ABC Grandstand's Unsung Sporting Heroes

By ABC Grandstand

A collection of short stories of courage, sportsmanship and having a go from ABC Grandstand.
UNSUNG SPORtING HEROS is a collection of more than 30 stories of courage, sportsmanship and having a go. ABC Grandstand's broadcasters - such as Jim Maxwell, Debbie Spillane, Amanda Shalala, Peter Wilkins and Shannon Byrne - join the winners of the inaugural sports writing short story competition to bring you heart-warming tributes to their personal unsung sporting heroes. From Kokoda veteran, ted Howe, who returned to his hometown of Penguin to become an integral part of the Penguin Football Club for an astonishing 66 years; to Paul Wade, the former Socceroos captain, who we all know rocked a great mullet, but who also battled with epilepsy, a condition he overcame with characteristic Wade humour and humility - this collection pays tribute to community heroes alongside elite athletes who all share a common ambition to contribute, achieve and love their sport.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781460701119

ABC Grandstand

ABC Grandstand is the most respected name in Australian sports broadcasting. Since 1924, it has forged a global reputation for comprehensive and balanced commentary across radio, television and online. ABC Grandstand radio is famous for its calls of cricket, AFL, rugby league, rugby union and soccer, and sets the bar very high with its coverage of big events like the Olympics and Commonwealth Games. On television, the sports coverage includes women’s basketball, soccer, Australian Rules and rugby union. ABC Grandstand has been home to some of Australia’s greatest voices, a proud tradition that continues today.

Book preview

Preface

ABC GRANDSTAND’S SPORTS-WRITING SHORT-STORY COMPETITION

WINNERS

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Foreword

Alan McGilvray, adapted by Craig Norenbergs

ALAN MCGILVRAY WAS the undoubted ‘voice of cricket’ in Australia from the 1930s to the 1980s. He played for New South Wales, but it was his work behind the microphone that made him a national icon.

He began his ABC career in an era when the only communication between England and Australia was ball-by-ball telegraph cables, embellished with sound effects and commentary to give an impression of the callers being at the match.

What he would have made of modern technology and social media, we can only guess.

Alan died in 1996, but before his passing, he spoke about his unsung heroes …

We all know about Don Bradman. His shadow looms large over Australian sport. In 1933, I played with him for New South Wales before he went to South Australia. We’d lost a few wickets overnight, and he was still batting. Alan Kippax said to me, ‘You open the batting for your club, don’t you? You’d better go in with Don. The new ball is due in an over or two.’

We walked onto the field with 45,000 people watching and my tummy was turning over, walking out with the great little man. All I had to do, really, was act as a runner, and feed him with the strike as much as I could. I did that, fairly successfully for a while, but every time I got the strike, the crowd would roar, ‘Get off, we don’t want you.’ It was Bradman they wanted to see. I didn’t mind, because it was a great education seeing him at work, and I played my part.

Bradman was extremely famous, but someone who should get more credit for the popularity of cricket is Charles Moses, the ABC’s General Manager (from 1935 to 1965). He was instrumental in broadcasting cricket in the early days of radio. When I listen back to the first calls in the 1930s, I wonder why they put me on as a broadcaster at all. Back then, we’d have to read a cable off paper from England with six balls on it, and describe the action from that. That would take us two minutes. It took a while for us to realise actual overs take about four minutes. If we finished those six balls, we had no further information off the cable. So, we’d look to the door for the young runner they had, who’d run in with the cable with details on it. We had a lot of padding to do. Padding is the most difficult part of a cricket broadcast on radio. We did well. We were only about one minute behind the actual ball being hit in England. The cable would come through in code, then someone would decode it, write it to us, set it up, and make it sound like we were at the ground. Moses set it all up, and gave me a chance. He believed in cricket and should be remembered.

They’re almost forgotten now, but Vic Richardson and Arthur Gilligan were the greatest commentators I’d ever heard. I was taken in by them as a boy, really. Vic and Arthur were so popular — at one stage during that period, fifty-nine per cent of the country were listening to their radio broadcasts regularly. It’s like having an Olympics all summer, every summer. The phrase ‘What do you think, Arthur? What do you think, Vic?’ was a household saying in Australia.

