Phillip Hughes

It’s been hard for a bunch of reasons to get something down about Phillip Hughes’ death. All there is in the beginning and all there is in the end is the shock and sadness. All the stuff in the middle - tweets, bats, analysis, this - is filler. It’s like there’s a little gap in the universe that opens up when someone dies, not just the person-shaped hole they leave, but the breach of faith in the universe for doing such a thing. The filling never gets to the ‘bottom’ of it. But I’m no different to anyone else in trying. Here is my handful of dirt.

The big question seems to have been why the reaction has been so strong and I can think of a lot of reasons. It started for me with the very graphic, public nature of the injury that caused his death. I happened to be on the SMH website early that Tuesday afternoon because I’d heard a helicopter hovering over Coogee that morning and - good on me - wondered if something bad had happened. “Warning: graphic images” is a bit like “Don’t push this red button”. The one I most wished I hadn’t seen was the one the Herald ran on its cover the next day. That has sort of set the emotional baseline for the past week, a general unsettledness that’s probably more physical or animal than emotional, like a flock of birds scattering at a loud noise or projectile.

The second time I saw that photo I (deliberately) looked at everyone else rather than Phillip Hughes, and I could see the kind of ‘tableau’ of concern, like a war photo or a Renaissance painting, the qualities that the Herald felt made the picture about more than ghoulishness. The ‘looking at everyone else’ is a big part of the sadness. When I see pictures of Phillip Hughes, I still mainly feel a blank incomprehension that there will be no more Phillip Hughes. It’s sadness, but in the form of an intellectual revolt. It’s more when I see the grief of people close to him, wholly comprehensible, that I get teary or upset - teammates at the hospital, tweets from colleagues, yesterday’s funeral speeches. And surely a great deal of the sadness is sadness for Phillip Hughes’ family in particular: sad for them in empathy, and sad ‘for’ them like an offering to them, hoping that if they know how sad everyone is it will be some comfort to them.

There are a lot of other things: the amplifying effect of social media, his youth, his status as hero and superhero in virtue of being an elite sportsperson, the fact of dying in what is supposed to be a game. None of these have much to do with Phillip Hughes himself, and the core of it for me has been that it was Phillip Hughes. If I feel so much in response to Phillip Hughes’ death it’s because I felt so much for him while he was alive. But that feeling was not of falling in love with a happy-go-lucky country boy.

I certainly see the country boy much more now that I’ve seen the funeral - God bless daggy country church services. I have no argument with cheeky, smiling, laughing Phillip Hughes. That’s the person who belongs to the people who knew and loved him. That’s the person. It’s not the persona I saw at the crease, the member of my imaginary cricket menagerie. Phil Hughes only appears in my archive as a troubled figure, fretful and fretted for. That’s ‘my’ Phil, it’s who I remember, and however unreal he is, it’s who I feel for and who I’ll miss and why his death has a heaviness it would not have if it had been someone else.

It’s like he had an ability to elicit emotion, to make people care. Mr Batsy tells me Michael Slater had something of this too, you saw him and worried about him. It’s the background of pathos that magnifies the tragedy. But it’s ridiculous to separate this from the circumstances: the horrendous on again-off again relationship with the selectors, the mythology of Phillip Hughes that was well under way in his life time. The domestic prodigy who had either never been given the chance he deserved or who had been way overindulged. Whether or not this was to do with personal qualities, people felt strongly about the “case” of Phillip Hughes, I can’t think of anyone else whose selection or non-selection aroused that kind of intensity of debate. I have no insight into Phillip Hughes’ batting skills and flaws, but I had no trouble picking up the drama, to the point that I wonder how much of my perception of Phil was a projection of my own performance anxieties.

The death of anyone young involves the sadness of unrealised potential, but with Phillip Hughes this is compounded by the sense of unresolved issues. I’m very fond of ‘my’ Phil Hughes, but I'm sure he would have preferred not to be seen the way I saw him and that’s part of what’s so unfair.