The Last Snake Man Read online

  Apart from Gabor, I never had a dedicated trainer for my other events: long jump, pole vault, shot-put or discus, even in the Olympics. I just watched what the other fellas did and tried to do it better. For instance, for the first year I was throwing the discus, I was doing it in an anticlockwise fashion. Someone pointed out I was spinning it the wrong way—it should have been clockwise—and the next year I won the state title. But Gabor got me sprinting to my peak. My 100 metres was the second fastest of all the decathlon men at the Olympics. And it was a pretty good time considering there was a strong head wind of 5 metres per second and we had faster times than seven of the open 100-metre heats—that’s more than 40 runners. The sprints—100 and 200 metres—and the long jump were my main events, but unfortunately I was never picked in them for the Olympics.

  Coming up to the Olympics I was busy training for the new club Randwick–Botany in numerous events, and the state selectors for the Australian championships told me there would be no Olympic trials for the decathlon. It was going to be on past performances. They were happy with my efforts in the individual events but I hadn’t had one high hurdles, a long jump or one 440 yards that year. ‘We don’t even know what you can do,’ they said.

  I said I hadn’t had time to do those events because I was doing all the other events for the club—the relays, the sprints and the low hurdles, in which, by the way, I became Australian champion just after the Olympics. These fellas wanted a long jump out of me, so I said, ‘Okay, I haven’t jumped all year,’ but I went out early one morning and I rolled the cinder run-up track, and patted it all down and fixed it all up. All the other jumpers were my mates so I told them, ‘I’m having first jump before you dig the cinders up.’

  So I had my first jump and it was about 22 feet, which the selectors would have been happy with, but the marker said, ‘John, you took off 2 feet behind the foot board.’ I said: ‘I know. I couldn’t get my run-up right.’ I’d never trained to have markers, so he told me to bring my starting point forward about 2 feet. My next jump was 24 feet 5½ inches, or 7.45 metres, and that was the best jump in Australia for eight years.

  And then they said to me, ‘You’ve got to do the high hurdles.’ I’d only gone over the high hurdles once before and never trained, and that’s really an event you’ve got to train for. So I decided to run against Keith Short, the state champion and a good mate of mine. I beat him and it was the first time he’d lost a race in New South Wales for eighteen months. My technique wasn’t the best—I hit more hurdles than I cleared—and Keith was a bit of an amateur cartoonist, so he did one of me titled ‘Gangway the Cann Way’. It shows me smashing my way through the hurdles rather than jumping over them. Very funny!

  After I’d done the hurdles, they said I needed to get an official time in the 400 metres. ‘Not today,’ I said, ‘I’m buggered. I’m doing everything else.’ So they put me in for a meeting the next week and I did 47.8 seconds, which was two or three seconds better than my previous best ever—that’s about 25 yards faster. That probably got me into the Olympics straight away.

  I knew my long jump was a good distance so I prepared for that event in the Australian trials, hoping I could get a shot at it at the Olympics. It was not to be; the first jump I had, I ripped the leg muscle in my knee. It was different in those days, and thankfully no officials knew, but I was injured and couldn’t do much heavy training before competing in Melbourne. It’s a shame. My trial long jump distance would have won me bronze if I’d been able to compete in that event and done that distance. But I wouldn’t have hit the board—I jumped better when I was sixteen years old.

  If you’re surprised that there was no supervision of our training or injuries, you have to remember that we were all amateurs with full-time jobs. We had to be, or we wouldn’t be allowed to compete. I even got into a spot of bother when a newspaper advertisement for Admiral televisions appeared with a picture on the screen of me hurdling. Obviously it was a bodge-up from an archive picture, but the Athletics Board wanted to know if I’d received any money or payment in kind for the ad. O’Briens, the agency that produced the ad, wrote to the board and told them I’d got nothing and that the ad had been produced without my knowledge or permission.

