RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30560, 1 October 1964, Page 30

RANDOM REMINDER

RESURRECTIONS

It is to be hoped the recent announcement that a New Zealand athlete of 1908 has been rediscovered—he walked for Australasia and apparently simply slipped from all the records—does not lead to the same sort of embarrassments which inevitably follow a published claim that someone has grown a brussel sprout measuring 14 inches from wingtip to wingtip. Newspapers these days are wary of printing pictures of a potato which look like a sealion or a tomato with the circumference of a Pickwick. For no sooner do they appear than someone turns up with a potato which looks like Mr Gladstone and a tomato like a meteoro

logical balloon. There have been times when newspapers have been deluged, after some such item has appeared, with hundredweights of decaying vegetable matter. Of course the reporters, whose frayed cuffs and frail physiques underline the well known fact that they have never been adequately paid, have been grateful for the food, and so have their little ones, reclining palely on their simple paliasses. So one can but hope that Mr A. E. M. Rowland, who walked for Australasia in 1908, does not set off a similar chain reaction. Sports writers, notoriously weak on matters of fact, would have the utmost difficulty tn sorting out all the

Olivers for the Rowlands. They could well be besieged by hordes of hesvUy-buUt gentlemen insisting that their fathers played for the 1905 AU Blacks but had their names dropped inadvertantly from the record books. They would be followed, perhaps by waves of Welsh, the Lord bless and keep them, all of whom had their forefathers holding some official office at Cardiff Arms and able to testify that -Deans had in fact dropped the ball 25 yards short of the line. Oh no. Mr Rowlands may now have his special place in the annals of New Zealand sport. May he keep it, and not be required to shove over, mate.