Giving back to basketball by mentoring at the grassroots level is something Deanna is passionate about. She backs this up by donating her time generously, whether it be through running a juniors’ clinic, giving a kind word of encouragement to a shy player, or motivating rising talent to push their skills to the next level. No child is ever left hanging for a high five when Doccy is around.
Do these kinds of things really matter or have any quantifiable payoff in the grand scheme of things? In today’s world of men’s sport in 360 degrees, 3D and three times a day on three sporting channels, could her efforts gain any kind of traction? Well, I guess the answer lies written all over the face of my daughter when she watches Doccy bring her own brand of ‘swagga’ to the court on game night. My little basketball fan is thinking, ‘One day, that could be me’ — a reaction that isn’t ever evoked from even the most dynamic dunk by LeBron James or an extended winning streak by the Perth Wildcats.
With Deanna’s foot injury well on its way to becoming a distant bad memory and an already enviable swag of sporting achievements, it will be interesting to see what is next for her. There is one obvious omission from her résumé: a chance to suit up for the Opals at an Olympic Games. Will Rio afford her that chance?
Driven by a fantastic bronze medal effort by the Opals at the 2012 London Games, Australia is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with in the women’s game. To see Smith bring her experience, energy and talent to join forces with current Opals heavy hitters such as Lauren Jackson, Suzy Batkovic, Jennifer Screen and Belinda Snell would indeed be exciting. I know one household that will be heard screaming at the television all the way to Rio and back if such an Opals dream team were to make the trip.
Looking at the careers and longevity of veteran players such as Kristi Harrower and Tully Bevilaqua, it is very possible that Deanna Smith’s best basketball is still ahead of her. Without injury holding her back, the West Coast Waves will be the team to watch as they look to build on the groundwork set last season and go from strength to strength as a group.
It will be interesting to note whether another successful Olympic campaign by the Opals will continue to raise the domestic profile of the WNBL, or whether they will remain the NBL’s poor country cousin in the eyes of some. Those who feel the women’s game affords them less ‘bang for their buck’ in the entertainment stakes may need to tune in and reacquaint themselves with just how far the women’s game has come. While it is true that dunking is still a rarity in the WNBL, these days you will see a game featuring long bomb three-pointers from ‘way downtown’, fade-away jump shots and charges, steals and fouls to rival any form of the game. Still unconvinced? Sit with your daughters and type ‘Deanna Smith, half court shot’ into your search engine and watch in disbelief as Doccy sinks a buzzer beater from just inside the half court line. Better yet, take the kids down to the stadium for a game and you will likely get to sit courtside, not nosebleed section, for little more than the change in your pockets.
Deanna’s legacy when her playing days are done will no doubt go far beyond her numerous on-court accomplishments. With her hands-on approach and tireless work ethic, her continuing efforts to encourage and promote women’s basketball ensure that she will make a lasting contribution to the sport. She joins the long list of passionate participants who proudly showcase their talents, week after week, to a comparatively small but enthusiastic crowd of loyal basketball fans.
When Deanna Smith achieves the milestone of her 250th WNBL game this year, don’t be surprised if you don’t hear about it on the news. It’s unlikely she’ll get a footballers’ parade and a 40,000-strong crowd to cheer her on. But maybe, just maybe, you might be lucky enough to be part of a standing ovation for a truly remarkable athlete playing the game for no other reason than it’s the game that she loves.
Duty first
by Alister Nicholson
IN TERRIBLE PAIN, crumpled behind a rock on a dusty, treeless Syrian battlefield during the Second World War, Ted Howe waited. Blood streamed from bullet wounds to his leg and around his ribs. When first-aid officers arrived, they patched him up as best they could and prepared a stretcher to carry him back to where the advance had started, about a kilometre away. But the patient was uncooperative. ‘No, I’m walking back. Someone else might want that,’ he insisted.
