Hockey: Simon Towns in search of Olympic gold

By SUZANNE McFADDEN

All has been forgiven, say the captain and the coach of the New Zealand hockey team. Yet the memory of a traumatic car ride in 1992 is still raw.

No one in the Towns family will forget that journey home, north across the Auckland Harbour Bridge — 19-year-old Simon, his father Kevin and mother Anne all in tears, because Dad hadn't picked his son to go to the Olympics.

It was an interesting ride, says Simon, then a talented young jock confident of a ticket to Barcelona. Awful, remembers Kevin, the coach who chose to leave his less-experienced son behind. "We all cried. Simon wasn't
arguing, just pleading for an explanation — he has always believed in being fair," Towns senior says.

As a boy playing swingball in the backyard, Simon argued with the kids next door — he had to play to win, and there had to be rules. He'd run inside crying, "But it's not fair, Dad." Now, after a 31-year partnership, father and son head to Athens, to tackle an Olympics together. As coach and captain they still keenly debate (not argue, they stress) decisions on and off the field.

And even though "Si" now lives in London, a credit analyst for a German investment bank, and "KT" is at home in Auckland, the pair have perhaps never been closer.

Once a week they chat on their hands-free mobiles — as Kevin, 55, drives to work at New Zealand Hockey and Simon heads home — to discuss team tactics. When the national side tours, they sit down at a cafe away from the team at least once to discuss life outside hockey.

Simon, who moved overseas to enhance his hockey and further his banking career, spends half his life in cyberspace — training in England to emailed fitness programmes; working ungodly hours on the internet when he's home in New Zealand for training camps.

"I had to ask the guys if they minded having a captain 12,000 miles away," he says. No one grumbled. In fact, the coach encourages his New Zealand players to live overseas. "Simon brings back a new confidence from playing other nations," Kevin says. Last year, Towns' English club side, Reading, were the European champions.

The tousled red-headed Simon followed his father — a national and Auckland rep — into hockey as soon as he could toddle, after his grandfather fashioned him a tiny stick.

He remembers playing, at the age of 7, on the old grass fields of Hobson Park on wintry Saturdays, then being ball boy for his dad's game. "Afterwards, I'd serve behind the bar in the clubrooms, and we'd get home at 9 or 10. Those were brilliant times," Simon says.

Father and son share a steely determination to win, play a similar aggressive style, and, they laugh, were once a similar build. "But Simon's a person who actually trains," Kevin says. "He's a human dynamo — in a 70-minute game he runs 10km — and he controls the game verbally and physically. He has more skills than I ever had."

A Jewish proverb says: "When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry." If Simon Towns leads New Zealand to the dais in Athens, you can bet there will be a carload of tears once again.