The Last Snake Man Page 6

  And I thought, this is really not my cup of tea, but then he said a few of the gymnast girls were going. They were dolls, so I said, ‘You got me!’ The thing about Bob Richards is that he was a bit of a celebrity already, and by the end of the Games would be the only man ever to defend his Olympic pole vault title. He would also become the first athlete to appear on the front of a Weeties cereal box in the United States—a big deal back then, almost the equivalent of appearing on the front cover of Time magazine.

  He made a living giving sermons as a guest preacher and doing what we would now call motivational speaking. He also got into politics later on, but we won’t go there. Let’s just say he did this for a living. He used to go all over the Americas and all over the world giving talks, and he expected that he would get paid, either a share of a collection or a fee agreed in advance.

  On the way back from the church, I was sitting in the back of the car with a couple of girls, he was in the middle of the front seat next to the driver, who was a bloke from the church. After we got going, Bob reached around and looked at me.

  ‘John, I give talks all over the States,’ he said. ‘This is my first one in Australia and you know what? They never gave me a damn dime.’

  How embarrassing! I was straight behind the driver and I could see he was going red in the neck. I didn’t half feel sorry for that bloke driving the car.

  For the record, I’ve done talks in America but I’ve never taken money for it. I’m just grateful that they fly me over and look after me. The Yanks have taken me over there about ten times now, and it’s never cost me a cent. They’ve also taken me to the Galápagos, and many other places, and paid my airfares and accommodation and everything. But they never give me money, and I don’t want it. I’m just interested in having a good time with my mates.

  Another friend I made at the Games was Martin Lauer. Another decathlete, he came fifth in the competition, representing West Germany (this was long before reunification). Martin and I were both practising at the same time, and he came over and gave me a few pointers. We hit it off from then on and we’re still mates to this day. I wonder if modern athletes help and encourage each other the way we did back then. Of course, we were true amateurs and money changes everything…especially big money.

  As for my performance, I’m not going to blame my injury, but it certainly didn’t help (even if my American friends had done their best to get me fighting fit). As you probably know, the decathlon is ten events over two days: 100 metres sprint, long jump, shot-put, high jump and 400 metres on day one; then 110 metres high hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 1500 metres on day two.

  It was a tremendous experience in front of all those people but the pressure was immense. My teammates and I encouraged each other but the atmosphere was so tense that we hardly spoke to our rivals. It was a fantastic feeling, just listening to the crowd roaring on competitors in other events. I met Betty Cuthbert a couple of times at the Games and watched at least one of her gold medal runs from the stands, but she never came to any of our parties. Young Dawn Fraser did, though.

  At one point I was in fourth place on points, but that was because I was mostly doing my best events first. If I could have succeeded in getting my best long jump in, my best hurdles and my best 400 metres, I would probably have finished fourth or fifth. But ‘what if’ counts for nothing in a sporting contest—you bomb out on the day and you’re done. As it happened, the Australian team came ninth, tenth and eleventh—with me in the middle. But every competitor had their physical challenges and injuries on the day, so I’m not using my injury as an excuse.

  And that was it for my Olympic Games. I honoured my commitment to my bosses to go back to work as soon as my competition was finished, and the next day I was back on the bus and heading for home. Okay, they weren’t to know what a big deal the closing ceremony would be that year—nobody did. Three days before it was all over, a Chinese Australian kid called John Ian Wing had written to the organisers and said wouldn’t it be great if, at the end of the Games, all the athletes marched together, not in countries or even sports, but just as friends. This hadn’t been part of the plan and he never heard back (partly because he hadn’t put his address on the letter). He thought they’d ignored his suggestion, but the organisers went for it, even though they only had a couple of days to change all their arrangements.

  History records that for the first time ever, all the athletes marched into the closing ceremony as a group, and as a result the Melbourne Olympics were christened the Friendly Games. I missed all the partying when the athletes could relax after months if not years of hard training and top-level competition, and I missed the history-making closing ceremony that has been the model for every Games ever since.

  I was already back in Sydney and that hurt. People would ask me what the closing ceremony was like, and I’d say, ‘Terrific, oh yeah, super-duper.’ But I just felt embarrassed. I had to get back to bloody work at Prince Henry Hospital.

  There were compensations about working there, though. It was round about this time that I started noticing a real good-looking sort walking past, and I asked my boss who she was.

  ‘Are you taking the piss?’ he said. ‘She lives across the road from you.’

  She did, but I’d never noticed her. I knew there was a heap of girls living there, about eight sisters, but I just hung out with my own mob and didn’t pay much attention. A few years later, the ‘good-looking sort’ would become my wife, Helen.

  Shortly after the Olympics, I left the hospital laundry to work on a shut-down at Kurnell. (A shut-down is when they close an oil refinery for servicing. They want to get it back up and running as soon as possible, so you can make big money if you are prepared to work the hours which were long but well paid.) So I should have ditched my job earlier and gone to that closing ceremony!

  Even though I only came tenth in Melbourne, I didn’t realise that the 1956 Olympics would represent the high point of my athletics career. By rights, I should have gone from strength to strength and been competing at the highest level for the next ten years or more. But bureaucracy and downright racism—not to mention snaking—were about to get in the way of all that.

