Netters:
I have been following Australian athletics for some 65 years
now---beginning, as an 12-year-old by listening to the Davis Cup battes that
featured John Bromwich and Adrian Quists for the Aussies and the immortal
Don Budge forr the victorious USA team. This gives me a little perspective
on the claim that Cathy Freeman may be the greatest athlete who has ever
represented the world's largest island or smallest continent---take your
pick.
To begin with, we cannot be parochial about this matter. The claim, as
I read it, was that she was perhaps her country's greatest athlete, not the
greatest in "athletics," the international term for what we know as track
and field. So it covers all sports.
Taking population into consideration, Australia is probably the
world's greatest athletic country. It is also the most sports-devoted
nation. Its history in sports is rich and varied: athletics, swimming,
tennis, equestrian of many kinds, its own version of football (a game which
would leave our overstuffed NFL and college linemen panting after a few
minutes of action) andm, of course, cricket. (Its greatest athlete, by the
way, comes from that esoteric occupation--Sir Donald Bradman, who I believe,
is still with us (he was living at the time of the Sydney Olympics).
Freeman's accomplsihments in track and field pale besides those of
Dawn Fraser, to name just one of the country's many swimming stars. (It was
Australia which revolutionizd that sport when it teenegsrs put an abrupt end
to U.S. Olympic domination in 1956 at Melbourne (and without any help from
illicit drugs). Australian tennis stars have a 100-year history: the names
of its stars are a history of the sport.
But even leaving the comparison to our sport, there are problems
with the claim. Walt Murphy describes uite well the reaction of Freeman's
win at Melbourne and calls it the high point of his Olympic viewing, which
has been extensive, but does not include 1960 (one he would loe to have been
at as his first cousin, Tom, was a member of the U.S. team that year. And it
was there that I had my own Olymplic highlight: the 1500M with the WR
victory of Herb Elliott, my own choice as Australia's greatest in our sport.
I am afraid that I must agree with John Molvar that PC has a lot to
do with the claims for Freeman;s supremacy. But, even there, she was not the
pioneer for Australia's native population---that honor must go to tennis
champ Eva Goolagong (Cawley). And, anyway. this factor should have no place
in deciding who is the greatest athlete. (Jackie Robinson has, obviously, a
unique and honored place in the history of baseball, but his name does not
surface when the question of who is the greatest player in that sport's
history is debated.)
Ed Grant
