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(Image: Getty Images / Archi Banal)
(Image: Getty Images / Archi Banal)

SportsJanuary 22, 2022

The 11 New Zealand cricket legends I most want to see in the Black Clash

(Image: Getty Images / Archi Banal)
(Image: Getty Images / Archi Banal)

The most popular event in New Zealand’s cricket calendar is back for another year, featuring many of the same former Black Caps as last time. Calum Henderson casts the net a little wider to select his nostalgic dream XI.

Tonight Mount Maunganui’s Bay Oval will be busier than it was on any day of the recent Black Caps vs Bangladesh test as a sellout crowd flocks to watch a team of retired New Zealand cricketers take on a selection of past and present rugby players in the fourth annual T20 Black Clash, the cricket match that seems like it should be for charity but isn’t.

For the diehard fans who’ve paid more than it costs to go to a real international cricket match to be at the ground, as well as those of us watching the event free-to-air on TVNZ 1, this is an exciting chance to see some of our favourite cricketers of yesteryear back in action. This year Team Cricket includes such legends of the game as Stephen Fleming, Adam Parore, Daniel Vettori and Shane Bond, while to make it fair even the big-hitting Brendon McCullum will be playing for Team Rugby.

I am not ungrateful for the opportunity to find out what Adam Parore looks like now or see how fast Shane Bond can still bowl without getting a stress fracture, but none of these players are in my first choice team of former Black Caps. Some of the team (Watling, Elliott, both McCullums) feel too recently retired to have any novelty factor yet, while others have played in seemingly every previous Black Clash already.

A handful of the players in my Dream XI have taken part in this event before too, but they also fit my main selection criteria of being an entertaining and/or deeply nostalgia-inducing cricket personality who I think could feasibly be available. While age isn’t necessarily a barrier – Ewen Chatfield only recently retired from club cricket at the age of 68 I have nevertheless made the difficult decision to not select Sir Richard Hadlee.

1. Mark Greatbatch | Does he still have what it takes to tonk it onto the roof the way he did at Eden Park in the 1992 World Cup, when he set the country alight by scoring at a touch under a run a ball? Seems unlikely at the age of 58, but it’s a punt I’m still willing to take.

2. Bryan Young | New Zealand’s original wicketkeeper-turned-specialist-batsman has been selected primarily to field at first slip, where he is under strict instructions to do his trademark “pocketing the ball” celebration any time he takes a catch. He will also open the batting in his trademark helmet without the grille, sending a couple of scorching cut shots to the boundary before chopping one on.

3. Jesse Ryder | Cricket has rarely been as thrilling as when JD Ryder was at the crease with a bandana peeking out from under his helmet. New Zealand’s leading proponent of the “see the ball hit the ball” batting technique was last seen on a first-class cricket pitch in Central Districts colours in 2018, and nothing would bring more joy to this exhibition cricket match than the sight of him happily bludgeoning ball after ball to the boundary once more. 

4. Scott Styris | It’s no coincidence the Black Caps’ transformation into the nice guys of international cricket took place after the retirement of Scott Styris, an opponent so annoying that Mitchell Johnson once tried to headbutt him even though he was wearing a helmet. It is exactly this kind of adversarial attitude that he has been selected to bring to the squad, however jarring and unnecessary it may seem.

5. Craig McMillan (c) | The Peaky Blinders superfan has been granted a special dispensation to wear his trademark cheesecutter in this match. He hasn’t requested it and may even try to claim he doesn’t want it, explaining the cheesecutters he wears are very expensive and he doesn’t want to get them sweaty, but rules are rules. 

6. Chris Harris | Played his final game for New Zealand in December 2004, just two months before we played our first ever T20 international (for which most of the team wore 70s fancy dress for some reason). It’s a tragedy his career didn’t overlap with the T20 era because his bowling style in particular is perfectly suited to the modern game. He’ll take 1/20 off his four overs against any opposition in the world, and you can almost guarantee that wicket will be a caught and bowled. 

