They say that in life timing is everything.
In sport timing is crucial. The era that you play in can determine what you achieve. There have been many great individuals who have not won what they should have because those around them at International level at that time were not of the same calibre. Players have played for unfashionable clubs and again have been stymied from winning trophies to reflect their talent and ability.
Then, as good as you may have been there has been someone in the same era who was as good, if not better. The German Decathlete Juergen Hingsen springs to mind, and how Briton Daley Thompson always seemed to pip him when it mattered. Hingsen’s achievements are often overlooked, so too the fact that his ability helped push Thompson to greater achievement.
One of the hardest things to time is when a top athlete decides enough is enough. Knowing he time has come to retire, to hang up the boots, to take the field for the last time.
Sometimes even though you have made that decision, and have announced that this will be your final game it doesn’t go to script.
Sir Donald Bradman’s last Test innings is famous for the fact that cricket’s greatest run machine was out for a duck at the Oval, bowled second ball by Eric Hollies. Bradman had scored 19 centuries in Ashes Tests, seven more than any other batsman, he needed just four runs to finish his career with an average of 100. Everyone was sure that he could achieve that. Very few give Hollies credit for the delivery that bowled “the Don,” the focus is on the great man’s failure. Hollies was no slouch as a leg break bowler averaging 20.94 in first class cricket, and despite only playing 13 Test matches.
The great Pele’s last game of football was an exhibition match played between the two clubs that he played for, Santos and New York Cosmos. He played a half for each side and scored the equaliser for New York before being substituted. Despite 77,000 packing the New Jersey Giants Stadium, it was not the farewell many felt he deserved.
Maradona’s final game was far from what he would have hoped. After serving a ban for 18 months after failing a drugs test at the ’94 World Cup he returned to Argentina to play for his first club Boca Juniors. He was fresh from a rehab centre in Switzerland and had hired banned Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson as his personal trainer. In August 1997 Maradona failed another drug test. The event became a soap opera with a federal judge’s injunction ordering the AFA to refrain from imposing a ban on the star, due to ‘alleged irregularities in the urine test that would be dismissed months later.’ “An exceptional person deserved an exceptional solution,” Eduardo Duhalde, Governor of Buenos Aires said at the time. The Super Classico against River Plate would be his last game. He was substituted at half time. There was no farewell substitution, just a brutal end.
Zinedine Zidane’s final game was even more spectacular. Here was a player that had won everything there was to win in the game. He had lifted the World Cup, The European Cup, the Champions League title, Serie A title and La Liga title, as well as numerous individual awards including three times being voted the FIFA World Player of the year. His head-butt on Italian Marco Matterazzi led to him being sent off in the World Cup Final, and many believe cost France the chance of retaining the Cup.
These stories all prove that as a player things do not always go as you planned or hoped, and show why yesterday Mark Knowles final game in the green and gold of Australia against New Zealand at the Commonwealth Games was so special.
Yes, Knowles missed a penalty stroke that would have sealed the match in the 54th minute that would have made it 3-0 to Australia, but one could not help thinking that it was almost as if that was the way he would have wanted it. As much as Knowles strives for perfection every time he walks onto a pitch, it would have been too perfect an end. He is a man who shies away from personal accolades and would no doubt have found such a finish embarrassing. ‘It’s about the team,’ ‘its about this bunch of blokes’ he has frequently stated, and he would have wanted it to remain that way, and not have a penalty stroke steal the limelight away from the team.
Australia’s Kookaburras won their sixth consecutive Commonwealth Games Gold medal, in a tournament that saw them unbeaten, scoring 20 goals and conceding just three in six matches.
Knowles has had a remarkable career and should be hailed as one of Australia’s greatest all time athletes, but sadly due to the sport he plays being given scant media coverage his achievements have flown under the radar. When he was announced as the flag bearer for the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast many seemed surprised. Yet his credentials were second to none. This was a great choice, and for once possibly not a choice to satisfy the public.
Knowles like Zidane has won everything that his sport has to offer. He is one of only four players to have won the FIH Junior Men’s player of the year award and then go on and win the FIH World Player of the Year; the others being Jamie Dwyer, Robert van der Horst of the Netherlands and Arthur van Doren of Belgium.
He has won the Azlan Shah Cup, the Champions Trophy, the Hockey World League, the World Cup and was part of Australia’s only Olympic Gold medal winning Hockey team. At club level he has won the Hoofdeklasse in the Netherlands with Rotterdam, the Australian Hockey League with Queensland, the Hockey India League with Jaypee Punjab Warriors.
Ask any athlete who has experienced success and they will tell you one of the hardest things to maintain is that hunger for more success, that desire to be better and the aim to play the perfect tournament or game. Somehow Mark Knowles has done that for the past 15 years.
Knowles is a natural leader. He is a very unassuming man. He will greet you with a cheery smile and will engage with anyone, but he has that indefinable air about him. His calmness belies the steel that coursed through his veins and the competitive glint in his eye. This was a man that after five minutes or less in his company you would follow him anywhere. That is in itself a rare gift. Never has he thrust himself into the limelight, it has always been about the team. It has always been about that group of players.
However it has been more than that. Knowles has called himself ‘a Hockey nerd.’ He loves the game he played. He respects the players of the past and what it means to wear the famed shirt of the Kookaburras. He has made sure as he became a senior player that the values associated with that shirt are instilled into every new player that comes into the squad. That it is always about the collective, and not the individual.
Knowles was the youngest player in the team when Australia won Gold in Athens in 2004. It was a sign of his determination that he made that squad. He broke his ankle following his first selection to the national side in 2003. He had to spend 10 weeks in a cast before he could return to light training and then he re-broke the same ankle!
When he returned from Athens after winning the Gold medal that may have been the moment that his leadership came to the fore. Talking in the book “Australia’s Hockey Grail” Knowles revealed to me what happened when he returned to Perth.
“That was the first time I felt the full significance of the Gold medal. About a week later we had a big party, just at a pub here in Perth, and there were guys from 1992, 1996, 2000 and the ’88 Olympics who came and were crying with emotion that finally someone had done it. I knew all these guys from watching, but I had only been in Perth a year or so and I hadn’t been around these guys all the time. That was the first time I realised how important the moment was for hockey in Australia. To have those guys as emotional, as into it as we were, I thought to myself ‘wow, I’ve been watching these guys and imagine if I’d lost. Would I be happy that someone else had won?’ I looked at those guys and I thought, ‘Yeah, I would be now after seeing that.’
You can guarantee that the next team from Australia that climbs to the top of the podium to claim Gold at an Olympic Games, Mark Knowles will be one of the first to congratulate them. The reason? That’s simple, because “its all about this group of blokes.”
Thank you Mark for being the player you have been, but more importantly for the way you have carried yourself. Umpires will no doubt be glad that you are gone, but you have been a great leader, and ambassador for hockey and Australia. Hopefully those that you are guiding at the Queensland Institute of Sport will appreciate how lucky they are to have such a leader as a mentor, and in time they step up and become leaders in their own right. Enjoy retirement.
