Show caption Kim Hughes in action for Australia. Photograph: S.Bent/S&G and Barratts/Empics Sport The Spin Kim Hughes: the golden boy whose career was a glorious kind of tragedy A book about the former Australian captain details a poignant, bittersweet, unique and weirdly life-affirming tale Rob Smyth Wed 14 Sep 2011 11.18 BST Share on Facebook

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A STORY HARDER THAN MOST TO DISTIL

Kim Hughes should have been a superstar. He should be talked about in the same breath as Victor Trumper, Don Bradman, Greg Chappell and Ricky Ponting. He should have averaged 50 in Test cricket. Instead he averaged 37.41 and is remembered as the boy who cried when he quit as Australian captain. It's a horribly unjust legacy, yet also strangely apposite. Hughes's career was a glorious kind of tragedy.

The Spin is currently two thirds of the way through Golden Boy, Christian Ryan's book on Hughes. It is one of the great cricket biographies, at once unputdownable and also unpickupable, because you pick it up you will eventually finish it, and what are you going to do then?

Hughes was undeniably a genius, with the qualities of the Prom King, yet perversely these led to unpopularity. Hughes was not entirely blameless, but in essence he was a thoroughly decent man whose apparent destiny to captain Australia happily ever after was compromised by factors beyond his control. His story is harder than most to distil. The main themes are the mutinous behaviour of senior players while he was Australian captain, the only partial fulfilment of his rare ability, and a horrible, grubby ending to his international career: a tearful resignation, two runs in his last four Tests, and finally a rebel tour to South Africa.

In a sense Hughes was the boy who had too much talent – and also who, in the opinion of many grizzled team-mates, never stopped being a boy. There are two ways of looking at it: his detractors say he never grew up, his disciples say he was forever young. Most if not all would concur that Hughes was ultimately damned by his ability. He never quite came to grips with its parameters, and he was subject to the same absurd mistrust of naked talent as David Gower, particularly when he succumbed to one of his many soft dismissals. The hype about his ability meant that almost every dressing room he entered were already suspicious of him. All they had been told about was this luminescent young talent; so even though Hughes had done nothing wrong, he was treated with the contempt usually reserved for the teacher's pet. One chapter in Ryan's book is called 'Dead animals, bloody turds, old apples, sponge cakes …'. They are just some of the things that were dumped in Hughes's cricket bag by senior players at his first club Subiaco.

The hostility from older players was a recurring theme of Hughes's career, even when he became Australian captain. They couldn't relate to him. Hughes was a dreamer in a dressing-room full of testosterone-heavy pragmatists like Dennis Lillee, Rodney Marsh and Rodney Hogg, who once threw a punch at Hughes during a Test in West Indies.

Lillee thought his mate Marsh should be captain. He was probably right. Marsh had a sharper cricket brain than Hughes and is, along with Shane Warne, Australia's great lost captain. But Lillee's response to Hughes's promotion was more than a little dubious. In the nets, Lillee would bowl line and length to everyone, until Hughes arrived. Then he would come on off his long run and ram in a series of bouncers. Hughes needed an X-ray before the start of the 1982-83 Ashes, with fears that Lillee had broken his forearm. In Golden Boy, the former Australian batsman Craig Serjeant describes the time Lillee followed through to collect a bouncer and said 'Sorry'. Hughes replied, 'Oh that's OK', at which point Lillee growled 'Sorry I didn't fcukin hit ya'.

This went on for years. Hughes did not complain once. The tears upon resigning the captaincy make it easy to conclude that he was weak, yet the situation was far more complex than that. Hughes was put under an incomparable strain, yet still managed to bounce back almost every time. He was also immensely courageous, as he showed in the nets against Lillee – and during his defining innings, an unbeaten 100 against the West Indies attack of Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Colin Croft and Joel Garner on a dicey pitch at Melbourne in 1981-82. Nobody else passed 21. Ian Chappell, no fan of Hughes, rated it as the greatest post-war innings by an Australian.

That was one of three extraordinary innings in the space of 18 months. His outrageous 213 against India at Adelaide a year earlier showcased his thrilling propensity to charge the fast bowlers, before thrashing a series of scintillating cover drives for four, while his 84 in the Centenary Test of 1980 was one of the most brilliant attacking innings ever played at Lord's. It included one remarkable shot off Chris Old that, according to some, was still rising when it struck the top deck of the pavilion. Keith Miller, commentating at the time, described it as "one of the biggest hits I've seen for many, many a year".

Hughes retained an amateur attitude to batting, and never quite found the balance between wanting to entertain and wanting to score runs. It's one of the many reasons why he is one of the more charming and interesting cricketers of modern times. "I have most admired him," said Des Hoare, his captain at Subiaco, "because he had the courage and the ability not to become ordinary." Another reason to admire Hughes is his complete lack of bitterness. He is now great friends with Lillee and Marsh, a bizarre and unexpected postscript. "I don't say this about a lot of blokes, but I love Kim Hughes," says Greg Chappell, another who sometimes made life difficult for Hughes during his playing career, in Golden Boy. "I admire what he's been through because my life's been very easy compared with Kim Hughes's life, and I think most of us could say that." It makes little sense to those on the outside, but then that's the case with so much of this poignant, bittersweet, unique and weirdly life-affirming tale.

• We have three copies of Golden Boy to give away. To enter the competition, email rob.smyth@guardian.co.uk with the answer to the following question: who succeeded Kim Hughes as Australian captain in 1984?