Heart of a Champion (4 page)

Like many Australian kids, Greg learnt through experience, almost unconsciously, about the ocean. As he developed his skills as a surfer, he learnt where a wave would break and how it would behave. He would study the formations of waves and the characteristics of the different beaches, their rips and their best breaks. Greg knew where to enter and how to ‘duck dive' or ‘dolphin' through the beach break, how to harness a rip to travel out behind the breakers and how to position himself to take off for the right wave. He learnt to respect rips but not be frightened of them—how, if you were caught in one, to stay with it, not fight against it, let it take you ‘out the back', and then swim off to the side and swim back in. Later, in his triathlon career, he would always embrace the ocean swims with great confidence. ‘Even when I wasn't one of the faster swimmers, in my first couple of years in triathlon, from 1985 through to 1988, I felt comfortable because I knew I was in full control in the ocean.'

Noelene noticed that Greg started to blossom in the early years of high school. ‘The school had never been into athletics. Greg used to get there early and persuade the kids that they had to run from Punchbowl to Bankstown before school. They ended up winning lots of cross-countries and developed some brilliant runners. He was like a Pied Piper.'

These were hectic but wonderful days for Noelene and Pat, as they ferried the boys from sport to sport. Greg began to reveal his gift for connecting with people. He'd often sit with the older men and yarn away as they watched the games. He was a great listener, and would often surprise his parents with his powers of observation. They also began to notice Greg's determination, as Pat recalls. ‘He was always a caring person, but if he made up his mind he wanted to do something, you could never say no. He had to do it to prove a point. I don't know why, but he just had to prove that he could do it. He was like that with everything he did.'

To Greg, it was all natural. ‘I always enjoyed talking to people, especially the older ones, because they could tell you so much. I only had to be told to do something once. I might have been a bit of a larrikin but I listened to people I respected.'

Chapter 4
A New Start

S
OON AFTER HE ENTERED HIGH SCHOOL
, Greg's world changed when Pop remarried. The ensuing accommodation changes saw Noelene, Pat and the three boys move to Ruse, a newly developed suburb of Campbelltown, a satellite city about an hour south-west of Sydney's CBD. The Welch's new home was on one of the first streets in the suburb—a new start in a new world. Close by, near the Georges River, was a beautiful wooded area with creeks and rivers. The kids found swimming holes and open spaces to explore on their bikes.

The move meant Greg's after-school jobs had to go, but he was determined to stay at Punchbowl High even though it meant a convoluted 50-km (31.1-mile) round trip each day. Every morning he bolted through breakfast and ran to catch the 6.22 am bus, which linked with the 7.07 am train to Regents Park. There he changed trains to Punchbowl. Luckily, Punchbowl Boys High was a stone's throw from the station (sometimes literally). In fact, the rail line ran right along the school's back fence. When Greg arrived, the school was just over 20 years old, an unexceptional, light brown, 1950s brick pile of buildings striving to live up to its motto, ‘
Facta non verba
'—‘Deeds, not words'. Greg took it literally. ‘The first year at high school I remember doing a ton of sport, and no school work. I started in all the top classes, then my grades plummeted. I think I was destined to be a sportsman. I dreamed of always being a champion, but I really wasn't that good at anything, just average.'

When he got home after school, Greg continued to look after Justin. He'd bolt out of school just after 3 pm, catch one train, then swap lines to get to Campbelltown. There he'd get the bus and arrive home around 5 pm, in time to pick Justin up from the local primary school. Then he'd cook dinner by 5.30 and have it ready when everyone arrived home around 6 pm. ‘My running started to drop off, I didn't play footy anymore and, despite the surroundings, I didn't like living out there. But I did find friends.'

Around this time, Greg started playing a lot of squash. It started when he and Darren watched Noelene and Pat play in their competition. The two boys would pick up racquets during the breaks and after the matches. They'd be banging away on the darkened courts while the adults had their after-game drinks. As in so many sports, Greg was a natural. Noelene recalls: ‘Pat and I used to play in round robins and Greg used to come along—anything for sport. He'd sit up there and just watch—all concentration, taking in who was doing what. One day, we were short a player, so Greg took his shoes off, left his jeans on and started running around the court and hitting the ball like you wouldn't believe.'

