The game is not the same. They were words once synonymous with the ABCs doyen cricket broadcaster Alan McGilvray, but apply well to his commentary heir Jim Maxwell now that the heart and soul of the national broadcaster’s cricket coverage is missing for the start of the Australian summer.
Perhaps we should start by blaming Maxwell’s beloved former colleague Kerry O’Keefe for the worst commentary mozz of all time. “It’s hard to imagine summer in Australia without Jim Maxwell,” O’Keefe recently wrote. It’s right there on the cover of Maxwell’s new book, The Sound of Summer, like a straight-faced setup awaiting O’Keefe’s signature lunatic cackle.
But here we are, one game into a potentially gripping Test series between Australia and South Africa and the soothing reassurance of Maxwell’s voice is glaringly absent from homes, cars and gardens around the country.
It happened in August, while Maxwell was covering the Rio Olympics from an outside broadcast van in Redfern. Of course he was on air. The 66-year-old uncharacteristically slurred an athlete’s name before his colleague Tim Gavel quickly realised what was happening. “Jim’s just had a stroke,” said Gavel, and Maxwell was promptly rushed off to St Vincent’s hospital.
If it’s a disorienting blow for all of us who treasure Maxwell’s warm and unflappable on-air persona, and his unmistakably mellow and scholarly dispatches from cricket grounds around Australia, it’s been just as frustrating for the man himself.
“After the first Test I’d have to say I have withdrawal symptoms,” Maxwell tells Guardian Australia in the days following Australia’s summer-opening loss in Perth. “I’m not used to sitting in the lounge watching TV and listening to the radio all day. I haven’t missed a Test match for so long that it feels very strange.”
He’s not wrong. Maxwell has, at his estimation, clocked up 285 Tests and in excess of 300 one-day internationals across five decades with Aunty. In lieu of his physical presence, colleagues at the ABC have set up a makeshift studio in Maxwell’s house, which allows him to come in for some brief comments during the lunch break, and his irreplaceable vocal chords are thankfully undamaged from his medical setback.
“The speech pathologist kicked me out after two weeks and said there was nothing wrong with my voice,” says Maxwell, who later in our conversation does a Daryl Eastlake impression that has me equally convinced he retains his full range. “I’m injured,” is the description he settles on, falling back on sporting terminology.
For now Maxwell is focused primarily on his physical recovery – six weeks of intense rehab followed by more from home, where he’s hoping constant games of Wii golf can have him back on real courses when strength returns to the right side of his body, and stamina comes back to the rest.
But his spirits are high and all things going well, he’ll be back on air for the 4 December one-day international against New Zealand at the SCG (“I don’t know how long I’ll last in a day-night game but we’ll give it a crack,” he says) and hopefully the Sydney Test against Pakistan a month later, which would be poetic 40 years on from his first Test call, which featured the same pairing of teams.
When Maxwell first swung the job at the ABC in an attempt to avoid his father’s fate of a life in law, Pakistan also featured. His eventual boss Bernie Kerr sent the young hopeful off into the back of the SCG’s Noble stand with a tape recorder to cut a 20-minute audition tape during the 1973 SCG Test. At the crease, edging their way to a game-winning partnership, were Bob Massie and one-Test-wonder John Watkins, whose longevity in the game differed markedly in the end from the young man pitching his commentary work.
“I’m far more relaxed than I was when I started out nervously and excitedly,” Maxwell laughs. “I was speaking too fast. It takes time to develop a style.”
Forty-three years on and he now sits in the pantheon with not only McGilvray for the esteem in which the public holds him, but the likes of Richie Benaud, with whom Maxwell shared a warm relationship through their combined involvement in the Primary Club and a mutual respect as broadcasters.
The mention of Benaud hits upon a melancholy note, leading one’s mind to the decade-long succession of losses suffered in Australian sports commentary ranks, including the deaths of Benaud and his stalwart Nine colleague Tony Greig, along with those of Peter Roebuck, Tony Cozier, Max Walker, Mike Gibson, and the retirements or close to it of Bill Lawry, Kerry O’Keefe and Dennis Cometti.
“You just get used to moving on I guess,” says a philosophical Maxwell, who has overseen six decades of change in not only broadcast journalism, but the game itself, having called cricket since before the inception of World Series cricket and felt the full force of Twenty20 revolution. “Certainly with Roebuck and O’Keefe I think we had something different,” he says of the ABC dream team of the last 15 years. “Humour and knowledge on Kerry’s part and a certain insight into humanity and editorial edge with Roebuck that no-one else could provide.”
But it’s hard to escape the feeling that these cumulative losses are spiritual blows to the game, leaving its coverage depleted and ushering in a new era of determinedly low-brow, self-regarding broadcasting. Maxwell’s book touches upon the post-Benaud world succinctly and pointedly:
On television you are a slave to pictures – unless you are Richie Benaud. He made an art form of television commentary, establishing the idea that silence was golden. He was the king of the pregnant pause. I believe the game can carry itself. I have to say though that our friends at Sky TV in the UK do a great job of calling what they see without xenophobia or cheerleading, offering humour and knowledge without bias or in-jokes.
Maxwell says it’s telling that Channel Nine still call upon Benaud from beyond the grave, using his pre-recorded voiceovers as segues. “He hasn’t quite gone. No-one has the gravitas of Richie,” he says, but adds that Mark Nicholas is a smooth presenter and has the chops to fill that role into the future.
Perhaps Maxwell could have ended up on TV himself, but he says he always preferred the “intimate” nature of radio, and the ability to form a deeper bond with listeners, who are so much more reliant on the delivery of a compelling narrative of the game at hand.
“You’ve just got so much scope than in any other sport because of all the down time in the game,” he says. “That’s the joy of it, that you can go to other places with it. You’re running this narrative for the listeners all day and you do develop this intimacy with the audience because you’re storytelling all day. That’s the joy of Test match cricket.”
“The lesson from working and listening to McGilvray is to get yourself involved in the game. I think today, at times, it’s becoming a bit too conversational and there’s not enough of actually conveying the drama of the cricket.”
As Australia’s Test side mucks along through a middling start to the summer, it’s at least comforting for fans to know that order will soon be restored to the ABC’s radio broadcasts once Maxwell’s voice returns to the airwaves.
It’s also heartening to know that Maxwell himself is full of optimism about both his own and the game’s longevity, as per his parting words: “Test cricket has been dying for years but not even Donald Trump can kill it.” We shall soon see.
