by Sue Williams
Throughout his military career, Glenn had always been fascinated by the story of Kokoda. He loved reading about the sacrifices and the heroism of his fellow soldiers on the godforsaken little track in the middle of nowhere, where the enduring myth of Japanese invincibility was smashed for the first time. Someday, he planned to walk the Kokoda Track to experience it first-hand. ‘These guys wanted to do something else,’ he says, ‘so I suddenly thought Kokoda could be the answer.’
Eighteen people took part in the 2003 expedition to PNG, and every single one of them loved it. Glenn did, too. ‘As we were doing it, it was going so well, I started thinking that I could imagine doing that for a living. It’s very closely related to being in the army in some ways, and I knew that having medical training would always be a very handy thing in that kind of work. It was a completely accidental start to another kind of business . . .’
News soon spread about the adventure treks to Kokoda, and Glenn was asked to run another, and then another. Alyssa begged to be allowed to go along, but he wouldn’t hear of it. In the meantime, to give the members of his upcoming expeditions a gym to train in, as well as his regular boxing and fitness clients, he subleased a dance studio at an hourly rate and named it Fighting Fit. When he arrived one day to find it locked up because the principal lessee hadn’t paid the rent, it was only through the intervention of his very first client – the lawyer – that Glenn was able to retrieve all his gear, which was still inside. He then rented an old upstairs restaurant, did some minor renovations and used that for Fighting Fit from then on.
With both the gym and expedition business building, it was tough deciding whether to chance his arm with leaving the army and throwing himself fulltime into a new career, or to stay with a guaranteed income, especially as the family was growing. Glenn and Therese’s son, Christian, was born in 2004, eight years after Alyssa. Almost immediately, however, they realised there was something different about the little boy. He was very slow to develop and, at eighteen months, he was still neither walking nor even crawling. They hoped it might merely be a sign that boys develop more slowly than girls, and agreed to have one more child in the hope that the company of a younger brother or sister would help him. Their third daughter, Samantha, was born on Glenn’s thirty-fifth birthday in 2007, two years after Glenn eventually agreed to take Alyssa to Kokoda. At about the same time, Christian was finally diagnosed with autism and an intellectual impairment.
By then, Glenn had decided to quit the army to concentrate on his ventures full-time. He’d received four medals, for time served and for his work in East Timor and Bougainville, but still had to buy his way out to pay for the degree course he’d done. A new opportunity had presented itself, however: he’d been using another adventure business part-owned by an ex-soldier in Brisbane as the ground operator on his Kokoda trips and, when one of the other shareholders left, he was invited in as a partner. Therese was cautious but Glenn was keen and, on a handshake, he invested most of his savings in the company, and set to work organising more Kokoda treks and thinking about new and even more challenging expeditions he could mount.
He had no idea how much of a challenge the new company would end up presenting.
CHAPTER 5
Looking for the Next Adventure
On Alyssa Azar’s return from Kokoda, she was taken completely by surprise by all the interest in her achievement. As the youngest kid ever to have completed the Kokoda Trek, she became something of a minor celebrity, featured in newspapers and magazines and called on to take part in interviews on TV and radio.
Therese and Glenn were left open-mouthed at the ease with which she seemed to handle all the demands, the questions and the cameras. Although she looked tiny next to all the journalists grilling her on what it was like, how it felt, what she planned to do next, everyone came away extraordinarily impressed with the composure of one who was still a little eight-year-old kid. David Koch, co-host of the Sunrise program on Channel 7, said she was an ‘amazing’ girl, and was so taken with her he even ended up going on the Kokoda Track later with Glenn’s company.
What Alyssa lacked in size, she made up for in resolve. Immediately she started badgering Glenn about what their next adventure was going to be. ‘I think both my parents thought I’d done Kokoda and that would be it!’ she says. ‘At that time, that was the only trekking-type adventure they were running through the company. But when I got back into school and into the usual rhythm, it didn’t take long to get bored with it and I wanted to do something else.