By the time he was 14, Greg played number one in the men's A grade side. Pat was amazed at his progress over the years. ‘He was a freak at squash, he was absolutely brilliant. He could have won state titles, except that he played all his divisions through the week and if the snow was good, he'd go to the snow on the weekend with his friends.'

Once, during the NSW State championships, Greg played and won all his matches through the week and then won his semi-final on the Friday night. His mates arrived with news that it was blowing a blizzard on the ski-fields. So they jumped in the car and drove through the night to the snow, skied all day Saturday and then drove home early the next morning for a touch football game. Greg slipped on the icy ground in the first minute and broke his collarbone. Then he drove back to the squash centre to collect his runner-up trophy. Pat was left shaking his head. ‘He was in the final and he would have been the state champion. The other guy won it on a forfeit.'

It was to be a recurring feature of Greg's career: natural ability would propel him to the brink of major success, then the larrikin would chime in and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

He started to travel to squash tournaments, and met the Hopkins boys—Cameron, Bruce and Scott—and their family. They would become a large part of his adolescent life. One of the great attractions of spending time with the Hopkins boys was that they lived in ‘the Shire'. The Sutherland Shire, on the southern Sydney metropolitan coastal border, is one of the last local government districts in Sydney to retain the old-fashioned ‘shire' appellation, as distinct from municipality or council. Locals have always cherished the name and the attitude of mind that accompanies it. To Greg it was paradise. ‘Everything that you didn't have in Campbelltown was in the Shire—hardly any violence, beautiful rivers and incredible beaches. There was also a different attitude. In Campbelltown, it was all about just hanging around the malls or hanging—just getting into trouble. In the Shire it was about challenging yourself to be the best, especially at sport.'

At first, Greg and his brother Darren did everything together. Pat and Noelene took them to cricket, football, athletics, the beach. Then they began to specialise, and soon Greg's running attracted the attention of Frank McCaffery, a World War II veteran who'd been a prisoner-of-war on Crete. Frank became a respected local athletics coach and co-founded the Nowra Amateur Athletic Club. He was mentor to a team of promising runners, including future Commonwealth Games 5000-m (3.1-mile) gold medallist and multiple City to Surf winner Andrew Lloyd. They trained at Wyatt Park, adjacent to Lidcombe Oval, and went on camps down the south coast, where they honed their cross-country skills and developed their fitness on the hilly tracks around the Shoalhaven River.

Frank McCaffery died a few years ago, but he always maintained that if Greg had concentrated on running, he could have been up there with Australia's outstanding endurance runners, Steve Moneghetti and Robert de Castella.

By this time Greg had made up his mind that the Higher School Certificate was not for him, and so he decided to leave school in year 10. He'd always thought he'd do something in the building trade. He didn't want to go into printing, like his Dad and elder brother Darren, largely because he didn't want to be stuck inside. He'd done woodworking at school, and working in the fresh air appealed to him.

In January 1981 he was offered an apprenticeship by a family friend. Noelene wasn't convinced it was the right move.

‘I thought Greg should have stayed at school on a sporting scholarship. Any time they wanted someone to represent the school at sport, it was always Greg who was first out. Greg played all the teachers at squash and beat everybody. He should've stayed on a sporting scholarship but we had friends in the plastering game who offered him a job, so he went to work for them.'

Greg, on the other hand, was delighted. ‘It was a huge breakthrough to get an apprenticeship. It didn't matter what trade it was. I would have taken anything. It was an apprenticeship and I thought, “There's a future in an apprenticeship.”'

G
REG WAS BEAMING WITH PRIDE
when he signed on as an apprentice plasterer with a small company, run by family friends. It was a major step towards independence. However, he couldn't afford a car, so his employers had to pick him up on the way to a job or Greg had to get himself there by train—no fun when you're lugging around a bag of plasterer's tools.

