The little boy lay in his hospital bed, enclosed physically and mentally. The doctors were puzzled by the problem with his lungs; his ailment couldn't be neatly labelled, so they were understandably cautious, deeming the intrusion of tubes and needles a necessity. The transparent, zipped-up plastic tent surrounding him had become a comfort in one sense, a protector. But it was also a barrier, a murky separation from a world he ached to know. The same could be said of his learning difficulties. A byproduct of his physical problems? No-one could be quite sure. But they were another obstacle in the path to normalcy. Of that there was no argument.

When she wasn't by his side, he pined for the presence of his mother, Val; his rock. For his little brother, Steven, and big sister, Sheree. For the kindness of the nurses. But he lived for the television, a clunky old black-and-white National that Val would lug in to the ward; helpless but never defeated, she had found a way to bring a smile to the face of her first-born son.

From the lonely side of the divide, he would stare at the screen and escape into World Series Cricket.

***

David Baird stands with a welcoming smile, holding open the front door of the modest Gold Coast house he and Val have called home for a decade. He wears a crisp blue-and-white Cricket Australia polo, tucked smartly into matching blue shorts. An assistant curator at Runaway Bay Cricket Club, he is deeply tanned from days of toil under Queensland's unrelenting sun. Despite having lost 23kg in the past two years, he remains a sizeable figure; tall and broad, though not imposing. His light blue eyes signal caution, but also a willingness to trust. His small talk is routine – heavy traffic, hot weather – and his handshake feels about as firm as a good handshake should.

David first toured with Australia to South Africa in 2005

David has an IQ of around 72, which places him in the 'borderline mental disability' category on the Intelligence Quotient. He is 45 years old, and he is pretty sure he still holds the record for the highest blood-sugar level ever recorded at the new Gold Coast hospital, at 51.

"They said I should've been in a coma," he says, a half-smile creeping on to his face.

And while each number tells a small part of his story, there's a single digit he prefers to focus on: one.

It's emblazoned right there on the side of his cap, which he has brought from his bedroom into the sun-drenched living room at the front of their home, as a sort of show-and-tell piece. He'll make similar ventures, back and forth down the hallway, across the next few hours, whenever he is reminded of a tangible piece of evidence to support the cricket tale he is telling. The cap is a navy blue version of the famous Baggy Green, and is to David every bit as special. Because he was an opening bat in the inaugural international match for Australia's Intellectual Disability (ID) cricket team, he was given the honour of owning cap number one.

As an international sportsman for more than a decade, he has tasted the salty air of Cape Town, smelled the freshly-mown grass at Old Trafford, and developed lasting friendships across the vast expanses of his own country and beyond. It's a dream he didn't dare conceive as a child; such fantasies were for others to chase, never him. Back then, cricket never went past the watching, existing solely as a refuge from a reality that promised nothing beyond the four walls of his hospital room.

"Sometimes I do have to pinch myself," he says. "I definitely feel lucky."

And as his story unfolds, you believe him.

***

The kicks to her side were so forceful that Val could just about feel her ribs cracking.

It was another of those nights. After taking a beating out the back of his local pub, Val's husband had returned to their Canberra home shortly before midnight in a drunken rage. Well versed in what to expect, she ensured her two babies, Sheree and David, were in bed, making herself the lone target for his violence. Out of sight, she always hoped, would mean out of mind.

Days later, she learned that her abusive, alcoholic husband had broken two of her ribs as she lay prone in the hallway, defenceless.

She had been five months pregnant with her third child.

"So as soon as I had Steven, I took a job at a Travelodge, doing washing up of a night," Val says, detailing the first steps of an escape from the domestic violence she was routinely suffering, way back in 1974.

"I didn't want to stay – he was never home unless he was (intoxicated).

"At the time I had three kids under three. So I virtually had to leave them in their beds of a night with him at home and go to work.

"I just thought, 'Well I'm not going to put up with this', so I left."

It was a courageous decision, one far more complicated than she makes sound; in a morass of fear and violence, no such move could ever be simple. But from Val's perspective, both then and now, it was the only one.

"Any woman that's in an abusive relationship knows you can't just walk out," she explains. "You're being threatened to be killed."

For years Val had been kicking against the lethal undercurrent of domestic abuse as it tried to drag her under. In her children, she had three living, breathing reasons to keep her head above water. If she kept swimming, she figured, sooner or later she would feel land beneath her feet.

***

David spent much of the first 13 years of his life in the Old Royal Canberra hospital, with severe lung issues similar to those suffered by people with cystic fibrosis, though he was never given that diagnosis. In hospital, he relied on an oxygen tent to assist his breathing, which meant he was virtually bedridden and unable to attend the in-hospital school, which further stymied his learning. His intermittent stints at home were only approved after the hospital acquired one of the first Atrovent and Ventolin nebulisers in the country for his use.