‘I felt lost without a goal to work towards. People who’ve done Kokoda often call it the Kokoda Blues. You do all that training, you get ready for it, you do it and then it’s like, okay, what do I do next?’
In the past, Alyssa had seen some photos of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain on the African continent, and the tallest free-standing mountain in the world, at 5895 metres above sea level. She read that climbing it was a demanding trek up through snow and ice, and gradually became entranced by the idea. She asked Glenn if it might be possible and he told her to check it out herself, hoping she might be put off by the task. Instead, she simply took it on as her next challenge, and spent the next few weeks poring over the accounts of others who had successfully climbed the dormant volcanic mountain close to the town of Moshi in north-eastern Tanzania, and the different routes to its summit. But then she chanced on one crushing fact: the Tanzanian national park authorities had ruled all climbers had to be over a minimum age of twelve.
‘You needed a permit to do Kilimanjaro, and they wouldn’t issue one to anyone under that age,’ says Alyssa. ‘I was very disappointed as I’d learnt so much about it and I was so keen to do it. I realised I’d have to put that back for another time, and I started to look up other trips and treks I could do instead. It was then that I discovered you could trek to Everest Base Camp.
‘I gathered lots of info about that trek and gave it to Dad. I told him that was what I really wanted to do next. He said he’d look into it. I was so excited. I don’t know when I’d seen my first picture of Everest, but somehow it had really captured my imagination. I loved the sight of all that snow and ice, especially as I’d never seen snow in my life. I used to wonder what it might feel like to climb a mountain like that, and how it would be to stand on the highest point on earth.’
Glenn was taken aback by how much research his young daughter had done on Everest Base Camp, and started studying everything she’d given him. It certainly looked an interesting trip, and it occurred to him that perhaps it would even offer an alternative trek for his training clients who’d already completed the Kokoda Track. He also looked into the effects of altitude sickness and strategies to prevent it, and explained what it was to Alyssa. He honestly had no way of telling how well – or badly – she might react to altitude. Some people seemed to be able to handle it much better than others, but no one knew why.
But there were three things Glenn did know. Firstly, he wouldn’t be able to afford the trip until 2007, two years away. Secondly, this could well be a trip he could organise for his clients but the first time would just be an exploratory trip with Alyssa and a couple of friends to work out the logistics. And, thirdly, if she really, really wanted to do this, she would have to train even harder than she did for Kokoda.
Over the next two years, Alyssa trained as if her life depended on it. On weekdays she was in her dad’s Fighting Fit gym by 5.30 a.m. before school, and by 5.30 p.m. after school, to do weights to build up her strength, and at least an hour of cardiovascular exercise to increase her fitness. Every Sunday she got up at 4 a.m., had a hurried breakfast and then went out for a four-hour trek with her dad or, if he was away, with Andrew Mills, the friend and neighbour who’d accompanied the pair to Kokoda. In winter, those before-dawn hours were bitterly cold, but all the better to simulate the temperatures they’d face on the way to Everest. Alyssa seemed indefatigable.
Like her dad, she was never much into team sports. ‘Glenn always said that he
preferred to compete on his own, so he couldn’t blame anyone else if he lost,’ says his mum, Carmel Clark. ‘He’d know it was his fault if he didn’t do well. Alyssa is exactly the same. She likes individual sports where she can compete on her own, rather than being a team player. She says it would frustrate her when teammates dropped the ball or hadn’t trained enough.’
Mills says he found Alyssa a real loner; a quiet, almost melancholy little soul. She could handle her own company for long periods and rarely opened up about herself or her feelings. ‘It was as though she loved the danger of treks and mountains, and felt really alive when she was doing something so tough and possibly dangerous, and so exhilarating. I think back then she was starting on a never-ending quest to prove something to herself or other people.’
