Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

in his eventual election as the Western Australian ‘Sportsman of the Year’ for 1976 (the first of three times he would win the award in the decade ahead). But a more important one was his much greater reputation in hockey. In 1976 his hockey commitment took him to Montreal for his second Olympic Games. * * * * * In Montreal hockey was played for the first time on an artificial surface that soon became standard in elite competition throughout the world. Far more controversial than this innovation was the last-minute boycott of the Games by Kenya in protest against the presence of New Zealand, following a rugby union tour by that country to South Africa, now very much the target of anti-apartheid campaigners around the world. After losing to the Netherlands and Argentina in a competition reduced to eleven teams, Australia survived the preliminary round only when penalty strokes decided a drawn play-off with India in a group in which the Netherlands had won every match. But a 2-1 victory over Pakistan took it into the final against New Zealand, a surprise victor over the Netherlands. Even more surprising to the Australians was New Zealand’s one-nil victory in the final. It was especially painful for Ric to acknowledge years later that ‘we underestimated New Zealand when it really counted’ because this was at least partly a criticism of Merv Adams, the national coach, one of Perth’s Anglo-Indians who had contributed enormously to Western Australian ascendancy in national hockey and been a major influence on the youthful Charlesworth: ‘For me and many like me in Western Australia in the 1960s and 1970s he was the heartbeat behind the game.’ If Australian hearts were breaking rather than beating, as they were always inclined to do in the aftermath of sporting defeats by their trans-Tasman neighbour, the realisation that the hockey silver was the best of only five medals won at the Games was seen as a national humiliation that eventually contributed to one of two revolutions in Australian sport. Before the lessons of Montreal provided a rationale for unprecedented government largesse, the private sector had also intervened to transform cricket, alienating a host of traditionalists in both hemispheres. Ric Charlesworth was not an initiator of either revolution but a close-quarters 32 1970-1976