Kiwi Olympians: Anna Lawrence

By SUZANNE McFADDEN

Crosby Morris was devastated when he missed the boat to the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928.

The young Canterbury farmer was chosen to row for New Zealand in the eights. He had his bag packed - inside was his black singlet emblazoned with the silver fern.

But the money to pay the rowing team's passage on board the ship Remuera did not arrive until the day after the boat set sail.

Morris never competed at an Olympics. He went to war, fought behind enemy lines in the Long Range Desert Group and returned to raise a family in Christchurch.

He died when his granddaughter Anna Lawrence was just a year old.

If he were alive today, Crosby Morris would be proud to see her achieve what he could not 72 years ago.

Lawrence is way ahead of Granddad Crosby now - she is on her way to her second Olympics as a member of the NZ women's hockey team.

Her first, at Barcelona in 1992, was a disappointment.

She was 20 years old, and in hindsight lucky to be there - recovering from a severe knee injury and a stress fracture.

While she held her body together, the team fell apart mentally, finishing last.

This time, a wiser and healthier Lawrence leads New Zealand into a battle which could produce a medal.

She understands the pressure on them all to match the golden success of the New Zealand men who beat the odds at Montreal in 1976.

Lawrence was 4 years old then and has no idea what she was doing on that historic day: "Probably screaming."

She didn't even know what hockey was, but her competitive streak was already evident.

"She was pretty stroppy," laughs her mother, Sally. "She wanted to have a go at absolutely everything. If someone was singing, she would try to sing louder. She was so energetic she never went to sleep.

"I'm very surprised that that stroppy little girl became who she is now."

That noisy, headstrong, inexhaustible kid grew up to be the composed captain and ice-cool penalty striker in what is already one of New Zealand hockey's great sides.

It should be no surprise that sport has dominated her life - the passion was inherited. Her great-grandfather Jack Lawrence played in New Zealand's first cricket test in 1893.

Growing up in Cockle Bay on Auckland harbour's southeastern shores, little live-wire Anna played netball.

But the kid who wanted to try everything trialled for the hockey team one day as well, and found herself having to make a choice.

"I think it was the running that nailed it. On the hockey field, you could run everywhere, and I could run all day at that age," she said.

"Sometimes now I wonder how far I would have gone in another sport."

During the doldrums of the mid-90s, when the NZ women slid out of the world's top 20, Lawrence thought seriously about quitting.

"We hadn't qualified for anything - the World Cup or the Olympics - and I wondered about trying triathlons or netball.

"Then things started trucking along. I guess in the end I stayed for the love of it."

Her perseverance was repaid with the captaincy at the age of 24 - a job she was groomed for since she started playing for New Zealand as an 18-year-old.

The inside forward now carries a second responsibility - to strike the penalty corners, where one perfect, lethal shot faster than the eye can see can be a game-winner.

Lawrence whacks a few hundred penalty corners a week.

Her reward is the sound of plastic ball on backboard - and the boards at the Olympic hockey stadium in Homebush Bay make the sweetest ping of any in the world.

The backboards there are metal and the crack of a goal echoes around the ground.

"When we played there last month, there was no crowd so all you heard was the bing of the ball hitting the backboard, and then our team go, 'Yay'," she recalls with a grin.

"We're not very good at celebrating. It's a bit of a New Zealand thing - we don't want to show too much emotion. Hopefully we'll be better in Sydney.

"But don't expect us to lift our shirts over our heads - we're wearing one-pieces."

Lawrence revelled in that ultimate "bing" three times in one game in Sydney a month ago - scoring all three goals in New Zealand's historic win over the world champions and Olympic favourites Australia for the first time in 15 years.

Yet she modestly plays down her role in that monumental victory.

"It was just a day when our corners actually went in," she said.

"When it comes to converting, my ratio isn't very high. There have been times when I haven't scored a lot of them, and I get a bit despondent. But I would like to think by Olympic time our corners will be a lot smoother."

The New Zealanders are ranked fifth for Sydney, but a couple of upsets - like the one over the Aussies - would vault them onto the medal dais.

Over the past four years, they have clawed back from nowhere - a ranking in the low 20s - to this.

They have left their families and jobs to live in Wellington for the past six weeks, training at dawn and again at dusk, trying to fit in normal work between.

Lawrence was able to transfer her marketing job with AMI from Christchurch to the capital. She now lives next door to star striker Mandy Smith.

She struggles with the early morning trainings, in the dark atop chilly Mt Albert in Berhampore.



"I've only managed to be late once. I woke up when I should have been here."

Old team-mates call her the absent-minded professor and she concedes she sometimes suffers "blank moments."

"I'm not going to say I'm dizzy. But my concentration might be somewhere else sometimes."

The Olympic draw has been kind to Lawrence. All but one of NZ's games are after lunch. Perhaps Granddad Crosby had a hand in it.