7. Katey Martin (wk) | There hasn’t been a White or Black Fern in the Black Clash since Liz Perry and Kayla Cocksedge were selected for the inaugural match in 2019. There’s really no excuse for this – even back in the 90s, when women still had to play cricket in skirts, it was normal to include at least one representative of the women’s game in this type of match. Otago stalwart and funniest member of the Spark Sport commentary team Katey Martin (who, unlike the rest of this team, isn’t actually retired yet) takes the gloves in this XI, along with a microphone and earpiece to provide running updates from the middle.

8. Daryl Tuffey | The big man has been selected primarily to open the bowling, so the commentators can talk up his uncanny knack for taking a wicket in the first over in homage to the late, great Martin Crowe. The first ball will be so wide it’s taken at first slip, but his third or fourth delivery will hit the seam and be inside edged onto the stumps. Hogan’s ghost will smile down on the oval and the wind will whisper his favourite word: “Sensational!” 

9. Simon Doull | Furious at being denied the new ball, the swing king and 90s style icon will no doubt be coming in off the long run and hitting the Patumahoe soil deck hard. Doully is under coach’s instructions to grow his goatee back, wear a gold chain necklace and re-pierce his ears a la David Brent in order to recapture his full 1990s rock’n’roll bad boy energy.

10. Danny Morrison | These days it’s hard to imagine him as anything other than a nomadic T20 commentator prone to lapsing into a strange kind of beat poetry any time somebody hits a six or “maximum”. But this strange man once spearheaded New Zealand’s pace attack with the most aesthetically pleasing bowling action I’ve ever seen in my life. If he can produce even a glimmer of his former magic, it will have all been worth it.

11. Chris Martin | Vibes like the kind of guy who probably hasn’t touched a cricket ball (and certainly not a bat) since the day he retired, but I also strongly suspect Chris Martin would still be able to put it on a good line and length without so much as a warm-up delivery. He has, however, been selected mostly for his batting. In many ways he’s the most entertaining batter we have ever known, and you can guarantee this match is headed toward a contrived scenario in which he faces the final ball requiring one run to win.

12th man: Chris Pringle | Coloured zinc is mandatory for this match.

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Lee Ralph (Image: Tina Tiller)
Lee Ralph (Image: Tina Tiller)

SportsDecember 31, 2021

‘Take me to the ramp’: The story of skateboarding legend Lee Ralph

Lee Ralph (Image: Tina Tiller)
Lee Ralph (Image: Tina Tiller)

Summer read: More than 30 years after he tore through the global skating world, people still remember the barefoot New Zealander with the wild red beard. Where did he come from? Where did he go? 

Watch more episodes of Scratched: Aotearoa’s Lost Sporting Legends here.

First published March 18, 2021.

Lee Ralph was pissed off. Thousands of kilometres from home, the 17-year-old Māori boy from Wellington via West Auckland was sitting in a carpark waiting for skateboarding legend Mark Gonzales to stop hanging out with Prince.

“I’d been there about two weeks and he’s like, ‘I’m going to meet Prince’. And I was like ‘So what?’” says Ralph. “’That’s got nothing to do with skateboarding, bro.’ I couldn’t give a fuck. I go, ‘I don’t care. Whatever, I don’t care. Take me to the ramp.’”

The year was 1987. A decade after the longhaired, surf-crazy Dogtown Z-Boys brought skateboarding back into the mainstream, the sport had matured into a worldwide phenomenon – with the fame and cash prizes that came with it. Ralph, who only a few years earlier had been given his first skateboard from a cousin returning from Australia, knew it could all be his.

“I knew I was good. Some of my bros could take me on the field, could hit sixes and shit, but they couldn’t skateboard – and I could. I was like, ‘I’m only a few years away from being the best.’”

After moving with his mum to Lower Hutt, Ralph had fallen in with the Westie crew in Newlands, led by Gregor Rankine – an underground legend who was one of few locals to keep skating when the sport fell out of favour in the late 60s. It was an inconvenient place to learn the ropes. Constant rain and wind meant wet ramps and dangerous airs. Ralph was on the verge of giving up, had it not been for Rankine.

