by Chris Ryan
Monday, November 4, 2002

If Bowral and Cootamundra are shrines to Don Bradman, then Sydney is Victor Trumper's town. It matters not that he died in 1915 and was born precisely 125 years ago last Saturday. Walk around the city, at odd times and places, and you can still sense his spirit.

It bubbles on the grassy banks of Waverley Cemetery where he is buried, gazing out at the high skies and inky blue of the Tasman Sea. It is there at Trumper Park, with its white picket fence and rising trees, and at Waverley Oval, where as a 21-year-old he hit 260 not out for Paddington in an innings hailed as "worthy of any batsman in the world". And it positively crackles at the SCG, that grand old ground which is somehow synonymous with the photographer George Beldam's famous and enduring image of Trumper: left foot thrust down the pitch, head perfectly still, bat flung high above his right ear, poised to strike.

Once upon a time Trumper meant a lot to this town. The town meant a lot to him too. Team-mate Frank Iredale toured England with Trumper in 1899, but wrote: "I felt somehow or other that his mind and thoughts were of his home; he loved his home ... and though he came with us on many occasions to theatres and elsewhere, one felt that whatever may have been in the place where we were, it was certainly not the real man."

A couple of weekends ago I took a tour of Trumpertown, starting at the spruced-up but still gritty inner-city suburb of Surry Hills. It was here that Trumper and his seven siblings grew up. First stop is 119 Cooper Street, where he lived from the age of 13 to 19. Now it is a barren, vacant lot, squeezed between a mud-coloured office block and a childcare centre. There is no plaque, no sign that that this was where Australia's golden-age king lay back and dreamed of girls, or mischief, or of playing for his country. There's just an upturned milk crate, two dilapidated green benches and half-a-dozen garbage bins.

A hundred metres away is 432 Riley Street, Trumper's first known residence, where he lived for three years from the age of six. It is now a neat terrace house with blue gate, smart blue shutters and potplants on the upstairs ledge. Backtracking 30 metres I set off down long, opulent Arthur Street in search of 30 Little Arthur Street. According to maps the road no longer exists. But it was here that Trumper, at the age of about nine, learned to play the piano and spent several hours a day in the backyard, refining the most watchable batting technique any man ever had.

He was the master of every stroke in the coaching manuals and the author of several that aren't. There was the "Trumper flick", where, with a graceful roll of the wrists, he would pick the ball off his off stump and casually deposit it beyond the square-leg boundary. Then there was his "yorker shot" - or "dog shot" - where he would cock either his right or left leg and turn fullish balls on middle stump under the raised leg for four.

He was batting's greatest improviser, frequently changing his mind mid-stroke, capable of hitting any ball anywhere. The England legspinner Len Braund once despaired to his captain: "I can't bowl to a man who continually back-cuts me for four from six inches outside his leg stump." Said Plum Warner: "The way he hooked good-length balls was amazing."

Crown Street today is one of Sydney's grandest, grungiest strips, a mix of pizza joints and laundromats interspersed with upmarket restaurants and furniture boutiques. The 11-year-old Trumper lived here for a year. He was educated here too, at Crown Street Superior Public School, where an older student named Monty Noble would later remember young Victor as a "short, spare, narrow-shouldered boy".

Trumper's old home at No. 487 is now the ramshackle office for a company called PN Building. It is a versatile firm, apparently: carpentry, joinery, plumbing, brickwork and roofing are listed among its many duties. But there's no sign of life today, only a handwritten note - signed Jo - apologising for being closed on weekends.

Next stop is Nichols Street, built on a steep hill. A lot happened in the year or so Trumper lived here: he lost a grandfather and a three-year-old sister, Louisa, both to tuberculosis. A lot has happened at No. 10 too: Trumper's former residence is now a five-storey block of brown-bricked apartments, complete with a cavernous underground car park that dominates the street.

I leave Surry Hills for the neighbouring suburb of Paddington, skirting the Cricketers Arms Hotel, South Dowling Street and massive Moore Park, where men in white are taking part in late-afternoon matches on seven or eight different ovals. This was Trumper's earliest cricketing playground. He used to practise here every morning before school - from 6am to 8am - under the encouraging eye of his father Charles.

