Tinkering

by John Clarke

  Sporting Heroes

  Terry Lineen

  In Palmerston North in the winter of 1959, I sat down and wrote to an All Black. I was ten years old and the letter was in my best handwriting.

  The letter was to Terry Lineen, the All Black second five-eighth who could float through gaps which he identified using radar. He was elegant and gifted and as Red Smith once said of a pitcher in American baseball, ‘He could throw a lamb-chop past a wolf.’ The next player who combined strength and subtlety in this same way was Bruce Robertson, who drifted upright past opponents who seemed to accompany him and offer whatever assistance they could. It was ridiculous and it looked easy and no one else could do it.

  In those days there were four tests a year rather than one a week and they actually mattered. Nobody sang the national anthem and if a player scored a try he returned to his position in solitude and waited until the fuss died down. Nobody got paid. The players all had other jobs. Like Ed Hillary, who climbed the highest mountain in the world, but was really a beekeeper.

  The only way to watch rugby at that time was to be at the game or hope that a few seconds of a test match appeared in newsreel footage at the pictures.

  For the kids of Palmerston North, however, there were the All Black Trials, matches between the Possibles and the Probables, imaginary sides made up of real players. Squadrons of us primary school kids would fill the Manawatu Showgrounds and watch our heroes before sprinting into no man’s land after the match and getting everyone’s autograph.

  The national selectors should have paid more attention to us at these fixtures. We were good. We went for balance in a side but we rewarded flair and our selections stand up well to this day. Basil Bridge and I picked Kel Tremain a year before the selectors did. Kel ran flat; nothing deceptive but he processed things fast and he was up on the opposition like a writ. The selectors ignored him until the Lions scored four great tries against us in the first test in Dunedin and the NZRFU referred to our notes and popped Kel on the side of the All Black scrum for the next eight years. That first 1959 Lions test match was the Dunkirk of New Zealand rugby. On the one hand firepower, élan, tactics and quick thinking. On the other hand (ours) Don Clarke kicked six penalties. As Churchill said at the time, ‘We must be careful not to assign to this deliverance, the attributes of a victory.’

  Observant kids on bikes who had been in attendance at the Manawatu Showgrounds had sensed this would happen. We’d made a few changes but they hadn’t been introduced. We’d picked Red Conway for example. How he’d missed selection for Dunedin we couldn’t understand. He’d come down from Taranaki and he’d taken the Trial match apart. He was all over the paddock and was one of the first forwards we’d ever seen turn up among the mid-field backs looking for part-time work.

  We’d also earmarked the big Waikato lock Pickering. I was so confident I got his autograph twice. He said, ‘You’ve already got mine,’ but I wasn’t convinced and he gave it to me again. I may be the only sixty-year-old kid in the world with E. A. R. Pickering’s name signed twice, one above the other because he was right and because he was genial, in my autograph book (I’ll leave it to the state. It’s an important record. It’s not just mine. It belongs to the nation).

  A lot of people think selection is easy. It isn’t. We had our difficulties. We were troubled by the Briscoe/Urban question at halfback and we didn’t spot Ralph Caulton, the Wellington winger who looked as if he’d arrived to check the gas meter and then zipped over for two tries in a dream debut in the second test at Athletic Park (I was there that day and Keith Quinn was a ball boy. After the match Keith got the ball from the final kick and returned it to the kicker, Donald Barry Clarke, the famously accurate porpoise from Morrinsville whose brother Ian was still propping the New Zealand scrum at 112. Don thanked Quinnie very much and, recognising a good keen man, gave him a pie).

  Terry Lineen wrote back to me.

  John Clarke

  18 Milverton Ave.

  Palmerston North.

  The letter thanked me, encouraged me and thought perhaps I might be interested in the signatures of the All Blacks who played in the third test against the Lions (which we won 22–8). These were all on a separate sheet. Each player was named and each had signed next to his name.

  I still feel good about this letter.

  When Fred Dagg first appeared on television in the 1970s, he got letters from kids all over New Zealand. Every kid who wrote to Fred Dagg received a reply. The reason Fred wrote back to all these kids is that Terry Lineen wrote back to me.

