The internet and its ubiquitous, encyclopaedic “engine” called Google are responsible for much that is good in mankind.
You can learn how to order a hamburger in Helsinki. You can watch a webcam in Amsterdam. If that is, um, your thing.
You can find out all manner of things. You can learn anything, even lies. Particularly lies, if that is of your wont. You can learn all sorts of malarkey.
But one thing the Net has killed is The Bet Down The Pub. You know the one? When you and a group of pals get down the boozer and one fellow says something about a sporting event, and another disagrees with a particular fact, say, whether it was Gary Freeman or Mick “Ginger Meggs” Neill whom Mal Meninga ankle-tapped in the latter stages of the 1989 NSWRL grand final.
The Internet’s killed that. Because now you just Google up the answer, and it’s taken away a semi-pleasurable little thing in our daily lives.
Do we lament this? A little, yes. Betting mates for money or a shout of schooners, arguing about particular sporting facts… that was fun. Still is. But people are loathe to ante up if they’re not sure because facts are at one’s fingertips.
But… in days when “the internet” wasn’t on telephones, and phones were used primarily for verbal communications, with texting as an aside, the following fun thing happened, would’ve been 2004, or thereabouts.
So I was down my local boozer once, the Clovelly Hotel in Sydney’s east, and had a bet with a mate about who ran out Brian Lara when he scored 277 in Sydney in 1992-93. As one does in groupings of men.
Now, I knew it was Damien Martyn. Knew it, knew it, knew it. I could see Martyn doing it, slinging it in underhand and getting Lara the only way Australia were going to get Lara out that innings, short of a sniper in the crowd with a poison dart.
Yet I couldn’t convince this mate, who was sure it was Mark Waugh.
So we had a bet. Twenty bucks.
He says, make it a hundred.
I say, make it five hundred.
He says okay.
Then he says, make it a hundred.
And I say okay. And still I gave him the get-out option. Telling him what I knew that I knew.
But he wasn’t having it. Indeed he began to goad me, telling me what he was going to do with my hundred bucks, how he was going to spend it, that he’d seen a Driver at Drummond had his name upon it.
And so on.
So the bet went back up again to $500, which was a rather large amount for a freelance sports hack and an unemployed mainframe “computer operator”.
(Photo by Joe Mann/Getty Images)
So we’ve got this bet and we’re trying to decide how to work out how to definitively work out who ran out Lara.
Should we nip over to the “Internet café” up the road? And leave the pub? Wasn’t happening.
What to do, what to do…
And then into the pub walks – not making this up – the bloody bloke who bowled the very ball that Lara prodded out to cover, GRJ “Mo” Matthews.
That’s right – Greg Matthews, the funky spin man and hep-cat, and really rather odd and interesting fellow – this very fellow wandered into the pub at that very minute while we were earnestly discussing this very important matter in Australian cricket history.
Ha. Greg Matthews – how about that.
So my mate Henry says, I’ll go ask him.
So up he goes, Henry, to the bar and pats Mo on the shoulder, and says, “Hey, Mo! Who ran out Brian Lara when he was on 277 in ’93 at the SCG? Was it Damien Martyn or Mark Waugh?”
And poor Mo sort of flinched and looked a bit frightened, wide-eyed, that my mate Henry – a large and half-pissed Kiwi – was looming over him, fronting him, asking him this random cricket question from a game played maybe 12 years previously.
Eek! What you want, random pub patron? Take my wallet!
Yet Mo managed to comport himself and reply: “I don’t know. But it wasn’t Damien Martyn”.
Henry returned to our table in triumph. Told me to pay up.
But I said No. For I knew Mo was wrong.
So a journo mate with us said he’d text Mark Waugh’s manager. Ingenious!
This manager bloke then texted Mark Waugh himself, who was in Singapore at the airport on the way to India.
Then Mark Waugh’s text came back to us via the manager, and read: “It could’ve been me. Sorry, I dunno.”
It was getting weird. Even Mark Waugh didn’t know that it wasn’t Mark Waugh who ran out Brian Lara on 277 at the SCG in 1993.
So then we SMS’d all these journos we sort of knew – Mike Coward, the late great Pete Roebuck, few others. And this bet of ours began flashing around press boxes Australia-wide.
Finally we got on to the official stats man of dear old Aunty ABC, man called Ric Finlay, effectively the statistician of the Australian cricket nation, who confirmed it:
“Damien Martyn”.
Which I knew.
So I let my mate off the monkey but ordered him to buy me beers for the remainder of the day.
And then I yelled out to Greg Matthews who was sitting at an adjoining table. “Hey Mo!” I yelled. “It was Damien Martyn who ran out Brian Lara when he scord 277 at the SCG in ’93!”
To which Mo replied, “That’s because it must’ve rained.”
And we were like… okay, then. And that’s where cross-table conversation between Mo’s table – featuring Mo – and ours – featuring us – ended for the day, which probably suited both parties.
And that’s how we left it: the last great cricket bet of the brave new millennium.
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