  CHAPTER 7

  RACE RELATIONS

  I went back to competing at a club level for the next year or so, breaking the national record in the 1-mile sprint medley relay in the New South Wales team—Bill Butchart (880 yards), Kevin Gosper (440 yards), and Gary Bromhead and me (220 yards)—and winning the national title in the 220-yard hurdles. I also found I had a bit of ability as a distance runner—as well as discovering the value of conserving your energy. Every year Randwick would stage a 5-mile cross-country race at Centennial Park. My brother George was always in it, and in 1957 he persuaded me to take part.

  It was a handicap race, and being more of a sprinter, I went with the early starters who were all slower runners. But they were too slow and the faster runners, who had started at the back, soon overtook us. Towards the last lap, I got fed up jogging along with the plodders so I took off after the leading group and pipped the race leader right on the finish line. I had a pretty good sprint finish and he was spent—but I wasn’t even slightly tired out at the end.

  After the Olympics, and having run 47.8 seconds for the 440 yards, Gabor offered to pay me 19 pounds a week to train full time with him, but the deal was if I ever travelled anywhere, including overseas, I would have to convince whoever was organising the tour to take him along too. Sadly, it never came to that. It would have been nice to pay him back.

  I loved my athletics but I was always bumping up against the bureaucrats, partly because I liked to do things my way. I was getting a lot of invitations to compete in different places but the athletics officials thought they should be able to tell me where to go and what to do. What could they do if you didn’t follow their orders? Well, they had bloody sneaky ways of getting back at you, as I discovered.

  There was the time I broke a state record by completing a de
cathlon in four and a half hours, instead of the regulation two days. The New South Wales Athletics Association bosses had wanted me to go to Lithgow but I had a mate from Tamworth, Mike Moroney, a long jumper who went to the Olympics with me, and he and his mob invited me up there to compete in a sports carnival so I said yes. But then, after I committed myself to go with them, the Athletics Association ordered me to compete in Lithgow that weekend. I refused because Tamworth had asked me first, and that didn’t make them very happy.

  When the Tamworth Association applied to register my record for the decathlon, the Athletics Association disallowed it by saying there had been half an inch broken off the javelin, which was a lot of rot—it was an aluminium javelin, not wood. But that was how they did things. They couldn’t fine you, because we were all amateurs, so they got at you in different ways.

  The last straw for me was when they tried to tell me who I could and couldn’t hang about with—and pulled a dirty trick on me when I told them to get nicked. I’d been having a bit of a break from track and field, doing my own thing, snaking and spearfishing and the like. But Geoff Goodacre, an athletics mate of mine, came out one day and told me there was a night-time meeting on the next week and the winners would automatically go to New Zealand to compete against the Kiwis. The events included a 220-yards hurdle, and at the time I was Australian champion. I hadn’t competed for quite a few months and Jimmy McCann, who was a good friend of mine, was the current state champion. But Geoff reckoned I could beat him, even without training, because I was always pretty fit.

  So Geoff put my name down for the program and out we went. I had a few Aboriginal mates from the Mission and I was helping them with a bit of training. They were natural athletes but they were too shy to compete—‘shame’, they called it—and I was in the habit of taking them down to the track with me to see if I could persuade them to have a go. So I entered the hurdles and I won easily. Jimmy McCann came second and Geoff was third. I was pretty happy, sitting up in the stand, and the loudspeaker comes on, saying, ‘John Cann, can you come down to the field, please? Officials want to talk to you.’

  I assumed it would be about the New Zealand trip so I went down. But they said they wanted to talk to me about the company I kept.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘The people you’re knocking around with out from La Perouse,’ says one of them.

  ‘That’s where I live,’ I said. ‘They’re my friends.’

  ‘They’re Aboriginals,’ said one of them.

  ‘So? There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re all good blokes,’ I said. ‘They come to the track and field with me when I’m competing, and I want them to compete too.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to change your attitude and the company you keep,’ one of the officials said.

  I said nothing and walked away, but they could tell I thought it was bullshit and I was biting my tongue to stop myself from saying what I really thought.

  A few days later Dad came in to where I used to sleep in the old house—just the back verandah with the snake-show banners around it for a bit of privacy—carrying the daily newspaper.

  ‘What’s wrong with your knee?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Why?

  He showed me the paper. There was a story saying the Australian athletics team was taking Jim McCann to New Zealand in my place because I had an injured knee. That was the last time I ever ran an official race in my life. I never got in touch with them again and never ran for them. At the grand old age of twenty, I retired from athletics for good.

  Being a decathlete, I could turn my hand to quite a few sports, and I was even offered an athletics scholarship to the University of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1957, organised by the Trinidadian sprinter Mike Agostini. They said I could try out for the gridiron team too, if I wanted, but I knocked both offers back. I would have been paid by the university to keep the discus rings clean and keep the lines on the football field marked clearly. Not a real job, then. I’d have had to make my own way over there and we couldn’t afford air tickets, so Boral Oil Refinery in Matraville offered to take me over in one of their oil tankers. I loved my sport, but as I said, the highlight of my life was going snaking with my dad, and I wouldn’t be able to do that if I was living in the United States.