  Different times—if that happened today you’d probably have an agent on the phone demanding payment…and a free TV as well.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE GAMES

  If you think the media today is a bit rough, I can tell you it’s always been that way. Only back then there wasn’t such a thing as political correctness, so they would say things that would make your hair curl. And they were just as capable of taking one small issue and turning it into something else entirely. I’ve already mentioned my mate Keith Smith. He put together a book that contains all my old newspaper clippings, hundreds of photographs and the life history of my family. One copy went to the National Library, one to the Bowen Library at Maroubra and the rest to family.

  When I was identified as an Olympics prospect, the newspapers did the full treatment on me, with headlines that referred to me as a ‘former cripple’ and stories that said I wouldn’t be going snake hunting any more (like that was going to happen!). When they say don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, it’s good advice.

  In July 1956, something happened that would have put a major spoke in my wheels—I got called up for my National Service medical. Back then any young man over eighteen had to do six months’ military training and then be in the Reserves for three years. Now, given that I was hoping to compete at the Olympics later that year, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I would get a triple-A rating for health and fitness. I’m happy to serve my country, of course, but with the Olympics in Melbourne looming and a war against Communists in Malaya (now Malaysia) well under way, I was worried.

  On the appointed date I joined a long line of young blokes waiting to be examined by an army doctor. When he got to me, he put the stethoscope on my chest and looked worried.

  ‘Sorry, son,’ he said, eventually. ‘We can’t take you.’

  Now, I was worried. What was wrong with me?

  ‘You’ve got an enlarged heart and flat feet,’ he explained. ‘You must be disappointed.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, relieved. ‘I’ve got better things to do.’

  And with that, I swear, he gave me a wink. Now, I’ve got two theories. One, somebody somewhere had had a quiet word with the military and they decided to let me off. Or maybe he thought my resting heartbeat of about 50 a minute, 30 per cent below the norm because of my training, was the sign of a problem rather than fitness. Either way, I was free to carry on with my life…but I remember that wink.

  And so, on Saturday 20 October 1956, I went down for the final Olympic trials in Melbourne a week or so after my decathlon tests in Sydney. Although I missed the long jump team with my knee injury, if you want to get into ‘what-ifs’ my trial jump of 7.45 metres was 3 centimetres further than Hugh Jack’s winning jump in the Olympic trials. As there was no official trial for the decathlon, I managed to conceal my injury for the rest of the day (and for weeks thereafter) and then had to sit and wait for the team to be announced.

  They did it there and then on the last day, and even though I was pretty sure I was a good chance, I was a bit nervous waiting for them to read out the names. They couldn’t have made it harder for me. Alphabetically, ‘D’ for decathlon is right up there, and ‘C’ for Cann is too. But no, the decathlon team was named last, and the final name of the chosen three they read out was mine.

  We were measured for our Australian team uniforms the following day and there was a young lady there helping out called Ann Tanner. She was the daughter of Sir Edgar Tanner, secretary-general of the Australian Olympic Federation, and her brother Ted would go on to be a member of the Victorian Government, so you could say she was well connected. I suppose Ann and I kind of clicked and our friendship came in handy later on, when the Games got going.

  Back in Sydney, my family
and mates were cock-a-hoop that I had been selected, but the celebrations came to a shuddering halt when the management of Prince Henry Hospital at Little Bay—where I was working in the laundry—said I couldn’t have time off to go down to the Games, which were scheduled to run from 22 November to 8 December. I was shocked and disappointed, but this didn’t sit well with the other workers at the hospital who had been following my progress in the papers.

  I don’t know who said what to whom, but probably my immediate boss Desi Walker got involved. He was a good bloke, and used to help me train during lunchbreaks, returning the shot-put or javelin after I’d thrown them. Whatever happened, the upshot was that management backed down, although they insisted that I had to come back to Sydney as soon as the decathlon was done. It was scheduled for the Thursday and Friday of the second week, so I would miss half the Games and the closing ceremony. But hey, it was better than nothing.

