Summer Reads: The Awa Book of NZ Sports Writing

Review by Mark Pirie of The Awa Book of New Zealand Sports Writing edited by Harry Ricketts, Awa Press, RRP $40.00.

Harry Ricketts released his book of New Zealand sports writing in June this year. I went along to the launch at Unity Books, Wellington. It was a full house. Writer and columnist Steve Braunias launched the book. I used to enjoy Steve’s football pieces when he was writing for the New Zealand Listener. At the launch, he told a story about his meeting with football writer Brian Glanville.

So, what will you get if you buy The Awa Book of New Zealand Sports Writing? Well, what you get is a carefully selected and highly personal compendium of national sports writing. It has an excellent introduction written by Harry himself. This book is the first of its kind since Lloyd Jones’ Into the Field of Play. Personal taste is definitely a hallmark of Harry’s selection. Harry is keen to capture odd as well as famous moments in New Zealand sport that convey a sense of literary craft as well as being memorable. Wit, humour and poignancy seem important. He has lifted various pieces from New Zealand sports books, newspapers, blogs, anthologies and biographies.
The oldest piece here is about canoe racing from The Nelson Examiner, 1843. Jeremy Coney’s snippet (from his autobiography The Playing Mantis) features Coney breaking his arm in the 1980s against the Windies - Joel Garner was the bowler. Brian Turner writes a poem for his brother during Glenn Turner’s difficult season in 1975/1976 (also included in A Tingling Catch). Other cricketing quirks are Hamish McDouall’s injury list for Chris Cairns used by Harry as a found poem.

Rugby and cricket are the most prominent. T.P. McLean, Keith Quinn, Chris Laidlaw, Greg McGee, Lloyd Jones and Spiro Zavos form the backline on rugby matches. Martin Crowe observes New Zealand’s semi-final cricket loss to Pakistan in the 1992 World Cup, and there are pieces by Joseph Romanos on New Zealand’s lowest Test innings total of 26, Lynn McConnell on New Zealand’s first Test victory in 1956 and Dick Brittenden on Bert Sutcliffe and Bob Blair during the Second Test against South Africa, 1953/54 season. Other sports featured are netball, racing, bowling, running, canoeing, swimming, mountaineering, fishing, yachting, boating, boxing, golf, aviation, archery, tennis, cycling, and soccer. Unfortunately, there is nothing here about rugby league or rowing. As Harry says, he ‘couldn’t find anything that was particularly memorable’.

Some of the best pieces in the book are by people one wouldn’t identify with a particular sport. Literary writers with much smaller audiences feature alongside big name sports writers and columnists from major dailies. Bill Sewell writes on Richard Pearse. Poet James Brown takes us to a child’s netball practice. You can sense the craftsmanship, with carefully chosen lines like: ‘Practice drizzles to a close’. Alongside conventional sports writing, poetry receives a fair amount of space. Bill Manhire has two racing poems, one very good poem on Phar Lap. Bub Bridger has a comic poem about wanting the Whetton brothers for Christmas. Pity the poem wasn’t better to really immortalise the Whetton brothers. Harry might’ve been better to have included one of his own cricket pieces in its place.

Overall, the great thing about this book is you can take it with you to sporting matches or on the airplane travelling. It’s the kind of book that’s perfectly designed for dipping into during the lunch breaks at Test matches or reading and storing at your summer bach. Not all the writing here is that memorable to me but I really like Harry's idea of a New Zealand book of sports writing as well as the range of sports on offer. Another editor might've picked an entirely different team, e.g. the cricket writing of Don Neely and Sir Richard Hadlee for instance. As Harry points out, 'You could probably assemble three or four parallel anthologies to this one without serious duplication’. Questions of personal taste aside, it’s nice to have a book like this to read, enjoy and return to in our leisure.

Review © Mark Pirie 2010

The Awa Book of NZ Sports Writing
edited by Harry Ricketts
(Awa Press: 2010)

Gregory O’Brien’s NZ cricket poem

When I published A Tingling Catch, I knew I wouldn't find every cricket poem written in New Zealand. Here’s a great one that got away.

Gregory O’Brien told me he once wrote a cricket related poem-letter to a friend Nicholas Jones while taking his son Jack-Marcel Haddow to the Basin Reserve. It was first collected in O'Brien's 7 Letters (Animated Figure, 1997 [a limited edition of 36 copies]) and later anthologised by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack in Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (VUP, 2009).