“Gregor, my mentor, was the hardest-core skateboarder on earth. And the best. He just totally ruled. I didn’t know how much until he went to America, kicked everyone’s asses over there, then came home and told me that he kicked everyone’s asses over there. And he said, ‘You’re going to as well, you’re on the right track.’ And I was like, ‘Far out. Cool.’” 

With the sport still in its infancy – particularly on the steep vert ramps that figures like Tony Hawk and the X Games would go on to popularise – style was every bit as important as substance. Under Rankine’s guidance, Ralph developed a powerful style, alongside his own, almost contradictory, straight-edge aesthetic, totally forgoing the drugs and alcohol rife in the scene. “I only think about playing guitar, and skateboarding,” he once told a TV reporter. By 1983, when Ralph was 14, he was ready for America.

Lee Ralph (Photo: Scratched)

“Imagine a 14-year-old kid goes and plays the All Blacks,” Ralph says. “He’s going to be killed in the first scrum, but in skateboarding he wins. He beats all the adults. If his dad enters the comp, he beats him too. It’s just insane.”

But Ralph’s parents were unwilling to send their son so far abroad. Instead, in 1986, Ralph went to Australia, continuing his training with Rankine and, in his words, “slaying everybody to absolute death”.

One day, after sleeping out a rainstorm sheltered inside a car the pair had broken into, Rankine and Ralph entered a local competition. They agreed to split the prize money, regardless of who won, and figured they had a pretty good shot at taking it out. 

“[The Australians] were inbreds back then. Total inbreds, so redneck you wouldn’t even believe it. The tricks they thought were cool were so stupid. That’s why they weren’t getting any better – their whole attitude towards skating was wrong.”

Ralph won the competition, and by ‘87 he had made the journey to the United States. After only a few competitions he signed a deal with skate brand Vision, producing his own board, and was a regular fixture in all the skate magazines. Tony Hawk, who would go on to make millions in clothing deals, skateboard sales and his own video games, rubbed shoulders frequently with Ralph, and would later describe him as “a barefoot caveman”.

Lee Ralph (Photo: Scratched)

It seemed to everyone paying attention that Ralph simply couldn’t lose. In the US especially, Ralph’s wild red beard and aggressive, powerful skating set him apart – and made him a legend overnight.

“Everything was so good. My whole life had been aiming at this moment, and it was on. Nothing could stop it, failing an injury, but I don’t get injured so that wasn’t going to happen either.” 

And then he went to France. At the time, skateboarding was strictly an amateur sport. Professionals needed green cards, and Ralph didn’t have one. After returning from a photoshoot in Paris, Ralph was stopped at the airport, seized by the United States government and put on a plane. He went to Germany and wouldn’t return to the US for a full decade. Disillusioned, Ralph picked up the paintbrush – and the bottle.

“That’s all you can do. Deny the depression. You don’t have any other… I didn’t think I had other options. I was too stupid.”

In the words of skateboard distributor Radar, Ralph took to partying “like a bull to red”. Having reached the pinnacle of the sport only to have it all taken away inside of two years by a bureaucratic technicality, Ralph was drowning his sorrows. He returned to his whānau in New Zealand, and began a gradual drift away from the sport and out of the spotlight, remembered only by the hardcores as one of skateboarding’s great what-if stories. 

But his love for boardriding endured, and, as street skating began to overtake vert skating in mainstream popularity, Ralph moved on to surfing. Unlike skating, he says, surfing has more of a spiritual component, and soon he had added carving to his repertoire of obsessions. That move, says Ralph, saved his life.

Now in his 50s, Ralph lives on a farm in Taranaki. When he’s not surfing or carving, he’s feeding calves, riding quad bikes and accidentally electrocuting himself on the property’s fences. He’s not a rich man, but in hardcore skateboarding circles, everyone knows the name Lee Ralph. And three decades later, that’s enough. 

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