I thought Michael Clarke was up himself. I didn't know him, I'd never even spoken to him, but that didn't stop me making up my mind: I thought he was a prize plonker.

Him and his tattoos and his blond tips and his diamond stud earring and his Aston Martin. What a tosser.

Yeah, he'd made 151 in his Test debut after being fast-tracked into the national side - as if any more New South Welshmen needed a leg-up - and I remember how the local cricket writers swooned over that. Here was the new Doug Walters, they said.

But I was telling anyone who'd listen that he was a creation of a parochial Sydney media, a victory of style over substance, a flat-track bully who was living off that spectacular start to Test cricket but who was found wanting when the going got willing against decent Test attacks on pitches with a bit of zing.

The glam girlfriend, the whole Posh and Becks thing, which was probably a tag he never used himself, but I reckoned he would have if he ever stopped posing for pics in the social pages.

Then he was made captain of the Twenty20 team when he couldn't hit the ball off the square. The offences - in my eyes, anyway - kept piling up.

So that was my opinion of Michael Clarke. I really couldn't find much good to say about him.

Then, sometime over the past 48 hours, everything changed. Like the Incredible Hulk, he began metamorphosing in front of my eyes. Try as I might, I found it hard to dislike this bloke any more; in fact, (and keep this under your hats) I came to have a sneaking regard for him.

The way he boarded that flight to New Zealand after the much-publicised split with his fiancée, Lara Bingle, with a TV news crew on the same flight, hounding him every step of the way. The way he got off the plane in Wellington, pushing his trolley through the media throng (pictured, above), smiling, unflappable.

And then the pre-Test media conference where he said he'd probably be sledged by the New Zealanders but that was OK. He didn't seem to bear any malice to anybody, although he probably had a right to feel a little aggrieved at some of the treatment he'd received. He just smiled and appeared to rise above it all.

My BPL colleague, the former Sydney Morning Herald cricket writer Malcolm Knox, wrote on this site last week that the media savaging Clarke had endured over the past week or two might have affected his demeanour from hereon in. That he could become embittered and grumpy like Allan Border, Steve Waugh and even his current skipper Ricky Ponting. That he'd be so scarred by the mauling he copped he'd become aloof and mistrustful and forever guarded in his dealings with the media.

On the strength of the past couple of days, that hasn't happened. Clarke has emerged from the Bingle-Fevola embarrassment, and then the split with his fiancée, with as much good cheer as could possibly be expected of him.

His press conference on Friday after making his 100 at the Basin Reserve was a masterclass in, well, class. The poise and graciousness he showed in thanking Bingle for her support - and for forgiving the media its worst excesses - was a model lesson to every sportsman, even public figure, who's found himself or herself in a similar position.

So, until I see the next picture of you in the social pages, behind the wheel of your latest sportscar, earring glinting and dark glasses reflecting, Michael, please accept my apologies. I was a plonker.