You said it, and we loved it.
By now everyone is hopefully making plans for January to get out in the sun and work off that expanded waistline from the 2014 silly season.
As a time of reflection, this column has just reached its one-year anniversary, making 12 months of my
demented ramblings about either Wanganui or the world's sporting moments.
My thanks to those readers who have stuck with it, and also to fellow scribe Zaryd Wilson for providing some very knowledgeable musings on the cricketing world in December, while I was off enjoying a little vacation.
Every journalist loves a good quote or soundbite, and there's been many a Wanganui sportsperson who is quick with the tongue or has the gift of the gab. There have certainly been some gems in the past 12 months that have brought a titter or two from me.
Therefore, in no particular order, here are some of my favourite Wanganui sporting quotes from 2014 - most of which have been published, but a couple you will be reading for the very first time:
"Are we going to have to test your boys?"
"Yep, they're all on the kava. They're having it now."
- WRFU president Brian "Porky" Green responds to a King Country supporter in Te Kuiti after Steelform Wanganui returned to the spot of their 30-29 loss and thumped the home team 37-6 just seven days later in the Lochore Cup semifinal.
"He said, 'lady, you are going to wear your legs out, right up to your bum'."
- Bev Shingles, the former national champion and newest inductee to the Wanganui Sports Hall of Fame, fondly recalls the young Maori boy who would come out to watch her run past his house every morning during training regimes.
"They just bent me over and shafted me."
- Jetsprint racer Hayden Wilson after a contentious vote by the NZ Jetsprint Association saw the points from his second round victory in the 2014 national championship declared null and void. Wilson would recover to win the 400 class title.
"It's tighter than a pair of underpants on the hook."
- Fellow jetsprint racer Leighton Minnell on the conditions at the Crownthorpe track in Hawke's Bay.
"He was chundering his ring out, the faster we went the more came out.
"I don't know if he'll ever forget the day."
- Minnell again, after his white-knuckled cousin Matt Minnell stood in for wife Kellie to be the navigator of his superboat at Crownthorpe.
"We assemble them all and then they ran into each other at 140mph on an open lake.
"How does that happen? Young fellas with no brains."
- Warwick Lupton, two-time World Grand Prix hydroplane champion, proving his son Ken Lupton and his fellow Waverley driver David Alexander are not too old for a parental tongue lashing after a training accident.
"I was meant to help out the boys on the scratch, but the two awful Aussies were out there and I didn't want them to win."
- Kiwi cyclist Simon Van Velthooven explaining why he had to go for it to win his fourth River City Wheel Race at the Cooks Gardens velodrome.
"That's been 50 years. I can die in peace now. I've done it."
- Castlecliff Golf Club veteran Clive Eades, 74, after finally sinking a "Hole in One".