When you consider that stoic and selfless act, it’s easy to understand why Ted Howe doesn’t find his enduring service to the Tasmanian town of Penguin and its football club all that remarkable. Now in his mid-nineties, Ted has dedicated more than two-thirds of his life to serving the local community. His natural instinct has always been to put others before himself, to roll up his sleeves and lend a hand.
It was these old-fashioned qualities that led him, like many young men of his generation, to answer the country’s call and enlist in the army when war broke out in 1939. After joining the 2/31st Battalion, Ted was initially involved in defensive duties in the United Kingdom; but in 1941, as the threat of invasion reduced, the battalion was moved to the Middle East, first to Egypt, and later joining the campaign in Syria and Lebanon.
After spending a fortnight in hospital following his brush with fate in Syria, Ted was posted to New Guinea, where the battalion had been redeployed amid growing concerns over Japan’s activities in the Pacific.
While this brought him closer to home, nothing felt further from the associated comforts than the utterly desperate conditions he faced fighting on the Kokoda Track. Ted describes his three months on Kokoda as shocking and the toughest of the war, but he was always conscious of others who might be doing it tougher. Ted routinely carried the guns of fellow soldiers who, devoid of strength and longing for a hot meal, struggled to push on through the thick mud and mountainous terrain. ‘You had to do it for your country and your mates. They counted. By hell they did.’ During his last night of combat at Gona, he recalls that just thirty men remained of the one hundred originally in his company; by morning, he was one of eight.
In some ways, Ted Howe’s childhood had him better prepared for war than most. Hardship, hard work and death were the harsh realities of life growing up at Mole Creek, a tiny rural town in northern Tasmania that tourists frequently bypass on their way to Cradle Mountain. Born in 1917, Ted was the second of five children born to Marjorie and Lindsay Howe. Just before his tenth birthday, he tragically lost his mother in an accident on the family farm. Marjorie was trodden on while milking a cow and, when her wounded foot became infected, she became seriously ill. With the nearest doctor twenty-five kilometres away at Deloraine — at the time about a day’s journey by horse and cart — she died on the property before medical treatment could arrive.
An already tough existence only became harder with the passing of Marjorie, who Ted describes as ‘a lovely mother’. Ted’s father was left to raise the five children, run the family farm and continue his work as a bullock driver carting logs from the Western Tiers to supply the local sawmill. Ted and his older brother, Alexander, had to take on greater responsibilities; before they had reached their teens the brothers were working like men on the farm, tending to the cattle and ploughing the fields with bullocks. It was these challenging times as a boy that shaped Ted Howe the man. He learned to be tough and resilient, and that he could make a difference.
After the war, Ted returned to Penguin — at the age of twenty-one, he had moved there in search of work prior to enlisting with the army. He was relieved to have made it home when so many others he knew had not.
The quiet beachside town on Tasmania’s north-west coast was a world away from Kokoda and Syria, with the waves of Bass Strait at its front door and a backyard of rolling, fertile farm land. Ted was discharged from the army five days before his twenty-eighth birthday and, feeling fit and strong, he almost immediately found employment with the Penguin Municipal Council, where his father-in-law, George Lancaster, also worked and clearly had some influence. Ted had married George’s daughter Edna in 1943 while on leave from the army, having bee
n ‘generously’ granted one week’s respite for his heroic deeds on Kokoda. Five years later, his brother Alex, who also fought in the Second World War, would marry Enid Lancaster, Edna’s sister.
A few months after returning from war, searching for the sense of belonging and comradeship that came with being part of the 2/31st Battalion, Ted decided to try his luck with the local football team. In the middle of the last century, the Penguin Football Club was a central part of the community, a vehicle for social inclusion and something to feel proud of. Ted won two premierships with the reserves and was called up to play a few games with the seniors as well. He played mostly in the back pocket, a position that suited him perfectly, as he was someone who was always willing to do a job and who never coveted pats on the back. In 1950 he retired from playing but promptly took on another role as a trainer with the club. It’s a position he still held at the age of ninety-four.
