Tommy Wills

Tommy Wills

Thomas Wentworth Wills (19 August 1835 – 2 May 1880) was an Australian sportsman who is credited with being Australia's first cricketer of significance and a founder of Australian rules football. Born in the British penal colony of New South Wales to a wealthy family descended from convicts, Wills grew up in the bush on stations owned by his father, the squatter and politician Horatio Wills, in what is now the state of Victoria. As a child, he befriended local Aboriginal people, learning their language and customs. Aged 14, Wills went to England to attend Rugby School, where he became captain of its cricket team and played an early version of rugby football. After Rugby, Wills represented Cambridge University in the annual cricket match against Oxford, and played at first-class level for Kent and the Marylebone Cricket Club. An athletic bowling all-rounder with tactical nous, he was regarded as one of the finest young cricketers in England. Returning to Victoria in 1856, Wills achieved Australia-wide stardom as a cricketer, captaining the Victorian team to repeated victories in intercolonial matches. He played for the Melbourne Cricket Club but often clashed with its administrators, his larrikin streak and defections to rival clubs straining their relationship. In 1858, seeking a winter pastime for cricketers, he called for the formation of a "foot-ball club" with a "code of laws". He captained a Melbourne side that winter, and in 1859 co-wrote its laws—the basis of Australian rules. He and his cousin H. C. A. Harrison further developed the game as players, umpires and administrators. In 1861, at the height of his fame, Wills retired from sport to help his father run a station in outback Queensland. Soon after arriving, his father and 18 station personnel died in Australia's largest massacre of colonists by Aboriginal people. Wills survived and returned to Victoria in 1864, and in 1866–67, led an Aboriginal cricket team on an Australian tour as its captain-coach. In a career marked by controversy, Wills straddled cricket's amateur-professional divide, and was reputed to bend sporting rules to the point of cheating. In 1872, he became the first bowler to be called for throwing in a top-class Australian match. Dropped from the Victorian team, he failed in an 1876 comeback attempt, by which time he was considered a relic of a bygone era. His final years were characterised by social alienation, flights from creditors, and heavy drinking, likely as a means of numbing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms that plagued him after the massacre. In 1880, suffering from delirium tremens, Wills committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart. Australia's first sporting celebrity, Wills fell into obscurity after his death, but has undergone a revival in Australian culture since the 1980s. Today he is described as an archetypal tragic sports hero and as a symbol of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. He has also become the central figure in "football's history wars"—an ongoing dispute over whether Marn Grook, an Aboriginal ball game, influenced early Australian rules. According to biographer Greg de Moore, Wills "stands alone in all his absurdity, his cracked egalitarian heroism and his fatal self-destructiveness—the finest cricketer and footballer of the age".

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