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, early, years, army and/or service:
“Even today . . . experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years. . . . Children don’t need parents’ full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“Are you more likely to tolerate drivel than you were four years ago? I think the answer is yes. Four years of Reagan has deadened the senses against a barrage of uninterrupted nonsense.”
—Alexander Cockburn (b. 1941)
“What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,—for there must be subordination,—but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare.”
—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)