  Murray Rose

  In mid-July 2011 I met the Olympic swimmer Murray Rose at the North Bondi Surf Club. Our small film crew was setting up to record an interview with him for a documentary about the importance of sport in Australia. Meeting at North Bondi was Murray’s idea. He loved the place.

  He remembered being a small boy, arrived from England and living near the Sydney beaches. One day he was playing on the shoreline when his small toy yacht drifted beyond his reach and began to bob further and further out to sea. A man in a rowboat saw this happening and rowed over to the little yacht, picked it up, brought it back in and handed it to the boy. ‘Here you are son,’ he said. ‘Can’t you swim?’ ‘No,’ said Murray. It was at this point he decided to learn.

  15 July 2011 was a dirty day in Sydney, wild and squally. Rain drummed on the surf club windows and lanyards beat on flagpoles. When Murray arrived he showed me around the upstairs room where they keep the photographs of surf lifesavers going back fifty or sixty years. Murray knew who they all were and remembered what they’d done. Murray was one of the greatest swimmers in history but he wasn’t just a pool swimmer. He loved the sea and these were his people.

  I’d spoken to Murray a couple of times on the phone and we’d discussed what we might talk about in the interview. His areas of expertise ranged across the history of Australian swimming, the Olympic movement and its ideals, drugs, suits and technology, broadcasting, literature, other swimmers, coaching, psychology, the feeling of being in the water, strategy, bodysurfing, philosophy and self-reliance. His voice was soft, with a slight accent from his years in America. He saw the universal and the particular as Astaire and Rogers. His memories were well formed, his manner was relaxed and easy and his point was always clear. He knew what he thought and he wanted to get it right.

  When he worked out that I came from Palmerston North, Murray recalled swimming there, at the Municipal Baths, in the late 1950s (I was there, with some other local squirts watching these tall, blond, actual Greek gods swimming in our pool). He explained how, in the relay they’d rustled up an Australian team by instructing the team manager to go and change and swim the first leg. (They won by so much it wouldn’t have mattered if the manager had swum in a full dress tartan. We were so impressed we ate a lot of ice-cream.)

  Murray’s favourite event was the 400m freestyle, which he won in Melbourne and again in Rome. It was tough and required sprinting speed but was long enough to be a tactical race, which he liked. His early hero was John Marshall, who broke twenty-eight world records and was killed in a car accident in his twenties. Murray said he tried to swim like John Marshall until one day his coach asked him what he was doing. ‘I’m swimming like John Marshall,’ said Murray. ‘No you’re not,’ said his coach. ‘You’ll never swim like John Marshall because he’s unique. But so are you and if you swim your own stroke, one day you’ll swim faster than John Marshall.’ Be yourself. Know yourself.

  Murray’s father had grown up with rheumatic fever and had to be careful with his health. He found a vegetarian diet at one stage and started eating cereal and vegetables. Murray went along with this and quickly developed a reputation for having a very weird diet, which in some versions of the story consisted largely of kelp. By this stage Murray was a competitive swimmer and he let the story circulate because it helped other swimmers create a reason he might beat them.

  Swimming has changed a lot. In 1956 there were no goggles and no tumbl
e turns. Murray and Dawn Fraser shared the distinction of having their Olympic careers cut short by buffoons in admin. They both kept swimming, of course, and at the age of about forty, Murray started doing tumble turns and his times started coming down. He was swimming faster than he had in Rome. At seventy-two he swam the Hellespont and he wanted to do it again. When we met, he’d been reading Byron, a previous titleholder in the event. Murray still swam most days, often in the sea, at Bondi.

