Alan Perrott talks to three Kiwis who almost made the big time, but for a stroke of fate.
Imagine watching a show like Antiques Roadshow as someone discovers their pile of junk is worth a million dollars. Then imagine knowing you'd sold it to them for a buck.
It's the kind of thing that can happen to all of us at some time, if not on the same scale. These are the occasions when you don't realise what is at stake until it is too late.
They can't be called failures, more missed opportunities.
Much like our original flying Kiwi, Richard Pearse. He tinkered away on his ridiculous flying contraption without a single care for anything happening beyond his front gate. If he had, he might have contacted a single photographer or journalist, anyone really, and his name would now be known everywhere as the inventor of powered flight. Sadly, he didn't, so he isn't.
Like Major Frank Holmes. During the 1920s, this ambitious Southlander secured concessions to all the oil in Bahrain and Kuwait in exchange for drilling a few wells. We now know he had been given first dibs on one of the biggest moneyspinners of all time, yet sadly the poor man couldn't convince anyone in England there was any oil at all. So the Americans took it.
Then there's Sandy Edmonds. After immigrating from Liverpool as a child, her look and voice added a touch of Carnaby St cool to 1960s New Zealand. Her singles attracted the interest of The Seekers - who were at the height of their popularity and auditioned Edmonds as a possible replacement for departing lead singer Judy Durham - as well as RCA, which offered her a lucrative recording contract. Then, with stardom almost assured, she disappeared.
Edmonds surfaced again about 30 years later. It seems she'd gone to India and simply forgot to return. This is the "if only" stuff of almost-legend.
Here, we speak to three others about their make or break moments.
Marise Wipani
Just think. If she had beaten Lorraine Downes in 1983, Marise Wipani could have been Miss Universe.
As it was, the runner-up was too busy fretting about the other Miss New Zealand hopefuls to consider how close she'd come to a congratulatory peck from pageant host Bob Barker.
So, what does the 46-year-old Aucklander reckon now?
"Nah, it would have been my worst nightmare. I dodged a bullet ... Seriously, it's just not my cup of tea," says Wipani.
At best, she had been an accidental contender anyway. She didn't know anything about the competition until the pageant's producer spotted the then 17-year-old in a Ponsonby photographic studio.
"Why would I want to do that?" she'd said after his invitation.
"Well," he replied, "you'll get to go to Christchurch and you'll get paid."
"I'm there," said Wipani.
And that was it. Until she looked at her wardrobe. "Mum ... what do I wear?"
She was fully frocked-up when the girls were corralled for a photo after they landed in Christchurch. She found herself posing alongside Downes and the girl who would finish third: "That was weird."
Then it was straight to work. Each day started at 7am with an aerobics class. As a late sleeper, Wipani was always last to arrive, running out in her pyjamas and clutching her track pants - before they were ferried off to various sites to shoot segments for the show.
"It was a blast and I loved Christchurch. I even ended up living there afterwards ... with one of the show's hairdressers."
As for the event, Wipani says: "I had no sense of competing and as for winning, it never really occurred to me. But for the others, for someone like Lorraine, they were professional models and this was their chance at the world stage."
Then there was the swimsuit parade. "That was really, really naff. I can remember standing there thinking 'I wish I had a dressing gown or a jersey and I'd really like to be wearing pants'. I mean it was pretty chilly up there."
It wasn't until things got serious that Wipani realised how much some of her new friends had at stake. And that made her uncomfortable.
"I could see that with some of them, this was really important, and I started feeling awful about that. Then Mariska was named in third place and I thought "yay, she's a lovely girl". I was looking around to see how everyone was handling it when I heard my name called out as runner-up. It was very hard not to swear. I used to have a video of it and I've watched myself walking forward but looking backward, thinking 'what the hell am I doing?'
"But then Lorraine won and everything was as it should have been. If I picture myself in her place on the world stage with Bob Barker and all that, well, I'm sure our judges would have wondered if they'd made a mistake. It's not that I know I could have pulled it off, but I wouldn't have won. They'd have pictured me in gumboots and black singlet. Then I'd have looked around, decided to stay, met some people and never come home."
So she ended up at home, watching a teary Downes being crowned Miss Universe in the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, Missouri. "I was crying too, and clapping, and jumping up and down ... she really deserved it, she's a class act."
Of course, that wasn't the end for Wipani. Ian Mune cast her in Came A Hot Friday, then she was off travelling and working in film, television and theatre around the world before enjoying a lengthy stint as our "Lotto Lady." She still appears in various productions while also working in a cafe.
"I wish I was rich and I wish I'd listened when people told me to save my money," says Wipani. "But I was like yeah, yeah, yeah and then didn't do anything ... It's been fun."
Bruce Hemara
It can't be easy being a great piece of sporting trivia. So it's a relief to hear that Hemara isn't someone who dwells on the past. To do so, he says, "would drive you nuts".
It also has to help that his present role with the Santboiana Rugby Club is far away on the outskirts of Barcelona.
It's a buzzing place, especially when he picks up his phone. The city's famous football club has just beaten bitter rivals Real Madrid in their Champions League semi-final and Hemara has had to close all the windows to hear me.
The 53-year-old has been living in or around Spain, on and off, since 1998. He even coached Andorra's 27 players through the 2007 World Cup qualifiers. But that's not why I'm calling.
Bruce "Bruiser" Hemara is not a former test All Black. Yes, he played a few midweek matches, was on the bench for some big ones, became a Maori All Black, and even had his name read out as part of a full All Black test XV - "the moment we all play for," he reflects, "what all the hard work had gone towards" - but fate decided he would never win a cap of his own.
