KEY POINTS:
For advice on how to catch a cab in Athens, David Kosoof is the man you want. In Beijing he will be on the bus and he couldn't be happier.
While his team-mates travelled en masse to trainings at the Olympic hockey venue, Kosoof went alone and had
plenty of time to ponder the merits of taxi travel in Greece's crowded capital at the Olympics there in 2004.
If he needed any reminding that he was an outsider, the cab ride that could last as little as 25 minutes or as long as 90, depending largely on the vagaries of his drivers, was all he needed.
"When I look back on it," he says, "it was definitely the low point of my career. It ended up being the high point of my career."
For the uninitiated, a quick re-cap.
Kosoof missed then-men's coach Kevin Towns' squad for the Athens Olympics, a jarring call that was softened only slightly by the news he was on stand-by for Ryan Archibald who had a compound fracture of the tibia.
Kosoof travelled with the team through their pre-Olympic tour of Australia and Europe while Archibald stayed home to try win his race against time.
"During that time it dawned on me I was going to go. Reports from back home indicated Ryan was struggling so as it got closer and closer I got more and more excited.
"Then suddenly Ryan was being flown over and into the Village."
Rules dictated that Kosoof, as an auxiliary member, had to leave the village and stay elsewhere in Greece's teeming metropolis. Don't ask him where - "the amount of phone calls I'd have to make to management asking them how to get to places was ridiculous" - all he knew was that he had to get a taxi to training.
"It was a real battle," admits Kosoof, who knew, having seen Archibald's painful steps to recovery, that he could offer the team more. He knew, too, that no matter what soothing words Towns offered him, he was always second choice.
As reality, not fate, would have it, Archibald was ruled out and the two exchanged keys to the apartment in the Village for the final time.
His form, as it turned out, was terrific, perhaps the best it's ever been for the national team, but you don't go through an experience like that without picking up a few mental scars, without feeling an interloper.
It is not drawing too long a bow to suggest the events of Athens were largely to blame for Kosoof's ennui-inspired decision to quit international hockey the following year. But more on that later.
This time Kosoof travels to Beijing as a fully fledged member of the men's team who, having caught the national Black-itis epidemic are known as the Black Sticks Version:male, or something like that.
He's not quite the same exotic character he was pre-Athens - the dreads are gone for starters - but he's cut from different clay than most hockey players who, to the everlasting thanks of their administrators, tend towards the straight and narrow.
The name is Lebanese. His father died when Kosoof was young and he hasn't explored that side of his heritage too deeply but believes he is at least three generations removed from the Middle East.
His mother, Ina, is Ngati Porou and he wears a traditional whalebone necklace given to him by his nan and is gradually immersing himself in that side of his culture.
"When I was younger I ignored it really but now I'm trying to get more involved. I've been down to Hicks Bay [near East Cape] which is where my tribe's from and it's such a great area I've been back a couple of times.
"More and more I've been trying to find out more about my heritage and take an interest in it. I've spent the last few days trying to come up with a design for a tattoo that includes the Olympic rings, the silver fern and a Maori design. I want Ngati Porou in there."
It's a tattoo that is bound to get sideways glances in Belgium too, where Kosoof will pursue a professional career after the Olympics. While not as prestigious as its Dutch neighbour, the Belgium national league is increasingly popular and lucrative and a good finishing position will land your team in hockey's version of the Champions League - where the rewards are even greater.
His goal for Dragons, his Belgium club, will be no different than for New Zealand: get in good positions in the circle and score goals.
Kosoof said one of the strengths of this national team was that the strikers had different qualities. He likes to poach from in close and can go for long periods without getting stick on the ball. Simon Child and in particular Phil Burrows, the team's other outstanding striker, needs to have the ball more and will often drop back into midfield to ensure he keeps in the game.
It's a combination Kosoof said the team has missed on its past couple of tours while they've tried a range of strikers, including the discarded Bevan Hari and Nick Wilson.
"It's been hard to get that combination going again but it's something we've got to get back to."
To hear Kosoof speak so passionately about the Olympics, his heritage and hockey now - he runs a hockey coaching business so his immersion in the sport is almost complete - it's easy to forget he was on the verge of giving the game away.
By 2005, after his polar-extremes Olympics experience, his relationship with the sport he'd played since his days at Orewa Primary under the guidance of Merv Huxford had gone stale. He had fallen out of love with hockey and had taken up with a pair of exciting new mistresses.
"I took up other things. I went wakeboarding and snowboarding and that overtook where hockey was at.
"KT [Towns] could see my motivation for the trainings in particular wasn't there; I still enjoyed playing games, but for the work required to play at the top just wasn't there.
"I took six months out and that turned into a year."
Kosoof kept playing in the national league for North Harbour and began to realise that even the lure of the mountains and water couldn't severe his ties with hockey. He also saw that the guys who were still playing for New Zealand hadn't gone that far ahead of him.
He wanted back in. One small problem: the Beep Test.
Few words instil as much fear in a team athlete like Beep. With two shuttles placed 20 metres apart and a little less than five kilometres to cover if you complete the test, it seems innocuous enough. But from having 8.47 seconds to complete the 20m during level one, it decreases exponentially until you find yourself sprinting the last 16 shuttles in 3.89s each to finish. Few do.
Kosoof didn't get close.
"I was too far off where everyone else was on the Beep Test. Playing-wise the skills were still up there but I needed to get fit. I had a simple choice: do the work to get back there or that would be it for my career."
So Kosoof cast aside his image of the talented wastrel. His almost daily visits to Snow Planet - an indoor ski slope north of Auckland - stopped. He hit the roads, not the slopes. As for his wakeboarding, the last time he went out he broke his boat.
"I miss it, for sure, but the Olympics are the priority."
