At a time when lucrative publishing contracts seem
standard issue for all new members of the Australian
cricket team, you would think a biography of the
world’s greatest player in a sport would attract
serious attention.
You would be right – unless you were thinking about
women’s hockey, and Alyson Annan.
Some would say cricket is one of the most popular
games, to play and to watch, in this country while
hockey is played by fewer people and is less
watchable. Perhaps, but let’s remember how few
countries play Test cricket.
The Australian cricket team has been remarkably
successful in the past decade, but so have the
Hockeyroos, who won Olympic gold in 1988 (Seoul), 1996
(Atlanta) and 2000 (Sydney), the World Cup in 1994 and
1998 and the Champions Trophy in 1993, 1995 1997 and
1999.
Annan was the International Hockey Federation’s player
of the year in 1998 and 2000, and has been a finalist
in the world sportswoman of the year run by the
Women’s Sports Foundation.
Teammates and opponents say she does things on a
hockey field they have never seen from any other
player.
Her story has been told recently in Beyond the Limits
(Simon and Schuster, 270 pages, $29.95) by Nicole
Jeffery, an award-winning sports journalist for The
Australian who covered the past three Olympic Games.
Despite Annan’s achievements and Jeffery’s pedigree,
you are reading the first review of Beyond the Limits
in an Australian newspaper.
Women’s sport, it seems, still does not rate as highly
as men’s sport. Or, it doesn’t without a sex scandal.
After the Sydney Olympics, Channel Nine’s Sixty
Minutes program ignored the world-beating Hockeyroos
until they got wind of a story that Annan had left her
husband for a woman (Carole Thate, captain of the
Dutch hockey team).
The American journalist Janet Malcolm has written:
“The narratives of journalism, like those of mythology
and folklore, derive their power from their firm,
undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella
must remain good and the stepsisters bad. ‘Second
stepsister not so bad after all,’ is not a good
story.”
A gay woman hockey player clicks into the Lego set
story kit produced by Sixty Minutes. A group of
supremely talented, fit women whose ferocity and
obsession with their hockey thoroughly unnerved
opponents (according to Carole Thate as reported by
Jeffery) is not a good story.
Here’s an even less good story: there is an argument,
supported by statistics compiled by Australia’s doyen
of Olympic historians, Harry Gordon, that Australia
women have consistently and substantially outperformed
Australian men at the Olympics.
The men’s hockey team, while often highly rated, has
not won Olympic gold.
Imagine that: a nation of sports-mad macho blokes
outdone by a bunch of sheilas.
Jeffery’s biography covers Annan’s sexuality but not
pruriently or exhaustively. She is more interested in
how Annan became the player she is (she is still
playing, in the Dutch national league) and in her
tempestuous relationship with her perfectionist coach,
Ric Charlesworth.
Charlesworth had been a four-time hockey Olympian and
saw in Annan a player so sublimely gifted she had
never had to work hard and who might never work hard
enough to fulfil her potential.
He rode her relentlessly, constantly questioning her
fitness and her work ethic. The evidence Jeffery
presents suggests early on that Annan was not a hard
trainer even though she thought she was.
But when she did become one, and paid attention to
every detail of her preparation, he still hectored
her. After the gold medal play-off game against South
Korea in Atlanta, at which Annan became the first
female player to score two goals in an Olympic final,
Charlesworth said to her: “Not your best tournament,
Al. Imagine how good you can be in 2000.” Whatever
accolades came her way, he would say she still had
plenty of room to improve.
In a preface, Annan aptly describes Charlesworth as
her mentor and tormentor. “I hated you at times –
actually, more often than not. You set such high
standards for me every day that sometimes they seemed
impossible to reach. But if you hadn’t set the bar so
high, I would never have been able to contribute to
the team as much as I did.”
Jeffery describes how after the gold medal ceremony at
the Sydney Games, Annan presented her bouquet to
Charlesworth, saying: “I don’t know if you remember,
but I gave you my flowers in Atlanta and I want to
give you these.” He replied: “I remember. I have them
pressed in a book.”
It is a lovely moment, and Jeffery’s book is at its
best, I think, when offering moments like these, and
small telling details, such as how before each game in
the 2000 Olympic tournament Lisa Carruthers plaited
Juliet Haslem’s hair.
A similar well of moments bubbles up throughout Game
Face: What does a Female Athlete Look Like? by Jane
Gottesman (Random House, 223 pages, $45.00). The cover
carries the famous shot of American soccer player
Brandi Chastain tearing off her shirt and sinking to
her knees in triumph at the 1999 World Cup.
Game Face is a pictorial celebration of the full range
of women’s experiences of sport, whether the grace of
sprinters such as Wilma Rudolph, the power of
heavyweight weightlifters such as Cheryl Haworth, the
blank intensity on the face of runner Gwen Torrence at
the starting blocks, or the brutality of a right cross
landing flush on the cheek of a woman boxer.
The book includes not just elite athletes but elderly
women putting the shot and young girls swatting
baseballs or, in one memorable shot, hanging on for
dear life in a sheep rodeo.
It also contains a valuable list of milestones in the
long march for sportswomen’s acceptance. It is not
surprising women were cautioned against undue exercise
150 years ago but it is disturbing to read that as
recently as 1997 an American university football coach
cut a female placekicker from his team with the
suggestion she stick to beauty pageants.
America being America, the placekicker sued and won
$2.84 million in punitive damages.
Note: This old article was brought to the attentin of s2h by Manish Kumar.