For such a young man, Phillip Hughes saw clearly the road he wanted to travel.
In cricket terms, it began with the Pacific Highway that runs right through his home town of Macksville and crosses the adjacent Nambucca River marking the mid-point of the journey between Sydney and Brisbane.
As a hugely talented and even more highly driven 17-year-old, Hughes saw that road stretching from his family’s banana property to the opportunities afforded by the city.
And despite his innate shyness and a country boy’s love of the bucolic life he gave up his other boyhood love – rugby league – and took his cricket kit to Sydney.
He was chasing a dream born around the time he first turned out for the Macksville RSL Cricket Club’s A-grade team against some combative and vastly more seasoned country cricketers – at the impressionable age of 12.
From the moment he moved into a small apartment close to his batting coach’s academy – the same address that had previously hosted another of shared mentor Neil D’Costa’s pupils, Michael Clarke – nobody who knew Phillip Hughes doubted that road would take him further.
To the Sydney Cricket Ground, where he played his first match for New South Wales 10 days before his 19th birthday, making him the youngest to don the baggy blue cap since Clarke eight years earlier, another link in the chain of friendship that bound the pair.
To Lord’s, cricket’s revered spiritual home where he represented its local county team Middlesex for a stint as a 20-year-old.
And, ultimately, to the Australian team at venues as deified and diverse as Wanderers in Johannesburg – where he became a Test cricketer in 2009 – Colombo, Delhi and the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Boxing Day.
But even while charting a path through the fraught and often frustrating landscape of professional cricket, Hughes lifted his eyes to a more distant horizon as he reiterated during the Australian team’s one-day series in Zimbabwe last August.
That triangular tournament which also featured South Africa and the home nation, provided a thumbnail sketch of the lot Hughes came to bear as Australian cricket’s perennial ‘next man in line’.
Publicly anointed as the preferred opening option should injury sideline Clarke from the series’ first game, Hughes's name was then conspicuously absent when the team sheet was finalised on match morning and he was, instead, once more assigned the job of 12th man.
That trip had already given rise to frustration and grumpiness among members of the Australian touring party who felt a sense of confinement in their Harare hotel.
But Hughes was never one to be consumed by misfortunes dealt, or outcomes beyond his control.
“I've been in and out of the national side probably four or five times now,” he told cricket.com.au during winter training in Brisbane earlier this year.
“I don't like to dwell on what's happened.
“If you don't pick yourself up and keep moving forward you're going to be left right back in the pack.
“That's something I've always looked to do, stay really positive in my mindset and pick myself up and look to get better every time I train.
“It's about getting out of bed in the morning and becoming a better player, that's my mindset because I suppose I’ve had a few kicks over the past few years.”
It was a clear, pure vision that carried Phillip Hughes to the upper-most echelon, as a cricketer and as a man.
