'Born to play': Mike Hussey, the daydream believer

Mike Hussey can still call to mind a special moment he shared with his dad, Ted, one spring day in 1994 shortly after being named to make his Sheffield Shield debut.

"It was just him and myself in our old Land Rover four-wheel drive," he tells cricket.com.au. "And Dad was just shaking his head, saying, 'I can't believe a son of mine is playing cricket for Western Australia'."

Almost 30 years on from those formative days, Michael Edward Killeen Hussey has scaled far greater heights than state representation, named today as one of two new entrants into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame.

From a quiet, undersized teen whose greatest traits were an obsessive work ethic and an insatiable drive, he spent an entire career waging war with the inner demon of self-doubt, emerging triumphant in his 30s to become one of the finest all-round batters Australia has produced.

Through it all, his seemingly unconditional love and respect for the game endeared him to cricket fans the world over; from the closing stages of an era in which Australia was often regarded as not only dominant but domineering, he provided a humble counterpoint, his competitiveness and intensity driven not just by a will to win but by what felt like a more innocent kind of passion.

"I did not want to be anywhere else in the whole world than in the middle of a cricket ground, playing for Australia," he smiles. "It felt like that was what I was born to do."

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By the close of his first two golden Test summers, Hussey's list of achievements in Baggy Green was already extensive. In 16 matches between November 2005 and January 2007, he had scored five hundreds, thrice hit the winning runs, thrice been named player of the match, and won each of the five series he had played.

He was also averaging 79.85, had reached 1,000 runs in world record time (164 days), been a star performer in Australia's legendary five-nil Ashes redemption, and never lost a match.

"Those first couple of years, I felt like I was in a dream," says the Western Australian, who at the time was also averaging 77.11 after 48 ODIs. "I was just praying I didn't wake up and find out none of it was happening."

Three months later, Hussey added 'ODI World Cup winner' to his resume with Australia's unbeaten campaign in the Caribbean.

He was about to turn 32, and apparently making up for lost time.

"I'd been through so much, I knew my game inside and out by the time I got to play international cricket," he says. "So that was a huge bonus, but having said that, I would have loved an opportunity earlier."

Since watching Allan Border in the 1982 Boxing Day Test and immediately switching to a left-handed stance in the backyard in tribute to his new-found hero, Hussey had aspired to become a cricketer. Much like the Chappells and Waughs before them, the backyard tales of the brothers Hussey – Mike and David, two years his junior – have become the stuff of Australian cricket lore.

Theirs was a carefree upbringing. Supportive parents, a safe and secure environment on a generous block in the northern outskirts of Perth, across the road from Mullaloo beach. Sisters Kate and Gemma later arrived to round out a happy and rather typical family unit.

Hussey pursued his dream with a relentless enthusiasm. Ted was not a cricketer but through his athletics background he preached the value of hard work and provided his boys with a strong fitness base, their countless hours of toil carried out on the sand dunes adjoining the beach, the highest of which became known to some locals as 'Hussey's Hill'. Mike loved it.

"He trained us up in the winter months, then handed us over to our coaches to go and play cricket," he recalls. "I really loved that he never put pressure on us from a cricket perspective. If we got out or played a bad shot, it was always encouragement, but he was also very much about 'you do the hard work and you get the rewards'. He was very influential."

When Dave tired of backyard battles, Mike turned to a sock hanging from the pergola ceiling with a ball inside, and belted that into submission instead.

He played his cricket at nearby Wanneroo, where he also tended the scoreboard during A grade matches for free hotdogs and cokes, and the chance to watch a young Damien Martyn – four years his senior but a world away on so many other levels – flay the visiting attacks.

By 16, he was in the WACA pathways but also one of the state's best young squash players. Around that time, he remembers being met with silence at a fortnightly family meeting when he said he was going to dedicate his life to his dream of playing cricket for Western Australia, though surely no-one sitting around the dining table was truly surprised.

