 67 from a heart attack due to the many blows he copped in that controversial series.
“Elite players make it look kind of simple. Their hand-eye co-ordination is off the charts, they’re fearless and the Phillip Hughes tragedy brought it into the light that it’s a very dangerous game.
“I’d played enough cricket to know that it was dangerous but I had enough trust in Brett Lee to put the ball in the right area. I decided to step inside rather than back away. I ended up at point, deep point, it was hilarious how far I got away. Elite players see the ball from when it leaves the hand but average players see it three or four metres in front of them and that was what I did.”
Cricket is not just a tough sport in the physical sense. The mind games within the game can build or break the strongest of minds.
Although he no longer plays, Zwar seems unsure whether he misses the hot afternoons hoping today will be his day to shine.
“When you’re playing a two-day game across two weekends and you get out cheaply on day one then you just have to wait, and wait, and wait,” he said.
“You could learn a foreign language in the time before you have to do anything again.”
Adam Zwar facing Brett Lee.
There’s a double-edged sword to nostalgia in that it can paint a flawed picture of the past. Cricket is struggling to recapture the popularity of previous decades and there is no obvious solution for administrators to recapture the magic of yesteryear.
“Nowadays there’s so much access to whichever sport you’re interested in,” Zwar said.
“We tend to lionise the old days but if you’re a cricket fan, you’ve got access to a lot of stuff, great stats and some of the commentators talk about the game at a much more sophisticated level now, I think they have to.
“Back when I was growing up it was footy in the winter and cricket in summer and we knew every player in the Australian Test team which was pretty much the one-day team too.
“You were following a soap opera. You knew them all, about their personalities. Whereas now there’s more players (across three formats) and it’s harder to keep track.
“I miss the group consciousness that all your mates at school would have watched the same match last night or on the weekend and you could talk about it but now that seems to have gone which is a bit of a shame.”
The soundtrack of the summer in previous generations was the Channel Nine commentary crew centred around Richie Benaud, Tony Greig, Ian Chappell and Bill Lawry and once Zwar realised, much earlier than he would have liked, that he was not going to cut it as a player, he wanted to become a commentator but chose journalism which eventually led to comedy, screenwriting and acting.
Lawry and Chappell, the surviving members of that cherished quartet, have now retired and Australian cricket has lost a few more icons in recent years with the passing of Dean Jones, Rod Marsh, Andrew Symonds and Shane Warne.
Richie Benaud, Ian Chappell and Bill Lawry in 2013. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
“Warnie’s death was shocking but it made sense on a story level,” Zwar said, piecing together his thoughts carefully as he uttered them. “Everything about him seemed hyper real, he always talked about his scriptwriter. And if you’re writing a script that’s exactly how you’d do it. Send him out at 52.
As for the future of cricket, Zwar is genuinely unsure how cricket will evolve as the T20 format and the Indian Premier League grows in status, fearing that the sport will mimic football’s model where players spend the majority of their year playing for a club and then have short windows here or there to squeeze in the traditional international fixtures.
Whatever the future holds for cricket, Zwar will be following along, enthralled by the pleasure and pain the sport never fails to deliver.
To order Twelve Summers, click on this link. Whether you’re a cricket fan or simply a lover of a good tale or 12, you won’t be disappointed.
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