One of my bowling heroes was Ray Lindwall. He could bowl fast and straight. Len Hutton said he’d never known a player with the ability to bowl such a fast inswinging yorker. His movement of the ball in the air was beautiful to watch. We say Dennis Lillee was good with his outswinger with pace, but Lindwall had control of pace with variation. Keith Miller was also amazing. People used to say they’d rather face six overs from Lindwall than Miller for one, when he was flat out. He was a vicious bowler, and we forget that. I don’t think Arthur Morris also gets enough credit as a batsman, either. We talk about great players and Arthur is never mentioned, yet he was outstanding for Australia, so tough and durable.

We talk about individual heroes, but what about heroic matches? In Manchester in 1961, I’d seen Richie Benaud bowling in a situation where England seemingly couldn’t lose. Benaud changed that. It was a beautiful match, with ninety-odd put on for Australia by [Alan] Davidson and [Garth] McKenzie for the last wicket. They were lower-order batsmen, and they fought back against the odds. In the second innings, Ted Dexter scored seventy-six for England and they looked set to wrap it up. Suddenly, Benaud came ’round the wicket and took Dexter, then [Peter] May, and then a beautiful finish for six wickets. Australia came from nowhere. They shouldn’t have won.

Unsung heroes are timeless. No doubt there was a hard-working person who hung up gladiators’ masks at the Roman Colosseum, or cleaned the lances of knights at jousting tournaments in the middle ages, doing their bit, week after week, year after year. This book, then, is well overdue.

ABC Grandstand’s inaugural collection of short stories is dedicated to all the unsung heroes who deserve to be sung about. The players, teams, volunteers, supporters, schools, charities, teachers, parents, officials, individuals and groups who make a difference. Whether they work at the top end of town, or toil away on struggle street, without them and their dedication, sport in Australia would simply grind to a halt.

This book is for you.

Introduction

by Craig Norenbergs

FRANK SINATRA WAS wrong. He might have told the world he did it ‘his way’, but everyone who makes it in any discipline, without exception, has had a helping hand. I’m sure a young Sinatra had a voice coach or promoter give him the encouragement and support he needed to stick with singing. I’m also pretty certain that Don Bradman would have munched on a sandwich, or downed a glass of milk provided by a long-forgotten tea-lady at a country cricket game. Even at the top of their professions, the Don and Old Blue Eyes would have been surrounded by unpaid, hard-working volunteers, happy to do their bit to help others. Truly, there are no heroes without unsung heroes.

Perhaps more than anyone else, we Australians celebrate sporting success. The achievements of athletes are elevated to the front and back pages of our newspapers, the feats of footballers lead news bulletins on television and radio, and websites report the every move of cricketers on and off the field. Unfortunately, in modern times, and with the rise of social media, bad behaviour has become more noticeable, even taking precedence over the positive things being done by people involved in sport. That is why this book is so important: rather than cutting tall poppies down to size, we’re elevating the colourful flowers around the edges to prominence.

Lots of people have asked what is meant by the term ‘unsung hero’. Dictionary.com defines it as ‘a person who makes a substantive yet unrecognised contribution’. This definition doesn’t do our unsung heroes enough justice. The people profiled in this book did more than simply contribute. Some spent their whole lives chasing a dream. Most suffered for their art without pay. They all inspire us, and remind us what makes sport special.

When I asked the Grandstand broadcasters to be involved, they immediately named half a dozen people they felt deserved recognition. Scores of listeners named fathers and mothers as their unsung heroes, so much so that we could have published a separate book on parents alone. I understand their sentiments. Growing up, I rarely saw my father during the week, but he never missed a football game I played in, and he encouraged and inspired me to get into broadcasting.

The ABC’s Debbie Spillane could just as readily be included herself, as a shining light for female broadcasters. Jim Maxwell, Drew Morphett, Charlie King, Karen Tighe and Peter Wilkins have inspired thousands of young people to dream of working in the media, while Craig Hamilton’s brave battles with mental health has seen him put pen to paper in separate books. But who are their unsung heroes?

