Heath Davis: A hidden treasure
Documentary brings back rich memories, PLUS: Irrelevant Comm Games and criticism of NZR goes too far (wait... what?!)
The Spinoff yesterday released their latest episode of Scratched, the brilliant web series highlighting lost sporting legends of Aotearoa.
The subject was Heath Davis, the mercurial fast bowler who made scattered appearances for the Black Caps during the dark cricketing days of the 1990s.
It was funny, poignant and revelatory.
Most of all the film - and Madeleine Chapman’s complementary feature - provided that sought-after combination of earthy storytelling that somehow soars.
It also resonated with me in a way that I tried to put into words.
Heath played a big part in my formative years, though he would not have known that. With permission from, and thanks to, The Spinoff, I republish my essay in full (this version might differ slightly as it is unedited).
THE MYTH & THE MAN
What I’m about to tell you is mostly true: when Heath Te-Ihi-O-Te-Rangi Davis was 14 years old he was eight-foot tall, had nostrils that flared like a Gorgon’s and could bowl at 150km/h.
If you don’t believe me it’s because you weren’t there cowering under the shade trees of Whanganui’s Victoria Park waiting for your turn to walk the green mile to the middle and face his peculiar brand of chin music.
Heath Davis. Just the mere mention of the name conjures up rich and visceral memories.
He haunted my teenage years. We were the same age or thereabouts. I had the good fortune to be handy enough to make age-group rep teams that regularly played his Hutt Valley and Wellington sides; I had the misfortune to not be good enough to deal well with it.
When you get to our age you think you remember more than you do about those snatches of youth. The broad outlines might remain intact but the colouring-in changes to suit the story you’re telling. I remember every game my teams played against Heath Davis - the outlines and the colouring-in. Even if he remains a somewhat mythical figure, those matches were very real.
The first was a winner-takes-all game between Western Districts and Hutt Valley for the North Island under-15 title.
That in itself was a minor miracle. We were two of the historically weaker teams, but that year we were coached by a technical genius named Phil Cooper (who had all the charm of an eftpos machine), and captained by the hyper-competitive, flame-haired allrounder David Lamason. Hutt Valley were usually the worst, but with Heath they had a puncher’s chance.
Auckland usually won these tourneys, with their brand new Gunn and Moore gear and parents who turned up in European cars, but although they boasted future Black Caps in Adam Parore and Blair Pocock, and possibly Mark Richardson too, they were savaged by Davis who reduced some to quivering, crying wrecks.
I was watching on an adjacent pitch, spellbound by the carnage and staggered by how far back Hutt’s yappy wicketkeeper, future All Black Simon Mannix, was standing.
Then the last day dawned and it was unbeaten us (our game against Auckland was rained off, though we were on top), against undefeated them.
Cooper roused us early to go down to the nets. He had Wingnut Carroll, a Hawke Cup opening bowler and legendary local character, come in and bounce the poop out of the batters to prepare us for Heath. I knew I was not going to feature in the playing XI when I didn’t get asked to face up to Wingnut, and to be honest I was relaxed about that - I’d had a lousy tournament, a habit I never really broke.
We won easily. We were lucky. It was the last day of a full-on week of cricket and Heath was spent, though legend has it that he perked up enough at the prizegiving to do some strange interpretative stuff with sausage rolls, or maybe it was the chipolatas - my memory is a bit fuzzy on that one.
On and off-field stories about Heath became a cottage industry of their own. Everyone has a favourite. Like the time he bounced a kid called Rick McIntyre in an under-16 game and it cleared everyone for six byes. It was a short boundary, but even so!
Or the time at under-18s when he broke the box of the talented Mark Lithgow twice in two innings, each time leaving him in the foetal position for 10 minutes while all around him winced or laughed.
Or the time when Lamason bowled so many bouncers at him that Heath came off at the innings break and wrote his name on his forehead in zinc, except he ran out of room for a single-deck headline so it was instead
LAMA
SON
Or it would have been except he’d done it while looking in a mirror so he actually took to the field with
AMAL
NOS
painted on his forehead.
By the time he got to under-20 level Davis was still big and scary-fast but we’d all grown up too. At Central Districts we had our own bully, Johnny Furlong. We met in a three-day match at nationals, again at Whanganui, and they bowled like the wind. On a lively wicket with good pace we skittled Wellington for less than 200 in the first innings and found ourselves 17-5 before scraping a small lead.
I faced one ball from Heath that day and it smashed into my ribs via my glove. It ballooned in the direction of fine leg and I scurried to the other end to check for broken bones. I’m not sure what was the graver injustice, the single being given leg byes or the atrocious LBW decision I fell to off Chris Lee, who might not have matched Heath for pure pace but he did for mania, a couple of balls later.
By the time the second innings rolled around the pitch had flattened out nicely and for the first and only time I dug in long enough to see the full range of Davis antics.
Heath would chide himself in between deliveries, constantly berating himself in an incongruously soprano voice. He’d flap his arms around, whinny like a horse (at least I think that’s what he was doing), bowl a steady stream of no-balls and, just when you thought he was done, rip one over your shoulder from around the wicket to remind you he retained lethal power.
I had the best seat in the house, especially, it should be said, at the non-striker’s end.
Some of us that played that game have remained in touch.
