By EWAN McDONALD
Ann, my wife, vividly remembers how she and her father drove from Hamilton to Eden Park to watch the fourth test between the All Blacks and Springboks in 1956. Though she was just a small girl, she can recall leaving the Waikato in the Ford at 3 am, crawling through the fog past the river and along the old Great South Road when the car lights gave out at Mercer, queueing outside the ground for a ticket, watching that legendary match from the terraces, seeing Peter Jones score his unforgettable try ... and hearing his equally unforgettable after-match remarks through the loudspeakers.
My family had a different sporting upbringing. We were of the soccer persuasion and therefore not particularly impressed that our neighbour was Winston McCarthy, the rugby commentator. "Listen ... it's a goal" was important to us only if it was our club, Diamond, knocking one in against Miramar Rangers at the Basin Reserve. We got most of our sports news from the Sports Post, the late edition of the Saturday evening newspaper. The front page was always given over to Neville Lodge's cartoon of the day's action. Longtime Aucklanders fondly remember the quaintly named 8 O'Clock.
Within a few years life had become very high-tech. At school we listened to Cassius Clay paste Sonny Liston on tinny little transistor radios with 2-inch speakers.
We never saw Peter Snell and Murray Halberg win their gold medals within an hour of each other in Rome because there was no television in Kilbirnie in 1960. Nor were there any pictures from the Tokyo Olympics four years later, though by the time the five-ring circus had moved to Mexico City, in 1968, we could see flickering grey-and-white images, days later when the film had been flown across the States and down to New Zealand, of the coxed four rowing to gold. You'd swear it was snowing in Mexico in midsummer.
FA Cup finals, live from Wembley in the small hours of a Sunday in May, were the big excitement later in the 60s. Rugby, of course, refused to consider live broadcasts of test matches for years because it might affect the crowds at the ground. These days they worry that letting the public into the ground might affect the TV audience.
The Government, which ran everything in those days, allowed the country to have colour television for the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch. Oh, the first day of the gala: Dick Tayler, leaping and bounding and cartwheeling across the brick-red track in the sun after winning the 10,000m.
TV's commonplace now. For the Sydney Games sports junkies will be able to watch the action on screen, via the internet or download results to their cellphone (as well as reading the Herald's special Olympics section, of course).
But the thrill remains the same: eye straining to see that black singlet with the silver fern, ear aching to hear God Defend New Zealand. As TV One warms up with its Dreams Of Gold series on past glories, we can't wait for next month and the real thing. C'mon, Kiwis, c'mon.
Herald Online Olympic News
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