O’Brien comments:

‘Whole forgotten days' is an informal letter-poem, the manner of which owes a lot to Baxter’s poems from his late Jerusalem period. In the early 1980s I spent a year or two in Sydney, where I started avidly reading the Australian poets Laurie Duggan and Ken Bolton...This poem is part of an ongoing correspondence with those exemplary figures (TCNZP, p. 118).

The poem appeals to me as cricket is often the backdrop for the poem and at the same time, the metaphors of cricket are behind the life-actions of the people in the poem. The humorous portrait of ‘a day at the Basin’ is expertly painted. The poem shows in profound ways how cricket affects people’s daily lives:

GREGORY O’BRIEN

Whole forgotten days

A letter to Nicholas Jones concerning a day spent with Jack-Marcel

Haddow and Anand Gaskin at the Basin Reserve

A fine day for the cricket. Which means for everyone

apart from the poor fool who has to fetch these balls,

which probably means

     me. The fanaticism of children is what amuses

then frightens me. After all we're only watered down

versions of them, perched on the edge of the

non-members stand between two beer cans, reading a book

about the Australian painter Brett Whiteley, about whom

I am, like my two accomplices, m two minds. Or, more

appropriately, a

grandstand of minds. (Apart from 'The Cricket Match' -1964 –

           which is a great painting.)

The trouble surrounding yourself with small children

is you find yourself

   in the First Eleven

without even knowing the rules, then spend your summer

there. As well as bowling the best balls

children spin the best lines ... Jack-Marcel last month

                    aimlessly

orienteering in the wilderness at Port Waikato

'miles from the nearest adult' -

       some of the children got so lost they actually found themselves

in suburbs. The thing about getting lost, he says, is

what you discover ... The year ends, children walk past

the front wall of our property, grabbing the flaking paint

then continuing down the road, peeling strips

     the length of the wall, like streamers,

ribbons, while we lie a few feet away on our well-tended lawn,

talking with our neighbours who were once 'reliably' informed

           a layer of old carpet was just the thing

to enrich their garden soil, only to discover

           later it had to be

wool carpet. For years now they have been unearthing nylon

from their garden, along with patches

     of lino. Another year, another ill-founded theory.

Heroic moths of the mind! I had every reason to exclaim, the day

a moth flew into my ear drum, went crashing around

the left hemisphere of my brain (the same morning

there was a sparrow inside the house,

   beating against the front window)

and later the doctor's predictable remark, 'we could just sit here

and wait for it to fly out the other ear', before finally

floating the intruder out on a tide of

warm wax. A time of marvels - Jack-Marcel present at the birth of his

sister: 'the amazing thing, you know, was

it was so

realistic’. The best lines, as someone else said, are ours

on loan. Or ours alone? My nieces are back home

in Rarotonga, clinging to an atoll, enjoying the weather,

the odd, distant explosion. They do not write

                 but send teeshirts.

In Zimbabwe, according to Jack-Marcel, you're more likely

to be hit by lightning

    than die in a road accident. Which makes

cricket a hazardous sport, and brings us back around

to the Basin Reserve like a Mexican Cheer circling the ground

followed by carloads of hoodlums. Then queuing outside the

Baxter's Caravan for a filled roll, half expecting James K. to

hand it over. A role he could fill,

                   you would have laughed -

like my mother who, every time a rubbish truck drove past

would say, 'Greg, that's the kind of job you could do.'

Late afternoon, a shadow

crosses the lawn: the crowd on the embankment

standing. Then, Just as suddenly, it is earlier in the day

again. Between the last ball of the over and

the end of the over. The moth that flew into my ear last

week, the experts inform me, I should have seen it coming,

          should have fielded

that one. And even if Chris Cairns says cricket is his religion,

you'd like to think it meant more to him

than that. The day ends, but the questions remain

like what was the score and

      who were we

                 playing?

During the break, I follow the two boys across

the in-field for signatures, mob someone I have never heard of

as clouds shuffle about on the grandstand roof and

the play of rain on the pitch

    ends play.

December 1995

Poem © Gregory O’Brien

(from Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets, selected by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack, VUP: Wellington 2009)

  

TCNZP = Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets