An idea became an obsession. A home became a shrine. PAUL AMY ventures inside a place where willow is worshipped, from Gray-Nicolls to Gunn & Moore, discovering its greatest treasures.
The idea came to Brad Baptist after he bought the Willow Wizard cricket equipment business in Melbourne 15 years ago.
As he settled into his small workshop, he thought his customers would dig a display of vintage cricket bats.
He fished around on eBay and found a few.
Then a few more. And a few more.
Before he knew it he had reached his hundred.
“It got out of hand pretty quickly, drastically,’’ Baptist says.
“I just wanted to hang a few on the wall and show people what the old ones looked like. It went past that!’’
Willow-worshipping Baptist now has one of the best collections of cricket bats in Australia.
There are Gray-Nicolls and Gunn & Moores.
Symonds and Stuart Surridges.
Crocketts and Callens.
Slazengers and Spartans.
Kookaburras and Kippaxs.
Duncan Fearnleys and Fishers.
New Balances and Newberys.
SPs and Screaming Cats.
There are …
Name a brand and Baptist will almost certainly have it in his collection of more than 600 bats, most of which live in plastic covers.
They occupy two bedrooms of his home in Melbourne’s east, as well as a shed where he occasionally makes a Willow Wizard bat or carries out a repair job.
Baptist is the head curator of the Junction Oval, the home of Cricket Victoria, and working on its wickets and outfield leaves him few hours to produce bats (the last one he crafted was for sports commentator Adam White).
Still, he finds the time to nose around eBay, Facebook Marketplace and other sites where bats can be bought.
Competition is tight. Baptist says bat collecting has become popular in the past few years and prices have increased sharply.
He says he’s lucky he picked up a lot of good bats cheaply when he was starting out.
“Back then you could buy a bat for $20 to $50. That same bat now sells for $150 to $200,’’ he says.
Gray-Nicolls bats are his specialty and have their own room.
He has 340 GNs, from vintage models to the most recent releases.
Besides bats, there are Gray-Nicolls bags, balls, stumps, shirts, bat covers, cones and posters.
He has formed a shrine to a cricket equipment company that is older than Test cricket itself.
*****
Baptist, 48, grew up in the southeast of Melbourne and by the age of 13 was helping curate the turf wicket at his local club, Parkfield.
One year the club showed its appreciation by buying him his first cricket bat.
Parkfield stalwart Geoff Milne took him to the Gray-Nicolls factory at Mordialloc, where he selected a Michael Slater Powerspot. He still has it, but it’s undergone a change of stickers, masquerading as an Elite.
Baptist recalled those Parkfield days when he set out buying bats.
Teammate Tony Payne had a Gray-Nicolls Powerspot. Baptist bought a Powerspot.
Graham Harris, another teammate, owned a Gray-Nicolls Dynadrive. Baptist had to own a Dynadrive too.
His coach, Ross Linton, had a Gray-Nicolls Giant Powerspot that everyone at the club used. Baptist hunted down a Giant Powerspot.
This Powerspot Giant is approximately 38 years old and still looking good! @MadeByGrayNics
Comment a picture of your oldest bat below! pic.twitter.com/FFxXVPmeng
“After I did that I thought, ‘Well, I might as well get one of every brand’,’’ he says.
Although he spent some time with master bat-maker Tim Keeley in the UK, Baptist largely taught himself to make bats, and the Willow Wizards he turned out were well received.
Trade-ins were part of his business.
Customers could bring in their old bats and if they were English willow, Baptist would happily take them and give discounts on new bats.
The scheme gave his growing collection a good bump-up.
Baptist also bought a lot of bats when he went to work in the UK as a curator.
His interest in the wicket at Parkfield – he even wagged school to help prepare it – led to an apprenticeship as a groundsman with the old City of Springvale.
Noble Park was the first oval he worked on.
In the following years, after striking out on his own, he looked after some Premier and Sub-District grounds and in 2018 was appointed to Marrara Oval in Darwin.
He went with his partner – as well as boxes and boxes of bats after calculating it was cheaper to take them with him rather than place them in storage.
During Covid, he landed one of the plum positions in his field, at the Junction.
“You get the job, you do the job. When other people talk about it, you do think, ‘Yeah, I’m pretty lucky’,’’ he says.
“There are times when you’re on the far side of the ground and you look across it and you go, ‘Yeah, how good’s this?’ There’s so much history to it.’’
Baptist also played cricket, earning one First XI game in Premier ranks for Casey South Melbourne in 2007-08. And he coached Sub-District club Endeavour Hills.
Player, coach, curator, bat collector … a passion for cricket developed at Parkfield became his occupation. In the case of bats, an obsession too.
*****
With hundreds of bats in his keeping, Baptist says he is focusing more on quality than quantity, and on gaining more Gray-Nicolls.
