After Cricket
In Sydney Grade Cricket, he scored 4,302 runs at 37.08 and took 348 wickets at 13.69. He later served as a selector for the Australian team from 1979 to 1984, and after serving as a vice president for three years, in 1970 became president of the New South Wales Cricket Association. At the age of 41, he was the youngest person to have held the post. Davidson held the post until 2003. Davidson was one of the trustees of the SCG from 1978 to 1998, during which time floodlights were installed at the ground.
Davidson has held positions on the board of directors of a variety of organisations, sporting, medical, philanthropic and corporate. He is the chairman of Freshfood Australia Holdings, and was the president of Surf Lifesaving Australia from 1984 to 2002. He served as a member of the New South Wales Sport Advisory Council from 1988 to 2008, and the national equivalent from 1977 to 1981, and served as a director of the ANZAC Health and Research Foundation from 1994 to 2003. He has held positions with the Australian Red Cross and Legacy Australia in the past.
He also served as the chairman of the Rothmans National Sports Foundation for six years. He served on the New South Wales Olympic Council from 1980 to 1996. He published his autobiography Fifteen Paces in 1963, a reference to the length of his bowling run.
Davidson married Betty Patricia McKinley in 1952. Their two sons were born in 1953 and 1955 when he was on tour in England and the West Indies respectively. He was named as the New South Wales Father of the Year in 1982. Davidson worked as a teller for the Commonwealth Bank from 1947 to 1974.
A suburban cricket & Australian rules football ground in Alexandria, in Sydney's inner-west, is named after Davidson. There is also a suburban cricket and soccer oval in Wyoming, New South Wales, on the Central Coast that is named after Davidson. As well as a Cricket and rugby field located in Strathfield.
Read more about this topic: Alan Davidson (cricketer)
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)