“The boys are 50, can you imagine that? It makes me feel old,” says a mildly alarmed Harry Solomons. The “boys” he speaks of are twins Steve and Mark Waugh, whom Solomons gave their first proper jobs in his Kingsrove Sports store when they were teenagers in the early 1980s. There the budding cricket stars roamed the shop floor selling bats and packing boxes but, by their own admission, not setting any benchmarks for employee diligence.
“I ended up out the back in the warehouse,” Mark once told cricket writer Mark Gately. “I used to go to sleep in this huge, big box. I used to curl up and have a nap in there.” Steve would term his work-day approach as “looking busy, doing little,” but more importantly working at Kingsgrove gave the young prospects plenty of time to hone their skills.
“They were both not the greatest of workers,” Solomons laughs. “They did their job but they were just hell-bent on cricket you know, you could see it in them. All they wanted to do was play cricket. I think they just both very well knew that they would make it to the next level and into the Australian side. Mark was very laid back. Steve was a lot more intense.”
In a subtle sign of things to come, at first only Steve won a bat sponsorship from Solomons, then an agent for the Indian bat brand Symonds. “The only reason [Mark] didn’t get the deal is that I didn’t have the budget for it. I’d blown my budget by sponsoring so many others. But in the end a few months later I said, ‘Bugger it, I’m going to do it’ and so I sponsored Mark too.”
Their New South Wales underage squad team-mate Mark Taylor was another junior to benefit from Solomons’ patronage, as did the Symonds brand’s marquee name Allan Border, whose $11,000 deal to endorse the bats tripled the contracts on offer to all of his Australian team-mates. Equivalent deals now push the $500,000 mark.
Back then juniors made do with a token fee and some bats, but the Waugh brothers’ time working at Kingsgrove was also when they started chasing the dream and finding their way in the world once their high school days were done. For them that period of upheaval was mercifully brief – barely 12 months – but certainly revealing of the character traits displayed in the international cricket careers that were to follow.
Steve enrolled in Milperra Teachers College but lasted a grand total of 90 minutes and only then after missing two weeks of classes whilst playing for the Australian Under-19s. Halfway through a music lecture he gathered his things and walked out. “Looking back it was a gutsy move but I knew it wasn’t for me,” Waugh told Gately. Later Milperra would put his name up on one of their honor boards.
With that, Steve had made cricket the only option for himself. Solomons already knew that from the amount of times the deadly-serious teenager had sat down in front of him and earnestly discussed his plans for his life in the game. “Steve knew he was going to make it in the big leagues,” says Solomons, “you could see it in his eyes. He had burning eyes. He was very ambitious and knew exactly what he wanted and where he wanted to be.” Besides his time at Kingsgrove, Waugh worked a day each week for three months doing manual labour for the Bankstown Council “tree gang”, but soon he’d be done with 9-5 jobs for good.
Cricket success came quickly. It was Solomons who handed Steve the phone when the New South Wales selectors first called with good news, a point at which Waugh would later say he had $100 to his name. Within days he was rooming with Imran Khan and not much longer after that Solomons gathered all of Waugh’s colleagues around him, cracking open a bottle of champagne to celebrate his Test selection for Australia.
Through all of that Mark hadn’t even bothered applying for university positions and when it came to cricket, the bus took a little longer to arrive as well. For a year while Steve’s career launched, he had to make do with his shifts at Kingsgrove, but his confidence that he’d make it too never waned. Real work, he thought, was for suckers.
At 67, Solomons is now an institution of New South Wales cricket himself, having built his the Kingsgrove business from a storage space the size of a bedroom in 1976 to six showrooms around the state, along with practice facilities that have been utilised by a roll call of international cricket legends. “He’s pure gold,” said former Test all-rounder Greg Matthews of the cricket kit guru.
Though the edges on the bats he sells are now three times as thick as back then, Solomons remains something of a throwback to the days before junior cricket pathway systems, academies and centres of excellence. In the early 1980s, if you were an ambitious young cricketer in Western Sydney like the Waugh brothers were, Solomons was a good man to know.
As well as sponsoring promising young players, Solomons helmed his own all-star touring team (“all my young hopefuls”) that travelled around New South Wales playing exhibition games and giving players like the Waughs more match practice. “I used to marvel at the way the boys fielded,” he says in something like paternal appreciation.
“Mark would almost be able to snap out a fly. His anticipation was so good he never even got dirty.” In honour of the pair Solomons soon started producing ‘Star Waughs’ posters in the style of the George Lucas sci-fi classic.
Perhaps there’s just some mystical quality hidden in the walls at Kingsgrove. In a remarkable dovetailing of eras, a decade after the Waugh brothers passed through Solomons took on a far more diligent warehouse packer who harboured dreams of one day captaining his country on the SCG. His name was Michael Clarke. “He was a very good worker, packing boxes. He was a good staff member and had a great personality and always did the right thing.” Three years with Solomons and he was on his way too.
Though he’s pained slightly to admit how quickly life has come full circle, Harry Solomons now sells Steve Waugh bats for his son Austin, a promising young New South Wales colt just as his father was when he first walked through the door.
“I can’t believe it,” says Solomons. “Time certainly flies. I’m enthralled to think that these two young boys, to whom I was mentor of sorts, that those boys are now 50. It feels funny. It feels funny that Michael Clarke is in his 30s and maybe in the throes of contemplating retirement.”
As Solomons departs and gets back to business he’s still full of pride at how life panned out for his famous employees. “As far as these two boys are concerned, they’ve done very well for themselves.”