  One of the significant examples of the value of the Olympic movement at its best is the story of Murray and the Japanese swimmer Tsuyoshi Yamanaka. Here is Murray:

  ‘When I was growing up, when I was three or four, I was part of a propaganda campaign for the Australian war effort. And the headline was something like “Will the Japs Come Here With Their Big Ships, Daddy?” And it was a fairly intense campaign. Fast forward a few years and I’m swimming at the Olympic Games and my main rival and competitor is Tsuyoshi Yamanaka and we happened to meet each other in every heat and every final. And by the time we got to the last swim we’d developed a pretty healthy respect and friendship. The last individual event at the Olympics in 1956 was the 1500m. And then after we’d finished we embraced across the lane line and a photograph of that moment was taken and was picked up by newspapers all over the world. For one main reason. The date was 7 December 1956; the fifteenth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. So it became symbolic of two kids who’d grown up on opposite sides of the war, had come together in the friendship of the Olympic arena.’

  Here are two more extracts from near the end of our conversation:

  ‘I’m still learning about swimming technique. Every time I go in the water I’m conscious of my technique and I’m looking at new ways of relating to the water, and learning, as the elite swimmers and elite coaches are today. They are still learning. We’re not done with this. You never become a master, until you’re able to go out there on Bondi and watch and be a dolphin, which we do sometimes.’

  ‘We had an experience one day last year; there was a fairly big surf coming in and the sun was shining, the wind was coming off shore and we were looking for waves. And then a rogue set came up from the back, so we swam pretty hard to make sure we got over it. And half way up the face of the first wave I knew that I was going to make it. So I just relaxed and streamlined, and the power of the wave just shot me almost up to my ankles out of the water because it was a fairly big wave. And the spray was being blown by the wind and it caught the sun and I was literally flying in a rainbow.’

  Murray Rose (1939–2012)

  Marjorie Jackson

  Marjorie Jackson is about my mother’s age and the people in photos of Marjorie when she was younger look like the people in my mother’s photos. The photos are in black and white and a lot of them are taken at beaches and other places where young people met, looking good, possibly for mating purposes. A noticeable feature of these photos is that there’s nobody obese or overweight in any of them.

  In June 2011 I met Marjorie at her daughter’s house, where we’d arranged to discuss her remarkable sporting career for a documentary.

  Marjorie was about to turn eighty and looked very fit. She was courteous, quick and lively, and her memory was excellent. In later years she was the governor of South Australia and she served in many national and international roles, but it was in talking about the world she grew up in that she located the values she has lived by all her life.

  Her story is a famous one. She came from Lithgow and was the first Australian woman to win an Olympic gold medal on the track. When she was a schoolgirl champion, her father had got a local man, Mr Monaghan, to coach her. Mr Monaghan had been a runner and they trained in the evenings after they’d both finished work. When it got dark Mr Monaghan would park his car at the end of the track with the headlights on and sometimes, when it was foggy, Marjorie wasn’t sure exactly where the car was while sprinting directly towards it.

  ‘How I didn’t break a leg or something I’ll never know.’

  Marjorie’s father sent away for a pair of running shoes. They cost five guineas and were so precious he built her a pair of protective rubber soles into which she could sit the spikes, so she didn’t damage them while walking around. A couple of times when we were talking about her childhood and these teenage years she looked away and shook her head slightly. ‘We were so poor,’ she said. ‘We really did have nothing.’

  The big star of the 1948 London Olympics was the Dutch sprinter Fanny Blankers-Koen, who won four gold medals. In 1949 Fanny came to Australia to run in some exhibition races against local opposition. Marjorie was seventeen and she travelled down to Sydney to compete in the first of the three races. To Fanny’s very great surprise, Marjorie won the first race in a time that would have won her the gold medal in London.

  When she arrived at the track for the second race, Marjorie was told she wasn’t allowed to run. When her coach found out about this he insisted that she go back and run, so she returned to the start line. At this point Fanny withdrew from the event. In the third and final race, Marjorie got away well and although she felt the Olympic champion on her shoulder at about the sixty-metre mark, she won again without much trouble. Fanny said there’d been a pothole in the track but the journalists who went out and searched the track reported that they couldn’t find one. After the race Marjorie realised she’d forgotten to remove the protective rubber soles from under her shoes. She’d been running without spikes.

