Australia's favourite cricket writer on how one player and his photograph changed a sport and a nation.
Today Victor Trumper is, literally, a legend revered for deeds lost in time, a hallowed name from the golden era from before the moving image began to dictate memories and Bradman reset the records.
In life, Trumper was Australia’s first world beater at his peak just after Federation, he was not just a cricketer but an artist of the bat, the genius of a new era, a symbol of what Australia could be. Crowds flocked to his club matches, English supporters cheered him on in Tests, and at his early funeral in 1915 even amidst the grief of war mourners choked the streets of Sydney.
Trumper lives on, not just as the name of a stand at the SCG, or a park near his former home ground. He lives in an image that captures him mid-stroke: a daring player’s graceful advance into the unknown, alive with intent and controlled abandon. Reproduced countless times in cricket books and pavilions around the world, it conjures an era, an attitude cricket’s first imaginings of itself and encapsulates the timeless beauty of sport like none other.
If Trumper is a legend, George Beldam’s ‘Jumping Out’ has become an icon.
But that image has almost paradoxically obscured the story of its subject. Man and photograph have entranced Gideon Haigh since childhood, and in Stroke of Genius he explores both the real Victor Trumper and the process of his iconography. Together they inspired a profound moral and aesthetic revaluation of the game, and changed the way we think about cricket, art and Australia. In this inventive, fresh and compelling work of history, Haigh reveals how Trumper, and Beldam’s incarnation of his brilliance, are at the intersection of sport and art, history and timelessness, reality and myth.
'Haigh, cricket-lover and polymath, couldn’t write a dull book if he tried ... the book equally qualifies as art and social history.' The Saturday Paper
'Gripping ... Haigh draws on an encyclopaedic knowledge of cricketing fact and folklore ... [and] evokes an era retrospectively made golden.' The Times
Gideon Haigh
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for more than three decades, has contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines, published thirty-two books and edited seven others.
The Office: A Hardworking History won the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction; On Warne was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature; Certain Admissions won the 2016 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime; and Stroke of Genius: Victor Trumper and the Shot that Changed Cricket was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Nonfiction.
Gideon lives in Melbourne with his wife and daughter. Nobody has played more games for his cricket club - nor, perhaps, wanted to.
ISBN:
9780143785965
Category:
Cricket
Format:
Paperback / softback
Publication Date:
27-11-2017
Publisher:
PENGUIN BOOKS AUSTRALIA
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
336
Dimensions (mm):
198x129x22mm
Weight:
0.3kg