Athletics: Modest stamp of a golden boy

By MICHELE HEWITSON

On the stamp he's not much more than a boy. He's 24, all lanky, coltish limbs; his shoulder-length hair streaming out behind him. His face is set, forever now, in what looks like ecstasy but which he says is sheer gasping-for-air determination. The light is golden. It's a golden moment: John Walker winning at Montreal in 1976.

The stamps were issued this week in time for Athens Olympic fever. Peter Snell is on the $2; Walker on the 45 cent one.

Walker says: "I like them all". This is a diplomatic answer. It is, he says, "very diplomatic". Then he says: "I'm going to be the most used". He likes the idea that he'll be arriving at your house with the bills.

At Walker's horsey supply shop, Stirrups, in Manurewa, there is a giant postcard with his stamp reproduced on it. He hasn't unwrapped it yet but thinks we might like to have a look. It might make a backdrop to proceedings, he suggests.

The card is wrapped in a triumph of packaging. Walker has a go at getting the bubblewrap off but gives up, leaves us to it and wanders away. His Parkinson's makes little taken-for-granted things as hard as winning a gold medal.

But there is also this: once the card has been wrenched from its wrapping, he doesn't give it a glance.

Not when he's telling the story of how, as a 14-year-old, he queued in the pouring rain behind 50 people to get Peter Snell's autograph, and I say: "Now, look, you've got another one. Right behind you." Snell's signature is on the card.

He doesn't look even when I ask: "When you look at that stamp, can you remember how it felt to run like that?"

He doesn't need to look. He could, he says, take me through that race second by second. "It is that vivid."

But he'd really rather not.

He does know he was "getting very tired. I was coming to the end of it, clawing at the air, saying, 'come on'. I didn't realise how close the athletes were to me. Luckily, I didn't look behind me. You never look behind. No, never ever look behind."

Or back? "Or back."

It is always going to be the case that other people are more interested in John Walker than he is. "I'm not interested in me." He has never read his ghost-written "autobiography". "It's all history."

The man on the couch is 52. He is still lean but with a sweet little pot belly, although no doubt he would not think of it that way.

He is still very health conscious and tells me, apropos of nothing, that he has just bought one of those grilling devices issued in the name of a boxer, which leach out all the fat. He cooked some patties the other night and you should have seen the fat. "It was disgusting." He is infuriated by ads saying that such and such is fat-free, when it's saturated with sugar.

He no longer has his long hair and, in addition to what age does naturally to faces, he has the immobile mask of the Parkinson's sufferer. This is rather disconcerting to me, but not, of course, half as disconcerting as it is for him.

Set down what he says and it could sound rather dour. In fact it is mostly self-deprecating, and his delivery is deadpan.

Every four years, when the Olympics roll around, he is hauled out - "I re-emerge". I thought he might get a little irritated. "No. But I expect it."

He's on the Manukau City Council so he's used to being phoned about blocked drains and broken windows. "And I turn up here to work and I serve customers and they bitch and moan at me if things are not right and I try to put it right."

He is trying to make the point that, despite the stamp which he is "flattered" about, "I just think of myself as a person who ran a race and won".

He never went big-headed "because I've got a family". He has four kids and they bring you down to earth pretty quickly, he says.

He retired from running when he was "39-and-a-half" and has never so much as jogged up the road since. "My body probably misses it but I ran for so long that I loved the day I retired. I could actually start concentrating on my family rather than me."

Running is a "very selfish sport", he says, and he's lucky that he has "a lovely wife. It's not easy being married to me. Well, she's had to come through the years when everyone was adulating over me, and that's not easy for a woman. But, I mean, it's superficial".

There were also the hard times in the late 70s and 80s when, by Walker's own assessment, "people had had enough of me. I was too accessible. I could never say 'no'."

He was, also by his own admission, abrasive and he got up people's noses. "You're young and brash and outspoken. But for the reason that I believed in the sport and I was frustrated about the way things were going. The athletes were being used and we were used, don't worry about that."

Walker never made any money from running, or from endorsements. He might have been the Fresh Up face; the money went to the sporting body. When I ask him if he'll be getting free stamps for life, he snorts and says that he was supposed to get free juice for life ... He did ads for Air New Zealand and was rewarded with "one air ticket". He can't remember where to.

Yet he insists he is not bitter, "not at all". Money wasn't the point. Running with "all those famous athletes" was. And despite the litany of "crappy hotels, crappy hotels", sleeping on the decks of ships, sleeping six to a room, if he has any nostalgia it is for what he regards as a golden time. He thinks athletics has got very boring; that it's all agents and diet and "physios and shrinks". He says, aghast: "They've just taken beer off the list. Alcohol! I mean, they're going stupid. We just ran a race."

But then youth is always, like that stamp, coloured by the memory of what it felt like to be young. "When you're young you think life's going to go on forever. You think you're never going to be old." And you don't, of course you don't, imagine that the vigorous athlete that you were would be struck down by a disease like Parkinson's.

Walker will be watching a young athlete at Athens, Nick Willis. "I think he'll do well." Another Walker? "Yes." He is not given to effusive utterances - except on the topic of the dreaded fat.

His health, he says, "Is as good as it's ever going to be. Over the years I will deteriorate. I try to live a normal life, but normal isn't normal. And I don't like to talk about it".

In a funny sort of way, the disease made him human. Before, he was a sort of sporting hero, a great, invincible. People queued, as he did with Snell, for his autograph. Now people pop into the shop, or call him to tell them their problems, their health woes. "I feel honoured."

That's daily life. And then every four years a funny thing happens. The Olympics comes around and "every four years, I don't grow old. I'll be like Elvis Presley. I'll always be 24. I'll always have long hair and, in reality, people can't relate to the old guy. So you stay young forever."

So I say: "See you in four years", and he'd grin, if he could.