The action we see on sporting fields each weekend is the tip of a vast iceberg of private lives. There might be a perception that sportspeople exist in a social-media fishbowl, but the truth is that the most sensitive information stays in-house, unless there is a blow-up that draws in legal, police or other authorities. Today's coaches speak the mantra of "turning players into better people"; what this actually means, from day to day, is a lot of time spent helping young men and women deal with complicated personal and emotional conflicts. Ever wondered why tipping competitions are so hard? One reason is that there is a critical mass of behind-closed-doors trouble that you don't know about until later, if at all.
Few sporting lives have been so complicated, or have ended so tragically, as that of the cricketer Claude Tozer. In the first book to be written about the NSW batsman, Bowled by a Bullet (The Cricket Publishing Company), the former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Greg Growden has detailed Tozer's death at the hands of his patient and alleged lover, Dorothy Mort, in 1920.
Born to a modest rural family, Tozer became a golden boy of Sydney's upper middle classes after he was sent to board at the Shore school. For four years he played in Shore's first XI, scoring 1909 runs at an average of almost 50, before his high academic results earned him a place in the school of medicine at Sydney University and a residency at St Paul's College. On the verge of state selection when World War I broke out, Tozer volunteered as a medical officer. He was sent to Gallipoli and then the Western Front, where he won the Distinguished Service Order. He was falsely reported killed in Turkey – Sydney grade cricketers played one game in black armbands for him - and he had a piece of shrapnel lodge permanently in his head from an explosion at Pozieres. He was lined up to play in the post-war AIF team under future Test captain Herbie Collins, but instead returned home to open a medical practice in Chatswood. Within months of his return, his fiancee Kathleen Crossman, to whom he had been engaged throughout the war, died from influenza.
Tozer was intermittently available for NSW due to his medical commitments, but was playing well enough to narrowly miss selection for the first post-war Ashes series, between Warwick Armstrong's Australia and Johnny Douglas's Englishmen. While the first Test match was being played, Tozer was shot dead.
Dorothy Mort had married into the prominent Sydney woolbroking family whose members helped found the AMP and Goldsborough-Mort companies, underpinned St Andrew's Cathedral and Woollahra's All Saints church, and had the suburb Mortdale named after them. But Dorothy was a victim of domestic violence. Her father, Mackay Woodruff, had once attacked his wife and children with an axe and, after time in a mental asylum, went to New Zealand, where he killed himself by jumping down an elevator shaft in 1919. Dorothy, a mother of two, was suffering from depression, anxiety and "erratic behaviour" when her husband, Harold Mort, brought her to Tozer for medical attention in the middle of 1920.
A dreadful perfect storm built over the next four months. Tozer, a damaged soul who was possibly suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder after his military service as well as grieving over his fiancee's death and that of his father who had died before Tozer returned from the war, soon fell for his patient. Growden's investigations suggest that the relationship was platonic but all-consuming. On the cricket field, Tozer was finding release from his tortured private life and batted himself to the verge of national selection and the NSW captaincy. In December 1920, he informed Dorothy Mort that their relationship had to end, telling her he was going to marry another woman, whose existence he had invented.
Mort went out and bought a revolver. The next time Tozer came on a home visit, she shot him in the head and the body. She also shot herself and attempted to overdose on laudanum, but failed and was committed for trial. She had admitted to shooting Tozer, but during her trial, where her defence focused the jury on the betrayal of trust in the doctor's having had an intimate relationship with an unstable patient, she was acquitted on the ground of insanity. She spent eight years in Long Bay prison hospital before being released, and lived until 1966.
The extraordinary, very Sydney story has many other twists, and it remains relevant in a time when sports are increasing their role in promoting awareness of domestic violence. When prominent sportsmen are involved in violent incidents with their partners, inevitably it is argued that the issues are far more complicated than they appear. Depression and other mental illnesses play their part all too often. If there is a greater incidence of domestic violence in sporting households, then it is right for sporting clubs and associations to take the lead in providing care, education and if possible solutions. The Tozer case had an extreme ending, but the emotional turmoil within it is grimly familiar. As Growden puts it, Tozer's achievements, public standing and grooming as a leader meant he was "never allowed to relax", and eventually "something had to give". The unrelenting emotional pressure of his tangled private and public lives led to his fatal error of becoming infatuated with a patient who was in the grip of her own horrific memories and present psychiatric condition. He and Mort were both victims. There were no rights and wrongs, only a final tragedy and ruined lives.