On the Perth grade scene, he studied Scarborough's young Test product Justin Langer and marvelled from afar at his work ethic (little did he know at the time that, many years later, a retiring Langer would slip a note under his hotel room door, which he held with shaking hands as he read that he was set to become the Australian team's next song master). He worked tirelessly with his coach, Ian Kevan, hitting thousands of balls and repeating the 'Invers' drill – named after WA legend John Inverarity – until his driving from wide mid-on to cover had morphed into muscle memory.

As Ted had forecast, his hard work paid off. Soon enough he was making his way into the big time, touring India with an Australia U19s squad in 1994 and attending the Cricket Academy in Adelaide under Rod Marsh a year later. A first-class debut came in between, but through it all, Hussey could never quite convince himself he was good enough to be where he found himself, believing instead that he was less skilled than his teammates, or not physically big enough to belong among the elite.

"It was also the game," he says. "It's such a hard game that you can never say you've figured it out, or get complacent.

"I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform well, and I wanted it really badly, so I had to evolve in lots of ways. From a technical perspective, but also mentally … by the end of my career, I wasn't crippled by the self-doubt or fear that I was earlier in my career, for sure, because I had the experience to be able to work through it all."

Yet that was a decade or more into the future. In the meantime, Hussey had to deal with entering a Western Australia set-up steeped in old-school ways, where junior players quickly came to understand their lowly place in the hierarchy. That challenge was compounded by clashes with opponents like Queensland, in which the likes of Andrew Symonds and Matthew Hayden would detect his insecurities like sharks sensing blood in the water, and zero in for the kill.

He worked with WACA psychologist Sandy Gordon on his mental application, and found reassurance in routine, repeating the same instructions to himself as he prepared to face up to each and every ball. He even penned a letter to Steve Waugh, who he viewed as the master of the game's mental side, explaining his troubles and seeking solutions. Yet he never ending up sending it; the process itself provided him with the clarity he sought.

A harder edge was built with age and across some strong domestic seasons and then a couple of fallow ones, when the runs dried up even as he piled them on in the County Championship (where in the late 1990s the 'Mr Cricket' moniker was born). In 2001, after the first of three triple hundreds he would make in that competition, Test skipper Waugh called him to offer his encouragement, and to tell him to keep persisting.

The truth was however, Hussey didn't see a way into the Australian side. Langer and Hayden had just cemented their places in the XI and the list of domestic bats he felt were ahead of him in the queue was not short. He looked at the two openers, he looked at the aggressive Ricky Ponting and the free-wheeling Adam Gilchrist, and he decided that was what he needed to be. And so he tried to reinvent himself in the guise of someone else. It was futile.

"When I was going through that phase, my performances became very inconsistent, and I ended up getting dropped from the WA team," he says. "But that was the turning point.

"I'd had some good seasons with WA initially, in my first four or five years, and felt close to playing for Australia, but I couldn't quite get there. So I trained even harder, I put more pressure on myself, I wanted it even more, and I tried to change my game because I thought the selectors wanted aggressive players.

"You're striving for it, and you want it, and it feels like it's just there, but you just need to make that jump to get there, and I couldn't quite make that jump.

"But once I got dropped, I thought, OK, well your chances of playing for Australia are pretty much none now, so you might as well just go back to enjoying the game, playing your way, being yourself, and enjoy playing for WA.

"I took all my focus away from playing for Australia, funnily enough, and as soon as I took that pressure off myself … that's when my confidence returned, my consistency returned, and of course that's when I got my chance."

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On February 1, 2004, smack bang in between the international exits of Steve Waugh and Michael Bevan, Hussey made his ODI debut. In a sign of things to come, he hit 17 not out to help Australia chase down a moderate Indian total in Perth.

He had to wait another a year for a second opportunity, but he ensured it was time well spent. In the summer of 2004-05, he hit three first-class hundreds, including an unbeaten 223 against a Victoria side spearheaded by Shane Warne, who Hussey swept into oblivion.

