Cricket was all Simon Wraight and his friends could talk about as he anticipated receiving a bat for his birthday as a child. Photo: Supplied / Simon Wraight
Even though I can't remember the exact summer, I can still remember the feeling.
It was mid-December, which meant three things. My birthday, Christmas, and, most importantly, cricket.
On the morning of my seventh or eighth birthday, the anticipation was killing me. I heard footsteps outside my room and my dad's head poked around the corner, his smile wide.
He wished me a happy birthday and handed me a cricket bat-shaped parcel.
I eagerly ripped off the wrapping paper to discover an English Willow cricket bat, a GM Maestro Extra. I'd skipped a level, leapfrogged my friends with their Kashmir Willow Mark Waugh Slazenger V100 bats.
Getting to this point had been agonising. I'd spent hours poring over cricket catalogues, analysing my favourite players and the bats they used. Did I want a Kookaburra, used by attacking players like Nathan Astle and Adam Gilchrist? Or did I want a GM, used by the elegant Stephen Fleming?
It was all I could talk about with my friends. We'd sit down before school and at lunch and compare the profiles of the players and the bats they used. Dissecting the names, Ridgeback, Golden Crown, Maestro, Diamond.
At one point in the buildup to my birthday, a friend came back from a trip to Nelson with lines all over his arms. He'd taken a pen to the sports shop and measured the middle of the bats, or the 'meat' as we always referred to it as.
His arms were a mismatch of lines and names, the bats of our idols measured on skin. We quickly grabbed our battered catalogues and cross-referenced the pictures with the hard evidence in front of us.
The decision in the lead-up consumed me. But that morning when I ripped open the paper and received my bat, I was content. It was a thing of absolute beauty. Much like a Stephen Fleming straight drive.
While I was a short and solid right-handed batter, in my mind I was a tall, elegant left-hander with the Maestro in my hand.
Simon Wraight has fond memories of the Maestro which he took with him everywhere over the few summers it lived for. Photo: Supplied / Simon Wraight
The week between my birthday and Christmas was taken up with me 'knocking in' my bat. Hours and hours of banging, preparing it for play and driving my family nuts.
As soon as my dad deemed it ready, we were off down to Memorial Park to hit the nets.
That summer took the flow of most summers in Motueka. We'd play cricket at Motueka High School on Saturday mornings, then head to someone's house for lunch before heading down to Memorial Park to play in the nets and watch the Motueka senior team play.
We'd sit and chat to the players when Motueka was batting, or create our own games in the nets, pretending to be our idols.
The Maestro came everywhere with me over those few summers. My favourite weekends were when we had rep cricket on Sundays against Nelson or Marlborough as well as the Saturday games. It was during one of these games, however, that the Maestro came to an end.
I had lent the bat to a teammate who was a very promising left-hand batter, and a very handy left arm seam bowler. He was an athlete of unparalleled skill at school, and we all knew he'd go somewhere (he ended up playing 300 games for the Warriors in the NRL).
He leant forward to play a drive and the lower half of the Maestro split in half. It was shocking, but I don't remember feeling sad. All my idols on TV had broken their bats at some point, so it felt like a badge of honour. And while the Maestro had played its last shot, my love for the game endured.
Part three of RNZ's summer essay series.
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