Early Years and Army Service
Iverson was a fast bowler at Geelong College where he was educated. His school career was notable for his dismissal of Lindsay Hassett with an inswinger in an interhouse match within his school, later to become his captain in both the Victorian and Australian teams. Iverson was to take no part in cricket for twelve years after graduation, and did not play first class cricket for another 15 years. Starting in 1933, Iverson became a jackaroo in the Mallee and later rose to become an assistant manager on a property of Essington Lewis at Tallarook.
In 1939, he enlisted in the Australian Defence Force after the outbreak of the Second World War, and served in the anti-aircraft regiments of the Ninth Division in the Middle East, before being deployed to Papua New Guinea. There, Sergeant Iverson developed an unorthodox method of spinning the ball, which he gripped between his thumb and middle finger. This enabled him to bowl a wide variety of deliveries, including off breaks, leg breaks and googlies, without any change of action. At this stage he was only playing socially in spontaneous recreation with other army colleagues.
Read more about this topic: Jack Iverson
Famous quotes containing the words early, years, army and/or service:
“On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,—
One old jug without a handle,—
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,”
—Edward Lear (1812–1888)
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)