Speed On Track and Football Field

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1033, 25 July 1930, Page 7

Speed On Track and Football Field

WHO was the fastest man on the football field with a New Zealand team? That question is very hard to answer. It is no use pointing to the - fact that Jim Parker and Jack Steel were professional sprint champions of New Zealand as well as All Blacks, or the curious converse fact that the Leaguer, George Davidson, was the New Zealand amateur champion. That doesn’t settle the question by a long chalk. Speed on the football field is a vastly different thing from speed on the Tuning track. Take "Wampy” Bell, the vice-captain of the Maori team which played the British at Wellington the other day. In 1923 when at the peak of his long and brilliant career. Bell was probably the fastest footballer in New Zealand. He was like lightning off the mark, and for 25yds or 30yds. his tremendous thigh muscles drove him through an opening like a shot out of a gun. But if you put Bell on the running track against an average lot of club sprinters, he would have run somewhere about last. And every often, the exact opposite applies to sprinters turned footballers Most of them don’t run as fast with a ball tucked under their wing as they do with a relay baton in their hand It isn’t that small load of leather and rubber than pulls them up, and it’s not “funk." Even a professor of psychology would find it hard to analyse that “something” in the human temperament which stops a great sprinter from reproducing his track form on the football field.

Several ofN.Z. s Sprint Champions Have Gained All Black Honours —Hurdlers Represented by George Smith and Van Heerden —Track Speed Not Always Duplicated in Football.

But Jack Steele did run comparatively as fast in football as he did in a 100yds championship; and so did Jim Parker. Maybe, the explanation is that these men had football temperament as well as track temperament. Steel was thick-set and nuggetty. He had no fancy tricks, such as a sidestep or swerve, or, at any rate, if he did. he seldom used them. If he couldn’t beat a man by sheer pace, as he did Henry Morkel and half the Springbok team in the memorable first test at Dunedin In 1921, he would simply smash his way through. Parker’s methods were more subtle. He was the 75yds professional sprint champion of New Zealand before he commenced his meteoric and (more’s the pity) brief All Black career in 1924 I think he was the finest wing forward New Zealand has produced since the war Let him sight an opening, and he was into it like a flash He also possessed a delicate change of pace in his running which always made him a dangerous man Parker was a born rover, with good hands and a football “head," allied to great speed. Van Heerden. the Springbok hurdler, had tons of speed, but the fastest sprinter-footballer who has visited New Zealand in recent years was “Slip” Carr, who was here with a New South Wales team the same year as the Springboks toured the Dominion. Carr was a world-famed sprinter, be-

ing a 9 4-5 man for the hundred, but he had football in his blood. His father before him toured New Zealand with a New South Wales team way back in the eighties. One of the chief reasons for George Davidson’s presence in the New Zealand League team about 10 years ago was the necessity for a man to mark the famous Australian “flying machine.” Harold Horder. And, good judges give George credit for the way he carried out his thankless task. Davidson, however, is better remembered as a great sprinter. A drop in the track at the Basin Reserve. Wellington. cost him the coveted “nine and four” figures for the 100 yards While on the subject of sprint cliam pions. it may be remarked that another of the “under evens” brigade Jimmy Carlton, the great New South Welshman. played for his State against Victoria recently at Rugby It is a coincidence that just as the 1924 All Blacks had two sprinters of the calibre of Steele and Parker in their ranks, the original All Blacks of 1905 aleo included two great track athletes, George Smith and “Bunny” Abbott. Many are the tales told about the famous “Smithy.” The match he pulled out of the fire at Wellington by scoring two sensational tries when many of the spectators had left for home is a cherished memory in Auck-

land Rugby. The year 1905 wasn’t his first trip to England. He was there a few years before that, but as an athlete, when he won the 120 yards A.A.A. hurdles championship at Stamford Bridge. Abbott was another speed merchant, but a colleague tells me that some of his old-time running rivals got the shock of their lives when, in the British team’s match against combined Taranaki- Wanganui -Manawatu in 1904, Teddy Morgan, the famous Welsh threequarter, ran away from Abbott. It came out after, however, that Morgan had won running events in Wales. “Bunny” and Bill Abbott were originally Aucklanders, and both crack professional runners, while they had a sister who used to win prizes for lady riders at the shows. An athletic family, the Abbotts. Ted Cook. a Southland Soccer player, who represented/New Zealand in a test game at Auckland six or seven years ago. was a champion Sheffield runner. He was very fast with the ball at his toe. and was an ideal centreforward.

Harking back a moment to the old-timers, an old friend of the writer’s who managed one of the first A.A.A. teams to Australia and has had a life-time’s experience of Rugby, avers that Frank Surman, great Auckland fiveeighth of the nineties, was one of the fastest men he ever saw on the football field. The record book is a sure guide to speed on the track, but football speed is hard to judge. There are too many factors to be taken into account The case of Bell, quoted and incidentally that of A E. Cooke, who was like a greyhound in 1924. are typical examples. But it Is reasonably safe to say that Parker, since the war. and Smith, in pre-war days, are the best examples of footballer-athletes who combined speed on the track with great natural pace in Rugby. J. McK.