By David

I own three guns. I have an old Diana .22. I have a much more powerful ex-army .303 and a pretty basic single barrel shot gun.

The most used and reliable is my .22. My Mum bought it for me in the late 1950s from the Ohakune Dairy Company. I notched the stock to record each animal I killed. I can’t remember the total number of cuts but I do remember passing 1000 sometime around my seventeenth birthday. The primary victims were the region’s wild goats. My domestic chore was to shoot two goats each weekend to feed our dogs.

Strangely my crowning memory of this rifle did not involve killing things. We had just finished Sunday lunch. My mother always cooked a leg of lamb on Sunday and served it with mint sauce, roast potatoes and best of all green peas from our garden. After lunch my father wandered off with his fly rod to spend the afternoon fishing for trout in the Hangaroa River. He seldom caught anything but enjoyed the solitude. An hour or so later I set out to find and shoot two unfortunate goats. As I wandered along, I felt the call of nature and started to pee over a cliff down into the Hangaroa River. Below me I heard a scream, “What the hell are you doing?” I believe the question was rhetorical. You are not going to believe this, but in 25 miles of river bank I chose to pee in exactly the spot occupied by my father. It took me weeks to convince him my aim had not been deliberate.

The .303 is not as well used but did assist in the killing of 30 or 40 deer and about the same number of wild pigs. There could have been many more pigs but knifing them to death was considered a preferable method. It did less damage to the meat and better bled the animal. Occasionally I shot goats with the .303. My Dad did not approve of the .303’s excessive fire power being used on these small animals. I think the more expensive bullets were his main concern.

For years my father would not allow me to use the .303’s magazine. He believed that by having to hand feed each bullet into the gun I would waste less ammunition. Looking back on it, he was probably right. For a short time, after I was allowed a magazine, it was like world war three out there. I did once score a moral victory over my father’s frugal views on ammunition. I shot a goat and walked over to the carcass to find two dead goats lying side by side. My bullet had passed through the neck of one goat and into the chest of another. I still remember shooting my first deer with that gun. A mate of mine, Kahui Duncan, and I fired at about the same time. The deer dropped but we only found one bullet hole. Kahui swears it was his; I know it was mine.

The shot gun is virtually unused. I found sitting for hours, waiting to shoot a duck, pheasant or turkey, boring beyond belief. Besides the hopelessly unsophisticated skill involved in pointing a gun like this in the general direction of a fleeing duck and blasting it out of the sky never appealed to me. The fact the current US Vice President finds it an attractive sport explains a lot about his behavior in Iraq.

When the use of guns has been so much a part of ones early life the thought of using them for anything illicit is abhorrent. A reliable friend of mine told me a story of a swim coach in the Caribbean who got on the wrong side of the island’s drug underworld. Two enforcers turned up at afternoon practice and sat tapping their palms with loaded hand guns. Guns at practice, every mothers dream. I bet no one skipped lengths that day. It is interesting to compare gun statistics between New Zealand and the United States. Internationally New Zealand has a high level of gun ownership. Twenty percent of Kiwi households own a gun; a figure that is beaten out of sight by the forty-one percent of armed US households. There are 0.22 homicide gun deaths per 100,000 people in New Zealand, compared to 6.24 shooting deaths in the United States; 2500% more, not a good figure.

Any of my Florida swim team reading this, need not be concerned. The coach’s arsenal is safely locked away in his mother’s home, 8000 miles away in New Zealand. Happily, there doesn’t seem to be any use for guns in Delray Beach, Florida.

By David

If you type “Toni Jeffs, New Zealand” into Google and go to the eighth item on page two you will find an article written by Joseph Romanos. It was published when Romanos worked for the New Zealand Listener; a magazine that was all the better for his presence. However the magazine’s new editor, a woman called Pamela Stirling, fired Romanos and replaced him with someone called Paul Lewis, whose writing is at best sporting froth compared to the substance provided by Romanos. I taught Stirling’s son to swim and understand that her knowledge of things sporting is pretty limited; a view confirmed by her selection of Lewis ahead of the erudite Romanos.

In this particular article Romanos discusses the fate of athletes who have missed selection for Olympic Games’ teams. In particular he highlights the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, the New Zealand freestyler Toni Jeffs and the American hurdler Harrison Dillard. While it may be necessary for the USA to have strict selection criteria, Romanos argues that New Zealand and Australia need to be more flexible. In his last paragraph he says, “New Zealand and Australia aren’t the US. Competitors good enough for the Olympics should be selected. Poor rules should not exclude them.”

I agree with the Romanos’ view. A number of fine New Zealand Olympic results have been achieved by athletes who were “not-good-enough” to be on the team. Norman Reid who won the 50km walk in 1956 and Peter Snell who won the track 800m in 1960 could both be said to be in that category.

Whether Jeffs could have been another we will never know. I see her swimming career has come to an end. The Dominion Post reports that “Mr Garlick, 54, and his partner Toni Jeffs, 38, a former Kiwi representative swimmer, have a four-week-old son … Toni has finished swimming and we haven’t got a lot of ties here now.”

I was responsible for Jeffs’ coaching from 1989 to 1995. In that time she competed in the Barcelona Olympic Games, she won bronze medals at the Pan Pacific Games and the World Cup finals (today called the World Short Course Championships), she was fourth and sixth in two Commonwealth Games and second in the first Oceania Swimming Championships. Since then she has been third in two Commonwealth Games and has missed selection for the Atlanta, Sydney and Athens Olympic Games.

Prior to 1995 Jeffs career owed much to generous patrons, Arthur Lydiard and Brian LeGros. Track coaching legend, Arthur Lydiard, contributed the training principles I used to guide Jeffs’ training. White House strip club owner and gentleman, Brian LeGros, provided a bucket-full of money.

Lydiard invested hours of his time working on the conversion of his track training to swimming and in particular sprint swimming. Appropriate aerobic, anaerobic and speed training were carefully calculated, tested and confirmed. Every week, almost every day, for three years, at an average cost of around $400 a month we discussed Jeffs training. Lydiard later recorded our association in his biography, “Arthur Lydiard, Master Coach”. Get yourself a copy, it’s an interesting read. Mistakes were made and were always acknowledged. I have no doubt that the longevity and successes of Jeffs’ career owe much to the meticulous conditioning inspired and guided by the world’s authority on that subject.

LeGros’ money was hard earned and was a financial life-line. I recorded the following appreciation of his willing support in my first book, “Swim to the Top”.

“Brian has financed Toni, Nichola Chellingworth and me with considerable money and has asked for nothing in return. His business might not be to everyone’s liking but his compassion and care for me and my swimmers has been unstinting and often unheralded; as has his financing of Disneyland visits for terminally-ill children, his provision of free accommodation for mothers and children stranded during an inter-island ferry strike and his weekly visits to Porirua Hospital with sweets and cigarettes for a mentally-disturbed young man. He could show his detractors the true meaning of charity. A fine and generouos man. I count myself lucky to have been his friend.”

The contribution of these two men may not be well understood. The fact one was primarily a track coach and the other worked in a “leper” industry may have contributed to their exclusion. Perhaps and hopefully this article will partially redress any inequity and provide some deserved and overdue recognition.