To trick my brain, I had this ability that every time I came back after injury, I would tell I'm coming off a five-wicket haul: Brett Lee

In Part 2 of his tell-all interview on Home of Heroes on JioCinema, former Australia pacer Brett Lee bursts open a surprise of how he moonlighted at a men’s wear store in Sydney throughout his playing career, why he picked jersey number 58 when representing the green and gold, and reveals who between Waugh and Ponting brought out the best in him.

You made your debut in 1999 against India and but even before that you played a couple of games. I think one against one is from New South Wales and one was the Minister's 11 and you got what 11 wickets in that game.

I think so, yeah. I remember playing against the Blues and then playing against the Prime Minister's 11 but I remember playing against you know I nicked off Sachin Tendulkar in Canberra. About two months before or better month before we played him in the Test match and I was thinking I've just nicked off Sachin Tendulkar - my life’s complete. I'm happy I'm done.

And now I thought wouldn’t mind if we get him in a Test match so that you take one wicket, you think I wouldn't want another one. But that was an amazing summer. I mean to me looking back, that was twenty-four years ago. I was twenty-two, just turned twenty-three actually. Boxing Day 99 and I just think back, it seems so long ago, but then it only seems like yesterday that I was given the baggy green cap and I had achieved my dream by getting it.

Yeah. What was it like leading up to that moment? So, sixteen was your first big injury. And then what was the journey like between say, seventeen and twenty-three?

So, when I was seventeen, I got picked in the U19s Australian side and I was just doing my HSC and playing here in India. So, 1994 was my first trip to India, nearly thirty years ago and I had to travel to Sydney to get measured up for our Australian team Blazer. So, the gentleman in Sydney, I got these details and I went into a store called Barclay's Menswear and he'd take all the measurements and then I'd send the measurements down to Melbourne they make the jacket or the blazer in Melbourne, and then send it back up and I'd come in and try it on.

Long story short, I went in and met him, he seemed like a nice fellow and then he called me two weeks later and said, have you ever thought about a job in Men's wear? I went I like menswear but what would I do? He said why don’t you come on Monday and we'll have a chat. I went in there on Monday and I've been aligned to him ever since. And even spoke to him two nights ago and we've become really good friends out of it. I worked throughout my whole career in that menswear store, I finished playing in the World Cup final in 2003. The next day I came home and I'm at work serving and trying suits on people.

Wow. That's amazing. What a great story. But coming back to the Cricket a little bit. The change of action must have been hard after the broken back.

Yeah, it was. I've always said and one thing I've found out about fast bowling - you can't change. It's almost impossible. When I say you can't, you can change it. You do anything, right? But it's 99.9% impossible, in my opinion, to change the bottom half of your action. So, if you land with your back foot parallel to the crease, you're a side-on bowler. I was sort of forty-five between the pop-in crease and the return crease or you got your toes pointing towards the stumps being in front-end action. So, what you got given at the bottom, that's the base.

You can change the top part but as long as your shoulders and your hips are facing the same direction in one line, then go look after you back. What I was doing, having a forty-five base so facing it towards mid-wicket when I'm bowling the right-handed batsman and then been told to look in that little window. It’s the worst thing you can do because you're going away. So, I was trying to get started on with my top half not knowing about actions yet. I had mixed action. All that stuff. So, once I match the top half of the house to the bottom half of the house, I was fine.

But you still had a lot of injuries though throughout your career.

Yeah, my parents said don't play football because you might get injured. Good idea. About ten operations later. You know, when you get that physio, and they shade in the area in the skeleton where you're injured where you’re sore. And I would shade everything just except for my eyes. Because I was sore everywhere but two muscle tears as a fast bowler in my whole career, which I thought was amazing.

Amazing. Which is incredible, I think.

Yeah. Like one calf and I did my side in the Ashes and that was it. The rest was all structural because when bowlers land on their front foot - it’s two times their body weight. I was sixteen times my body weight. On the pressure pad because I would slam my foot down and have a brace front leg. And that's why I've had five ankle ups ops on the left and one on the right. It’s all good I can still run.

Your jersey number is 58. Yep. What's the story behind that?

My lucky number is eight, born on the eighth, I lived at number eight. That was the house number that I lived in. I always say at one stage of my life I turned eight. And then when I was going into the New South Wales cricket team, eight was taken and so was five. So, I combined both I love five and eight. So, I combine the two fifty-eight. It's funny how that becomes your number and you know obviously with playing for India that you almost become part of that number.

So, you played under two captains. Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting and like from the outside we feel like we see there's a difference. But you've been on the inside, so how different are they?

Totally different. Steve Waugh, his philosophy was to use me a lot differently. So I was used as a shock bowler. Which was exactly what he was trying to do. Like bring me on, he said - I don't care if you go for 40 runs of four overs if you get us a wicket, get a breakthrough that's going to set us up to crack open that middle order, and then you get the wicket and the captain’s happy, the coaches happy. But when you look up at your figures on the board or the next time that the selection camera and they've gone through the numbers, it didn't play as pretty as what it should because you know I've got one for forty of six overs. You know they go on about why is his economy so high but in context, I was doing the job I was asked to do.

But yeah, I mean he was great to play for obviously someone that I looked up to under Steve Waugh. I think it would have been Ricky Ponting that got the best out of myself under his guidance and I think the reason why was because he understood my game more than Steve. So, I really enjoyed playing on both, but I certainly enjoyed playing under Pointing.