  Gridiron wasn’t the strangest sport offered to me when I was still competing. Straight after the Olympics, Geoff Goodacre got us invited to the Inverell Highland Games, which were held every year on New Year’s Eve. They liked decathletes going to these country carnivals, especially me because I’d enter anything that was going. Geoff was about ten years older than me and was a seven-time Australian 440-yard hurdles champ. He’d also won bronze in the event in the 1950 Empire Games, and at one point was the New South Wales decathlon champion. I think he finished third in the competition the year I won the state title, so he was no slouch.

  Whenever we went up there, they gave us accommodation at the Inverell Hotel, and between us we would win everything so we weren’t real popular with the local blokes. It didn’t matter that we were there to do what we had to do. That year we’d just come off the Olympics, so this was a big deal to them, especially if they could beat us at something.

  ‘How about having a go at one of our events and see how good you are,’ one bloke said. ‘Go into the sheaf-throwing competition, if you think you’re that good.’

  We didn’t know what they were talking about. Then they showed us this pole vault bar and told us we had to throw a 9-kilogram sheaf of hay over the bar using a long pitchfork. The highest throw would win the prize.

  ‘What do you reckon, Geoff?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not doing it, but you can do it,’ he replied. ‘You’ll be all right with that.’

  I reckoned I would but I immediately started to wonder. They had semi-pro guys who would go around the country fairs competing for the prize money. And you also have to think there’s no equivalent sport that uses the muscles you need to throw a heavy object straight up in the air, so you could injure yourself, regardless of how fit you were. But I was working at Kurnell at the time, digging ditches with a long-handled shovel, so I thought I would maybe be okay. On the other hand, they were calling it the North-East Championship of Southern Queensland, so all the pros were there. ‘Stuff it,’ I thought. ‘I’ll have a go.’

  I beat them all at their own game, and surprisingly they loved us, dragging us into the bar and plying us with free grog and wanting to know all about the Olympics and whatnot. There was money involved—a few pounds of a purse—but we told them we weren’t interested in the money. We were strictly amateur and couldn’t take a cash prize.

  ‘Okay,’ they said. ‘You can have the trophy.’

  It was beautiful big cup but we couldn’t carry it with us so I asked one of the organisers of the whole carnival, Snowy, who was the publican at the Inverell Hotel, if he would take care of it for me.

  ‘You mind the cup for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll come by and pick it up later.’

  Well, I got around to picking it up about twenty years later, if not more. I’d been up there chasing turtles with a mate and we went into Inverell but everything was shut except for one shop. I asked the shopkeeper if Snowy still ran the hotel.

  ‘How come you asked for him?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, he’s an old friend of mine,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘He got buried yesterday. His son owns the hotel now. Why don’t you see him, have a word to him?’

  The pubs weren’t open yet, it was just before 10 a.m., but the door was open so we walked in.

  ‘Oh, you’re a bit early, mate,’ the barman said. ‘I can’t start serving you yet.’ I looked at the end of the bar and there were all these trophies stacked there—mostly football cups and the like. After all those years I couldn’t tell which one was mine. I didn’t say a word. My mate and I just walked out and kept going, and I never ever got my trophy for being Inverell’s champion sheaf-thrower.
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  Another brief flirtation with professional sport was when I was persuaded to take part in the Bringenbrong Gift, a race held right on the border with Victoria, on a property called Bringenbrong. This was like the Stawell Gift, a professional handicap footrace for decent prize money (although most of the cash changing hands happens with the on-course bookies). I entered under the name John Russell, just in case my reputation had reached this corner of south-west New South Wales. They asked me if I had run professionally before.

  ‘Never,’ I said, which was true.

  ‘Can you run?’ they said.

  ‘I was pretty good when I was at school,’ I answered, again honestly, although neglecting to mention my athletics medals and Olympics participation. I had to let them think I was good enough to race, but not that good. There were two sprints—75 yards and 130 yards—and my mates told me to run ‘dead’ in the first, to increase the betting odds. I think they gave me about a 6-yard start in the 75, but when the gun went I discovered it’s hard to run slow and came in third.

  They must have got suspicious of me in the heats, because for the main race, the 130 yards, they put me back on scratch. So much for tanking! I was so pumped up for the final that I broke before the gun so they put me back another yard. At this point my odds must have shot out. The gun went, I blitzed the field and finished with daylight second. As I got to the finish line, one of my mates grabbed me and said, ‘Keep running,’ and steered me right to the car. My mates had done a major plunge on the bookies and they wanted me out of there before people started asking questions.

  ‘We told them you’re injured and we’ve got to take you to the doctor,’ one of them said. ‘You’ve torn your leg bad.’

  So they got all their money off the bookies and jumped in the car back to Tumbarumba. They wanted to give me my share of the cash but I wasn’t interested—not for running, cheating or gambling. I don’t gamble in any form. But I got a trophy and a sash, which one of the blokes went back to collect a couple of days later. That sash is now in the little local museum at Corryong, Victoria, along with a note I wrote, telling the whole story of how it got there.