His devout, get-out-of-bed dedication is worth noting. Yes, Trumper was an instinctive, impulsive, impetuous genius. Yet he was more than that. It was not purely by some fluke of birth, for example, that he became history's canniest batsman on sticky wickets; he used to spend hours in the SCG nets rehearsing on a saturated pitch as it dried under the sun. In other ways he was the most unpremeditated of cricketers. He would take to the middle any old bat, preferably one without a rubber grip, then hand it back to the bewildered owner once he had finished.

Paddington is where Trumper, with his brothers and sisters, lived the first half of his adult life. Thirty-one Selwyn Street is an anorexic-looking terrace house with bars on the windows and a bulging garbage bin out front. Apart from the TV antenna, diagonal parking spaces and fresh coat of pale blue paint, it is hard to imagine it has changed too much in the last century.

They lived here for three years before moving to the other side of Oxford Street, with its overspilling shops and pubs, where the men wear leather and the women favour summer frocks. Thirty-one Liverpool Street, Trumper's next home, is much like the Selwyn Street house except that there are no bars across the windows. Nor, again, is there any recognition that it was once occupied by the man who, although approaching only his mid-twenties, was already rated by many as the most brilliant batsman ever.

In 1902, at the height of his fame, the family moved to 112 Paddington Street. They lived here for seven years, joined from 1904 onwards by Trumper's wife, Annie. It is an elegant, mustard-coloured, newish-looking townhouse on three levels, nestled among trendy art galleries and a nearby church. But again, there's no plaque, no hint that this is one of Sydney's sacred sites. And I can't help but wonder: do the people inside know Victor Trumper used to live here? Do they even know who Victor Trumper was?

Few Australians do, it would seem. When the ACB unveiled its Australian Team of the Century in January 2000 Trumper somehow missed out. When Wisden elected its Five Cricketers of the Century only four of the 100 judges voted for Trumper. A quick trawl through the National Library of Australia archive reveals he has been the subject of only four books; more than Noble and George Giffen and Charlie Macartney, to be sure, but Bradman has had more words written about his left earhole.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he died at 37, of Bright's Disease, and had no chance to round out his legend through decades of devotion to coaching, team selection or administration. Perhaps it has something to do with that Test average of 39.05 - less than half Bradman's. As Neville Cardus once pointed out, judging Trumper on his batting average is like assessing Mozart "by adding up the notes". Yet somehow in the last three or four decades the legend has diminished. Trumper has been forgotten.

Well, almost. Last Saturday morning around 300 true believers - including Neil Harvey, Arthur Morris and numerous Trumper descendants - clustered at the SCG to celebrate the 125th anniversary of his birth. "He was the first icon of cricket, the man who excited everyone," said Alan Davidson, the champion 1950s allrounder.

"My grandfather used to talk for hours about Victor Trumper: the modesty of the man, the genius that he had. And so I was brought up on it. He always talked about how humble Trumper was, how on scoring a hundred he would look around for a young bowler to throw his wicket away too." Ashley Mallett, a Trumper biographer, summed it up sweetly when he said: "Trumper was one of nature's good guys, and he proved that good guys can also run first."

Back in Paddington, a well-struck straight hit takes us back to where this story started: Trumper Park, or Hampden Park Oval, as it was called when Trumper used to pile up century after century here. And it is here, at the front of the red-stilted pavilion, that I find what I've been looking for: a plaque headed "The Immortal Victor". It tells of a man who was "a more than competent bowler, brilliant in the field, daring and precise with the bat, whose ease and grace on and off the field endeared him to everyone".

Next to the words sits that famous black-and-white photograph. Left foot thrust down the pitch, head perfectly still, bat flung high above his right ear, poised to strike. "To me," said Davidson, "that picture epitomises everything about cricket - the style, the artistry, the skill and the daring. I first saw it when I was very young and I still can't stop raving about it."

It is the image of Victor Trumper. The image of Sydney.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd