ABC Grandstand's Unsung Sporting Heroes

by ABC Grandstand

  The sensible geography teacher inside her said ‘no’ but, as the year went by, she recalled her love for Spain from the Barcelona Games. So she wrote up her résumé using a translation website to turn it into (a version of) Spanish, and then flew across the world to Madrid, thus becoming the first woman in the world to play wheelchair basketball as a professional.

  The one-season experiment turned into two, and was followed by a move to Sardinia, Italy, where Tesch would ride her bright red Vespa to training, past fields of people picking artichokes and riding donkeys.

  An invitation to play in France was another attractive opportunity but, not content with her own successes, Liesl refused to play in their first division men’s competition unless they formed at least a second division women’s team, with whom she would also play. It was one of many victories in her quest for equal opportunities, and so it was off to Paris, where a ride along the Seine would take her to training in sight of the Eiffel Tower.

  Her Spanish and Italian language skills were proficient enough for her to converse and coach in those countries, and in Paris she learned just enough French to talk her way into jail … as a motivational speaker. With her ‘can-do’ attitude, it’s easy to imagine the bubbly Aussie promoting the importance of a healthy lifestyle to inmates while encouraging the acceptance of people with disabilities. ‘If you think you’re doing it tough, there are people in this world whose lives are much harder than yours’ was her mantra.

  It was this passion to improve life for others that propelled Liesl Tesch around the world volunteering in disadvantaged communities.

  It’s easy to forget that this smiling ball of energy can only walk — she calls it ‘waddling’ — with the help of lower-leg orthotics, and has to use a wheelchair to travel any distance. She genuinely rejoices in the abilities she has, and maintains that meeting disabled people in developing countries makes her feel lucky.

  It was a trip to Laos that prompted Tesch to form an official organisation to make a difference. She had attended a convention being held there to ban cluster munitions. She saw disabled people living in cabins with dirt floors, sharing one wheelchair between them for an occasional outing to the market. They were isolated from and ostracised by the wider community. ‘There were people with limbs blown off by cluster bombs who didn’t realise they had a right to be included in society, and certainly had no concept that they had the right to play sport,’ she says.

  Tesch came home and, with friend Jackie Lauff, set up Sport Matters, a not-for-profit organisation that uses sport to change lives. Her vision: a world where everyone is active, included, healthy, empowered and free from poverty. Experience as an elite athlete made sport the natural vehicle to drive that message home.

  Despite a full schedule juggling basketball clinics and teaching geography, business studies and Aboriginal studies to high schoolers at the Brisbane Water Secondary College on the central coast of New South Wales (not to mention myriad speaking engagements), Liesl’s personal sporting achievements continued.

  Prior to the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games, she had bid Paris ‘adieu’ and moved home: ‘The time was right. I needed to be here as captain of the Gliders. I’d been offered a job at an accessible school, and my parents weren’t getting any younger.’

  Beijing yielded a bronze medal, and with gold still eluding her, Tesch took time out and travelled to Tibet. Standing at the North Base Camp of Mount Everest at an altitude of 5150 metres, Tesch knew if she could get there, then she could do anything, and headed back to Australia determined to go for gold at London 2012.

  The next year brought new opportunities when an invitation arrived to sail the 2009 Sydney to Hobart Race with Sailors with disABILITIES. No stranger to the water, having spent many happy years sailing the waters of Lake Macquarie as a kid, she climbed on board.

  A television documentary about the journey was seen by Paralympic sailor Daniel Fitzgibbon, who contacted Tesch in 2010 to ask her to sail with him. The pair proved so successful in the SKUD 18 class (two-person keel boat), that after just eighteen months working together in the boat, they had qualified for the 2012 Paralympics. Faced with a difficult choice, Liesl said farewell to the Gliders and set sail for London in her new sport.

  Basketball Australia was sad to see her go. As a leader and a motivator, Liesl Tesch is one of a kind, but her joie de vivre is what makes her truly special to be around.

  Despite her unstinting efforts to improve life for others, Tesch is no ‘goody two-shoes’. Her well-developed sense of humour saw her play basketball with her hair dyed bright green and gold. In 2008, she bought a turtle at the markets in Beijing and smuggled it into the Paralympic Village. Tesch named her new pet ‘Jackie Chan’, but when the turtle was discovered, she was informed it was against village rules, and was ordered to give it up. She complied, but not before planting her tongue firmly in her cheek and renaming her pet ‘Tibet’.

  How Tesch kept her smile intact for her sixth Paralympic Games in London speaks volumes about her character. With her mother in the final stages of a battle with cancer in Australia, the decision to even go was heartbreakingly difficult.

  Pam Tesch spoke to her daughter on the phone just before the competition commenced at Weymouth and Portland. With a smile in her voice, Liesl recounts their chat: ‘She said to me, “Liesl, you’re ratshit if you don’t bring home the gold.”’

  It was the last conversation the two would have.

  Leading the competition after the first day of racing, Liesl climbed out of an ice bath and prepared for bed, when the dreaded call from her sister came.

  While her mother’s passing was not unexpected, Tesch had expected to make it home before the end, and the news, coming as it did just one day into the Games, was a shock. ‘With so many things to fit in, my life is pretty strictly scheduled. My plan in London was to finish my races, and get the first plane back to Mum. That was how it was supposed to be.’

  In her inimitable style, Tesch picked herself up, channelled her emotions and, using her mum as her inspiration, she and Fitzgibbon took an unassailable lead in the competition. The pair was declared the winner, with a race in hand. ‘Not many people get up on the morning of their gold-medal race and start organising a memorial service for their mother, but what a beautiful way to celebrate my mum’s life, to win gold on a beautiful, sunny day,’ she said.

  After six Paralympic games, at the age of forty-three, Liesl Tesch was finally on top of the podium clutching her first gold medal.

  For mere mortals, that would be a fitting end to the story. For Liesl, though, it was merely a joyous highlight in her continuing tale. ‘Winning gold is incredible — to see the joy it brings others makes me want to win more. We weren’t even meant to do it in London — it was supposed to be a warm up for Brazil 2016.’

  When I caught up with Tesch in the spring of 2012, she’d been in possession of her gold medal for just four weeks. But already, it had passed through the hands of hundreds of delighted children, been proudly displayed at multiple speaking appearances, and even spent twenty-four hours around the neck of the owner of a campsite Liesl and her friends randomly chose for a weekend getaway.

  Sharing the happiness has meant the most to her.

  Her home is not a showcase for trophies and accolades; it’s a functional space in which to keep the treasures she collects on her travels. The medals, however, help open doors and break down barriers, and that is her ultimate goal. ‘I want to open minds, to see disadvantaged and disabled people fully integrated into society. We aren’t freaks or outsiders; we’re just doing what we want to do. Everyone, everywhere, should be able to have that, and that’s what I’m working towards — that’s my perfect world.’

  My netball post in the paddock

  by Jessica Currie

  IN THE PADDOCK behind my parents’ house in Boort stands a treated-pine post. At a netball-regulation 3.05 metres, it stands tall among the neighbouring peppercorn trees — this is where it has been since
1993. It is the pole’s third such home in my lifetime — first it stood, with a netball ring at a modified 2.4 metres, twenty kilometres away on the farm at Lake Marmal, and then, as I grew up (but not tall, unfortunately), it moved the fifteen kilometres with us to Barraport. Here in Boort was the only time Dad mixed cement into its footings. This time, the post was permanent.

  It is at the netball post in the paddock in 1994 that my story begins. I was nine years old at the time, and it must have been the April school holidays by virtue of the crispness of the air and the warm Mallee sun. Throwing goals in the paddock was a regular pastime at that stage — the hundred goals I would shoot every day foreshadowed the discipline (read obsessiveness) that has come to the fore in other parts of my life over the years. When I think of the hours I must have spent out there throwing goal after goal, I recall the smell of peppercorns and damp soil and the sounds of dogs barking in the distance.

