Tua shapes up to classic cars and cheeky chimp

By SANDY MYHRE

It's a hot desert day. A chimpanzee called Tarzan sits in the driver's seat of a hand-made classic car once owned by erHollywood "rat pack" members Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr.

The chimp is wearing pyjamas and plastic sunglasses. He pulls back his lips into a manic smile and waves. We check our pulse, wondering if we've fallen into virtual reality, like Paul Jonas in Tad Williams' Otherland.

But this - where else? - is America. .

The Nevada desert surrounds the Prince Ranch where Auckland heavyweight boxer David Tua spent a rigorous seven weeks before his 12-round points loss to the world titleholder, Britain's Lennox Lewis.

The chimpanzee, its trainer and a collection of other animals - including a lion, tiger, baby kangaroo, a couple of emus and a draught horse - call this home too, for largely unexplained reasons.

New Zealand Tranzam drivers Craig Baird, Alan Ferguson and Grant Silvester paid a visit to Tua's ranch just before their own Las Vegas show (where Baird captured an impressive second at the speedway).

Their introduction to the ranch residents, both two and four-legged, included the opportunity to pat the lion. Baird seriously valued his skin and stood outside the electric fence.

The ranch is not a ranch at all but an eclectic collection of rooms clumped together to vaguely resemble a hacienda. It was once a brothel housing exotic, er, dancers. Now it houses exotic cars.

The classic cars are part of a rare collection belonging to ranch owner, Greg Hannley, a Las Vegas businessman whose original purpose for the buildings was as a car museum before Kevin Barry hired the place as a training centre.

Two of the exotic cars were parked outside the gym, next to Tua's four-wheel-drive Hummer. One is the Excalibur - basically a Corvette frame, transmission and engine, designed by Brook Stevens, hand-built in 1965 and modelled after the 1929 Mercury Coupe.

Of the 53 known to have been built, only 16 remain and Hannley has two of them.

The other is a Clenet, designed and produced by French artist Alan Clenet, using a Lincoln chassis and housing a 7.5-litre Ford Windsor V8.

A combination metal and fibreglass bodywork compliments wire spoke wheels. These are slightly less rare than the Excalibur but still exotic enough to be considered collectors' pieces. Only 250 were ever built and Hannley's Clenet is the rare white-on-white model.

Four hours later and even the surreal has an end, does it not? Back on the metal road, past an Indian Reservation, heading vaguely towards the legendary Cheyenne, we each silently mused on the words fact and fantasy.