Not 10 months later, the pair were Test teammates when Hussey was called up as a late replacement for an injured Langer in the first Test of the summer, against West Indies at the Gabba. He had scored 15,313 first-class runs – more than any player before wearing a Baggy Green – but he still wasn't sure he belonged. It was an exchange with Warne that proved impactful.

"I was intimidated by him – I'm not hiding from that fact," he says. "We'd had a couple of run-ins in Sheffield Shield cricket, and I didn't know if he liked me or not."

Which made their brief interaction all the more meaningful. After Ponting won the toss and opted to bat, Hussey readied himself to open the innings. He nervously headed into the toilets for an umpteenth time that morning, and came across Warne.

"I remember it vividly," he smiles. "It wasn't the best picture in the world – him in his underpants smoking a cigarette – but it was the words that mattered. He just pulled me aside and he said, 'Mate, we all rate you here, we all back you – you've just got to play your way and you can't fail'.

"I mean, I didn't appreciate it in the moment, because my head was just all over the place, but once I took a step back and thought, ‘well these guys do think I'm good enough to be here’, it was such a boost to my confidence. So it meant the world to me."

Warne's faith was well placed, as Hussey soon established himself, scoring hundreds in his second and third Tests. Like all the truly great players, he was quick to pick up length and play accordingly. To short balls he employed his ferocious pull shot, while his cover drive is revered as one of the finest of the modern era. Years as an opening bat had taught him to leave the ball judiciously, and to the spinners he used the full depth of his crease but also advanced rapidly, skills that made him one of Australia's best performed batters in Asia.

His six-hitting prowess was underrated in an Australian side that included Gilchrist and Symonds, and was key to him so effectively modernising the 'finisher' blueprint he took from Michael Bevan. Perhaps only David Warner has his measure as Australia's greatest three-format batter.

With three hundreds by the end of his first Test summer, he was already marching towards such lofty heights, and if that wasn't enough to bring him to the attention of the Australian public, the way he scored the third of those on the second morning of the Boxing Day Test certainly was.

Against a strong South Africa, he was on 27 and Australia were 9-248 when No.11 Glenn McGrath walked out to bat. He knew any runs he could manage from that point would be a bonus, and so he took the Proteas attack to pieces. There were four sixes – including two consecutively from Andre Nel that were deposited beyond long-off and into a delighted crowd – as Hussey demonstrated his versatility.

His final 95 runs came from 108 balls, and he completely dominated a 107-run stand with McGrath to put Australia in a match-winning position. It remains one of his fondest memories, for both the occasion and the way it called to mind for him those years of hard work on the Mullaloo sandhills.

"A lot of my training as a teenager and a younger player was based around playing in a Boxing Day Test," he says. "Running up sandhills, all those tough sessions, it was: ‘This is going to get me a Boxing Day Test one day’. That was the dream.

"So to actually play one, I was just over the moon, and then secondly, to be placed in a situation where every run was just going to be a bonus really – we're nine down and Glenn McGrath was at the other end – so to be to be able to play almost with no fear, in the biggest Test match of my life, was just the weirdest feeling.

"It was like I was playing in the backyard with my brother – I could just play with gay abandon almost, and as we kept going, I could really sense the crowd coming into it."

By then, with his prolific run-scoring, his enthusiasm in the field (often he could be heard exhorting his teammates with cries of 'C'mon Australia!'), his busyness at the crease and his zinced-up cheeks, Hussey was already winning the hearts of an Australian public on the lookout for new heroes, with the faces of a golden era about to fade from view.

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That Boxing Day Test victory was Hussey's fifth match and the first of Australia's world record equalling 16 consecutive wins. His personal – and team – highlight in that stretch came amid the Ashes whitewash, when he hit the winning runs during 'Amazing Adelaide' after controlling the final-afternoon run chase with a superb 61no from 66 balls.

"That's the best feeling I've ever had on a cricket field," he says. "Just to be out there, hitting the winning runs in an Ashes Test with the crowd going nuts, seeing the faces of the fans, the faces of my teammates – yeah, that's definitely my most memorable innings."