One of Alyssa’s favourite training sessions was boxing, and she soon came onto the radar as one of Queensland’s best young boxers. Although she was still small for her age, she was fit, she was light on her feet and she moved constantly around the ring. She also had fast fists, her technique honed by all the hours she’d spent practising. And, most importantly of all, she was absolutely determined to do the very best she could.
‘It was purely for fitness at first that my dad was teaching me – because we had a gym we thought we might as well use it for training,’ says Alyssa. ‘But I really enjoyed it as well. Boxing at that age is more about speed and points than it is about knocking people out. I was quite light, but women tend to pick up the technique better because they don’t have as much of an ego, I guess; they don’t just want to punch everything, they watch the technique a bit more. It taught me mental toughness and self-discipline.’
It was still never a tame sport, however, even for little girls. Alyssa started out competing in a few local competitions, and was selected for the gym’s official amateur boxing team, Fight Club, which travelled around the region fighting other teams. With her hair tied back in a ponytail, and dressed in a baggy blue singlet and silk boxing shorts with flames around the hem, she looked tiny in the ring. As soon as the bell sounded, however, she was always first to the centre spot. She was fearless, confident and ruthlessly efficient. She made a lot of her opponents look big and clumsy by comparison and usually took them completely by surprise.
‘I went to one of the championship fights in the Lockyer Valley one night to see her,’ says Mills. ‘I was horrified at the ferocity of the fight between Alyssa and another young girl. They were just flogging each other in the head, going as hard as they could. There was such determination there, and courage. I thought a lot of those punches to the head would have really hurt.’
One night, when Alyssa was ten, the first age at which kids are allowed to fight to win on points – before that, they’re confined to exhibition matches with no one declared the winner – she entered the ring and discovered her opponent was two years older, and 11 kg heavier.
Glenn, watching on from her corner, was appalled and asked her if she really wanted to go through with it. But there weren’t a lot of girls of Alyssa’s age and in her weight division fighting, and she dearly wanted the experience of testing herself against a bigger opponent in the ring. Kokoda, at the time, had seemed a huge challenge, and she’d come out of that well. Why not this? She turned to her dad and nodded that she was ready, her face disappearing into the huge padded boxing helmet she was wearing. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked again. She stepped towards the centre of the ring, her gloves already up.
‘Alyssa’s that kid who always, if she’s decided to do something, just does it,’ says Glenn. ‘I see it as my role to prepare her physically and mentally for everything she wants to do. There are points where I’ve said she could quit but she always refuses. I’m not soft on her. That day was so hard for me, seeing her in the ring with a girl so much bigger and who looked as if she wanted to kill Alyssa.’
For Alyssa, the start of the first round was a shock. The other girl had been told to go easy on her much smaller opponent, but she came out swinging heavily from the start. Immediately, Alyssa realised she had no intention of holding back at all. She understood she was going to have to give back as good as she was getting if she’d stand any chance of lasting the three rounds.
‘In that fight, I gave away a fair bit of weight, which is always pretty dangerous when you’re fighting,’ she says. ‘It was a tough fight. The whole idea was that she’d go easy but she didn’t. She got in the ring and tried to take my head off. I remember originally I was quite upset, it was a shock and it hurt getting hit a lot by someone who was much, much bigger than I was.’
‘Alyssa was crying,’ Glenn says, ‘and I told her to stop fighting, but she wouldn’t give in. So eventually, at the end of that first round, I said, Okay, if you want to continue, you’ve got to stop crying. That’s a tough call for any parent. But at the end of the day, she has to learn how to make her own decisions. Her mental toughness constantly amazes me and I’ll protect her as much as I can, but I won’t stop her from doing something she really wants to do.’
Glenn then urged her to make more use of her better technique against her opponent. The other girl might have been taller and bigger and heavier, but Alyssa should try to use her adversary’s strength and weight against her. ‘I took that advice and after that, I wasn’t getting hurt as much. While I lost the first round, I actually won the second and the judges said the third was a draw. It all ended up pretty even.