  But, on this particular day, it was the echo of footsteps reverberating across our verandah in the distance that caught my attention, and there’s no doubt that I ran a personal best getting back to the house to see who had come to visit. I dashed to the clothesline and launched into a triple jump before thundering across the verandah to our front door.

  In the lounge room, I found Mum and Dad chatting away to a woman with stunning silver-blonde hair tied back in a neat ponytail. I recall that she was vaguely familiar in an eerie she-looks-like-my-mum-but-not-quite way; no doubt she’d been one of many such people I’d met at funerals over the years. (I don’t mean to be morbid — we’re a very large Catholic family, and quite frankly we do funerals really well.)

  ‘Jess, you remember your cousin Jackie, don’t you?’ said Mum. ‘One of Uncle Frank’s from Lake Marmal.’

  That’s about all it takes for the McGrath family puzzle to fall into place — a patriarch or matriarch and a locale and I’ve got it sorted. And of course by ‘cousin’, Mum meant ‘second-cousin-once-removed’ but, again, we’re a classic Irish Catholic clan — a cousin is a cousin is a cousin.

  When you’re nine years old you get used to adults ignoring you — they’re always busy talking to other adults about ‘adult’ things. When they do talk to you, it’s about who your favourite teacher at school is or what your favourite colour is. But Jackie was different and I will never forget how respected I felt when she turned to me, nodded to the netball scooped under my arm and declared: ‘I can’t wait for you to join the Hot Pursuits one day!’

  Jackie has a distinct mannerism that I observed for the first time in that moment and continue to admire to this day: she pauses after posing a question or making a comment, and hangs for your response with an authenticity that is all too rare. I giggled politely (and in all likelihood made a self-effacing comment about not being good enough to be picked) and we talked for what felt like a long time about our shared love of netball, and the Hot Pursuits (her netball team), who played every Thursday in the ‘big smoke’ (Melbourne).

  I’d never heard of netball that wasn’t played alongside the footy on a Saturday, let alone a competition played indoors and with no training sessions! But Jackie explained that the Hot Pursuits was an institution in itself — most of the girls who played were also cousins, McGraths by name and/or lineage. Those who weren’t became family by association. It sounded a far cry from the competitive nature of netball in the North Central League, but Jackie assured me that the Mallee spirit was a strong eighth player on the team, with many of the girls having grown up playing for Boort and Charlton.

  There’s a strong suite of common characteristics across the family that are worth standing behind with pride — generosity, kindness, respect and humour, to name a few. Jackie is the epitome of all of these things, and I suspect she’s secretly a favourite-cousin to many. It would be fair to add ‘competitive’ and ‘tenacious’ to Jackie’s list of assets, as her long-term commitment to Hot Pursuits’ recruitment was demonstrated every school holidays for the next nine years, until I made my debut on Court 3 at the Parkville Netball Competition at the ripe age of eighteen.

  In the interim years I had applied the very same traits I came to admire in Jackie to my own netballing exploits. My love of the game only grew, and I continued to labour away at the netball post in the paddock to the point where what I lacked in social status (a very important element in country netball) was well and truly compensated for with skill. I added vertical leaps to the ritual sprint from paddock to door and fashioned a passing partner out of the corrugated iron of the garden shed (sorry, Dad, that probably explains why the shed is more of a lean-to these days).

  I was no Sharelle McMahon by any means — no North Central Representative Team selection ever came beckoning — but I worked bloody hard all through my junior years and was rewarded with the honour of captaining the Boort Netball Club A-Grade team in 2002. We suffered a gut-wrenching defeat to Donald in the preliminary final that year, but I will always be proud of our girls and how we worked together.

  In February 2003 I made the big move to Melbourne to study, choosing one of the smaller colleges at Melbourne University in an attempt to avoid being overwhelmed by the scale of city life. An incredible amount of change happens in the life of a country kid who moves to the city to pursue studies; we are presented with the opportunity to shape the adult we want to become at a time when we are still ‘plastic’. We navigate independent living and balance part-time work with study. We learn (often the hard way) about trust, responsibility, equity and justice. We develop a relationship with ourselves that prepares us to understand our role in shaping the world we live in. But we also experience great loss. We are hours away from our families, hours away from our communities; we are suddenly surrounded by thousands of people for the first time and have never felt so alone. It is a world of possibility and colour, but it’s a long way from the netball post in the paddock.