The treatment methods of football trainers in the 1950s were far removed from those that pamper the modern-day player. There wasn’t much a good rub or hot towel couldn’t fix. Ted Howe’s massages became notorious: players would wince and squirm as his strong, rough hands, with fingers twice the size of the average person, went to work on their bodies.
Gary Carpenter, who played close to two hundred games and coached the club, remembers some were too frightened to lie on the table: ‘If you got a rub from Ted it was like getting a rub from sandpaper or the old scrubbing brush — he’d soon get the acne off your legs. If you got a corky he used to try and slap the hot towels on straight away, which nowadays is a no-no. Ice wasn’t even thought of back then. They’d warm the towels up in the old boiler we used for cooking the savs in and they’d slap these hot burning towels on your leg. Ted also loved rubbing corkies out and he would see you trying to get up off the table and dig those bloody hands in a bit further.’
Those infamous hands have massaged the hamstrings and strapped the ankles and shoulders of many fine footballers over the years, including Geelong’s first premiership captain, Fred Wooller, who was player-coach at Penguin for four seasons following his retirement from the Victorian Football League in 1964. Ted Howe also remembers the great Polly Farmer taking training as a gesture to Wooller, the man he replaced as the Cats’ skipper. Barry Strange, an All-Australian alongside Ted Whitten and Ron Barassi at the 1956 carnival, and former Fitzroy and Richmond dasher Michael Gale, who played in Penguin’s last senior premiership in 1985, also had those hands to call on.
Ted didn’t confine his efforts to helping Penguin’s senior players; he would also front up for training with the under-nineteens, who were put through their paces on alternate nights. He loved to help the young players and derived great pleasure from seeing them reach their potential. Year after year, Ted fronted at the football ground four nights a week and was there again early on Saturday mornings to carry out his duties with the club’s three teams on match day. He also became a surrogate psychologist, as players would confide in him when they were having a tough time or couldn’t get on with the coach.
Ted’s involvement with the football club was by no means the extent of his voluntary service to the community of Penguin. He spent more than twenty years as the treasurer of the local Returned Servicemen’s League, devoted hundreds of hours to delivering Meals on Wheels, and looked after gardens for the ‘elderly’ — often people much younger than himself. On Sundays, parishioners would be greeted by his smiling face and warm disposition at the entrance to the Penguin Uniting Church as he handed out hymn books. Even outside the service, Ted still found ways to serve. Ted took great pride in the church; he had stood atop those same steps, with that same smile, following his marriage to Edna Lancaster. He helped to paint its exterior and always ensured that its grounds were well maintained.
He also found time to volunteer his services to the local fire brigade for more than two decades and was first on the scene of what The Mercury newspaper at the time described as ‘the worst fire to have ever occurred in Penguin’. It was May 1949, and Penguin’s Neptune Grand Hotel went up in flames when fire took hold in one of the upstairs rooms. Twenty-four people escaped the burning building, including an elderly man from Kalgoorlie, who’d been staying in an adjacent room and was forced to leap from the window.
Ted had heard the station’s fire alarm blaring in the middle of the night and ran from his home to the station to collect the local brigade’s version of a fire engine — a wagon he pulled by hand to the scene of the fire. When he got there the blaze was out of control, but typically, Ted did what he could before reinforcements arrived. The Mercury described the flames as being forty feet high: ‘So intense was the heat that the shop fronts across the street began to smoulder and the roof of a garage at a bakery opposite caught alight.’ Damage was estimated at between eight and ten thousand pounds.
Only recently have Ted Howe’s remarkable life and deeds been officially recognised — not that he ever thought they should be. In 2005 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the community of Penguin through a range of charitable, ex-Service and sporting organisations. Five life membership certificates hang on his wall. When Penguin plays arch rival and neighbour Ulverstone in their traditional clash on Anzac Day, Penguin’s best player is awarded the Ted Howe Medal. Ted himself would have probably massaged or strapped up the winner before he ran out on the field.