Hussey's maiden Ashes hundred came in the next Test in Perth, his 103 the last in a string of six consecutive scores of 50-plus (preceded by 182, 86, 91, 61no, 74no) and one of a handful of forgotten hundreds; his player-of-the-match performance in a series-winning triumph was outdone by Adam Gilchrist's 57-ball hundred.

It was the case, too, for his 182 in April 2006 in Chittagong as Jason Gillespie's 201no stole the limelight, while in 2012, three of his hundreds came while Michael Clarke was scoring doubles or a triple at the other end.

All of which sits easily with Hussey, who preferred to carry out his work away from the spotlight if he could manage it. In that way, he believes the presence of so many legends in those early years allowed him to quietly settle into his international career. It also meant he neatly complemented Clarke, a player he enjoyed batting with and a character the headline writers seemed more interested in amplifying.

Together he and Clarke were Australia's middle-order engine room as the team navigated its way through a post-golden era malaise; in the four years between Hayden's exit in January 2009 to Hussey's in January 2013, they scored 22 of the Test team's 50 hundreds.

Australia lost two Ashes series in that time but Hussey led the way for his side, his 846 runs at 49.76 (second only to Alastair Cook across the 10 Tests) reaffirming his status as a man for a crisis. He was also remarkably adaptable, willing to shift roles to fit the requirements of the team; an opener through his first-class career, he settled in Baggy Green in the middle order, where he became just the second Australian after his childhood hero Border to score five Test hundreds from three different positions.

"I just loved the team," Hussey says. "I loved the team atmosphere, loved helping my teammates and loved seeing them do well, so whatever I could do – from a batting point of view or in the field – that's what I was going to do."

That team-first philosophy led to leadership opportunities, too, and while four ODIs as skipper resulted in four defeats, it also seemed to bring out the best in his batting; two of his three hundreds in the format came while he was in charge (he is quick to add with a grin that he did enjoy one win as Australia captain, against Northamptonshire on the 2009 Ashes tour).

Even at the back-end of his career, he was setting new marks. In Sri Lanka in 2011, his 463 runs across three Tests were the most by an Australian player aged 35 or over (he was 36). The tourists enjoyed what would become an increasingly rare triumph on the subcontinent and had player-of-the-series Hussey to thank for it.

There were more Test hundreds to come (his four in 2012 were the most he managed in a calendar year) before Hussey ultimately decided he had lived his dream long enough. At 37, with 79 Tests and 6,235 runs to his name and a batting average of 51.52 – topping even Waugh and Border – he was chaired off the Sydney Cricket Ground by his teammates.

There were cries at the time that Hussey had gone too soon, and almost 11 years on, he remains a highly respected and much-loved figure in the game, having stayed involved through both commentary and coaching. And as with his parents before him, he has two sons who love their cricket (his 11-year-old, he grins, "sleeps with a cricket ball") and two daughters who do not.

Typically, he tries to play down his standing in the game to his children, but should they wander into his study they will find tangible evidence, from each of the bats he used to score hundreds for Australia, to framed tributes relating to Amazing Adelaide and his role as the team song master, which he passed on to Nathan Lyon in 2013.

He thinks back to his days as a young player making his way with WA, and he knows the advice he would offer in retrospect – don't put too much pressure on yourself, keep working hard, don't worry about trying to play like other people, just be you – but equally, he knows it would probably have been wisdom ignored.

"You need to go through the journey to realise all that," he says. "I probably wasn't ready to hear it at that stage, but you figure it out slowly as you go along."

He turned 48 this year and in the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame already there is a coterie of his contemporaries. Such is life when you turn up in a golden age. Just as he joined them then, he does again now.

The Hussey family lost patriarch Ted in October 2014, but Mike can make an educated guess as to how his father would have reacted to the news his first-born is now a Hall of Famer.

"I know he'd just be blown away," he smiles. "He wouldn't believe it."