  Marjorie was getting pretty famous by this stage and when they heard that the Olympic Athletics track in Helsinki would be made of cinders, the people of Lithgow took up a collection and put in one lane of cinders at the local grass oval, for her to train on. When she went down to Sydney to compete in the New South Wales championships, where she hoped to qualify for the Olympics, the car she was travelling in was hit by a truck and rolled over and Marjorie was taken to hospital. The women’s sprint events at the New South Wales championships were postponed that year because the other women refused to run until Marjorie was well enough to compete. Marjorie’s voice went a bit soft when she was describing this, which she said was one of the greatest things that happened to her in sport.

  The 1952 Australian Olympics team flew to Helsinki in a plane. The trip took a week. The first stop was in Darwin. After a couple of days team management said, ‘Get up and move around. Go for a walk. Change seats. Introduce yourselves to each other. You’ll be sitting down for a while.’ Marjorie found herself sitting next to a cyclist from South Australia. They got on very well and by the time they got to London, he’d asked her to marry him. ‘I only knew his name,’ she smiled. ‘Didn’t know anything else about him. I thought, fancy waking up with this gorgeous hunk.’ Team management were appalled and counselled caution but Peter Nelson and Marjorie Jackson were a match for life.

  Marjorie won both the 100 metres and 200 metres in Helsinki, broke world records in both of them and set a new standard for Australian track athletes.

  I’d watched both these races on YouTube and observed that she’d won them by a good margin.

  ‘Really?’ She said.

  At this point our sound operator got his phone out and found the 1952 Helsinki Olympics Women’s 100m final on YouTube. ‘Here we go,’ he said.

  An enduring memory of this wonderful day is watching a small group including Marjorie and her daughter, crowded around watching this great race on a very small screen. ‘Oh yes,’ conceded Marjorie after the race had finished. ‘I did win quite well.’

  After we left, Marjorie asked her daughter if the 200m final would be on YouTube. It is, and they found it on the computer and watched it together. Marjorie won it by miles. She turned to her daughter Sandy and said ‘Do you know why I ran so fast in Helsinki?’

  ‘No, Mum,’ said Sandy. ‘Why did you?’

  ‘Because I’d just met your father. And I knew he was there, in the crowd.’

  When she returned to Australia, the aircraft flew low over Lithgow on
its way to Sydney and when it banked Marjorie could see the people of the town lining the streets to greet her. She would not be there for many hours. The honour of making these people so proud was a considerable reward for Marjorie.

  Also in Lithgow that day were her parents, of whom she spoke with admiration and gratitude. She misses them still. She wishes they’d lived to see more of the lives of their children.

  Marjorie’s mother never saw her run.

  Peter Thomson

  After the Christchurch earthquakes the Australian golfer Peter Thomson contacted the Shirley Golf Club and arranged to come over and visit the course. He wanted to know how he could help. He has friends there he has known for fifty years.

  Peter won the New Zealand Open golf title nine times. When I was growing up, you knew it was summer when there were nectarines on the ground and pictures of Peter Thomson in the paper. He looked elegant, compact, determined and ironical. I’ve played a bit of golf with Peter over the years and have had the opportunity to study him at close hand. He is elegant, compact, determined and ironical.

  After winning the British Open five times Peter retired and came home. He became an excellent writer and commentator, flirted with politics and now runs a successful international business designing golf courses.

  I asked him recently if he’d always been competitive. ‘I think I’ve always been pretty competitive, yes,’ he said. ‘I had brothers and we were all competitive.’ Then he thought for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you how competitive I am,’ he said. ‘My oldest friend in golf is Kel Nagle. I’ve played golf all over the world with Kel. We won the Canada Cup together. We’ve been through a lot and he’s a great friend. And it has occasionally occurred to me that Kel would be a nicer bloke if he didn’t putt so well.’

  When the Presidents Cup was played at Royal Melbourne in 1998, the first ball hit down the first fairway in the first match on the first morning was hit by a New Zealander. The Presidents Cup is between the USA and a team of Internationals. The captain of the International Team that year was Peter, and he’d selected two New Zealanders among his twelve players. They weren’t ranked in the top fifty in the world but Peter thought they could do some damage. He was later asked by the media why he’d sent the New Zealanders out first. ‘New Zealand is two hours ahead,’ explained Peter. ‘They’re awake a bit earlier.’