  In the second week in November we were all bussed down to the Olympic Village in Heidelberg, which was just amazing. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. I expected dormitories but we all had our own little houses, and I was in with the other two decathlon men, just the three of us: me, Pat Leane and Ian Bruce. There was nothing like the security you see these days, so it was very relaxed. That said, the women had their own section with a big barbed-wire fence around it to keep the men out. Not that I was very worried about chasing girls.

  It was a great time. My brother had come down to watch the Olympics, as had a mate of mine. I’d give George my blazer and my mate my hat or a badge, and they’d just walk in, say g’day to the guards and they’d let them in there. Different countries had their own villages, and we could go to any restaurant we wanted to—me, my brother and my mate, wearing different bits of my uniform—and have a good meal from different cuisines.

  There was a big scandal at the 1964 Olympics when Dawn Fraser was accused of stealing an Olympic flag from outside Emperor Hirohito’s Palace in Tokyo. What most people don’t know is that three flags were stolen at the Melbourne Games. I know because I ‘souvenired’ all of them—the American, Russian and a Union Jack, to complete the set.

  To put you in the picture, there was a huge training ground in the middle of the Olympic villages and every country had a flagpole near the entrance where their national flag would be flown. Now when I say security was slack around the villages, the one major exception was the Russian section. The USSR had invaded Hungary that year, and some countries had boycotted the Olympics in protest. The Russians were, it’s fair to say, not the most popular competitors at the Games.

  Now, being barely eighteen years old and from La Pa, I wasn’t all that clued up on international politics—but I didn’t mind having a bit of a joke at someone else’s expense, especially if that meant taking a bully down a peg or two. I’d brought some boomerangs made by my Koori mates at the La Pa Mission to swap with other athletes as souvenirs, and I did a couple of demonstrations for the foreigners for a bit of fun. I soon noticed that the Russians left their flag flying around the clock, and I saw an opportunity for a bit of a laugh. I did a bit of a demonstration near the Russian village and dropped a couple of throws near their flagpole so I could do a sly reconnaissance to see exactly how they tied the flag cord.

  Well, that was a blow. It was securely tied in a series of knots that Houdini couldn’t have undone if his life had depended on it. The only way to get it off in a hurry was to cut it. So one rainy night, with a knife in my pocket, I walked close to the Russian compound then dropped into a patch of shadow and crawled across the wet grass towards the pole. As I got closer, I noticed two Russians behind a large window in the foyer, but they were deep in conversation, not looking at the flagpole, and it would have looked pretty dark from inside, where it was all lit up.

  I kept crawling until I reached the flagpole, cut the rope and lowered and unclipped the flag. I stuffed the flag down my tracksuit top, crawled back out of the grassed area, stood up and, soaked to the skin, casually walked back to the Australian village. Every night there would be some sort of a party in at least one of the team houses in the Australian village—and that night it was the decathlon boys’ turn. So I walked into our party with the Russian flag draped around my shoulders, much to everyone else’s surprise, amusement and envy. John Landy, who would go on to become Victoria’s Governor, offered to ‘mind’ it for me. Maybe he wanted to keep one of the team’s youngest members out of trouble—he was one of sport’s true gents—or maybe he wanted it for himself. And, considering what happened to Dawn Fraser eight years later, maybe he was trying to do me a favour. Whatever the case, I kept it and hid it behind the gas stove in the apartment, where it remained undiscovered until I took it home to La Perouse.

  The Russians didn’t fly another flag from that flagpole for the remainder of the Games. Maybe it was in protest at being robbed, maybe they thought the Hungarians had pinched it as an act of revenge, maybe they hadn’t brought a spare one with them.