‘In the end, it turned out to be a good life lesson. Even though the odds sometimes look as if they’re stacked against you, you can still win through. You shouldn’t be put off. You just have to buckle down and make the best possible use of what you have. Nearly always there’s a way through. I learnt that anything worth doing doesn’t come easy.
‘I did love the toughness of being a fighter, being one of the boys. I can be intense internally and boxing is a good outlet for that. I think it also really helped to shape me mentally. I love that line from the movie Fight Club: “How much can you possibly know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”’
That newfound confidence and resolve stood Alyssa in good stead in the ring from that point forward. A few months later, still at the age of ten, she fought in Gatton, between Toowoomba and Brisbane, for a national title, another moment she later looked back on as life-defining. She ended up winning the Australian Global Amateur Title for the under 32 kg division, and was featured in all the TV news reports of the event.
‘I was pretty nervous in my title fight, but it was exciting too,’ Alyssa says. ‘It was against a girl I’d fought several times before, but I wasn’t sure how I’d go. I think it was probably worse for Dad, having to watch. It was nerve-racking for him sometimes, being in my corner in fights.’
Alyssa won comfortably on points and was presented with her medal, which she still has today. ‘It was a big day for me, and for my dad too,’ she says. ‘I was still very quiet so I was never overtly aggressive. I was never the kind of person to go around hitting anybody. But maybe I naturally had a bit of aggression on the inside.’
As a result of the win, and of the Facebook publicity Alyssa received, she was invited to carry Sam Soliman’s belts into the ring for his World Boxing Association super-middleweight title fight against Anthony Mundine in Sydney. Soliman, however, didn’t do quite as well. He lost in the ninth round.
And, like him, Alyssa totally failed to see the blow coming that threatened to fell her too.
While Alyssa never actively courted the press, people were naturally fascinated by this pint-sized girl who was so driven in every aspect of her life. Not only had she created a world record with her Kokoda trek, she was clearly punching well above her weight in boxing championships and was now talking about journeying through ice and snow – even though she’d never seen either before – to Everest Base Camp.
The TV cameras filmed her at school, at home and at the gym, and the local newspapers kept tabs on her to see what she’d be up to next. Alyssa was still mystified ab
out their curiosity, but shrugged and took it in her stride.
There were some people, on the other hand, who didn’t.
It started slowly, quietly, insidiously, on social media. There were posts on Facebook suggesting Alyssa was far too big for her boots, that she thought she was better than anyone else, that she didn’t have any friends, and that no one liked her. Alyssa saw the jibes, and they shocked her. She tried to ignore them, but they became more and more spiteful. She was upset, but tried not to show it.
Her friends gathered round to support her and urge her to ignore them. They were proud of her achievements, and had taken delight in what she was doing. ‘At school, when she was away on Kokoda, we used to trace her progress on a map and imagine where she’d be each day,’ says her schoolmate Hannah Mason. ‘For most of us it was great fun, and we kind of felt involved in her journey. Then when she came back, there were lots of interviews on TV and radio and newspapers, and we’d pore over them to see what she’d said.
‘But I do think there were some who didn’t like her getting so much attention. They felt jealous and tried to make up stories about her. It was so unfair because she never boasted about what she was doing, she was just totally absorbed by it, and worked incredibly hard. But some people can be very mean-minded.’
Alyssa was hurt by the criticism, but tried to ignore them. She didn’t hit back, as the first rule of the gym had always been that you never used your skills on anyone outside. Instead, she sat tight and hoped they’d tire of it if she didn’t react. The opposite happened; it became more and more vitriolic. With comments coming even from people she didn’t know, or posters using false names, she retreated a little more into herself and stuck only with her immediate group of close friends. That incited the bullies to start claiming that she thought she was too good for the rest of her schoolmates.