Can you name the elite soccer player who, unbeknownst to many, battled with epilepsy for many years? Or the only Australian to run under ten seconds at an international track meet? Who was the Australian wheelchair basketballer who was the first to play professionally? Which broadcaster called countless Olympic medals, despite only having one eye?

Thank you to all the ABC personnel who gave up their time and energy, as well as all the Grandstand listeners who sent in their prose. The passion for the topic and quality of writing was inspiring. It made selecting the final list extremely difficult. Thank you also to Helen Littleton from HarperCollins, who championed the book. Without her, it simply wouldn’t have got off the ground, and these stories wouldn’t have been told. And a special thank you to the heroes whose lives are documented within these pages. You are now ‘sung’.

Making miracles happen

by Stephanie Brantz

THE SPACE OCCUPIED by Liesl Tesch vibrates with goodwill, determination, happiness and contentment. A reality that could, and perhaps should, have been very different under her circumstances.

Gold medal-winning Paralympian, human equality campaigner, motivator, teacher and mentor, she once wanted to be an environmentalist, until an accident ended her ‘greenie’ dream. Greenpeace’s loss turned out to be the world’s gain.

Born in Brisbane, Liesl was three months old when parents Pam and Ted moved the family to her mother’s homeland New Zealand, where sister Trudii was born the following year. The girls enjoyed life in a home-made caravan at the beach surrounded by cats, goats, a pig and a rabbit.

When Liesl was seven years old, the family returned to Australia and settled in a friend’s boatshed on the shores of Lake Macquarie, where the girls continued to enjoy an alternative, occasionally eccentric, but nonetheless loving, and even idyllic, upbringing.

It was an unexceptional afternoon some twelve years later which saw the Newcastle University student riding home on her mountain bike after visiting a friend. Coming down a hill, the front wheel of her bike hit the gutter and life, as Liesl Tesch knew it, changed forever.

Somersaulting over the handlebars, she hit the ground so hard that her vertebrae collapsed. The L1 vertebra shattered, and a shard of bone sliced into her spinal cord.

Lying unconscious in the driveway of a nearby house, Liesl was unaware that the lady who found her just happened to have a daughter living over the road who was a nurse, a random twist of fate that turned out to be a stroke of luck. Suspecting spinal injury, the nurse ordered her not to be moved before being transported to hospital, a decision which likely saved her spinal cord from being completely severed.

Even so, the prognosis was grim. Liesl woke up in the hospital two weeks later, to the news that she would never walk again. It was devastating news for an active nineteen-year-old hell bent on outdoor pursuits.

Liesl Tesch, though, doesn’t seem to have the ability to process negative thoughts. While her body struggled to repair itself, her brain kept telling her that while she had legs, she should be able to walk. She remembers thinking, ‘Everyone knows a story of someone who has broken their back and has miraculously got up and walked again.’

In this case there was no miracle.

Determined to leave hospital under her own steam, months of painful physiotherapy followed, as partial lower limb sensation slowly returned. The willpower required to retrain her legs was immense and her recovery a gruelling experience. She recalls it as ‘being like a baby, trying to learn to walk — but you’re an adult, and it was as if you’d bought someone else’s legs and stapled them onto your own body. They didn’t behave the way you expected them to.’

Through sheer bloody-mindedness, just half of the expected six-month stay had elapsed when Liesl refused the proffered wheelchair, and painstakingly shuffled a bulky walking frame towards the hospital door.

Returning to university just one month later, she had to rediscover student life using a wheelchair, at a time when accessibility to buildings was a problem. The realisation soon dawned that if negotiating a city campus was difficult, then her dream of trudging through rainforests in a quest to be an environmentalist was no longer a realistic option.

Changing tack, a short-lived dabble in town planning was rejected in favour of a career as a geography teacher. But outside the academic sphere, Liesl had discovered other talents.

During rehabilitation, a physiotherapist had noticed her proficiency with a foam basketball, which she would shoot against a perspex backboard mounted in her room.

