At Swimming, League Can Take On All-Comers

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30289, 15 November 1963, Page 17

At Swimming, League Can Take On All-Comers

Arguments on the relative merits of sports will never be settled but Rugby League will always be able to claim that when it came to a contest on common ground its representatives were decidedly superior. In a unique encounter at the Wharenui Coronation Pool, teams of four representing League, Rugby, women’s basketball, men's hockey, cricket and soccer matched their skills at swimming—and League's quartet proved the best by a good 10 yards.

The gathering resembled a who's who of Canterbury and New Zealand sport. Rugby's team included R. H. Duff and P. B. Vincent, both All Black captains; cricket had four of the Dominion’s best postwar players in A. R. MacGibbon, S. C. Guillen, G. T. Dowling and P. G. Z. Harris: League was led by M. L. Cooke, the New Zealand captain and world class loose forward, and hockey had four notable internationals in J. C. Abrams, I. D. Armstrong, E. Barnes and R. Gillespie. The women's basketball side included three members of the highly successful Dominion side at this year’s international tournament in England: J. Martin, -P. Edmonds and J. Blair. Soccer was represented by D. Chapman, I. Graham, J. Campbell, and A. Cameron.

There was high-spirited byplay at the start. Cooke broke by a good second, taking Guillen and Miss Martin with him. Guillen was last out, declared the water to be hot and fell in again. Duff, who cut as majestic a figure in bathing trunks as he did in All Black uniform, gave Rugby a first length lead from soccer (Chapman) and League (Cooke), with Guillen languishing at the rear. But Vincent was unable to hold off W. Godfrey (League) and Abrams, both

swimmers of note, and Graham, a prominent surfer, maintained the soccer team’s good position.

League continued to prosper on the third leg through the powerful strokes of G. Cooper and the lead he gave his team-mate, J. Fisher, once one of the country's best young sprinters, put the issue beyond doubt. Soccer and hockey, who had somehow contrived to change lanes during the race, were second and third respectively, followed home by Rugby, cricket and basketball. If this was the most entertaining event in a programme of off-beat relay races, the others were little Inferior in appeal. An inter - island jockeys’ race, in which four of the Skelton brothers participated. was won by North in spite of E. Skelton, South's anchor man, cribbing five yards Then a Police team gave the jockeys eight seconds start and beat them over four lengths. But the jockeys came into their own when they jumped on the broad backs of the policemen and rode them down the pool in a burlesque climax to the evening. The feature events were interspersed by parent-child relays—in which the former national men's 100 yards freestyle champion, R. Hatchwell, and his daughter, Susan, formed a happy combination —a mass dive by young swimmers to retrieve more than 200 pennies thrown into the pool, and a demonstration of breaatstroke by Alison Mitchell, the Wharenui club swimmer selected for two weeks’ specialist coaching in Auckland on the proceeds of the carnival.

This project was considered such a worthy one that several members of the large crowd proffered more than the admission fee at the door.