Sir Murray Halberg died at the age of 89. Photo / Photosport
Sir Murray Halberg died at the age of 89. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
Sir Murray Halberg is in the callroom at the Olympic Stadium in Rome with the other finalists in the 1960 Games 5000 metres.
“I looked around,” he’d say many years later, “and I realised I was with 11 frightened men. I knew then I could win.”
Halberg’s generosity ledto him setting up the Halberg Foundation, which for almost 60 years has benefitted physically disabled Kiwis by allowing them to get involved in sport.
The kindness and empathy expressed through the foundation provided a lovely counterpoint to one of the most fiercely competitive sportspeople New Zealand has ever produced.
His sporting career could have been over when he was just 17. Playing rugby for Avondale College he was smashed in a tackle. His left shoulder was dislocated, blood clots formed, and the nerves in the arm would never recover.
Sir Murray Halberg during a race. Photo / Photosport
Seeing him run live for the first time in 1962 in a meet in Hamilton, I was startled by how little he could use his arm, which basically rested across the front of his chest while he ran.
Out of hospital in 1951 Halberg took to running, and within a year was in the camp of a hard-nosed Mt Roskill milkman, Arthur Lydiard, who had used himself as a guinea pig by running 160km a week in training.
By 1956 Halberg was at the Melbourne Olympics, making the final of the 1500 metres. In 1958 in Cardiff he won gold in the three miles.
But the pinnacle of his career would be at the Rome Olympics. He and Lydiard had an audacious plan. Halberg would sprint with three laps left in the 5000 metres final.
“I knew what the other runners would be thinking, ‘He’s mad.’ But it was my destiny to win, not to quit,” said Halberg of his all or nothing dash. “The hours and hours I’d put my body through flashed through my mind, and the strength returned to my body.”
Film of the race shows how much effort he’d put in. Once he ran through the finishing tape he swerved to the inside of the track and, in his words, “hit the deck in a heap”.
It was the second leg of a magnificent afternoon for Lydiard-trained runners, as less than an hour before Peter Snell had won the 800 metres gold.
There would be one more gold medal in Halberg’s glittering career, and that was in the three miles at the 1962 Empire Games in Perth. It remains one of his greatest efforts.
By then Halberg held the world three-mile record, set in 1961, but he had a challenger in a young Canadian called Bruce Kidd. Halberg in Perth, Lydiard would say, was “so fit he didn’t know what to do with himself”. In the final he virtually ignored the rest of the field and cruised along beside Kidd, sometimes turning his head to catch Kidd’s increasingly nervous gaze. In the last lap Halberg kicked away and won with a smile on his face.
I didn’t meet him properly until after he’d retired. I’d got his autograph in 1962, after he won a two-mile race in Hamilton, and in hindsight he must have still been in steely race mode. He fixed me with an intense stare and said: “Are you going to keep this? Or will you forget where it is in a couple of weeks?” I swore I’d keep it, and to this day I have.
The man who in 1963 set up the Halberg Foundation, and ran a drapery shop with his wife Phyllis in Dominion Rd, was a very different proposition, friendly and helpful to a young journalist hanging on his every word.
More recently he’d been struggling with his health for more than a decade. When we last spoke, in 2011, I asked, at her request, if he’d write a foreword for Valerie Adams’ book. As an official at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester he’d been very kind to a teenaged Valerie, and she’d never forgotten his thoughtfulness.
He wrote: “As a competitor she presents a real game face to the world, but out of competition she is a big hearted, warm and kind natured person.” The same description perfectly fitted Sir Murray Halberg.
