Owen Melvin ‘The Fog’ Walford
June 3, 1949 – October 17, 2024
Legendary Hawke’s Bay softball pitcher, Owen Walford, who won world titles hurling for both New Zealand and the US, has died in Hastings.
Walford died in Hawke’s Bay Hospital on Thursday, October 17, just two days after confirmation of terminal lung cancer. He was 75.
He rested at Ballantyne St, Frimley, over the weekend, to be taken to the Softball Hawke’s Bay Akina Park headquarters on Sunday afternoon. His funeral service will be today, at 11am at Hawke’s Bay Crematorium.
Hastings-born, he was the youngest of four sons of Nigel Walford and Margaret Joyce Roberts, his father also having two other sons and a daughter, among them Paul Walford, also a well-known sportsman, including blazing the New Zealand softball trail in the US.
Black Sox player number 38, Owen Walford was nicknamed “The Fog” in the US, because that’s where they reckoned the ball had come from, such was the speed of the ball as it was unleashed from his powerful right arm.
From the time he arrived in the US in 1974, to play for Saginaw Bolters, he developed a reputation as one of the greats, heralding the emergence of New Zealand ball players in the US and the New Zealand national side’s emergence as one of the most successful New Zealand sports brands at a world title level.
By 1976 the pool of New Zealand softball talent amassing in the area of Prescott, Arizona, was becoming widely noticed, and Walford was the most prominent – as posters would say advertising the games to be played by the Franklin Cardinals, of Stratford, Connecticut, about a decade later: “Featuring the World’s Best Pitcher”.
At the height of his career, he pitched in four World Fastpitch Championships, winning with New Zealand in Lower Hutt in 1976 (shared with the US and Canada) and in Tacoma, Washington, 1980, as the first to win for two countries, pitching for Michigan side Midland McCardle Pontiac-Cadillac, whom he had in 1979 pitched to the American ASA title and the right to the berth at the world title showdown.
In the 1980 tournament, he achieved the record-breaking feats of pitching 35 innings without conceding a hit, and across the two world tournament successes pitched a record run of 12 matches without defeat (6-0 at each tournament).
He learned to pitch through the centre of a suspended rubber tyre as he grew up in a sporting family in Hastings, and the Wolves Softball Club (for which he would play as Mudgway Wreckers late in his career), was set up around him.
Having gone to Mahora School, Heretaunga Intermediate and just into his second year at Hastings Boys’ High School before heading for the Tomoana freezing works, he first represented Hawke’s Bay in 1964, and was on the Americans’ hit list at least as early as 1970 when he pitched Hawke’s Bay to a 3-1 win over the touring Arizona Allstars, in Hastings, two years after the Bay had beaten a San Antonio team 5-1 in Palmerston North.
In the 1970 game, he pitched 11 strikeouts, mesmerising the tourists with his drop ball in the most devastating assault on the Arizona batting on the tour, and he also batted-in the Bay’s first run and ran-in the second.
He first represented New Zealand in 1972 on a tour of South Africa and the World Championships in the Philippines, had been lured by Saginaw by the end of 1974, and followed with the 1976 and 1980 tournaments, and the 1984 tournament pitching for Franklin Cardinals in Midland, Michigan.
It was not only the lure of the money – at one stage a contract reportedly worth US$100,000 (now $165,000) – that got him to the US, but also the chance to go pitch-for-pitch with American great Ty Stoflett.
Stoflett was famed for the 20-innings no-hitter lined-up against Kiwi and Waikato hurler Kevin Herlihy in a US 1-0 win over New Zealand in the Lower Hutt tournament finals, a match which lasted past 1am.
Bad weather resulted in the three-way sharing of the title.
Walford had pitched New Zealand through six wins to get to that stage, and could not resist the opportunity offered to pitch for McArdle Pontiac-Cadillac fastpitch to win the 1979 ASA national championship in front of 9500 home-diamond fans at Currie Stadium, in Midland.
It culminated in a 1-0 title-winning effort against Stoflett’s Reading Sunners, and claimed McCardle the US spot in the World Series McCardle won with another Walford 6-0 record the next year – the first to win world titles with two countries.
In Midland, a city of about 80,000, it’s forever remembered, as shown when he returned in 2016, local media, including a TV crew, there to greet him when he renewed acquaintances with catcher Nels Cronkright, first baseman Jim Wright, and second baseman Jack Starling, in Walford’s first time back since 1984.
He’d been in the US for a reunion of Saginaw Bolters, and had also caught up with old mates from Franklin Cardinals in Boston, but when he walked into the lounge in Midland it was like walking into Currie Stadium again in 1979, the Midland Daily News reported.
“Memories. Lovely memories,” Walford had said “with a wistful smile” of what it meant to him to come back to Midland. “I loved pitching at Currie Stadium – the atmosphere, the crowd, everything.”
Wright had made the men’s reunion a must the minute he heard Walford was back in the US and said: “I just thought it was important to see him. It’s fun to relive those couple of days we had in September 1979. It meant so much to me in my life. And it meant so much to Midland at the time, because so many people still remember that night. It was just an awesome night. Just to have him here from New Zealand is a great thing.”
“I came [to the McArdle team] with a vision to beat Ty Stofflet,” Walford said in 2016. “He was the best in the World, and I wanted to beat him. I loved the guys in Saginaw, but they understood why I was leaving. The first year [with McArdle] was awesome. I beat Stofflet in the final. I loved playing the big teams, and [McArdle] gave me the chance to do that.”
The night ranks as the highlight of Walford’s career, after the 1980 world tournament in which he was named the Most Valuable Player the next year.
At the 1979 and 1983 Men’s ASA Softball Fast Pitch Nationals (USA), he was named in the First Team All American with a 5-1 Win ratio, 40 Innings pitched and 44 strikeouts in 1983, and having pitched a 10-inning, 1-0 victory to get to the 1979 championship.
In 1980, he was named SA/USA Softball Male Athlete of the Year, and was later inducted into both the Softball New Zealand Hall of Fame and the International Softball Federation Association Hall of Fame (now the World Baseball Softball Confederation), and the Hawke’s Bay Sports Hall of Fame, with his picture on the wall at the Pettigrew Green Arena.
After being injured in the 1984 world tournament, he pledged to coach women’s teams back in New Zealand, and he and wife Dorothy, who he had married on January 5, 1975 (and with whom he had daughter Tineka and son Joshua), took the Whakatu Lions team to the national inter-club title in 1985.
He extended his career playing in the US and for the Wreckers, Bucks and Happy Tav in Hawke’s Bay, but called it quits at the age of about 40, turning to golf where he was a member of the Hawke’s Bay Golf Club, and helped work on the course while living at nearby Bridge Pā.
Former Hawke’s Bay softballer Mike Bills, now in Australia, reckons Walford never got the full recognition he deserved, being in the shadow of Herlihy who enjoyed the glare of metropolitan media.
“I will never forget at the ′73 or ′74 nationals when he [Walford] pitched 21 innings against Auckland for the Bay. Auckland used three pitchers and he only got beaten on an error made by [double-international] Billy Davis. And Wally had been on the bourbon the night before!!”
Walford was also a tinkerer, says daughter, Tineka, and had an aptitude for welding, meaning things were usually fixed rather than broken.
He was also a great storyteller, and on the pitching mound an original Goat – one of the greatest of all time.
He took the mound for possibly the last time for an innings in the Hawke’s Bay Evergreens tournament in 2008, relieving the toil of three-times world champion pitcher Chubb Tangaroa.
Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 51 years of journalism experience, 40 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.
Police are still investigating while Fenz confirmed they attended the scene two weeks ago.