Athletics: Walker moving on after the glory days

By WARREN GAMBLE

John Walker makes us a cup of coffee with slow, careful movements.

The former Olympic champion has trouble screwing the top back on the coffee jar before putting it on the shelf with the lid askew.

It's a mundane frustration in his decade-long struggle with Parkinson's disease. There are other minor signs - a slow motion knee-bend to put his cup down, the deliberate gait of legs that once powered him to the world mile record.

But Walker has not suffered the tremors which Muhammad Ali etched into public association with Parkinson's when he opened the Atlanta Olympics. With medication and a good dose of the tenacity that propelled him around the world's tracks, Walker says he has no real restrictions.

He could run for recreation, and says he probably should: "It's laziness" that keeps him to an occasional walk or a game of tennis, which he now loses, with his teenage son.

But it's not as if the 51-year-old doesn't have a full life. There's the equestrian supplies business in Manurewa he runs with wife Helen and 23-year-old daughter Elizabeth. There are his three other children, two of whom are at school, and there is his second term as a Manukau City councillor. Later on the day we visit he is chairing a community development committee meeting where he will lock horns with former running rival and fellow councillor Dick Quax over park development.

There is also a tribute dinner to prepare for. On April 3, running legends Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett will be among a host of stars in Auckland to honour Walker.

New Zealand contemporaries from the golden 1970s - Quax, Rod Dixon and Dick Tayler - will be there, as will his 80-year-old former coach, Arch Jelley.

Daughter Elizabeth, an accomplished singer, will also perform at the black tie dinner to raise money for Children's Charity health projects and for the Auckland Parkinsonism Society.

Walker initially refused the idea from Sydney-based fundraiser Max Markson, but friends talked him into it - as long, he says, as it isn't overdone.

He doesn't seek sympathy. He gets annoyed if people treat him or other Parkinson sufferers differently. "I have good days and bad days like everyone," Walker says. "Some days I have marvellous days and mostly it's average. But sometimes I don't know what a good day is."

Walker doesn't let the disease shackle him: "I cope, I fudge it , I get around it.

"I have frustrations if you call that a restriction, taking a tablet every three or four hours for one, but a lot of people take tablets.

"I don't operate as well as I used to bodywise. It's not the same as it used to be. And I get tired, sometimes very tired. That's Parkinson's."

Walker's freakish natural machine - which made him the first man to break 3m50s for the mile in 1975, took him to Olympic 1500m gold at Montreal in 1976 and a stupendous 129 sub four-minute miles - started betraying him in the early 1990s.

He had trouble writing and remembers going to knock on a door and not being able to make his right hand work.

After two years of trying to ignore it, he finally went to a doctor, then a specialist who diagnosed Parkinson's, a disorder of the central nervous system. It results when brain cells fail to produce enough of a neurotransmitter chemical called dopamine, and it progressively affects the motor system.

Walker kept the secret for another 18 months, a horrible period in which he says he was a pain to live with.

"I kept asking why me? I didn't want to work, I didn't want to go out any more, I didn't want to play any sport. I just wanted to mope. I was suffering quite badly."

But by the time he went public with the disease in 1996, he had decided to begin again. He doesn't really know why. "I just started to relive life and to cope with it the best way I could."

He initially resisted taking the dopamine tablets which control some of the disease's effects, but found he could not write. Now he advises others not to delay taking the medication.

EVERY WEEK Walker gets calls from strangers struggling to cope after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. They come from men, women, runners, professionals, young and old. They are often distraught, confused, depressed, sometimes near suicidal.

Walker says at first he was reluctant to become an unofficial counsellor, but he realised he could help just by listening and talking about his experience, even though the disease affects everyone differently.

"What I have learned is it doesn't matter how fit, how young, what excellent health you are in, how good your diet is, there are no exemptions.

"What I tell people now is to get out of the chair and go for a walk. Keep busy, keep working, don't knock off. It's damn frustrating and it gets worse, but it's not life threatening.

"Hopefully, I can give other people hope and the hope is just get on with life."

Walker is thrilled that Coe and Ovett, the British duo who tussled for his world middle-distance crown as his injury-plagued career waned in the 1980s, will be here next month.

Coe, who took Walker's world mile record in 1979, is now a peer in the British House of Lords; Ovett moved to Queensland with his family 18 months ago.

Walker recalls the first time he ran against Ovett as he returned from injury in 1977 at a meet in Crystal Palace, London. The brash Ovett won going away, pulling out to the middle lanes in the final straight and waving to his mother in the crowd.

"So I didn't take too kindly to him at first. But as I got to know him I realised what a wonderful human being he is.

"He was a non-conformist. He would do things his way, and he got criticised for that. But I saw his softer side, the way he would visit young children in hospitals."

Walker did not know Coe as well, but experienced his kindness first-hand when he visited a leading international authority on Parkinson's in Belgium several years ago.

He thought the trip had been arranged by athletics officials, but found out that Coe had organised it.

Walker doubts whether the two English rivals, constantly contrasted and compared in the world's media, have been in the same room for years.

He also doubts there will ever be a return to that golden running era when such personalities strode the track.

The age of professionalism, appearance fees and agents created machine-like performances, particularly from a production line of lightly built African athletes better suited to speed.

In New Zealand, Walker says, children have far more distractions away from the simple, hard work of athletics. He believes the participation, not results, approach to sport has diluted the field of potential champions, as have smaller lifestyle changes such as parents driving their children to school instead of letting them walk because of safety concerns.

Walker doesn't dwell on his glory days because he says he always knew they would not last, even though they endured longer than most.

"There has got to be another side of life and for me that is my family, my work and Parkinson's. What it has taught me is to appreciate life a lot more and make the best of it.

"What I'm saying is, you have got to move on."