BOXING: Legend still excites

30th March 2006

HAMISH BIDWELL

Roger Arrowsmith is typical of a lot of New Zealand men in their fifties or sixties.

Brought up in an age when there was very little to occupy a young person's time other than sport, top sportsmen were true heroes, larger than life characters whose feats captivated a nation.

All Blacks such as Don Clarke and Ron Jarden and cricketers John Reid and Bert Sutcliffe were genuinely adored by the public.

But for Arrowsmith, and thousands of others, there was one sportsman whose deeds in the 1950s outshone all others - Dannevirke boxer Barry "Bomber" Brown. The New Zealand Sportsman of the Year in 1953, Brown produced a performance the following year that Arrowsmith still regards as the most thrilling thing he has seen.

So when he learned that Brown was to be posthumously inducted into the Sport Hawke's Bay Unison Hall of Fame, Arrowsmith rushed into Hawke's Bay Today brandishing his most prized possession - a faded newspaper picture of Brown knocking out South African Gerald Dreyer to win the British Empire welterweight title at the Basin Reserve in 1954.

Brown had worked for Arrowsmith's father at his sawmill in Weber and still gets a chill up the spine every time he thinks of his hero being awarded the championship belt on that balmy January night.

Barry Brown jnr has lost count of the times he's heard stories like that from people who recognise his name and want to know whether his father was indeed the famous boxer. He never tires of them, yet at the same time they're almost stories about a man he never knew.

"It's quite amazing, really, because Dad had well and truly retired by the time we came along. He was just our father and working for a living like everybody else," Brown jnr said from Auckland yesterday.

"So it was always kind of funny to hear all these sorts of stories later on, because there was never any talk of boxing at home when we were growing up. So to be coming down to Hawke's Bay 50 years after Dad's boxing career to see him honoured at the Sportsman of the Year dinner really is something.

"And it's nice that boxing is being recognised, too, because in its heyday it really was a big sport in this country. It's a shame that it tends to be regarded as a bit of a three-ringed circus these days, because of all the rubbish that's gone on in the last 10 years."

This will be Barry jnr's second trip to the awards after accompanying his father down from Auckland several years ago, when businessman and former boxing promoter Bob Jones demanded that Brown snr be invited or he would decline a request to be guest speaker.

As this is likely to be the last time, he said the family is making a special effort to be there, with Barry jnr driving down from Auckland with his mother, Julie, and brother Ron flying over from Sydney.

"Mum's still got a lot of family in Waipawa and Waipukurau and we're going to make a real weekend of it," he said.

"And I know it means a lot to her, and would mean a lot to Dad, that it's the Hawke's Bay Hall of Fame that is honouring him. The family has been in Auckland a long time now but it wouldn't mean as much if he was honoured up there.

"Hawke's Bay occupies a special place in their heart and they had some of their happiest days there, so it really means a lot to us all and we thought we should show that by making sure we were all there."