After more than seventy years in the only house he ever owned, just a few drop punts from the Penguin Football Ground, Ted Howe moved to a retirement home. But that didn’t mean he planned to retire from his role at the football club. Penguin’s president, Tony French, recalls a 94-year-old Ted approaching him at pre-season training and asking if his services were still needed. The answer was emphatic: the Penguin Football Club wouldn’t be the same if Ted Howe wasn’t around to help. And with that, he immediately went home, collected his first-aid bag and returned for his sixty-sixth year with the club.
Sadly, the 2012 season ended early for Penguin’s most loyal servant after he fell at home and broke his hip. It’s likely his days as a trainer are over — but then this is the man who politely declined a stretcher as he bled behind that rock in Syria.
Tour de force
by Matthew Sumner
EVERY BOY HAS his heroes and I was no exception. Long before I knew of kings or queens, presidents or prime ministers, soldiers, warriors and figures who bent fortune to their own will, my heroes were sportsmen. Kevin Bartlett kicking goals for Richmond. Dennis Lillee running through the English top order. Peter Brock scorching the opposition at Bathurst.
But I was also one of those rare breeds who knew about cycling. My father had been a domestic professional rider, so I had grown up with the smell of liniment in my nostrils. It was from him that I heard the stories of the Australian legends time and time again: Russell Mockridge; Sid Patterson; Barry Waddell. These were the giants of my father’s generation.
I can’t remember when I first heard of the Tour de France or the Paris–Roubaix or the Tour of Flanders. But I can remember going to the local newsagent with my mother, when I was about eight or nine, and scouring the magazine racks for the latest cycling magazines from Europe. They would arrive three months late, long after the news they carried was obsolete. But for a sports-mad boy who was crazy about cycling, they were a lifeline to another world.
Bernard Hinault. Francesco Moser. Giuseppe Saronni. These were the kings of cycling who adorned the pages of those magazines. Suddenly, I could put faces to names, colour to descriptions. The myths and legends of the Tour de France began to burn brightly in my mind. I became hooked. My father put together an old bike for me and, while riding to school, I would imagine that I was cycling through the green fields of France, or up the scree-strewn slopes of the Alps or the Pyrenees, dishing it out to Europe’s best.
But for aspiring young Australian cyclists, one thing was missing: a legend for our own generation. In 1980, he arrived.
I first saw his name in one
of those outdated cycling magazines. While devouring every last piece of information in that issue, I came across the result of this nondescript Italian event. Some local riders had apparently slipped off the front and taken the first three placings but the bunch sprint for fourth was won by a young Australian called Phil Anderson. There were no pictures. No story. Just this unknown name, popping up unexpectedly in the results column.
Australians had raced in Europe for the best part of the century but, for a variety of reasons, most had had to pack their bags and come home, cap in hand, seeking easier rewards than those offered in the pitiless world of professional road racing. There had been some small successes, but most Australians who ventured to foreign climes to race bikes made their name on the velodrome, where there was no shortage of antipodean champions. On the roads of Europe where Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx were gods, no Australian had as of yet managed to scale to their heights. Seeing Phil Anderson’s name in that column, I glimpsed the possibility that all that may be about to change.
The 1981 Tour de France was supposed to be a procession. Two-time winner Hinault, the darling of his French homeland, was expected to win ‘La Grande Boucle’ in a canter. He had been forced to abandon the race due to injury the year before, handing the crown to perennial runner-up, Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk, who won his only victory in the great race that year. But now, Hinault was back. And he was prepared to rip the cycling world apart to regain what he believed was rightfully his.
After starting in the millionaires’ playground of Nice, the race skirted the Mediterranean coast, heading west. By 29 June 1981 it had reached the famous walled city of Carcassonne — fitting, for the best riders in the world were going to need to erect their own defences in the days to come. The Pyrenees were nigh. Hinault the Conqueror was ready to strike.
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