Sport
The flying housewife
by Joseph Romanos
No wonder Fanny Blankers-Koen was voted Female Athlete of the Century.
The greatest age-defying defeat in New Zealand sport surely belongs to billiards wonder Clark McConachy. The Timaru man, born in 1895, won the New Zealand professional billiards title in 1914, when he was just 19, beating Bill Stevenson. He still held the title when he died 66 years later!
In 1968 McConachy, aged 73 and suffering severely from Parkinson’s Disease, lost his world title to Englishman Rex Williams, one of the big-name players of his era. Yet, despite his advanced age and medical problems, McConachy, 40 years past his prime, pushed Williams all the way and lost by just 265 points.
So McConachy stands supreme in terms of a sportsman not acting his age. However, motor racing’s Kenny Smith is starting to run him close.
Last month Smith won his third New Zealand motor racing Grand Prix. As Smith is aged 62 and was decades older than anyone else in the 27-strong field that lined up at Invercargill’s Teretonga track, this was some feat.
Several teenagers, such as 16-year-old Chris Pither, have driven outstandingly in New Zealand this season, and they were expected to battle for the national title. Instead, canny old Smith, keeping a cool head on a day of crashes, came through.
It was Smith’s third New Zealand Grand Prix, following successful drives in 1976 and 1990. In his 46th consecutive season of racing, Smith’s performance was a tribute to how well he has maintained his physical skills and kept his nerve.
The New Zealand Grand Prix was first contested in 1950 when John McMillan won in a Jackson Special. In 1956 Stirling Moss became the first of several world-famous drivers to claim the honours. Moss won it three times. Others who won it included Jack Brabham (three times), John Surtees, Graham Hill (twice), Chris Amon (twice), Bruce McLaren and Jackie
Stewart. Denny Hulme never did win it, though he was involved in some fantastic racing in the late 1960s.
The 1950s-60s was a golden time for the Grand Prix, with the best Formula One drivers in the world bringing their cars to New Zealand and producing some amazing displays. Even into the 1970s, the racing was of the highest class. Swede Keke Rosberg, the world Formula One champion in 1982, won back-to-back New Zealand titles in 1977 and ’78.
But since those heady times the race has fallen in prestige. This year’s title was contested by Formula Fords.
Even so, the racing is quick and competitive and for a 62-year-old to come through was something special.
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What's this? I always thought that New Zealand’s A J Hackett invented bungy-jumping, a thrill-seeking adventure that has been exported around the world.
But possibly not, at least according to the latest issue of Vanity Fair, which has run a story on the Oxford University students of the late 1970s who formed the Dangerous Sports Club. These students got involved in all sorts of high-risk capers, including sending a grand piano down the slopes of St Moritz, skateboarding with the bulls of Pamplona, and
pioneering hang gliding.
And bungy-jumping. Chris Baker, who these days runs a cemetery near Bristol, explains in the magazine that the idea of bungy-jumping came to him when he was using bungy cords to tie the hang gliders to the roof of his car.
He had seen television footage of Papua New Guinean vine-jumpers and thought that rolls of bungy cord could be attached to jumpers who would then leap off the 245ft Clifton Suspension Bridge above the River Avon, near Bristol. Baker told his fellow club members, who not only jumped off the Clifton Bridge on April Fool’s Day, 1979, but took their idea to the US, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge and the Colorado Royal Gorge Bridge wearing tuxedos. The Colorado jump was for the television programme That’s Incredible.
The students then gave bungy-jumping exhibitions around England. All this and not a mention of A J Hackett!
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A film is to be made about former world heavyweight boxing champion James J Braddock. (It’s curious that three heavyweight champions – Corbett, Jefferies and Braddock – have been James J.) The title is The Cinderella Man and -Russell Crowe will star.
Crowe will obviously have to hone his boxing skills – he didn’t fare too well in that after-hours fracas with Eric Watson in London – and Muhammad Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, was drafted in to give him some pointers.
The Braddock story is a beauty and well worth filming.
Braddock’s nickname was extremely apt. In his prime he failed to make the big time and he received a title shot almost by chance very late in his career and after having virtually quit fighting.
When Braddock beat Max Baer to win the title in 1935, he was 29 and had won just 42 of his 82 fights. Of his last 11 bouts he’d won only six.
Braddock, brave and orthodox, knew hard times during the Depression and, after a spell working on the wharves of New York, was forced to stand in the breadline to feed his wife and family. Then he was offered a fight with a promising youngster named Corn Griffin. He gladly accepted the $200 pay and surprised everyone by winning. There followed a points win over leading light-heavyweight John Henry Lewis, followed by another over Art Lasky.
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