"When they're in hospital, they're in oxygen tents with needles in them everywhere, they don't actually learn anything," Val says. "They don't learn how to eat; David would just eat with his hands."

What he did learn about was cricket. The sterile hospital smell, the burning fluorescent lights and the unconscious humming of machines all faded away when he lost himself in the grainy television footage. The spectacular pace of Thomson, the grit of Wessels, the showmanship of Richards and Garner – they became his escape, his passion, his sources of conversation. At home, he plastered his bedroom walls with posters of World Series cricketers he had collected from McDonald's. Even today, memories of hospital stays are intertwined with cricket moments.

"The Steve Waugh sightscreen catch," he says of a famous outfield effort from the summer of 1988-89. "I remember I was back in hospital for that."

All the while, Val was doing what she was programmed to do as a mother; worry ceaselessly about her boy, and the quality of life he might expect. During the times he was out of hospital, he attended a special school in Canberra, but any gains were quickly lost due to a combination of David's ID and long absences from any form of education.

Val, now in her 70s, is a petite woman, though given what she has overcome in her life, it would be impossible to call her frail. Well dressed and carefully manicured, she presents a pleasant, confident face to the world. But her emotions show a rawer side when she recalls this period in their lives.

"It was terrible, because when you left him at the hospital, you didn't know whether he was going to be alive when you went back," she says.

Her voice cracks, and a tear escapes, which she quickly brushes away, dismissing it from her presence.

"I'd take the children in (to hospital), have them in there all day. Take them home, bathe them, get them to bed and then go to work.

"But in your mind, you'd always be there (at the hospital). The things you see in a children's ward makes you appreciate life much better. I've seen some terrible things happen to good people."

***

Desperate to find – and fund – a new life for her and her children, Val wasted no time applying for jobs around Canberra, a city that was growing steadily in the mid-1970s with new housing estates popping up around the outskirts of the small CBD.

The position going at the Canberra College of Advanced Education was an attractive one as it afforded her some flexibility – a priceless element for a young, single mother of three. She didn't know it at the time, but it was the best interview of her life; not only did she land the job, she also met her future husband.

As the months unfolded, Val found the man who had conducted the interview to be compassionate and warm. In time it became clear to her – this was the man she was meant to marry all along.

"He was wonderful," she says, her expression shifting from stern to wistful as she evokes a love undimmed. "He was totally different (to her first husband). Just a gentleman through and through."

Twenty-six years older than Val, Duncan was a Scottish farmer and one of four brothers who had served in World War II. He emigrated to Australia in 1969. At the college, he watched with interest and no small amount of admiration at the way Val somehow juggled raising her three children with her job.

(L-R) Siblings Steven, Sheree and David Baird

"When he married me, we went through all the official channels so he could formally adopt the children," Val says. "They just idolised him. All three of them have always regarded Duncan as their father."

A staunch monarchist and devotee of King George VI, who reigned during the war, Duncan carried an old sixpence coin with him throughout the conflict. It was a treasured possession, a tiny beacon of hope in a world of despair. Before closing his eyes each night, he would rub his thumb against the King's head, saying to himself: whatever challenges I'm faced with tomorrow, I'll get through them.

***

The Bairds moved east, to the postcard town of Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast, where David attended the local public high school. It was a fresh start, an opportunity for Val to rid herself of the daily reminders of the nightmares associated with the home in Canberra.

As his condition stabilised somewhat in his teens, David spent less time in hospital and more time interacting with others. Val and Duncan enrolled him at Ulladulla High School, where ironically, his ID seemed to aid a level of tolerance reserved for few his age; in viewing often-complicated teenagers through a simple lens, he was more willing to accept the best in people with the worst in people. Sometimes the distance between the two wasn't so great. He was bullied and beloved, insulted and embraced. He made friends at school, but was an eternal target. He has never quite understood the lines that separate good from bad, kind from dismissive; instead he made a choice – he would not be someone who dwelled on negatives.

"Some things did hurt, but you get over it," he says. "Life goes on."

David was overweight due to the bloating from regular injections of cortisone. He spent much of his time with Duncan and Steven, familiar and familial security blankets he could attach himself to and rely upon. Together with his ID, his weak lungs hindered his attempts to build a normal life. In class one day he collapsed, seemingly at random, and had to be taken by ambulance to the local hospital. He was put on pure oxygen, which had almost the reverse effect of what was intended, as his breathing laboured further, leading his paediatrician to believe David's lungs were better suited to a more humid climate, where the air naturally contained more H2O.

The struggles were constant. A school cross country event remains a vivid, unpleasant memory that, given the way Val nods along with the retelling, has been pored over within the family more than once in the intervening years.

"I'd never run in me life," David says. "And it was a five-kilometre course."