  Another highlight was bumping into Ann Tanner again. She asked me if I would like to go with her to the Olympic swimming, saying she could get tickets. I said, ‘Sure.’ So we linked up with two of her other friends and she gave me the tickets to hold. I still have mine. It states ‘Entrance to the Royal Box’. Next thing, we were sitting a few seats from the Duke of Edinburgh.

  That was fine, but then my Australian teammates were sitting across the pool in the swimming area and it sounded like an echo chamber, I could hear them so clearly. Now, having heard a few tales about me and my snake-catching and spearfishing escapades, they’d christened me Nature Boy. So these idiots started shouting things like, ‘Having a cup of tea with the Queen?’ and ‘Hey, Nature Boy, what are you doing up there with royalty?’

  There I was, trying to look as if I belonged in the Royal Box. The Queen wasn’t there, but I was just a couple of seats away from the Duke and everybody there was looking for Nature Boy. So I told Ann to start looking too and we did, so that nobody would think it was us. She was so embarrassed—but it was funny.

  If you think I wasn’t taking my sport too seriously, you’d be right. At the start of the Games, my knee was gone, completely buggered, and I couldn’t train properly. But nobody knew about my knee except Pat and Ian, my roommates. We didn’t have a physio but even if we had I wouldn’t have gone, as they would have sent me home. I’d visited the United States village a couple of times to hang out with the American athletes. I was very tanned in those days, so a lot of people thought I was Aboriginal—and throwing the odd boomerang or two would have confirmed that misconception, I suppose. Two of their three-man decathlon team were African Americans and I got on great with them.

  They noticed I was injured, and despite the fact that I’d be competing against them the following week, these blokes really looked after me. To be fair, one of them was the decathlon world record holder Rafer Johnson, and he didn’t even win gold. That went to his teammate, Milt Campbell. Suffice it to say, they weren’t feeling unduly threatened by a rookie kid from La Perouse.

  I also got on well with a couple of American high jumpers, Charlie Dumas and Vern Wilson, and they started treating my injury, putting all sorts of potions on it, warming it under a sun lamp and strapping it up—in a completely different way from Australian physios, had they even been there. They gave me the treatment for about a week or so and I had to wear long trousers to hide the strapping on my knee. But they got me as good as I could be for the event.

  I was nothing if not grateful, but being an equal opportunity mischief-maker, I decided that what was good enough for the Russians was good enough for the Yanks. Now, you may not know this, but if you fly an Australian flag in public, the law says you have to take it down at night unless it’s illuminated. It seems the Americans have similar regulations—or maybe they’d just heard about the disappearance of the Russian flag—because I noticed that every evening one of their team members would walk the 20 or so metres to their flagpole and lower and remove the
flag. It was pretty informal; the man, dressed casually but wearing a team jacket, would walk to the flag, lower the flag, unclip it from the rope, fold it, and return to the village entrance. I also noticed that the village had a rear entrance between the accommodation units.

  I swapped souvenirs with Charlie and Vern, and I scored an American Olympic baseball cap, complete with the stars and stripes insignia. I started wearing it when I was around the American village, just so the others who didn’t know me would assume I was a Yank in a different sport from theirs. Then one day, dressed in non-team clothes (apart from the baseball cap), I waited until ten minutes before the usual time for the flag lowering then strode out to the flagpole and untied the rope to lower the flag. My heart was in my mouth when two United States athletes came out of the village and walked towards me, but I turned my back on them, grunted a greeting in my best Yank accent, and looked busy with the cord.

  ‘Great job, man,’ one of them said and they walked on. I folded the flag up reverently and, with all due ceremony, held it high and marched it back into the United States village…and all the way through, out of the rear entrance. When I got back to the Aussie village, I stored it with the Russian flag behind the gas stove. The Americans had come prepared—they had a new one flying the next day.

  I also got on well with Bob Richards, who was the world pole vault champion and a member of the United States decathlon team. Bob was an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren, and he said to me one day, ‘John, I’m going to give a little talk to a church on the edge of Melbourne. You want to come for a run with us?’