Even back then we all knew he was “different” - a catch-all term used by young males to describe any other young male whose life didn’t revolve around the twin pursuits of getting steamed and pulling chicks. It would be wrong to say cricket was an enlightened environment but (apart from Canterbury, perhaps, where the conservative streak ran strong) being different was tolerated if not necessarily celebrated.
I asked for memories or anecdotes about Heath.
Our keeper, Glenn, ended up playing with him in club cricket in Wellington and remembered days when Heath would bowl until his feet bled.
Tarz, who ended up playing some first-class cricket with Heath, said “he was a real good dude and when you sat down and talked cricket with him he knew his stuff, but it was clear he didn’t have a whole lot of love for or trust in the New Zealand set-up of that era”.
Even Amal Nos, his nemesis, remembers him warmly: “I watched him bowl one spell in a first-class game and couldn’t believe it. Real pace. I was 12th man, so was very relaxed.”
Then, of course, we swapped the story about him playing while tripping on acid, a hyper-niche category of sports history that has already been the subject of a brilliant baseball documentary.
I played a tiny, unremembered part in Heath’s back story; the role he played in mine was much bigger. For me he really was a larger than life character.
I hope he reads this if only to realise there’s a bunch of us that still talk about him and remember him fondly. We might have played better cricketers - though don’t get me wrong, Heath was a hell of a bowler - but few that have left such an impression.
It’d make me happy for Heath to know that when he was 22 yards away, about to unleash another ball in your general direction, for a split-second you truly knew what it meant to feel alive.
On the subject of The Spinoff’s scoop, it was disappointing to see so many outlets pick up the piece and run matchers (essentially copying the story) and not link through to the original or even the documentary. Just saying where it originated from is not enough, especially when you’re piggybacking off the work of much smaller “newsrooms”.
David Farrier has written about this phenomenon on his Substack newsletter Webworm, also pointing out why it matters.
The Detail this week asked whether the Commonwealth Games were still relevant?
My short answer to this would be: “No, and that’s why they’re such fun.”
Otago Daily Times sports editor Hayden Meikle and veteran journo Phil Gifford, quoted below, give far more considered answers.
“Of course they’re weird. It's kind of like saying, ‘Let’s have a big sporting event where only countries whose name ends in the letter A are allowed to compete; it’s as random as that.”
They are random and in keeping with that sense I’ve taken a very scattergun approach to watching them, basically just playing Russian roulette with the remote and hoping I land on something watchable.
So far the track cycling, with the brilliant Ellesse Andrews and Aaron Gate leading the way, wins by a country mile.
It is approaching crunch time in the netball, hockey and cricket tournaments, and running races are always good value, so I will start to take a more scientific viewing approach shortly.
Williams, whose Wikipedia page informs me is famous mostly for being the least successful coach in Scotland history, is a columnist for the Irish Times and he writes that Super Rugby and southern hemisphere rugby in general is terrible and it’s all NZR’s fault.
Frequent readers of The Bounce will know my natural inclination is not to defend the national body, but misinformation dressed up as serious analysis bothers me.
Here Williams repeats a lazy narrative.
The reaction to defeat by the New Zealand media and their wider rugby community has exposed a deep flaw of character. The treatment of Foster by his own community has been nothing short of shameful. As a coach criticism comes with the badge but the personal vilification he has had to endure is simply not acceptable.
Williams provides not one example of personal vilification. I can’t claim to have read every story about the All Blacks but it is clear many pundits feel Foster is ill-equipped to lead the All Blacks. The questioning of somebody’s coaching ability is a harsh reality of professional sport, it is not personal vilification.
While he is right that Super Rugby has been a shambolic mess, it is an extraordinarily narrow and Austral-centric view to blame that all on NZR, who have maintained the same five franchises since inception.
After trampling all over Super Rugby, then alienating every national union in the south and possibly forcing the Springboks north, is it any wonder New Zealand Rugby and its team find themselves isolated and boxed into a corner created by their own self-serving actions?
South Africa has been threatening to move their operations north since very early in the Sanzaar partnership and you’d be closer to the truth to suggest their internal political needs, which saw the ill-fated addition of teams, ruined the early success of Super Rugby.
While Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest, who Williams cites as a benevolent force, might well want to bankroll Rugby Australia now, he will also do well to remember it was the ARU, not Sanzaar, who binned his Western Force.
This defending of NZR feels eerie and it is true that their negotiation tactics over the past few years have been damned across the board as conceited, but compared to the administrations of South Africa and Australia, they’ve been a model of stability.
The BYC returns after a short hiatus next week.
Looking at that photo, couple of handy players there - is that
Rick Francis - of Feilding High School rugby as your manager? And Si Mannix, yeah he was never short of a word either, problem was he could usually back it up - grrr! Geoff Baker was a better keeper though in my opinion, he went on to play first class for Wellington (might have been a year older) while Simon pursued the St Pats Stream, Petone, Wellington, NZ rugby pathway - would not have picked that playing him at pre-secondary school level. A few sporting gems came out of the Hutt Valley in the 80’s.
A Hutt (and HVHS) legend, be a few of us @ 50 who still have memories of trying to handle his speed (and avoid the spit!) in the late 80’s - not many helmets in those days Dylan!