Inevitably, he began trailing the field, and by so far that by the time he returned to the school oval that marked the final lap of the course, in the company of a lone supportive friend, everyone else was long since finished. He took out his Ventolin, fuelling the lungs that had cursed him his entire life.

From behind, he heard the sputter and whine of a dirt-bike, approaching fast. Before he could understand what was happening, he was being dragged along beside the bike, his neck in the grip of a strong arm, his feet fighting to find footholds on the grass.

Clearly still miffed, David recounts the story as if it happened just hours ago. An over-zealous PE teacher had seen him and his friend lagging so far behind that he assumed they were misbehaving, and using the Ventolin to get high, as some kids had been prone to do.

"He must not have read my file," David says, his emphasis still making the statement sound like a question more than 30 years after the fact. "That was a bit tough. I didn't know how to handle that."

Months went by before Val found out Duncan had later paid the principal and the teacher a visit. He had told Val to let the matter pass, then surreptitiously set about ensuring some closure for his son.

"Everything got sorted out then," David says. "Dad told them what I'd been through, and the teacher actually come up and apologised. We were fine with him after that."

That was Duncan; compassionate, quietly determined, considered. Regardless of David's challenges, the teachings of his father were ones he would pick up on and store away. He carries them with him still, the defining traits of a man who has cast aside his own limitations to understand the life lessons that matter.

"I see a lot of Duncan in David," Val says, smiling. "He cares about people."

***

Val and Duncan continued to be surprised by David's cricket acumen. He had a knack for knowing players and moments and scores, and by extension, was learning numbers and countries and the importance of rules; it was an education by leather and willow.

Tentatively at first, they encouraged him to get into the actual playing of cricket. With Steven supporting him, David happily lined up in the local indoor cricket team. He batted at No.11 and made duck after duck, but was completely unperturbed by his returns; the sense of being part of a team was transformative. The next summer, he signed up for regular cricket, too.

As it happened, Ulladulla was the perfect distance from Sydney and appealing enough as a destination to attract some of the country's finest cricketers for coaching clinics. David Boon and Allan Border both visited the little community, playing exhibition matches alongside the locals, while it was the advice of Steve Waugh that David took as gospel.

"He asked me where my bat was, so he could sign it for me," he remembers, grinning. "I told him it was on layby, so he gave me his. Gave me a pair of gloves, too!"

David stands unexpectedly and hurries out of the room, returning moments later with the evidence: a signed Steve Waugh Gunn & Moore bat, with matching gloves, professionally framed. On the bat is the famous Waugh signature, with a simple prefixed message: To David, play straight.

"And that's how I learned how to play," he says. "Just play straight."

David took the words of his all-time cricket hero to heart, and began practising religiously, forever keeping the ball between 'the v'. If it was good enough for the world's best batsman, it was certainly good enough for him. There were more ducks in the years that followed, but David's persistence paid off; for 11 years he was a regular fixture at Ulladulla Sports Park, finally making his first half-century, and from there the runs came more readily.

On the Indoor scene, he rose to spend 14 years as NSW ID captain in what is now known as the Lord's Taverners Shield, a division incorporated into Cricket Australia's National Indoor Open Championships for players with an intellectual disability. He made his way up the order, too, becoming the reliable opening bat he remains today.

Indoors and out, home and away, Duncan was his biggest fan, his best mate and his role model, as reliable a presence at his son's cricket as the stumps themselves.

Then in 2005, when David was 32 and the family had moved to the humid climes of the Gold Coast to better assist his breathing, it was announced that the first national outdoor ID cricket team would be selected for a tour of South Africa.

His name was on the list.

Decades removed from the daily uncertainty of a childhood spent in hospital, David was living.

***

The memories come quickly, and they're telling. Watching a daring team manager ride an ostrich at an ostrich farm. Operating the scoreboard at the picturesque Boland Park in Paarl. Spotting great white sharks around a seal-inhabited island off the coast. Gazing – awestruck – at Newlands and Table Mountain. Holding a six-month old lion cub. Embracing Herschelle Gibbs in another photo for his collection.

In David's mind, playing cricket was secondary to the experiences. Not even a broken collarbone – suffered in the field during the match in Paarl – could take away from an adventure that was like nothing he had known. He wandered the cities wide-eyed, struck up conversations and friendships with opponents; one still sends him South African playing strips, which David happily adds to his wardrobe of cricket garb.

That South Africa tour cost him around $2000 but times have since changed, as Cricket Australia's 'A Sport for All' mantra increasingly rings true for society's disadvantaged minorities. Sponsorships have come on board and awareness has grown, to the point that Australia's ID tour of England last year – David's international swansong – was fully funded. In January, the National Cricket Inclusion Championships (NCIC) brought together not only ID players from around the country, but deaf and blind cricketers as well. The interest continues – South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia lead the way among state and territory associations in the process of or planning to establish development academies for their NCIC playing groups.

