“Huh dad, that looks bad,” Kevin Mitchell Jr would tell his father, who was the chief curator of the Gabba in Brisbane. It was the late 80’s, and Kevin, in his early 20s, had just joined his father after working in mines for a while. His father would have one look into the horizon behind him, nod, go over to the stands where Kevin’s grandmother sat. She was told to get to a safe place as a fierce storm was about to blow over.
The other side of the ground it was still quite sunny. Senior Kevin came over, told his groundstaff ‘right then, let’s run’ and they all charged across. Puzzled, the umpires would try waving them off, and Kevin Jr remembers David Boon at short-leg bewildered: ‘What are you guys doing here?’ The stumps were pulled out without the umpire’s permission and by the time, the cloud had burst and the stadium was absolutely drenched. “Courtesy my dad’s intervention, that game was saved, and we could resume later.”
Not long after, Kevin Sr. won a lottery, lotto. “He decided he could now relax and retire. The funny and the most unbelievable thing is that in 18 months time, he won another lotto, another handsome amount. Bloody crazy!”
The father and son are the real men behind what has come to be known as Gabbatoir. Traditionally the first Test of a series in Australia where the visitors invariably struggle with the seam movement on the first day, and the pace and bounce on the next two days. “If they somehow survive all that, Shane Warne will do his magic on the last day,” Kevin Jr laughs. In his 33 years, manning the turf, Australia never lost. “They last lost a game under my old man’s care!”
Sitting in a pub the afternoon before the Test. the stories began to flow. “I remember a young Virat Kohli, probably his first game at this ground. When the game was over, and I was walking around I saw him sitting inside a trolley and he was being furiously spun around at a frenetic pace by a teammate. They were going up and down a small slope and spinning around. Think they saw me as he got out, all dizzy and wobbly, and they slipped out of sight. Like kids do. We all should remember that most of the time these are young cricketers playing out there and should be careful with our criticism!”
Incidentally, for a man who meticulously prepared one of the most hallowed turfs in the cricketing world, an Indian spinner figures as one of his early cricketing memories. “My family was always associated with cricket. My grandma used to go to a school nearby, and would tell tales of peering through the fence and watching Don Bradman bat. My early memory of cricket was a newspaper feature on the great Bishan Singh Bedi. They had four-panel pictures of his various grips. I fancied myself as a spinner and tried them out!”
There might be pitches in Australia where the Australian captain or coach might have a word or two with the curator, but not in Brisbane. “The way the pitches were so consistent for decades and they knew what they were going to get, no captain ever said anything to me. It didn’t hurt that they were winning everything. I remember this one time, I had prepared a particularly fast pitch and it was a game against the West Indies – but after the Viv Richards era, Mark Taylor came to me. I told him it would be a bouncy pitch, and he went, “perfect, that’s what I was hoping for! He was such a naturally attacking captain and a friendly man. Steve Waugh wouldn’t say much, he talked only if there were some other teammate who was around who was speaking to us; else kept himself to himself. I don’t remember Sachin Tendulkar or Rahul Dravid saying much either. Perfect gentlemen.”
In his youth, he saw the famous West Indians with swagger from Clive Lloyd and Richards and all the pacemen bowl. “They were quite something. I remember Richards would come, look at the pitch, and go back without saying anything. No whining, he didn’t have to do all that with that team, did he?! In their practice they would hit the ball really high, it would look like pies in the sky but when it came down, they would so casually pluck it!”
Back in the day, a greyhound track would run just beyond the boundary, and the practice pitches were on the other side. One day Joel Garner was a touch late. “They were looking for him, and he waltzed in. There were a few steps up to a small gate, beyond which lay the pitches, and he so coolly just lifted his leg – and cleared the steps and everything in one giant step! For some reason that image has stuck in my mind, it’s very funny!” He stands up and tries to mimic that gigantic step of Garner.
“Another funny memory involves Carl Rackemann, a damn fine bowler but couldn’t bat. As soon as he would come to bat, my man with the roller-tractor would start the machine. Invariably, in two balls the innings would be over, and we would be immediately over the boundary! Not sure if Rackemann ever knew about that!
Kevin Jr though would have sleepless nights just before and during the game. “Butterflies all those years, despite all that experience. That never went away until I retired. It helped me in one game in 2008, I remember. It was past midnight and the game was in the morning. I couldn’t sleep as well as usual and that’s when the ferocious Gap Storm hit us. I called up the security guard at the Gabba, “mate are the covers on?” He replied: “All I can say is that a gate has just blown away. I can see no covers on the CC TV.”
Kevin rushed to the stadium with two interns staying with him. “We had to wade through a waterlogged outfield. Rains lashing down. Just then the roof of a stand flies over! My heart is in my mouth as I reach the pitches. We had kept sandbags and such but they all had rolled up and the covers blew away. Luckily there was one pitch in the centre that wasn’t that affected; the water had seeped into the rest. This one just had a patch. Once the rain eased, we worked overtime, and unbelievably we had the game start on time.”
He remembers an advice his father gave him: “Don’t repeat the same mistake twice.” “I think I achieved it”. Though Kevin Jr would repeat one act that his father did, not a mistake. “That rain barge! It was a game against Pakistan and just like my dad did, I had my men run in without the umpires asking for it. A shot had just been played and I recall a Pakistani fielder chasing it when his eyes bulged at the sight of us running in. He froze. So did the rest of the players as we kept running, ignoring everyone and covering the pitch just in time before it got flooded. The game was saved. I remember the match referee asking us later what would have happened had the ball gone into our vehicle with covers and stuff that we drove in. Before I could reply, one of the umpires, Peter ‘Porky’ Parker, quite a character, said, “Hole in one!” Good times!
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