By Phil Jarratt
OKAY, I promise this will be the last one from Sri Lanka – at least for this time around. But coming home as the cricket season kicks off with a Test series, I guess this is slightly relevant.
Having been a cricket tragic since about the age of 10, watching a game in the Caribbean and the sub-continent from the excitement of the music-filled bleachers is high on my bucket list, so I first planned to coincide our Sri Lanka trip with the Australian tour last August.
Work got in the way of that, so when I rescheduled, I was delighted to discover (after a lot of Googling) that we would be in Colombo to catch our flight out on the Sunday of the last one-day fixture between Sri Lanka A and West Indies A. Okay, not quite us versus them at the highest level, but it would do. All I had to do was get tickets to what, in cricket-mad Sri Lanka, would surely be a sell-out.
Wherever we went on the island we saw evidence of this cricket madness – tiny tots in full whites playing with serious intent on full sized grounds, whole families joining in beach cricket of a standard you never see in Australia, tuk-tuk drivers pointing out the homes of district cricketers you never heard of as we pass by. Then in the evenings, I’d get on-line and try to buy tickets, without success.
Eventually I phoned Cricket Sri Lanka, and after being passed from pillar to post, I found someone who knew something about this international fixture. “I’m sorry sir, you cannot buy a ticket.” Bummer, sold out. But she continued: “It is free entry, just go to the ground.”
This was good news and bad news. The good was that I wouldn’t have to buy a scalper a new car. The bad was that we would probably be killed in the crush to get in.
So we rose at dawn and tuk-tukked to the International Cricket Stadium two hours before the start of play. Two policemen were guarding the entrance. They looked puzzled as to why we would want to come in, and asked to see our passports.
Finally admitted, we looked out over an entirely empty stadium. It stayed that way until five minutes before scheduled start, when half a dozen local boys ambled in. About an hour into the West Indies innings, we were joined by a mixed race family and a bunch of locals with conga drums and colourful hats. Now we were getting somewhere!
But that was it, for the entire match! Okay, the drummer boys and the chorus got a bit excited when the home team took a wicket or two, but mainly the crowd just watched in stony silence as Andre McCarthy hit a brilliant hundred off 75 balls. As much as we enjoyed the cricket, we’d come for the hoop-la too, and inexplicably, there was none. Guess we’ll have to wait for Kingstown, Jamaica.
Nat is still tops now
CAN it really be a half century since Australia’s Nat Young claimed the world title in San Diego on “Sam”, the thin-railed nine-foot-four-inch Gordon Woods board, designed over the winter in Noosa, that was the fore-runner of the shortboard revolution?
I’m catching up a bit late on this because the anniversary didn’t make the headlines in Sri Lanka, but Life of Brine’s man on the spot, Peter “PT” Townend, reports that the city of Oceanside really turned it on for the champ on a night honouring all of the big names from that momentous event in October 1966.
At the time, Californian surfing was fixated on nose-riding, and there was a huge expectation that David Nuuhiwa, unquestionably the best nose-rider in the world at that time, would make mince-meat of the Aussies and claim the crown by a country mile.
But Nat was the stand-out from the start, flipping Sam around in tight turns the others had no hope of matching, and power-stancing through soupy sections to utilise the reforms inside the mushy beach breaks on offer.
Paul Witzig’s footage of Nat’s performance still stands up today as brilliant longboard surfing, and at just 18, Nat walked away with the world title and a brand new Chevy Camarro. Nuuhiwa didn’t even make the final.
Nat and his Aussie media mates were pretty brash back in those days, and John Witzig’s breast-beating article in Surfer Magazine, “We’re Tops Now”, didn’t win them many friends. But Nat mellowed over time, becoming a revered elder statesman of our tribe, and he tried, as much as he could, to put his decades-long rift with the late Midget Farrelly to bed. When I interviewed him at his Angourie home earlier this year (before Midget’s death) for our film, Men of Wood and Foam, he was nothing but gracious about his old rival, and gave us some great insights into the world of surf stardom back in the ‘60s.
In his introductory remarks to a packed house at the Oceanside Surf Museum a couple of weeks ago, PT recalled how Nat was still setting the pace for the rest at the Quiksilver Masters World Championships at Makaha in 2003, charging 15-18-foot waves on finals day at the age of 55. Rod Brooks and I were running that event, and I’ll never forget Nat facing the media after bombing out of his semi with a huge over-the-falls wipeout.
“Hey, you’ve gotta have a go!” he gasped into the microphones. “Not bad for a bloke who just got his Senior’s Card!”
The other night in Oceanside he had them in stitches one minute, in tears the next. Nat’s still Nat, as they say, and that’s that!