Willow Wizard had given him income that he disposed of on bats. He has fewer dollars to spend now, but he’ll splash out when he sees something that takes his fancy.
Baptist gets bats given to him, too. Many people in the Victorian cricket scene know of his collection and will donate to it, happy to see a bat go to a good home.
He’s also happy to do trades, swapping other brands for Gray-Nicolls.
“Obviously UK heritage, but they’re Australian and been at the forefront of innovative designs for so many different models,’’ Baptist says of his affinity for ‘Gray-Nics’.
“We all grew up with the scoop. It’s one of the most iconic bats ever.
“A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to try to get the biggest Gray-Nicolls collection in Melbourne or Australia or whatever, maybe the world. I’ve got a long way to go, no doubt. You can never have enough Gray-Nicolls.’’
His range of GN scoops is stored together, including Hookes Hurricanes.
The bat named after the late David Hookes can fetch more than $1000.
Baptist owns four. Without wanting to appear greedy, he’d like a few more.
Collectors have a Facebook group called ‘Vintage English Willow Connoisseur’.
It has 2600 members. They buy and sell, trade, show off their latest finds (in recent weeks bats have been picked up at garage sales, hard-rubbish piles and op-shops), and generally hold up cricket bats as one of mankind’s great inventions.
There’s a smaller, private group too, named ‘Willow Worshippers’.
Baptist says he has no doubt the Covid lockdowns turned quite a few people into bat collectors.
“They might have been bored sitting at home and then they’ve seen a group or heard about a group or something and thought, ‘Oh yeah, I’d like to get into that’,’’ he says.
Nostalgia, he adds, plays a part in the batty business.
“Childhood memories. You think of those bats that were around when you’re growing up … people say, ‘I remember that bat, I want that bat’. And if you get two people wanting it, you can sometimes see ridiculous money paid. I don’t think they match up to what they’re really worth. But, yeah, the sentimental value gets a lot of people in.’’
*****
Cricket bats have changed since Brad Baptist bought his Michael Slater Powerspot in the early 1990s.
These days they’re light, have enormous edges and large sweet-spots.
“They’re drier, bigger, more forgiving if you hit off-centre, so much lighter to pick up, the handles are better, everything about them is better to perform,’’ Baptist says.
“But they obviously don’t last because the willow is dried out a lot more.’’
He regards a bat made about 70 years ago as a jewel in his collection.
It’s a Stuart Surridge ‘Perfect’, has a reinforced toe and a ball has never touched its face.
When Baptist bought it, it came with the original paper bag it was shipped in. It was an eBay buy and he happily admits he paid more for it than he should have.
He fell hard for that bat. He fell harder for the bag.
“Sometimes if you get a new bat from an earlier era, I tend to pay overs,’’ he says.
“They’re hard to find. To find them in harrow or junior sizes is really easy because back in the day mum and dad would buy you a small cricket bat because you’re learning. You might use it for a while and it goes in the cupboard. Thirty years later someone pulls it out in pristine condition. But it’s a harrow or it’s a size 6. To have a short-handle, adult-sized bat put away that someone hasn’t used, it’s very rare.’’
Baptist isn’t running out of enthusiasm for collecting, but he is running out of room.
He laughs when he hears others complain about having no more room on a wall to display their bats. He went from the walls to the floors a long time ago.
But he’ll find space for more Gray-Nicolls. Of course he will.
“If I can find an unused old Gray-Nic, that’s like the holy grail,’’ he says. “I’ll keep searching.’’
1. Gray-Nicolls scoops. Iconic models.
2. Kookaburra graphites, for their innovation.
3. ComBat, Dennis Lillee‘s aluminium stick.
4. Gray-Nicolls Kaboom. It changed the game so they changed the laws.
5. Gray-Nicolls Elite 500. Because ‘Boony‘ used one.
Before joining CODE Paul Amy was a sports reporter and editor for Leader Newspapers. He was also a long-time contributor to Inside Football and is the author of Fabulous Fred, the Strife and Times of Fred Cook.
Australia could be forced into an unthinkable switch which could pair the two best batsmen of their era at the top of the order.
Steve Smith has made Big Bash history, smashing an incredible century for the Sydney Sixers to notch up a long-awaited milestone.
Explosive allegations Pakistan’s captain Babar Azam sexted his teammate’s girlfriend have gone viral, but not everything is as it seems.
Long Island cricket captain Tom Boxell is to undergo open heart surgery. He explains why.
The Mankad movement had a major moment in the Women’s Under-19 T20 World Cup this week. And one moment showed exactly where the divisive debate is at right now. VOTE NOW
For three years now, Virat Kohli’s status as one of the world’s best Test batters has been fading. But in worrying signs for Australia, history suggests the king could be back, writes JACOB KURIYPE.
Our Apps