Deaker battles mental illness

By PHIL TAYLOR

Sports broadcaster Murray Deaker has been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, a condition characterised by excessive mood swings.

In a book to be published next month he writes about his struggle with the illness and how it seemed to be triggered by the America's Cup last year and the controversy over the BlackHeart group of Team New Zealand supporters.

He was off air for a month last August following erratic performances on his shows Sportstalk, Scoreboard and Sky Television's Deaker on Sport.

In a chapter entitled "Depression", he tells of despairing of making it back to broadcasting, of a collapse in confidence and of learning to live with the disorder.

Deaker told the Weekend Herald that at its depth, his bedroom became the bounds of his world.

He struggled to find the will to get out of bed let alone face normal life and, for a time, it seemed impossible to him that he could again become the personality the sports public knew.

It was a period in which he became hugely dependent on his wife, Sharon, who has written about this in Deaker's book, Just An Opinion.

His depression hit when he was on holiday in Europe. But the trigger, Deaker said, was the America's Cup, the loss by Team New Zealand and his prominent role in BlackHeart, a group which supported Team New Zealand and portrayed as traitors those such as Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth who defected to the Swiss syndicate, Alinghi.

BlackHeart and the Cup, to which Deaker devotes a chapter, became emotional topics for him. He clashed about Coutts on air with fellow Newstalk ZB broadcaster Larry Williams, whom Deaker said was a golf partner of Coutts and Butterworth, and he was filmed rowing at the America's Cup ball with Alinghi spin doctor Bernard Schopfer.

Schopfer had apparently criticised Deaker's support of BlackHeart, to which the broadcaster reportedly responded with the taunt "You Swiss couldn't make up your mind who to support in World War II either".

Deaker, a former schoolteacher, has been outspoken about his alcoholism and devotes a chapter, "Living with Alcohol", to the topic.

He describes this and the chapter about his mental illness as "an honest attempt to appraise a couple of problem areas in my life".