That summer, I pulled one of my father’s books from the shelf. Its title caught my eye, “Slasher Opens Up”. It was an autobiography about a boy from Nundah called Ken Mackay who was a prodigious junior cricketer who went on to play test match cricket for Australia and most famously in the tied test in Brisbane in 1960.
The simple inscription on the inside cover; “Best wishes John, Ken Mackay” fascinated me and my dad, John, who turns 90 this Christmas, told me about meeting Ken and hosting him at his boarding school when he was playing for the Wanderers Club before he played test cricket. Wow, meeting an actual test player.
To this day, there is never a birthday or Christmas in my family where a cricket book of some type or other is not exchanged. Between us, we have hundreds of them. I dive into one of five or six on rotation that are always sitting by my bed each night. It relaxes me and I drift off somewhere where dad took me with Slasher Mackay in the summer of 1979.
