Olympic Tales Of Yore
More Kiwi NRL Debutants, Some NBA Free Agency Stuff & Aotearoa Olympic Medals Of Old
Podcast
TNC Variety Show - Episode 27
Reading Menu
OlyWhites at Tokyo 2020: Heads Held High (Football)
Aotearoa Warriors Dairy: Viliami Vailea Debut Tells The Junior Pathway Story (NRL)
It’s Happened Again: Steven Adams Has Been Traded To The Memphis Grizzlies (NBA)
The Levels of Depth Pushing Blackcaps Test Cricket Forward (Cricket)
Almost Daily Olympics Blog: Wildin' (Olympics)
Scotty’s Word
Among all the sporting funk this weekend, three lads made Kiwi-NRL debuts and all three came on Friday night.
Viliami Vailea - NZ Warriors.
Kelma Tuilagi - Wests Tigers.
Xavier Willison - Brisbane Broncos.
If you’ve been reading these emails you'll know who all three are as I’ve shared plenty of tidbits around these three. Vailea was playing with Aorere College 1st 15 last year and played SG Ball for NZ Warriors to start the year, then he quickly progressed through to reserve grade footy this year with Redcliffe Dolphins in Queensland before starting at centre for Warriors vs Tigers.
NZ Warriors have their junior systems set up in two different countries and are still churning out their own homegrown NRL debutants. Vailea is joined by Edward Kosi, Rocco Berry and Taniela Otukolo in coming through the Warriors system to debut this year. Vailea, Kosi and Otukolo are all from Auckland - Kosi and Otukolo played Fox Memorial in Auckland last year.
Kelma Tuilagi is part of the Wests Tigers raiding other clubs for Kiwi-NRL talent. Tuilagi is a Glenora Bears junior and was scouted by Melbourne Storm, moving to the Tigers last summer. Tuilagi only started on a development contract and that’s the common theme of these debutants as they are allowed to play after the mid-season marker.
Xavier Willison popped up on my radar last summer after strong work for Palm Beach Currumbin on the Gold Coast. Willison appears to have been recruited by Broncos from Hamilton (Hamilton Boys/Wai Coa Bay) to finish school at Palm Beach - like Vailea, Willison finished school last year and NRL debut this year. Deine Mariner is a centre from Auckland and is on in the same pipeline with Palm Beach/Broncos, dominating all competitions.
Here are all the Kiwi-NRL debutants so far this year…
Wiremu Greig - Northern Swords/Eels.
TC Robati - Porirua/Broncos.
Simi Sasagi - Ellerslie/Knights.
Edward Kosi - Mangere East/Warriors.
Taniela Otukolo - Otahuhu/Warriors.
Rocco Berry - St Pat’s College/Warriors.
Viliami Vailea - Aorere College/Warriors
Falakiko Manu - Mangere East/Bulldogs.
Greg Marzhew - Mangere East/Titans.
Junior Pauga - Glenora Bears/Tigers.
Kelma Tuilagi - Glenora Bears/Tigers.
Tukimihia Simpkins - Rotorua Boys/Tigers
Xavier Willison - WaiCoa Bay/Broncos.
Quick exercise naming all the players who generally fit around the positions that Roger Tuivasa-Sheck will be hunting for Auckland Blues and Auckland Blues.
Auckland Blues
TJ Faiane
Rieko Ioane
Caleb Clarke
Mark Telea
Stephen Perofeta
Zarn Sullivan
All Blacks
Jordie Barrett
Damien McKenzie
Josh Goodhue
Anton Lienart-Brown
Sevu Reece
Will Jordan
George Bridge
David Havili
Quinn Tupaea
Braydon Ennor
That’s a lot of good rugby blokes huh? It also appears as though Solomone Kata will be lacing up for Auckland Rugby and that’s another fun reason to catch some NPC footy live in the coming weeks.
Wildcard’s Notebook
NBA Free Agency
Last week it was Draft Day, now today you get to have a happy Free Agency Day in the middle of all your Olympic indulgences. Sorta feels like everything else should stop while the Olympics are on just to give us a small opportunity to have a life outside of sports for a few hours a day but nah here we are and literally within about a minute of the window opening ol’ mate Shams served up a lil bit of this...
They’ve done well to negotiate an entire contract in one minute, aye?
Lol – we all know that these trade windows and free agency rules are all broken at every opportunity. There’s just a veneer going on where everyone has to at least pretend that they’re following the rules that everybody else knows they’re breaking. ‘It’s only illegal if you get caught’ being the operating cliche here.
The Lonzo Ball one is funky from a Steven Adams perspective. Ball’s signing with the Chicago Bulls but it’s a sign-and-trade deal that’s reportedly sending Garrett Temple and Tomas Satoransky (plus a second round pick) back the way of the New Orleans Pelicans. Now, $85m is a lot for any player and there was already doubt about whether the Pels would seriously try to keep Lonzo, doubt which lasted all season. Even as Ball’s three point shot came thrillingly right... his fit was still a wonky one next to Zion Williamson once Zion started taking over the ball-handling duties thus limiting Ball’s finest skill.
But he was a restricted free agent and therefore the Pelicans had first and last dibs on whatever happened to him. They’ve chosen to let him walk (but with a wink and a handshake that gets them a couple cheap-ish role played coming back the other way) meaning that since Willie Green was hired as coach, since the franchise was able to start moving forward on their plans for next season in other words, they’ve traded Steven Adams and Eric Bledsoe and let Lonzo Ball go in free agency. Three of their five main starters from last time are gone. Only Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram remain.
