Toombul District Cricket Club wishes to thank Adam Burnett (Author) and cricket.com.au for allowing us to use part of this story and for the full article please go to https:www.cricket.com.au/
Half a century on from the death of Martin Bedkober in a Brisbane grade match, we trace his all-too brief journey, and try to understand the toll it took on the other man at the centre of a devastating accident
With his gaze steady but his body gently shaking, Terry O’Connell begins a story he hasn’t told in half a century. He is an old man now; white beard, pained eyes. And while, in private, the intense flashes of anger remain, his medication – and perhaps the intervening years – help him display a warm, gentle countenance.
He wears a green jacket, open, over a red-and-navy striped rugby top. Pale blue jeans. Outside, on a warm, cloudless winter’s day in Queensland, he eases onto a timber bench, and smiles into the sun.
Beside him, typically, is his former Sandgate-Redcliffe teammate Bob Joyce. Friend of more than five decades, Joyce is the “block of concrete” O’Connell has leaned on through times of desperate trouble. Yet even he isn’t privy to all that O’Connell wants to tell today.
“I’m almost 76,” he says, “and I feel like my story should be heard.”
And so Terrence John O’Connell reaches into his past. All the way back to December 13, 1975.
It is hot and humid at Oxenham Park, home ground of Toombul District Cricket Club. A Saturday morning like most others through another endless Brisbane summer. Alongside the ground, across Duke Street, the trains roll intermittently through Nundah Station.
O’Connell’s parents, Neville and Mary, are down from the Queensland country town of Charleville, holidaying at nearby Redcliffe. Today, Mary will be watching her pace-bowling son for the first time in Brisbane grade cricket.
O’Connell has driven to Toombul this morning from his home base of Toowoomba, and he has done so with a fire burning inside him. Truth is, that’s been the case most mornings since Vietnam; many years later, a psychiatry report would state that he “attempted to sublimate some of his feelings on a cricket pitch”. Added to that is the rivalry between his Sandgate-Redcliffe side and the boys from Toombul, which runs deep.
This summer, there are two new faces in Toombul’s top three. A pair of highly regarded Sydneysiders who arrived in the off-season. One is the Test-capped 22-year-old opener, Ian Davis. The other, not widely known in Brisbane grade circles, is a 23-year-old wicketkeeper-batter from Petersham-Marrickville named Martin Bedkober.
The two recruits, Davis and Bedkober, are sharing a house in Wooloowin, just a 10-minute drive from their new home ground. Toombul’s other Sydney signing, Jeff Thomson, lives there too. Thomson, who made the move north 12 months prior, is away for this match, playing a Test against West Indies in Perth.
It is the second Saturday of this contest. Sandgate-Redcliffe have 300 on the board, and now their pace bowlers – O’Connell among them – like what they see in the Toombul pitch. Thomson would have been flat-out dangerous.
“No covers in that era,” recalls Brian Short, Toombul’s other opening bat that day. “A generous tinge of green in the wicket, and it was unusually juicy. There were plenty of places I’d rather have been, to be honest.”
Shortly after play begins, O’Connell has Davis edging through to wicketkeeper Ray Brewster.
“Terry was always a new-ball bowler,” says Short, “and in the context of grade cricket, he was really letting it rip.”
With Toombul one down, and the match just minutes old, the right-handed and whippet-thin Bedkober walks to the wicket. He is still a foreign face in his adopted city but today he has a special supporter in his corner: his fiancée, Virginia Johnston, who is visiting from Sydney for the weekend.
To date this season, Short has found Bedkober to be a capable and composed batting partner. Together, they have navigated some tricky phases, and some fiery spells.
O’Connell eyes the new man at the crease.
“I was really fired up,” he says. “Martin came in, and Brian Grace, our captain, set the trap for him.”
He needs no encouragement to pitch it short. The new ball is skidding through, and he gives Bedkober a brief working over. The batter scrambles a couple of runs. From short leg, Joyce snarls a few words.
“I could be a bit aggressive at times,” he offers now.
O’Connell runs in again. He can’t know it in the moment, but the next few seconds will change his life.
Sitting beside him all these years later, Joyce still wonders: what if it had been him bowling – a man who wasn’t forced to confront the terrors of Vietnam, and the trauma in its aftermath? Would he have been impacted across the decades as severely as his friend? He shakes his head as he considers it, knowing it is a question that will never be answered.
O’Connell’s right arm comes over. His wrist snaps down, and his fingers release the ball. It’s not the fastest delivery he will ever bowl. Nor is it especially short. Bedkober moves to shoulder arms, but misjudges the trajectory as it jags back towards him. The ball strikes him in the chest, right on his heart.
Just metres away, Joyce sees and hears the impact as well as anyone.
“I was looking at him, right in the face,” he says. “I was about to say, ‘I hope that hurt’.”
But at that moment, Bedkober falls. Almost immediately, Joyce senses it isn’t right. He moves quickly towards him, instinctively shifting from rival to rescuer.
At the other end of the pitch, two men, metres apart, watch the same scene unfold in different ways.
Short, the non-striker, moves from one state of mind to the next fairly quickly. First, and because he has seen many batters fall and then recover seconds later, he is expecting Bedkober to do the same. When he doesn’t, time stands still.
Come on, Martin, he exhorts silently. Get up.
Then, as he notes the urgency with which Joyce is responding, he moves into a state of shock.
O’Connell meanwhile, sees it all through a lens coloured by war. It takes him only a matter of seconds to reach the end point of this scene, well before it has played out for Short, or anyone else.
“I got down to him – and Bob got to him – and his eyes rolled back,” he says, very slowly now. “And my experience, being in Vietnam, I’ve seen people who had died – and I knew then that he was dead.”
Yet he continues to act. He removes Bedkober’s boots, as Joyce – performing resuscitation – and now Grace – compressions – coordinate CPR. For just a moment, as they await an ambulance, the Sandgate-Redcliffe boys feel a pulse in the young man’s groin. Yet they cannot revive him. Bedkober vomits, but he is motionless.
An ambulance drives onto the ground, parks only metres away. Even the paramedics are shocked by what they see at this suburban cricket oval. One of them, Des Klaassen, applies an oxygen mask to Bedkober. Two more ambulances arrive to continue the supply of oxygen, firstly at the ground, and later en route to the nearby Royal Brisbane Hospital.
From beyond the boundary, the stricken onlookers include not only O’Connell’s parents, but Bedkober’s fiancée Virginia. Toombul players, led by Davis, attempt to shield her from what is unfolding.
“Then they put him in the ambulance, and they drove away,” O’Connell says. “I walked off the field and just yelled out: ‘He’s f—ing dead’.”
Toombul District Cricket Club wishes to thank Adam Burnett (Author) and cricket.com.au for allowing us to use part of this story and for the full article please go to https:www.cricket.com.au/
Footnote: Toombul District Cricket and Sandgate Redcliffe Cricket Club are in discussions to introduce the Bedkober-O’Connell Cup where each year both clubs in first grade in the Brisbane Premier Grade Two-Day Cricket Competition play for the Bedkober-O’Connell Cup.
