Richard Boock: The only time I agreed with Muldoon

Fifteen were needed from the final over; four wickets remained. Hadlee hit the first ball for four but was trapped in front off the second. Smithy took a pair of twos off balls No 3 and 4, but was defeated by No 5. One ball left, six to tie.

I couldn't tell you where I was when JFK bought the farm or when John Lennon went west, but 25 years (this Wednesday) after what we like to remember as "The Underarm Incident", the details of that late summer's evening are still vivid and detailed.

It was the upstairs proprietor's flat of a well-known Dunedin hotel; a two-roomed abode decorated in the style of the time - that is, heavily embossed wallpapers, bold paisleys, shag-pile carpets, candlewick bedspreads and fake leather upholstery.

In the long twilights of February, the sun was still shining outside but the burnt-orange and brown curtains had been drawn to prevent any glare on the old Pye TV, which was, at that moment, the centre of my universe.

One ball left, six to tie, and walking to the wicket, Brian McKechnie - a man with a batting average of 13.50, who had never cleared the boundary rope in his previous 13 internationals, and who was only there as a late replacement for Gary Troup.

These were the days when the Melbourne Cricket Ground was roughly the size of the Nullarbor Plains, and when there weren't any health and safety rules forcing organisers to create a buffer zone inside the fence.

The feeling back then was that, if some players insisted on careering headlong into the concrete and steel-reinforced boundary hoardings, they shouldn't be stopped by officialdom; indeed it sometimes added drama to an otherwise dreary session.

But the point was that the chances of McKechnie walking to the middle of this most tumultuous contest and smashing the only ball left in the game into the stands were wafer thin at best.

No one had achieved it so far that day; in fact a six had not been hit during the previous six ODIs at the MCG, dating back more than a year to January 1980 when West Indian all-rounder Collis King cleared the fence.

McKechnie wouldn't have been aware of that, of course, nor of the impending moment that was about to change his life - from double All Black to the poor bloke who was on the end of Trevor Chappell's underarm.

If anyone doubts how annoying that can be, they need to think about the countless times McKechnie's had to tell his tale, explaining almost by rote why the idea of flicking the ball up with your toe and then blasting it out of the ground with your bat is more difficult in practice than theory.

A victim of circumstance, he was once even dragged out into the middle of a cricket ground by an enthusiastic media agency, and made to attempt the flick-up pull about 40 times before any of them would believe him.

Besides, as the anoraks will tell you, if the ball is rolled down the line of the stumps (rather than Geoff Boycott's "corridor of uncertainty") and a batsman tries to scoop it up with his toe, he'd have to be adjudged lbw.

Back at the hotel flat, it seemed as if life had been suddenly switched to a slow-motion feed, so drawn out were the events just before Trevor Chappell's Peter Belliss impression and his instant membership into New Zealand's Hall of Loathing.

When it finally became obvious that Greg Chappell was instructing his brother to bowl the last ball underarm, it was like witnessing something from another world, and I can recall immediately bolting downstairs to inform the public bar.

The place was in an uproar (which wasn't unusual, come to think of it), but the noise levels escalated to new heights at this transtasman treachery. The bar takings probably did as well.

Then there was the next day's fallout and the glee with which we greeted Prime Minister Rob Muldoon's comment that it was "appropriate" that the Australians were wearing yellow.

That was another watershed day for me - possibly the only time I ever agreed with the man.