"The touring days were good fun," David says, his mind more in the past than the present. "I loved South Africa. I can't believe some of the interesting people I've met. You do all these things …"

He drifts away with his thoughts, and Val, as ever, is on hand to carry on the thread, adding another angle to the conversation.

"I think it's just wonderful that Cricket Australia has come on board with it," she says. "These kids, they get picked in that Australian team, and they become friends for life."

Almost 13 years after the fact, there remains a standout recollection for David of that first international tour – and any tours since – and it's the most revealing of all. On the eve of their first match in Durban, the squad conducted a coaching clinic for hundreds of kids who had come from far and wide to take part.

"Some of them had driven five hours for it," David says.

They ran the kids through drills, throwing balls at plastic stumps and running between makeshift wickets dotted across the ground. It was organised chaos, and David and his friends embraced the experience as much as the kids themselves, finding utter joy in their shared passion. Beyond any cricket tutelage, David's mind traces back to the smiles and laughter, which he clings to as an emotional compass to map out the next phase of his life.

"It's why I want to get into coaching young players with disabilities," he says. "That's my goal now. To give back."

***

Three years after that maiden tour, David suddenly felt tethered to home. Duncan, approaching 90, suffered a stroke, and while he was eventually released from hospital, he never completely recovered. David and Val, operating on the same love and loyalty Duncan had shown them for 35 years, nursed him in their Runaway Bay home for the next 18 months. At Christmas 2008, David dressed up as Santa and presented his dad with a beer. It's another smile he remembers. Two months later, Duncan passed away in his sleep aged 89, the gangrene in his foot too much to handle.

David as Santa for what was Duncan's last Christmas

"That was the toughest time, that six months after losing him," David says.

Val recalls the monarchist in her husband until the end, devastated he wouldn't live to 100 to receive a letter from the Queen: "I still remember he said to me, 'I'm not going to get that letter, am I love?'"

Today, a photo of Duncan hangs on the side of the fridge, blown up and impossible to miss as you head down the hallway. In it, he's in his final years, but the smile is one of contentment, and the eyes, deep-set and framed by dark and tired wrinkles, still sparkle with life.

The same photo is in the living room, too – the smile, the eyes – and serves as a constant presence of their dearly departed.

Duncan Baird, who passed away in 2009

As ever, David and Val endured together, their lives forever altered but immeasurably richer for having had Duncan by their side.

Two years ago, David had another turn and was again taken by ambulance to hospital. The humidity in Queensland makes breathing easier but it will never heal his cursed lungs. For days he was unable to quench a growing thirst, until he all but collapsed one Saturday morning at the local grocery store.

"Next thing he's clinging to the trolley," Val says. "I said, 'What's wrong?'

"He said, 'I can't see'.

"I said, 'What do you mean you can't see?'"

David's seriously blurred vision and record-breaking blood-sugar levels were classic symptoms of Type 2 Diabetes, which he was quickly diagnosed with in the resuscitation ward at Gold Coast hospital, where he spent the next 48 hours recovering.

"His body had been eating his body for three days because he wasn't getting treatment," Val says.

It was just another parameter to incorporate into their lives, which nowadays is a humble, contended existence. Val drives David to training, matches and his voluntary curating work at Runaway Bay CC, where he was recently awarded a life membership, and had the 'David Baird Clubman of the Year' award named in his honour.

"David loves the club, loves going down there," Val says. "Because other than that, we've just got our simple little life here at home."

Having attained his Level One Coaching Certificate, David is preparing himself for his next adventure. Already he mentors a couple of young kids at his club, including one up-and-coming left-arm pace bowler who is also an ID player.

"He's good," David says. "We just have to work on his run-up – he runs in a bit crooked."

Opportunities at Queensland Cricket look likely to open up for him in his chosen pathway; inevitably, the game David loves will continue to hold his and Val's world in orbit. He is yet to completely retire from playing, but the competitive fires are waning and he sees the end as nigh. He might see out another season at Runaway Bay and with Queensland, imparting some of the knowledge few believed he could possess onto a younger generation.

"When you get older, you get wiser," David says, smiling. "I look at it like I'm nearly a wise man."

***

David has one last item he wants show, the most meaningful of his treasured keepsakes.

He repeats his routine, retracing his footsteps down the short hallway to his bedroom. Fifteen seconds pass, before he walks back into the living room. At first, it appears as if he is holding nothing at all. Then, from one large hand he produces a small, clear plastic satchel. His fingers fumble with the seal, and then the contents within. At last, he pulls out a worn, silver-coloured coin.

He rubs his thumb against the King's head on the side, looks at Val, and smiles.

Whatever challenges we're faced with tomorrow, we'll get through them.