THE PERFECT ENDING

In 2010 the New York Times reported that Filipino karaoke bars were removing Frank Sinatra’s My Way from their songbooks. It was causing too much trouble. In the preceding decade, at least six people had been killed because the audience didn’t think their rendition was up to snuff. “The trouble with My Way,” one bar owner was quoted as saying, “is that everyone knows it and everyone has an opinion.” Another added: “It’s so arrogant. The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody.” For years in the UK, My Way was the most popular piece of music at funerals. According to the most recent survey by the Co-op, it is still fifth on the list, one behind, oddly enough, the theme from Match of the Day. My Way has become the quintessential exit music, its sincerity unaffected by the fact that the man who wrote it, Claude François, electrocuted himself trying to fix a broken lightbulb while taking a shower.

Sinatra couldn’t stand the song. His daughter Tina once said that her father thought it was “self-serving and self-indulgent”. By the end of the ’70s he was in the habit of introducing it by explaining how little he liked it. “I hate this song. I hate this song!” he said before performing it at Atlantic City in 1979. “I got it up to here, this goddamn song.” Of course when Sinatra died, pretty much every single TV and radio news show played him out with My Way, “the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly dictatorial chestnut in the old man’s vast and dazzling back catalogue”, as Sarah Vowell called it in her essay “Ixnay on the My Way”. Even stars of Sinatra’s size don’t always get to finish in the style they’d like. All of which is a roundabout route to Christchurch, and the second Test between New Zealand and Australia. A match already made famous, though it isn’t over yet, by Brendon McCullum’s farewell innings.

Of all the tricks in Test cricket, quitting it has to be one of the hardest. WG Grace went on too long. He was 50 when he played his final Test match, the first of the 1899 Ashes. He made 28 and one. But it was in the field that he felt his age. The ground, he told, his friend Stanley Jackson, seemed to be getting further and further away. “The agile cover point of his youth had been reduced to standing in position and stopping only those balls that came near as dammit straight at him,” is how Charlie Connolly put it in Gilbert, his fine novel about Grace’s life. “In the Australians’ first innings he’d been only too aware of the catcalls of the crowd whenever the ball had sped past him.” At the end of the match, which England drew because of Ranjitsinhji’s 93, Grace told Jackson: “It’s all over, Jacker, I shan’t play again.”

Then there was Don Bradman. The story so famous it hardly needs retelling. “I dearly wanted to do well,” Bradman admitted. He was bowled second ball by Eric Hollies, “a perfect length googly” which just touched the inside edge of his bat and then knocked the off bail. If he had scored only four his average would have been an even hundred. Jon Hotten has argued, eloquently, that the final figure of 99.94 is all the more meaningful because of its slight imperfection; you wonder whether Bradman would have agreed. “The Don was, like the rest of us, human,” wrote Hotten. In his Farewell to Cricket, Bradman goes so far as: “I have always been first and foremost a human being.” Which rather makes you wonder what he considered himself the rest of the time. Whatever, you suspect he would rather have relished finishing with the perfect average of exactly 100.

Bradman’s contemporary George Headley should have finished that same year, 1948, but was recalled for a last hurrah at his home ground, Sabina Park, in 1954. He had been playing well for Dudley in the Birmingham Leagues, so the Daily Gleaner ran a public subscription to pay for him to come back to Jamaica to play in the series against England. They raised more than £1,000. Headley was 44, and hadn’t played a Test in six years, but was picked to bat at No6. When he came in, England spread the field to allow him a single. Len Hutton said it was a mark of respect. Headley reckoned it was just so they could keep him on strike. He ground out 16 in an hour’s batting, before being dismissed by Tony Lock. Lock got him again in the second innings, this time for a single.

From these three, a fine tradition. Rahul Dravid finished with a single fifty in his final eight innings, as India were whitewashed 4-0 in Australia. Ricky Ponting mustered 32 runs in five innings in a home series against South Africa, finishing with four and eight in a thrashing at Perth. Denis Compton, Garry Sobers, Imran Khan, Brian Lara, Mohammad Yousuf and Shiv Chanderpaul all made a duck in their final Test matches. As is always the way in cricket, there seem to be so many different ways to fail. Steve Waugh scored 40 and 80 in his final Test, but suffered because he had announced his retirement so far in advance that the summer seemed to turn into a valedictory tour. “An entire summer of farewell to international cricket,” as Gideon Haigh put it in this paper at the time. “Even Sir Donald Bradman’s parting spanned only three cheers and two deliveries.” It left him looking, whisper it, a little selfish.

To McCullum, then, who engineered the perfect exit for himself, in a home Test against Australia, in Christchurch on the fifth anniversary of the earthquake that ruined the city. He is only 34, and could clearly go on longer. But he leaves with everyone wanting more. In the first innings, when his team had been 32 for three, he delivered the fastest century in Test history. In the second, another 25. Out, for the last time, coming down the pitch attempting to hit a second consecutive six to midwicket. Bombastic, assertive, unapologetic, and on his own terms. It was the ending everyone dreams of having. True Sinatra style. His Way.

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