Bill Ralston’s sibling rivalry

Sibling rivalry never gets old.

Bill Ralston, photo David White

Brothers can be extremely annoying. Mine, named Jack, is five years older than me and was always sports mad. He played footy, ran like a hare and has led one of the fittest, most active lives of anyone I know, coaching champion triathletes. By contrast, I tired of sport very early and have always preferred the more sedentary pursuits of reading and writing.

Now, the bugger has gone and written a book. Would I run the New York marathon? Maybe I should replace Graham Henry. I need some sporting revenge because he’s on my literary turf and this is slightly frustrating, especially as I’ve always talked about writing one and have been too lazy to do so.

In The Sports Insider (yes, of course I’m plugging the thing – it may be annoying but he is my brother) he details a life in sport: from his early days learning athletics coaching with the great Arthur Lydiard, through his time with sports giant Nike and hanging out with folk such as Tiger Woods, top American basketball stars and the Springboks, to working with the NZRFU and the All Blacks. Plus coaching Hamish Carter, who got gold in Athens. Sigh. Now you see why I’m annoyed.

Reading it can make you review your own life and start wondering what exactly you’ve been doing for the past half century. Interviewing politicians and covering squalid news stories around the world doesn’t seem to measure up. In the course of doing that I’ve been vilified by prime ministers, shot at, tear-gassed, arrested and thrown out of at least one country, but this all seems somewhat negative compared with the positive accomplishment of, for example, producing a long string of New Zealand champion sportsmen.

Even at 60, Jack remained superbly fit and ran huge distances with his training team of young triathletes, so it was something of a shock to discover he had developed a rare blood disorder similar to leukaemia that threatened to take his life. He’d been feeling run-down, but plugged on until he was diagnosed, shot into hospital, given a bone marrow transplant, plied with massive doses of chemotherapy and confronted with imminent death at least twice. However, a year or so later, he somehow recovered. His survival we all attribute to his state of high fitness.

You cannot say the same about me. Fortified by a lifelong diet of fags, booze, and inactivity, I immediately developed a cancer in a subconscious fit of sibling rivalry. I couldn’t even match him in potentially lethal health issues. A cut of the surgeon’s knife removed the problem, it hasn’t spread and I am well again if a little sore.

Jack Ralston, photo David White

For all the jokes about “man flu” and blokes behaving like whining wimps when they get a cold, men have a tendency to completely ignore the subtle signs the body gives when it’s in distress – such as pain.

Most women, if they have even a mosquito bite on their bum, go to their GP to check it’s not an incipient tumour. They sensibly schedule regular health checks and don’t seem to mind the doctor prodding and probing around their nether regions every few months. Most men encountering lumps, aches or lack of energy seem to block out any thought of looming disaster, disdain the doctor and carry on. This, I’ve found, can be a terrible error.

I blame my parents, as we all do for most things we do wrong in life. They defined your state of health in two ways. You were either well or crook. The state of “crookness” was relatively open-ended. It covered everything from a mild sniffle to a triple bypass.

You could be ringing the bell at the Pearly Gates and my folks would have described you as being “a bit crook at the moment”. That is not a good model of family health diagnosis and we all need to be a bit more vigilant when it comes to figuring out what might be wrong with us.

My advice to blokes is, if you are feeling crook, go to the doctor. Yes, you may have to bend over and hear the snap of a rubber glove and know he’s not about to do the dishes, but men need to realise that stoic denial of health problems is not the answer. Those issues need to be identified, confronted and battled – a more manly thing to do than simply pretending they don’t exist.

I know that’s a fine sentiment, except that I ignored my warning signals for years and could have paid a mortal price had I continued to do so. Still, I’m better now and I will try to get fitter. I might go for a run, perhaps even a swim. If I learn to ride a bike, maybe I could give that Hamish a run for his money. Revenge.

THE SPORTS INSIDER, by Jack Ralston with Steve Kilgallon (Allen & Unwin, $36.99).