Mr Cricket (23 page)

AMY HUSSEY

Mike and I have been together for more than a decade and he is still very much that same lovely guy I met at university. We were both studying education; I am a primary teacher and he was studying secondary education. He needed to make up some credit points and took a class that I was in. He didn't turn up to the first two weeks but when he did, we discovered we had an instant attraction to each other.

I had no idea Mike was a professional sportsman. He asked me out on a date but throughout the evening made no mention that he was a cricketer. He made a real point of not telling me his full name. We got in the car after dinner and I said, ‘Mike, I don't even know your surname!' He was so reluctant to tell me.

I can understand now why he didn't want to say it. He just wanted to be seen for who he is, not the fact that he's a sportsman. It didn't make any difference to me when I found out. At that stage I was pretty naive, but the fact that I went out for dinner with him says that I knew he was a trustworthy and decent person, whatever it was that he did.

I had grown up watching the cricket with my dad and when I told him Mike's surname we both clicked that he was, well, not a big name, but someone who played for WA. Still, Mike and I didn't talk about cricket on our early dates. We just talked about life and everything else. It's probably lucky he didn't tell me he was a cricketer because maybe I wouldn't have gone out with him!

We've come a long way since then. Nowadays almost everyone knows that Mike plays cricket for Australia but, up until quite recently, whenever Mike was asked what he did for a living, he would always just say he was a teacher – even though he's never taught! It wouldn't be until we got to know people quite well that he would say he was a cricketer.

I love that quality about Mike. He has never big-noted himself or used his name to gain an advantage in any way. Because I'm so proud of him, I don't want either of us to feel like we have to hide what he does. It's just that he thinks of himself as an average guy and that's how I see him too. Around our family, he's not Mike Hussey, Australian cricketer. He's just Mike, the dad, the husband, the son.

I learned a lot about Mike about three or four years into our relationship, when he went through his tough times with the WA team. During that period he was quite reserved and, overall, a bit flat. Communication has been the key to our relationship but I could see that he became a little closed off to others. Our conversations around that time were often me saying to Mike, ‘You either love the game and want to keep playing – if that's the case, you go back and work hard, do whatever you can and wherever you get to is great – or you give it away and you feel happy with that.' I knew he would never give cricket away because he'd always been so passionate about it.

Mike was quiet and a bit sad about the way things were going. I told him he should spend more time speaking with Bob Carter, who was a hugely positive influence on Mike. I could only ever talk with Mike about the emotional side of things and help him to organise his thoughts. But Bob had become a great friend who could also talk about the technical aspects of what was going on.

Mike had got to a point where he had wanted to play for Australia so much that he was burning himself out. If there was a day off he wanted to be training because nobody else would be. An extra day's training, he believed, would get him one rung up the ladder, a small step ahead of everyone else. His life had become cricket and not much else. I told Mike that he needed to take a step back and calm down. He was putting so much pressure on himself to reach the top. Some people might have thought he'd gone a bit mad, but I didn't see it that way. I saw him as a man with incredible determination to succeed.

Somehow Mike's cricket obsession didn't affect our relationship all that much. He was pushing himself very hard, but he is a very considerate person and would always make time for me. Probably the only difference
from other relationships was that his time was always very structured. He would organise to see me at a particular time and would tell me that at, say, 2pm he was going off for a hit. It was never a case of spending the day together and we'll see what happens. It was much more like, ‘Okay, let's have breakfast together, then I'm going to train. At 6pm I'll pick you up and we'll go out for dinner.' That might sound a bit awkward but Mike ensured I never felt neglected.

Not a lot has changed! The first thing Mike will say to me most mornings is, ‘Right, what's the plan today?' Sometimes I just want to say, ‘Let's not have a plan.' Sometimes I want us to have a day where we just take it as it comes. But I can see why he does it. When you have three kids and you play cricket for Australia, you have to have a structured life. Mike has been like that since I met him. He always has a list of things he wants to accomplish. He finds it hard to sit down and do nothing.

Mike has managed to balance things out very well as his commitments have grown. Sometimes I wonder how he does it. He is away a lot, but he always seems to find time to spend with our children. Sometimes he'll race in from training and will have just a few minutes before he has to head off to do an appearance or give a speech, and he'll get down on the floor and play with the kids. It's beautiful to see. He's a very selfless person.

A great example of this came shortly before we got married in April 2002. In the weeks leading up to the wedding there was a lot of media speculation that Mike was going to be selected for an upcoming tour. If he were selected we would have had to postpone the wedding. Mike became very worried but I just told him that if he got selected there would be no question – of course he should go. I'd always be here for him and our wedding could wait. If he got selected, it would be fantastic and if not, we'd have our wedding as planned, which would be great too! As it turned out, he didn't get picked. But we had a beautiful wedding.

At various times over the years we felt that Mike was on the verge of being selected but just missed out. However, I always believed that Mike would get his chance. I just knew it. Even when he was dropped from the WA side, in my heart I always thought he would reach the goal he had set himself. He worked hard enough, he was good enough and I didn't think there was much more he had to do. It was just about an opportunity arising at the right time.

I guess a lot of my confidence in Mike making it in cricket comes from my faith. I just prayed for him over and over. I think prayer is quite a powerful thing and if you have people praying for you it has to be a bonus. I believe that God has a plan for your life and I kept saying to Mike that whatever will be will be, but know that there is someone in control of what's going to happen to you. I'm also a believer in that you don't ever get more in life than you can cope with. Whether it's challenging times or good times, I always come back to that and we've applied that way of thinking to Mike's career. I don't know if it's made much difference to the way Mike feels overall, but maybe it helped him to relax a bit through those testing stages of his career.

One instance that sums up Mike very well was our recent drama with Molly. I first went into hospital just two days after Mike had returned from a very long tour to the West Indies. Straight away he had a full-time job looking after the kids and me. He would come into the hospital twice a day with the kids and always made sure they were at all the other places they had to be. I don't know how he did it. There were a few things he could have done better: sometimes the kids would come in to visit and I'd think, ‘Oh dear, what are you wearing?' Mike would say, ‘Well, Jas insisted,' and I'd say, ‘Well, you don't let her! You tell her what she's wearing!' But apart from dressing the kids in funny clothes, he was amazing. Not once did he whinge about the situation. By the time I came back from hospital my little boy didn't want me; he just wanted his dad!

Things have settled down now but life is still very hectic. It's only occasionally that we get the time to enjoy where Mike is at. We'll be driving along somewhere and I'll look over at him and say, ‘Can you believe it?' I may not have doubted it would happen, but I'm a bit surprised at just how incredibly well it's all gone. He's had twelve years of lead-up, though, and deserves the success.

Mike is very much the same man now as when I met him: loyal, kind and thoughtful. If I had to pick one thing that's changed recently, it's that he has developed an intense dislike of queuing! He went in to Medicare the other day and complained to me that he had to wait twenty-five minutes to get served. I laughed and said, ‘Welcome to the real world, babe!'