Nearly 30 years on from Heath Davis’s experience, queer athletes are still struggling with prejudice, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in The Bulletin.
Heath Davis kept his two lives separate
This morning, the final episode of The Spinoff’s documentary series on Aotearoa’s lost sporting legends, Scratched, debuted. It is the story of former Black Cap Heath Davis and is the first time an international male cricketer from New Zealand has spoken publicly about their experience as a gay professional athlete. Davis, whose story features on the front page of the Dominion Post this morning, is something of a cult cricketing hero who played for Wellington and New Zealand in the 90s. In a feature published this morning, director of the episode and editor of The Spinoff, Madeleine Chapman, discusses his career and his very human, complicated and nuanced grappling with who he is.
Growing up with the myth of Heath Davis
Davis’s New Zealand cricketing career ended in 2004. He moved to Brisbane and only really surfaced again in the public eye in 2009 after a work accident resulted in a portion of his left foot being amputated. Notorious for bowling no-balls, Davis joked that the amputation meant “no more no-balls”. Davis was selected for the Black Caps in 1994 and was one of the fiercest pace bowlers in the world at the time. The Bounce’s Dylan Cleaver played with Davis in age-group rep teams in the Hutt Valley and Wellington sides. On The Spinoff this morning, he recalls being nowhere near good enough to deal with him.
The marked contrast between queer elite female and male athletes
The claim that Davis is our first gay Black Cap is of course, entirely hypothetical. In the documentary, Stephen Mather notes the statistical improbability of Davis actually being the first gay first class cricketer in New Zealand. Out and proud are still choices for every individual to make, and the decision to tell his story is Davis’s alone. But the lack of publicly gay athletes, especially in traditionally male-dominated codes like cricket, league and rugby, does raise questions about our sporting culture. Alice Soper discusses the stark contrast with women’s sports where, as Soper writes “Queer wāhine athletes have been so normalised across so many codes that it’s not unusual to see partners and wives end up playing alongside each other.”
Nearly 30 years on, queer athletes are still struggling with prejudice
Today’s news comes as researchers note a rise in anti-LGBT hate in New Zealand, and only a few days after an incident over the wearing of a pride jersey at the Manly Sea Eagles, decades after Davis’s experience. Sharni Williams, a gay sevens player in Australia, described the rejection of the jersey by several Manly players as a “punch in the face”. Ian Roberts, who became the first rugby league player to come out as gay while playing for Manly in 1995, said the player revolt “breaks my heart”. Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks player Toby Rudolf has since backed the introduction of a pride round, saying he is sexually fluid and that “love is love”.
