KEY POINTS:
Those who saw shearing icon David Fagan speaking to the crowd after last year's Golden Shears Open knew one thing, and probably sensed another.
He wasn't the winner: he hadn't even made the semifinal. But they must have sensed this was the last time they would see Fagan - urged out of the crowd into the spotlight on that stand - as a shearer.
He didn't say he was finally bowing out, but to many it looked that way.
Wrong. As they just about always have been with the 15-times champion.
The face of shearing, at 45, was back on the stage as the 47th open championship began in Masterton yesterday.
"No," he said, when asked if missing out on the semifinals last Sunday at the last show before the Golden Shears might have just raised his hackles a bit. "That's irrelevant."
Likewise the rumours. No, he hasn't got a goal like winning, say, next year, because that would make him the oldest man to win the most coveted title in world shearing.
It's only a shaking of the head, but the answer's the same: he's not going to spend time thinking about winning at the 50th anniversary Golden Shears in 2010, or in 2012 when he'd be 50 - and when the Golden Shears will also host the World Championship, which he's won five times.
Yesterday, it was "the old and the young", he reckoned, as he sat with reigning champion Dion King, 32, as they prepared their combs in readiness for their heats a few minutes later. Fagan revealed: "Two years ago, I was contemplating giving it all away. It's time."
The shearing star, winner of more than 600 shearing titles around the world, had actually lost interest in winning "... about five years ago".
"I'm here to hassle the young guys," he says, towards the end of a summer in which he reckons he's shorn just 800 sheep - something he used to do regularly in a day.
The change came when King Country's favourite son (sorry Pinetree) finally made it to Auckland, taken on by Mt Wellington shearing machine company Tru-Test as roving ambassador and working in research and development.
"It's prolonged my time in the industry," he says. It sounds like some sort of relief, to reveal where he is at, but even as he speaks there is plenty of evidence he's not the only one who can't give up.
In Heat Six, right behind him, there is 53-year-old Sam Te Whata, winner of the 1972 junior title, the intermediate championship in 1974, and one of the best shearers the world has seen - certainly one of the best who never won the Open.
On the same board are Southlander Darin Forde, whose 10-year-old world record for shearing ewes in nine hours was broken just four weeks ago.
And then there's Alan MacDonald, who's been a mate of Fagan's from school, a friendship which has lasted through a victory together in the world teams championship and a world two-stand lamb-shearing record in which they each shore more than 800 in nine hours.
A lot of these guys, fierce rivals on the board, are great mates, possibly never better displayed than when Fagan, MacDonald and King were all working together in a remote shearing shed in the King Country when Forde's record was broken by a single sheep on January 31, as Porangahau speedster Rodney Sutton shore 721 ewes in nine hours.
None of the trio shore a sheep that day, they were in the pens to help a mate.
MacDonald admits tears were in his eyes as everyone urged Sutton to the record in the tense last moments, when the crucial record-breaking catch was made with just four seconds to spare.
Fagan, yes, the man who has won everything in shearing, is adamant: "It was the greatest day in the history of shearing. Those who weren't there really missed something. That man must be the most mentally-tough person in New Zealand."
It barely rated a mention in Auckland. The shearing competition at the Easter Show, revived in recent years, used to be the New Zealand Championships, a late-March event which has now turned Fagan's hometown of Te Kuiti into the shearing capital of the world, something which doesn't fit well with those in Masterton who've had the Golden Shears for twice as long.
But, hey, Te Kuiti has the statue to prove it. King, as it happens, is pretty much still the young boy around town, compared with Fagan, but there's little question he's hungry to win again.
You know you're in shearing country when you ask what it's been like in his year as "Miss World" and someone else says: "Not as good as a year with Miss World."
Real answer: quite busy.
Went overseas, married long-time partner and school teacher Tammy Onekawa on one of the trips while they were holidaying in the United States with son Deejay and daughter Paige, and then, on January 10, set a world lamb shearing record of 866 in nine hours.
In January, he also set a world speedshear record, one lamb in 14.06 seconds; and on Thursday night, he ventured out of Masterton on the road to Castlepoint to win the Tinui Hotel Speedshear - $1000 for shearing just two sheep, in less than 40 seconds.
The crowd, almost entirely a shearing crowd, still watched in awe as King, shearing outside on the back of a truck, in the breeze, took to the board for the first time just after 10pm, and in a few flicks of the handpiece shore his first sheep in 19.8 seconds and his second in just over 18.
Fagan and MacDonald once shore in a speedshear in an Auckland pub. Te Whata shore in TV studios in Auckland during a made-for-television masters series which he won in 1985, although he'd skipped the Golden Shears two months earlier.
Tom Brough, who won the Open in 1976, at the Easter Show at least once, remembers clearer the day he shore in Queen St, at a display with Martin Ngataki, who won the title in 1979.
In Britain in 1968, he shore in an eighth-floor TV studio, having to cart the sheep upstairs himself.
"No one else knew how to handle them," he said between stints judging at this year's Golden Shears."We couldn't exactly let them run off down the street in the middle of London."
Yesterday, Fagan, King, and MacDonald all made it through the first stage of qualifying, but there were only rumours about who would still be there in the final tonight.
