Loping the Chch hills with Willie Nelson

Press, 11 February 1981, Page 3

Loping the Chch hills with Willie Nelson

By STAN DARLING Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be joggers . . . Willie Nelson came up over the brow of the Port Hills yesterday and got a good, * far-off look at the piace .where he. would be singing last eve ing. He ran up there at an easy pace — they would probably call it loping in Austin. Texas — with a few Christchurch runners, rhe

kind who talk about running r straight uphill being good as 1 a sharpener, -and a way to tone up the muscles. , Nelson looked as if he t ! could stay with them even if J they tried to burn him into J rhe dust. They didn’t. < He took the front a few ''times, and climbing single ,'file at rhe back of Sugar I ■ Loaf, through the bush, he : resembled a frontier scout , j with his red bandanna and pigtails waving. The singer was wearing a I black T-shirt from the Muhammad Ali Training Camp at Deer Lake, Pennyslvama. asked jfjhe had: eyer. been in the' ring with Ali. He hadn’t, but he said-Kris Kristofferson had trained, with the former heavyweight, [champion before the recent Holmes fight. [ That might- have been, i-Alt’s problem. Nelson Suggested with a laugh. He was asked if any other members of his family ran. “They’ve took a run at it,” he said, “but I’m the onlyone that’s kept it up.” ■ There was- no danger he would get too winded to put on a good concert. Runningset him up just right, 'tired him out so he could go on relaxed. Eric Hunter. Don Cameron, John Drew, and Rod Rutherford took him up the scenic tracks, pointing out the sights. Drew told them to wait up for a while so that he could give a geography lecture as they looked down into Lyttelton Harbour from above the Sign of the Kiwi. Drew said he and Camieron had been up there with the first Maoris. The others

;i assured Nelson that Drew (just looked that old. H They told him it might ‘turn southerly after the hol ; nor’wester, and the concert■j goers might see more stars 'at Queen Elizabeth II Park than the ones onstage. ‘•You see one star, you’ve iseen ’em all.’’ Nelson said. They came almost face-to- : face ’ with some woolly ■ natives, and Nelson heard ' the usual tourist stuff about the ratio of sheep to I humans. Those up ahead were the i wild sort, he was told. .‘■No morals at all, huh he said. .... . . ' Nelson. , has 1 just finished another movie, not ’yet released, and still has. one, ‘‘Honeysuckle Rose," to come to New Zealand. He hadn’t thought about • being typecast. In one movie, he was a band leader, and in the latest, he played an old outlaw. Come to think of it, he said, .there wasn’t much difference. 1 Coming down the other i side of the crest, they told .Nelson he was running : through country where the •'Victoria Park murder had i taken place years ago. He was told the sordid ■ tale, and it was suggested 1 that he might write a song j about it. I “That’ll give me . somei thing to think about,” Neilson said. I But he seemed to be hapj pier thinking about the view ■ spread about in front of ; him, popping blackcurrants i into his mouth from a passHng bush and smiling .at a ■ picnic group of elderly I women sitting in the shade i of trees.