Great man manager. You know, the type of guy that would have the hard conversation, very transparent, say, look, you are not playing tomorrow because this, this, this if you do this, get back in the sport, work on your fitness, work hard on you, get your ankles right, whatever it might be. But publicly would support me, never he'd never say anything bad about his players publicly. Whereas I've played under other captains that you know, and I'd probably say one thing to the public and one thing to you I don't necessarily always agree with.

So, did Ricky spend a lot of time with you individually one on one? I think he obviously had conversations with you.

I think the thing I've learned about captains is that you have to understand the personality of the player. So, if you're my captain or I was your captain, I would want to know about you as a person. You know what makes you tick? What makes you frustrated? Because everyone gets frustrated and gets happy or have tough times and how you deal with it. So, you know, we did this multiple-choice questionnaire and we found out what type of personality we were fitted in these four quadrants. And me, I was judged as a person that acts quickly like a little bit of mozzie buzzing around and the life of the party type of thing. So, Ricky knew how to deal with me, if there was time when, you know it wasn't the best of me on the field, he knew how to get the best out of me by cracking a joke or saying something or giving me that hug around my shoulder when I needed it most. So, he knew his players and that was the best thing for me as a player.

 And coming up, as a youngster, you were bowling along the likes of Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, and Jason Gillespie. What was that for you as a 23-year-old?

It was brilliant, you know, I go into the Australian dressing room for the first time. McGrath on my left, Gillespie on my right, and I still remember before we even got the ball. Before my first Test match, I'm sitting here and I've met most of the guys before, but not all of them. And McGrath is talking to me and he's really engaged. He's like leaning forward. He's telling me, I'm thinking and I'm like listening to a single word. He was distracting me so Gilly could tie my shoes lace together.

 I could have an injury for the first test, but that initiation says a welcome type of thing. It was a really good experience. It was a lovely experience playing for your country and playing with those legends but daunting as well. Because as you mentioned, Gillespie had been there since 95 and 96. McGrath established himself and was a quality bowler even at that early part of his career. And Warnie, who I watched in the early nineties with the bleached blond hair and the earring and everything. Right. And I thought - this is amazing. And here I am. Do I actually belong in this team? I was hoping that was good enough to be on the team. But I thought, I'm with these superstars, this is weird.

When you actually came into the side you had raw pace and you weren’t too erratic but there was a sense of that in your bowling, but that refined very quickly. Who played an impact on that or did you work on it by yourself with Dennis?

I think playing at a higher level. Raw pace doesn't always get wickets. So, it works maybe at a shield level. Definitely at first-grade level because it scared the tripe out of them. Yeah, but when you're playing against guys like you, Sachin, Laxman, Brian Lara and Jacques Kallis and all that, pace is still very important, but there are guys that love to play the shot that aren't scared.

 Well, I need to be a bit more stringent here. I need to work on other skills, not just short or yorker - how to work on hitting a length but bowling next to Glenn. He without even trying to, educated me because I was watching him at the other end. So, okay, that's how he gets his wickets. He's patient.

Just two or three years, four years into your career, I think was one of the best years of your life when you won the World Cup as well.

For me that was probably where I've felt almost, I've been in the team long enough. To feel like I warranted my place, I actually belonged in that team without being confident or cocky. I knew my body because I was three or four years into it. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight whatever it was where your body is naturally used to now bowling fast, and the fittest have ever been yeah.

I was working so hard on my training. Working really hard on my sprinting. It was a great time in my life touring the world as a single person and hadn’t had a care in the world, it was. And we had a great team. The best thing about playing for the Australian cricket team was we were just like mates going on tour playing cricket.

Skip to the next World Cup in 2007, you missed it. That must've been devastating.

Yeah, we were training in Auckland, I think it was. We were meant to leave the following week to go over to the West Indies and I remember saying to our coach at that stage, I'm not keen to field today, It's a bit greasy, a bit wet been a bit of morning rain, been raining the whole morning and we end up getting on. I'm like when your brain tells you something's not right. My gut tells me. And I should have listened to my gut and there were like no you’ll be fine, we’re good and as I went to pick up the ball and sort of slide in to pick the ball up, I slid and heard my ankle go crack!

I did two and a half of the three ligaments and the funny ankle called a syndesmosis. I mean, to me when he said that, it seemed like an Indian dish, this sort of tasted right. So, the syndesmosis I've never heard of and I've pretty much buggered my ankle and that was big rehab that was in a boot, everything. And then as I'm on the ground in immense pain and I said don't worry about scanning it. I know it's buggered. I know I'm out, I'm out of the World Cup. Oh no. And it sunk in I am out of the World Cup. I was training for four years to get to that. In that state, I was devastated.

How did you deal with that?

I had this ability that every time I came back after injury to trick my brain and tell my brain I'm coming off a five-wicket haul. Yeah. Got five to three days. Got up feeling great and my body was gone. Nah, my ankle is sore. Not feeling really good. So, the hardest competitor was against me. It was a killer to get out of bed and that's the thing for the young boys and girls who want to be fast bowlers. I think it's the hardest job in the game physically because we're traveling and we're covering about 17 kilometers a day. Pressure goes through your ankles, knees, back, and glutes, and lose up to five liters of fluid a day. Yeah, but I wouldn't change it any other way. It's good pain the hard work.