A good friend sent me a link to a story last night about Chis Cairns, the New Zealander cricketer, being on life support in hospital in Canberra.
That man could play cricket. His dad, Lance, was legendary when I was a boy, in a strangely unique New Zealand kind of way. He played as if he had never been coached, bowled off the wrong foot and hit the ball so hard his scorecard was almost always made up of sixes and dot balls.
New Zealand cricketers didn't swagger back in Lance's day. They toiled and ground out results. That's not to say that they didn't have success, they even managed to beat the unbeatable West Indians in a test series in 1981. The West Indians were so gobsmacked they walked off the pitch in protest in one of the tests and charged into the umpire in another.
Richard Hadlee was coming into his pomp then but he had a different kind of swagger, very measured and understated even though he was probably vying with Dennis Lillee for the title of the best bowler in the world for a lot of the '80's.
Chris Cairns was a natural at the game, and unlike his dad his bowling and batting were perfect, he could have been used as a coaching manual.
And he had swagger. He was part of a generation that for the first time seemed to go into games expecting to win, even if they were playing Australia, India, or the English.
I was in New Zealand visiting my parents in 1999 when the cricketers were readying for a tour of England. Ever since Hadlee and Martin Crowe had retired the New Zealand public had defaulted back to imagining their test cricketers would put up a good fight but come home empty handed.
I was spending an afternoon wandering around a little town named Thames and walked past the betting agency, the TAB. In the window was a big promotional poster with odds for the coming test series. England to win the four test series were unbackable, something like $1.25. England to win the series four-nil was about two to one. I thought that was pretty dismissive of the kiwis considering the weather usually wins at least one test in an English series.
I looked at the names listed below, for most runs or wickets in the series. Reading down the names I thought to myself 'why the heck are the English favourites?' New Zealand had Nash and Fleming, MacMillan and Doull. England had no superstars that year.
And New Zealand had Cairns. I could see him walking past a TAB somewhere, seeing those odds and thinking, I''ll show you who should be $1.25 favourite.
I was visiting from Australia and I only had some pocket money my mum had shoved into my hand when I set out from their home for the day, she would have said something like 'you'll need some lunch, and a coffee.'
I didn't know how to mark the tickets so I asked the man behind the perspex screens, it was too early for the horse racing to have started and there were only a couple of old boys in there, checking the form for Ruakaka and the Cambridge trots.
He asked what bets I wanted to put on. I looked at the notes in my hand and had about $20. I asked if he could give me $10 for New Zealand to win the series two tests to one, and $10 for them to win the series 3-1. He said something like 'let's hope they do', looking at me thinking there's $20 you'll never get back.
The first test went to script, New Zealand collapsed in their second innings and England knocked off the required runs easily.
New Zealand won the second and fourth tests. They should have won the third but that was the one the weather came out on top in.
I left the tickets with mum and forgot about them. As the team was flying back into Auckland mum would have taken the tickets out of the envelope she put them into neatly, tucked away in the roll top desk for safe keeping. And when she and dad went shopping next she would have gone into the TAB, and politely asked the man behind the perspex to check if they were winners.
She sent me what she would have described as a 'wee note' soon after, with $160 in crisp $20 bills hidden neatly between the sheets of folded writing paper. They would have been the exact notes the man counted out for her that day.
I thought of Chris Cairns then. He had swagger. He would have said something like 'well, that was money for jam'.