  On reflection, it was the things that stayed constant for me throughout this time that had the strongest influence on who I became and framed how I responded to change: my boyfriend and our families; Ian Rankin novels; philosophers like Michel Foucault and Bertrand Russell. And, perhaps most importantly, Jackie and the Hot Pursuits.

  On the first Thursday of the first semester, Jackie’s silver hatchback idled in the college driveway. That night I pulled on the hot pink Centre bib for the very first time. It was the culmination of a nine-year recruitment effort and it would be easy at this point to say ‘and the rest was history’, but that would not do justice to the importance of that moment, or every Thursday that followed for the next twenty seasons.

  At eighteen, I did my bit to bring the average age of the Hot Pursuits down. At that time my sister was the next youngest, at twenty-five, followed by a roll-call of McGrath cousins (Ange, one of Aunty Marg’s from Lake Marmal; Marie, one of Uncle Michael’s from Erinvale; Anne, one of Cousin Maurie’s from Charlton) and others who would become my new family (like ‘Bova’ and Denise). Our matriarch was Jackie, the heart and soul of our family. Jackie coached us by example, directing play into space with strong passes and shooting like Vicki Wilson. Her style was steady, reliable and strong — on the court and off. The talk during play was positive — no ‘watch your passes, girls’ here.

  To the team, Jackie was our manager, coach, captain, goalie, mentor and friend. To me, she was my ‘netball post in the paddock’: always there, always standing tall, modifying herself to the circumstances. Jack quietly paid my Netball Victoria membership in 2003 and happily arranged our court fees roster around my casual pay dates. She picked me up and dropped me home without fail every Thursday for years. I learned more in those car trips than Jackie will ever know: how to balance study with full-time work; how to make time for important things like family and fitness; how to drive in the city; how to manage seven women with different personalities and priorities with aplomb; what a healthy adult friendship looked like (thanks in no small part also to Denise) and how to live a healthy and happy life. I learned how to liste
n and, most importantly, I learned how valuable it can be to take another young woman under your wing.

  In the eight years that I had the honour to play under, with and for Jackie, my netball skills flourished. I doubt I’ll ever have the chance to develop another partnership as intuitive as the one we had between centre and goal attack. Jackie gave me the freedom to dictate play with my passes. She could pluck the ball from any space I threw to and make every move (no matter how poor my pass) appear premeditated. She brought a steady calm to fiery games and set a sporting tone for our team that is respected by opponents and officials alike to this day. The Hot Pursuits won several trophies in that time and acquired even more new family members. We even broadened our recruitment beyond the Boort/Charlton crew to include Deb from Wycheproof (arguably our best recruit — both as a player and a person — to date).

  In all the years I’ve known Jackie, she hasn’t aged. Her silver-blonde hair is still tied back neatly in a ponytail. She is still as fit as anyone I know. Her one physical limitation was the result of a torn anterior cruciate ligament in 1992. It was an old netball wound that occasionally gave way and highlighted that even Jackie wasn’t invincible.

  One day, in early 2011, it happened. A seemingly innocuous awkward landing. It didn’t seem any worse than previous scares. But then the phone call from Jackie came — the physio had suggested it was time to hang up the skirt and would I step in as team manager in Jackie’s place? I’ve never been at once so profoundly sad and proud.

  And so the Hot Pursuits continue, with me in body and Jackie in spirit. I’m already laying the groundwork for young Maggie McGrath (one of Ange’s, from Lake Marmal) to join the fold in nine years or so.

  Jackie McGrath, my netball post in the paddock, my cousin, my mentor, my friend, my hero, I only hope that I can be for others what you have been for me.

  The Hume heartbeat