The "why" goes back to the mid-80s, when Hemara was hooker and captain of the hard-nosed Manawatu provincial side. Andy Haden had cobbled together an unofficial team, the Cavaliers, to tour South Africa after the 1985 All Black tour was cancelled.
Hemara was invited to join them after hooker Andy Dalton had his jaw broken. He declined, but only because, as a government employee, he would have been forced to leave his job.
His decision looked like paying off the following year when the Cavaliers were banned from playing in the All Black test against the French.
Hemara's time had finally come - he was named in the replacement All Black squad. But he was determined to play in a friendly for Manawatu against North Harbour four days before the test.
"Look," he says, "I was captain. You know? ... So, it was right at the end of the game, the very last scrum, and I popped a bit of rib cartilage. Looking back now, I probably wouldn't play a game in the week leading up to a test, but it wasn't bad enough to stop me training."
So he said nothing and went into camp to prepare for the game.
It popped again the day before the test. "I was doing something innocuous, then bang, I couldn't breathe. It felt like I'd torn the whole thing out. The coach [Brian Lahore] said he'd give me all the time I needed to come right, but I knew it wouldn't do the team any good if I played.It was a no-brainer really, I just wanted to go home and get myself right."
Once back in Palmerston North, he skipped the test altogether and watched a local basketball game instead.
Which meant Hemara missed seeing the now-famous Baby Blacks' 18-9 victory and the debut of a young upstart hooker named Sean Fitzpatrick.
Uh-oh. As anyone into rugby knows, Fitzy played the next 63 consecutive tests, eventually notching up 92 while setting all manner of records along the way.
Hemara's second chance never arrived. He even had a his jaw broken while trialling for the 1987 World Cup squad.
It's a story that still raises eyebrows whenever it comes up in the pub. It has even featured in a brewery's rugby trivia competition: Whose injury launched Sean Fitzpatrick's career?
Which only makes his phlegmatic cool all the more impressive.
"Look, I've had a unique career and in the end it's all just luck. Everyone gets their shot, it's up to you whether you take it or not. I know I got mine and I know Sean got his at the World Cup when Andy Dalton pulled a hamstring. The thing is that you can only control what you can control. With everything else ... cop it sweet and move on."
Bryan Gould
It had been bad enough when Bryan Gould abandoned his family's long-standing National Party affiliation to go leftie. But leading the British Labour Party?
In the early 90s, Gould gave the top job a fair crack - not realising how close he had come to 10 Downing St until it was too late.
Gould arrived in England in 1962 as a Rhodes Scholar, whose politics had been reshaped by his time spent in dairy factories - he'd come out as a leftie to his family by shunning a Young Nats dine and dance so he could shout his workmates beer and takeaways on his last day.
By the early 70s he was working for the British Foreign Office and thinking that the speeches he was writing would sound better from his own mouth. Off he went to the Labour Party, who stood him in the marginal Southampton test seat. He won by 530 votes, only be tipped out again by Thatcher next time round.
He then worked as a television current affairs presenter and reporter before being re-elected in the deep red London seat of Dagenham.
"Oh, my poor parents," he says, sitting in his sunsoaked Ohiwa home, near Opotiki. "But I do have to say they put up with it with pretty good grace."
Apart from one loose comment his mother made to a New Zealand reporter who was curious about her son's rise in British politics. After hanging up, the reporter immediately called Gould to say his mother had said he was a Communist.
Well, not quite, but Gould was definitely a chap on the rise, especially after the public exposure from running the party's 1987 election campaign. Many assumed he was the party's deputy leader.
On Labour's front bench, he was a contender and someone who could offer a leg up to others, including one particularly keen MP named Tony Blair.
If he had a weakness, he says it was internal party politics: "I simply didn't do enough." It took a few other MPs to prod him into action a year or so out from the 1992 election. "When the time comes, we want you to stand," they told him.
That time came when they lost a close race. Leader Neil Kinnock resigned and Gould immediately put his hand up. His chances against the favourite, John Smith, were slim and got slimmer with each vote until he was forced to concede. His sideline bid for the deputy leadership did far better, despite criticism that move had split his vote.
Too bad, Gould decided he'd had enough. He accepted the post of Vice-Chancellor at Waikato University and came home in 1994 (he remained in the role for 10 years before his retirement in 2004).
If only he had put all his efforts into the deputy spot and won. Because just before he left London, John Smith upped and died. If Gould had bided his time as deputy while continuing to build his support base, he may have been a position to hold off Blair and eventually become Prime Minister.
What then? "It would have been fun ... I think I can say for sure that there would have been no Iraq war, not one involving Britain anyway. That only compounded the problems around 9/11. I would have looked to the UN instead and concentrated far more on reducing the widening inequalities in Britain. As for George Bush, I think I would have found dealing with him difficult, he had some severe limitations, but I would have managed. I certainly would have relished dealing with Obama. Even if he hasn't done as well as I could hope for, he is much more of a European figure somehow."
Oh well. But then, his home country didn't help matters much. After a Government invitation to visit New Zealand in 1987, he and wife Gill loved it and returned every year before settling here in 1994.
"Living and working in Westminster is like being on an ocean liner, nothing else seems to matter. But by coming home, and without even realising it, I began to wonder if all that stuff was really that important. I think that's one reason I didn't become leader. To get there you have to be incredibly single-minded. The paradox for me was that the closer I got, the less single-minded I became."
