CROQUET NEWS: Veteran Winds Back Clock to Claim NZ Title

22 April 2009
Dannevirke, Tararua, NZ
in Hawke's Bay Today, Hastings, Hawke's Bay, NZ

Tony Stephens with the NZ trophy and old newspaper clipping.

How many people can say they have won a national title as a teenager then emulated that feat almost 50 years later?

Former world surfing champion Marco Occhilupo of Australia, won the title when he was 16 years old but re-enacted his effort 16 years after.

While not 50 years on, it's still a remarkable achievement.

Well, veteran Hawke's Bay croquet player Tony Stephens joins that elite group.

In winning the New Zealand singles championship at Dannevirke during the Easter weekend, the 66-year-old Tukituki orchardist etched his name on the silverware he first left an impression on as a naive 16-year-old schoolboy.

"My sister in Dannevirke (Marie) pointed out to me the other day that she read in a copy of the Reader's Digest that Marco Occhilupo had won a title when he was around 16 and then got caught up with drugs and booze and all that and did it again at the age of 32," Stephens tells SportToday.

When Stephens was 16 in the 1960s, he won the New Zealand Open in Auckland, which included the singles, doubles and handicap titles all rolled up in the Open.

Several years later the Open was fragmented into singles, handicaps and doubles national championships to attract more players and offer shorter tournaments, says Stephens.

In the Easter championship at Dannevirke, he was up against a tougher calibre of opposition compared to his teenage years.

It included the New Zealand men's squad players competing in the world championship in Palm Beach, Florida, in the United States early next month. Otago's Anthony Ritchie, Aucklander Robert Lowe and Wellingtonian Drew Phillip were among the field, with Paul Skinley, from the capital city, who has elected not to go to the world champs despite his selection.

Stephens, the former US Open croquet doubles champion who won the title on the substitute course that professional golfer Michael Campbell won his major golf crown on, took up polevaulting and decathlon after winning his first national croquet title in the sixties.

The late Ashley Heenan, of Wellington, who was the conductor of the New Zealand Youth Orchestra, had also won the NZ Croquet Open.

"I beat him in both the Open and the singles after he was unbeaten for three years," Stephens said of Heenan who had won all Open titles bar the handicap one.

Ironically the year Stephens reigned in the 1960s Heenan had asked the teenager to be his doubles partner. The pair won the doubles title but, unsuspectingly and to his dismay, Heenan hadn't envisaged "an upstart" to topple him in the pursuit of other titles.

Explains Stephens: "My handicap was sort of mid-range so no one had seen much of me. I ended up outplaying him and winning everything."

A then wide-eyed Stephens, who was the only other teenage competitor with fellow Dannevirke player Ralph Brown, had said to Heenan that someday he was going to be a minus handicap player like him.

"I remember he sort of gave me that look. We were naive and, quite frankly, we didn't know what we were going into.

"If you asked us to shoot anything we could but we certainly weren't battle-weary at all."

Stephens only ended up in the Dannevirke nationals by chance during Easter. Englishman and regular Bay visitor Jerry Guest, who drives an apple truck for the Stephens family over summer, had talked him into entering.

As it turned out, Guest got a bout of shingles and Stephens had to go to the tourney.

Competing in the New Zealand Open in Wanganui next year is on Stephens' agenda. It's a tourney he has been a runner-up in several times since winning as a teenager.

For the past six years, no Kiwis have etched their name on the silverware because it has a strong foreign contingent competing for it.

Stephens says the beauty of playing sports such as croquet means players can stay around to compete at a ripe old age because it was more a test of mental fortitude rather than a physical one.