What’s in a Name?
Why they called him “Slasher”
One of the nice things about writing about people you’ve met instead of about politics is that sometimes your heroes turn up.
Or, if they’re no longer with us, their relatives do.
Such was the case last month when I posted a story here about famous Australian cricketer Ken Mackay – known universally in the ’50s and ’60s as “Slasher”.
The story was called: To Remember One Hero – is to forget many.
I wanted to contrast how Slasher and other great cricketers have been forgotten … whereas Don Bradman is remembered in song. In TV series. In statues. On grandstands … and everywhere else.
The sort of Shakespeare of cricket.
I knew, but had forgotten, that Slasher’s brother Sommie Mackay was an Australian golf champion – until Sommie turned up on the phone last week.
He was laughing with joy at the memories of his beloved champion brother.
Sommie and his wife, Heather, were delighted with my story remembering Slasher who grew up in a family of six children in Virginia, north Brisbane.
There was “excitement” in the family, so she sent the story to Slasher’s four daughters.
Sommie added to my knowledge of my hero. Aspects about him that people just didn’t know at the time … when Slasher was famous as a gum-chewing, limping, obdurate, left-handed Test batsman.
As a boy in Brisbane, Ken Mackay was known as “the Virginia Bradman”.
“You said Ken averaged 700 in the 1933 schoolboys’ competition, actually it was 723!” Sommie recalled, chuckling. “But what no one remembers is that the next year Ken scored 1,100 runs at an average of only 550 because he was out twice, not just once!”
Proud of his big brother, Sommie – who also represented Queensland Schoolboys successfully in inter-state cricket before turning to golf – added: “You didn’t mention that Ken scored 157 not out, aged 27, batting against the legendary Australian opening bowling attack of Keith Miller and Ray Lindwall!”
Even more remarkable than that, this one Brisbane family also produced the Queensland women’s table tennis champion, Marion, and Queensland softball team member, Virginia.
Which must be a record for the one family: four state champions in four different sports.
Ken Mackay, Sommie recalled, was also an A Grade tennis player – which explains why Davis Cup champions Roy Emerson and Mal Anderson (Wimbledon and US Open champs respectively) attended his engagement party to Mavis Jean Kenway in Brisbane.
So now I know why Slasher was sitting in the seat behind me in the timber grandstands at Milton Tennis Courts when I went to watch my mate Kenny Fletcher play British champion Mike Sangster in the early 1960s.
Next to me was the girl I admired most in the world: fellow reporter Sallyanne Kerr, who decades later became Brisbane Lord Mayor Sallyanne Atkinson.
I’d invited her to the tennis; I suppose hoping that some of Fletch’s easy glamor would make me more attractive to her.
She seemed so confident and sparkling.
It was because of her that I first met my hero.
As Sallyanne and I stood to go to lunch, to my surprise and mortification, she turned to Slasher, sitting behind us, and said: “Slash, why don’t you join us for lunch?”
As the three of us dined (Slasher’s shout) in the Milton Clubhouse, I couldn’t help noticing – as he wielded knife and fork – his slender wrists: I’d expected a Test cricketer to have huge forearms.
It showed me that hitting a ball hard must all be in the timing, not the strength.
That was also when I learnt that Ken Mackay’s stoic ruthless determination not to lose was an essential part of his character.
Desperate to air my knowledge about something (anything) I remarked “Newcombe did very well in the Davis Cup final, don’t you think?”
Still a teenager, John Newcombe had forced both US players to five sets.
To my surprise, Slasher replied matter-of-factly: “No he didn’t. He lost.”
From then on, I shut up and listened.
Sommie revealed that, after Slasher belatedly got into the Australian Test cricket team at the age of 30, [I thought he’d have been in years before if he hadn’t been a Queenslander] he soon became best mates with his former New South Wales archenemy, Sydney’s Richie Benaud.
Sommie continued: “On the ship over to England in 1956 [probably 5 weeks] Richie and Ken even performed a dance together on stage to entertain the passengers and crew.”
Apparently, it was a big hit.
Critics complained that Slasher Mackay was not only a slow-scoring batsman but also a negative bowler.
“What they didn’t know,” said Sommie, “was that Richie, who was captain, would tell Ken: ‘Slasher, you keep them from scoring runs at one end and then they’ll attack my leg-spin at the other end, and they’ll get out’.”
Sommie laughed at the descriptions in my Substack article of Slasher’s shuffling, jerky, hesitant batting; the English reporter’s complaint “Mackay limps on both legs”; and the quote from another English sports columnist who wrote of Slasher’s first Test innings: "The man who pulls the strings on the puppet that is Ken Mackay batted particularly well today."
Sommie said an English cricket captain had once asked him what had happened to his brother as a child to cause his slouching gait. Bursting into laughter, Sommie told me: “I said: ‘Nothing happened to him! That’s just the way Ken always was!”
So it turned out that Slasher’s childhood “infantile paralysis” was a myth.
But the biggest scoop Sommie gave me was how Slasher got his internationally known nickname.
Ken Mackay had been in the Australian army in the Pacific as a teenager from 1943 and wasn’t discharged until 1946 – when he was, of course, straight into the Queensland cricket team.
“On his first southern tour they were playing South Australia in Adelaide in 1947 and in a lot of trouble. So Ken, 21, dug in to try to stave off certain outright defeat.
“He was batting with Aub Carrigan and at one stage Ken batted for more than an hour without scoring a run. So, after the match was saved, Aub stood up in the dressing room and ironically christened him “Slasher” – and the nickname stuck for the rest of his career.”
The name was, of course, in the great tradition of Australian nicknames where a redhead was called “Bluey”; a tall bloke “shortie”; and a bald man “curly”.
Read more of my stories about cricketers by clicking on these links:
To Remember One Hero Our Don Bradman Dealing with Fame Lunch with Ian Chappell
What a remarkable family the Mackay's are. I'd love someone to collect all their stories, and trace where this sporting skill originated, and are there any sporting enthusiasts in their descendants. Lovely to read how proud Sommie (now where did he get that name?) is of his big brother.