Time out as sport ends up in court

David Jarvis (centre) leaves the Dunedin District Court. Picture / Otago Daily Times

The game clock showed less than five minutes had passed when Tony Ashton collapsed during a Dunedin club basketball match.

Players and spectators expected the 20-year-old physical education student to get up and keep playing after an opponent's elbow hit him in the temple. Instead, he lay motionless.

In the minutes that followed, it was feared he might die on the court. Instead, the blow put him into a coma, and when the popular Nelson man awoke two weeks after the match in May last year his life as he knew it was over.

Mr Ashton was left with a brain injury resulting in severe physical and mental disabilities. The right side of his body was paralysed, his personality changed and his speech painfully slow and slurred.

The man whose elbow struck Mr Ashton, former Otago basketball representative David Jarvis, was found guilty by a Dunedin District Court of injuring Mr Ashton under circumstances that if death had occurred he would have been guilty of manslaughter.

During the trial, the prosecution said Mr Jarvis had deliberately struck Mr Ashton with his elbow, causing him to fall and strike his head on the court. Mr Jarvis denied that.

Mr Jarvis' conviction has captured the attention of sportspeople, administrators and legal observers. It has raised the question of where legal responsibility lies in the sports arena.

Sporting bodies are now looking at what this case could mean for them. This week Mr Jarvis was ordered to pay $10,000 reparation to Mr Ashton.

Mr Ashton and his family declined to speak to the Weekend Herald, but friends of the injured man say $10,000 is a pittance compared with what he has to face.

They are standing by Mr Ashton as he recovers at a Nelson residential facility.

"He was always real helpful and funny. But after [the injury] he went through a real down-time because he was really, really depressed," one friend said.

"If you have seen old people who have come through strokes, it's like that.

"But it has happened to a really young guy and under such awful circumstances. His life has been changed forever."

Otago University law professor Mark Henaghan said the prosecution of Mr Jarvis showed that violence on the sports field could be dealt with in the same way as anywhere else.

"It's good to haul it back and show it's not just the law of the jungle on the sports field, and if you're going to go beyond the law - think again," he said.

Legal expert Andrew Scott-Howman, of law firm Bell Gully, did not think the average sportsperson had anything to fear from the prosecution of Mr Jarvis.

There was still a "very high hurdle" before police would take an interest in an incident in a sporting fixture. And it would require a flagrant breach of the laws of the game, Mr Scott-Howman said.

"For example if a guy leapt the net in tennis and belted his opponent around the head with a tennis racket, that's far more likely to attract the police attention, because it's just got nothing to do with tennis.

"In contact sports, like rugby, the rules of the game actually contemplate a bit of biffo."

While there have only been about 10 cases of assaults in the sporting arena reaching the courts in New Zealand, there have been numerous cases overseas.

Former New Zealand rugby league player Jarrod McCracken is seeking more than $1.53 million in damages after a spear tackle ended his career in a match five years ago.

He won a negligence case against the Melbourne Storm rugby league club in February following the tackle by Storm players Stephen Kearney and Marcus Bai left him with neck and spinal injuries.

Statistics from the Accident Compensation Corporation show 18,511 moderate to serious injuries from sport and recreation prompted claims totalling $125 million in the last financial year. Seventeen per cent of sports injuries happened on the rugby field, costing $20.1 million.

Basketball New Zealand described the Jarvis case as a "one-off".

Said chief executive David Crocker: "We hope we can learn from the whole thing to ensure there isn't a circumstance like this again."