Better hope they’re a little more onto it with their recruitment this time around... not sure if they will be though. This target the Pels seem to have of a high calibre point guard is weird considering Zion Williamson mostly plays point guard for them. Kyle Lowry (gone to Miami), Chris Paul (staying in Phoenix), Spencer Dinwiddie (tba) all rumoured but why would they wanna play for a team where they can’t do what they normally do (see: Lonzo Ball leaving)? And why wouldn’t the Pels rather spend that money on shooters and switcheable defenders? Ah well, that’s their problem. We’re all Grizzlies fans now so who cares.
Olympic Tales Of Yore
The Women’s Sevens team winning gold the other day marked New Zealand’s 50th ever gold medal. We’re still well on pace for several more, in fact today could be an absolute cracker, but it’s always cool looking back at the context of history when thinking about these things. Anthony Wilding has had his name back in the mix lately after Marcus Daniell and Michael Venus matched his Olympic bronze in tennis 109 years later. There’s a bit on him in Sunday’s Almost Daily Olympic Blog, have a read of that one there if you will.
Thing about Wilding is that he didn’t technically win that medal for Aotearoa... this was before New Zealand competed as a separate nation. He won it for Australasia, one of four kiwi medallists who predate the inaugural 1920 New Zealand Olympic team – of which Darcy Hadfield’s bronze in the men’s single sculls rowing marked the first medal... fittingly in an event that we’ve continued to do well in throughout the century since. Rob Waddell and Mahe Drysdale (twice) have each won that event.
Boxer Ted Morgan was the first gold medallist for NZ eight years later in Amsterdam where he won the men’s welterweight division. Which he did despite fighting with a dislocated knuckle in one of his hands that apparently meant his left hand was mostly used for decoration during that event. Our guy won that thing one-handed, man. And he was a southpaw too so it was his wrong hand!
Those were the first medals for New Zealand, the first by a New Zealander came way back in 1900. Victor Lindberg was the fella, born in Fiji to Swedish and Irish parents but grew up in Aotearoa from a young age – Whangarei specifically. He moved to London just before the Paris Games (having travelled there a few years earlier as a gun swimmer who’d competed in Australia and NZ) and swiftly found his way into the Great Britain water polo team that went on to win the gold medal after dominant wins over consecutive French entries and then popping Belgium 7-2 in the final.
The squads were a bit weird back then. They weren’t so much national selections as they were clubs from within nations (Lindberg being a part of the Osborne Swimming Club who represented GB) and not all of the players were nationals of the countries that their clubs represented. Lindberg being one of those. Another example being Englishman Bill Burgess, who later became the second man to swim the English Channel, as he competed for one of the French teams (which was where he resided at the time).
It gets even weirder from Lindberg’s point of view because records held by the IOC don’t actually have him on the team list at all... granted those records are pretty whack because one of the guys who was on the list was William Lister who died of typhoid fever during military service in the Boer War two weeks before the Games even began. A posthumous gold medal? Not sure how that works. Plus three other guys from that IOC list who reportedly played games in England around the same time and in those days it was impossible that they could have travelled back and forth so quickly.
There’s one contemporary record out there though which does list Lindberg (albeit with his name spelled wrong) and more modern research has suggested that he played in all three Olympic matches. However this wasn’t really known for decades upon decades after the fact. The lost Olympian. Forgotten for generations but the NZ Olympic Committee brought it back around in 2014 with a presentation to his living descendants that officially honoured him as the first New Zealander to win an Olympic medal. Apparently he returned to NZ after his athletic career and worked as a farmer in South Auckland until his retirement. He died in 1951 aged 75.
The 1900 Olympics were insane by the way, they were the second of the modern Olympiad and the format was still being figured out. Like for example the Olympics took place alongside the 1900 Paris World Fair and the combined events lasted five and a half months. There were sports that took place there that never took place again, while the distinctions between which events were World Fair ones and which were Olympic gets a bit confusing too.
It was the only time that cricket was an Olympic sport – Great Britain beating France by 158 runs in a two-dayer to win that one... bowling the French out for 26 in the second innings but only taking the last wicket with five minutes remaining in the match. Croquet was there too. Motor racing. Basque pelota. Tug of war. Not to mention a host of “demonstration sports” that were sorta on the borderline of Olympics/World’s Fair that include Fire Fighting, Pigeon Racing, Cannon Shooting, Kite Flying, and Fishing. Remember that if someone complains to you about rock climbing or skateboarding being in the Olympics - gotta know your history.
And there’s a great story about the 1900 Olympic marathon in which a pair of Frenchmen finished first and second. Apparently the course was poorly marked and guys kept getting lost, not to mention that there were cars and bikes and pedestrians and horses getting in the way of runners. There was an American bloke who finished fifth but contested the result saying that nobody had passed him along the way, so how could he be all the way back in fifth? Another American reckoned he was catching up with the leaders when he got bowled over by a cyclist. It was even claimed that the two French blokes on the podium had cheated by taking a shortcut... as evidenced by them being covered in mud whereas no other athlete had a speck on them. Also it later turned out that the French winner was actually from Luxembourg but La Marseille still rang out loud from a military band at the finish line as he crossed it.
Tell ya what, one day I’m gonna write a book about all these old sporting yarns. Publishers: make me an offer. It’s a guaranteed best seller.