Being taken to the gym to watch wheelchair basketball in action was the catalyst to Tesch becoming one of Australia’s most successful Paralympians.

Before becoming what is officially termed an ‘incomplete paraplegic’, basketball had been just one of her many active pursuits. Describing herself as ‘good but not exceptional’, she had won age championships for sport as a school kid. On the basketball court, she’d made representative teams and the university side.

But in a wheelchair, Tesch was sensational. Selection in the New South Wales representative team was swiftly followed by an invitation to try out for the national team and a debut in green and gold at the 1990 World Championships.

Her Paralympic appearance with the Australian wheelchair basketball team (the Gliders) in Barcelona 1992 was to be the first of five. She won silver medals at Sydney 2000, and Athens 2004, as co-captain, followed by a bronze at Beijing 2008, as team captain.

By the time the Sydney Games rolled around, Tesch’s talent and skill on the court was so obvious that, as the Australian women sat ruing their missed opportunity for gold, the men playing for the Spanish national team approached her, and invited her to play in the male professional competition in Spain.

The sensible geography teacher inside her said ‘no’ but, as the year went by, she recalled her love for Spain from the Barcelona Games. So she wrote up her résumé using a translation website to turn it into (a version of) Spanish, and then flew across the world to Madrid, thus becoming the first woman in the world to play wheelchair basketball as a professional.

The one-season experiment turned into two, and was followed by a move to Sardinia, Italy, where Tesch would ride her bright red Vespa to training, past fields of people picking artichokes and riding donkeys.

An invitation to play in France was another attractive opportunity but, not content with her own successes, Liesl refused to play in their first division men’s competition unless they formed at least a second division women’s team, with whom she would also play. It was one of many victories in her quest for equal opportunities, and so it was off to Paris, where a ride along the Seine would take her to training in sight of the Eiffel Tower.

Her Spanish and Italian language skills were proficient enough for her to converse and coach in those countries, and in Paris she learned just enough French to talk her way into jail … as a motivational speaker. With her ‘can-do’ attitude, it’s easy to imagine the bubbly Aussie promoting the importance of a healthy lifestyle to inmates while encouraging the acceptance of people with disabilities. ‘If you think you’re doing it tough, there are people in this world whose lives are much harder than yours’ was her mantra.

It was this passion to improve life for others that propelled Liesl Tesch around the world volunteering in disadvantaged communities.

It’s easy to forget that this smiling ball of energy can only walk — she calls it ‘waddling’ — with the help of lower-leg orthotics, and has to use a wheelchair to travel any distance. She genuinely rejoices in the abilities she has, and maintains that meeting disabled people in developing countries makes her feel lucky.

It was a trip to Laos that prompted Tesch to form an official organisation to make a difference. She had attended a convention being held there to ban cluster munitions. She saw disabled people living in cabins with dirt floors, sharing one wheelchair between them for an occasional outing to the market. They were isolated from and ostracised by the wider community. ‘There were people with limbs blown off by cluster bombs who didn’t realise they had a right to be included in society, and certainly had no concept that they had the right to play sport,’ she says.

Tesch came home and, with friend Jackie Lauff, set up Sport Matters, a not-for-profit organisation that uses sport to change lives. Her vision: a world where everyone is active, included, healthy, empowered and free from poverty. Experience as an elite athlete made sport the natural vehicle to drive that message home.

Despite a full schedule juggling basketball clinics and teaching geography, business studies and Aboriginal studies to high schoolers at the Brisbane Water Secondary College on the central coast of New South Wales (not to mention myriad speaking engagements), Liesl’s personal sporting achievements continued.

Prior to the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games, she had bid Paris ‘adieu’ and moved home: ‘The time was right. I needed to be here as captain of the Gliders. I’d been offered a job at an accessible school, and my parents weren’t getting any younger.’

Beijing yielded a bronze medal, and with gold still eluding her, Tesch took time out and travelled to Tibet. Standing at the North Base Camp of Mount Everest at an altitude of 5150 metres, Tesch knew if she could