Unfortunately, Greg's first flush of pride at securing his future didn't last long. The family friends who'd given him the job found themselves in financial difficulties and had to put him off after only 18 months. To add insult to injury, he discovered they'd also underpaid him. It was a sobering reality check. Pat helped Greg take his case to the Apprenticeship Commission where he won his back pay. But he was still without a job.

His luck changed during a squash game a couple of months later. ‘I was talking to this guy after a game where he'd beaten me in five sets and he said, “What do you do for a living?” I said, “I'm a plasterer.” He said, “I am too.” I told him I was out of work and I was still an apprentice, going to tech but I'd been put off. He said, “I'll talk to my boss and see if we've got any extra work.” He was as good as his word and called me the next week, telling me to give his boss a call.'

Greg made the call and Arthur Blizzard, owner of Plaster Linings of Loftus, agreed to take over his apprenticeship. Greg had struck pay dirt in two ways: first, Arthur and his wife Jan turned out to be wonderful employers and later great friends, and second, their office was in the Shire. Greg's friendship with the Hopkins boys had developed and he ended up living with them in the Shire during the week, rather than spending long hours travelling to and from Campbelltown.

Greg was not a natural plasterer. For a start, it helps to be tall when you're trying to hold up plaster sheets, and reaching up from scaffolds to plaster joins and cornices. Greg wasn't called ‘Shorty' for nothing: he'd hit his full height of about 1.67 m (or 5 foot 6 inches in the old money). But he attacked his new trade with his usual fierce determination. Each day he'd turn up resplendent in a T-shirt that Noelene had insisted on ironing. He was surely the neatest and tidiest apprentice plasterer in the state. He would also sport his distinctive plasterer's hat—a natty square, foam-padded number designed to protect his head while it supported plaster sheets as he positioned and nailed them above him. The padding was meant to help avoid the dreaded ‘plasterers' bald spot'.

As the apprentice, Greg floated between teams of two plasterers. He would work below them, ‘buttering up' cornices—putting lips of cement on the edge of sheets—and handing them up so the teams didn't have to constantly climb up and down their scaffolds. Sometimes he'd team up with Arthur on a scaffold and hone his skills, hauling up sheets, some up to 5 m long, balancing them on his head while he reached into his pouch, grabbed a nail and his hammer, lined up the sheet with the adjoining one and then hammered in the nails backhand. ‘You hammer backhand as a plasterer and then you've got to turn around while the sheet is still on your head so you can get to the other side and stabilise it by putting two nails in. That's why it rips your hair out.'

After some time, one of the other plasterers left, and Greg became a tradesman, teaming up with Dick Harding, then almost 60 and a gentleman. Greg quickly developed a special relationship with both Arthur and Dick. ‘Arthur was a great man, a great family man, and we got on like friends. We were all friends at that job. Dick and I used to get on so well. We'd get there in the morning and he'd say, “Come here, you little bugger.” And he'd shake my hand. Every day, he'd shake hands before we'd start work. And he'd make me warm up with funny loosening exercises and then he'd say, “OK mate, you're ready to go.” From the very moment I started working with him, he accepted me as his partner. I ended up being very fast and efficient. And I was getting fit. Is there a better way to work your upper body than to lug around heavy sheets and work in backhand?'

During this time most of Greg's sporting energy went on squash, and the Hopkins family played an increasing role in his life. ‘They were always inviting me to come and stay with them. Then they lost their mother to cancer and they lived with their Dad, who was a very successful businessman. In the end the boys moved to their own unit and I used to stay with them a lot, sleeping on the couch.'

While Greg was learning the ropes as a plasterer, he was also beginning his apprenticeship as a serious athlete. He was developing his lifelong discipline in training, even while he worked a full-on eight-hour day, six days a week. It was the start of his habit of squeezing every minute of fun and activity out of every waking hour. He became renowned for his ability to crash as soon as his head hit the pillow. His friend Bruce Hopkins always reckoned Greg had a special switch behind his ear. ‘Yeah, just turn Welchy's switch off and he's gone. Out like a light.'

Around this time Greg embarked on his first serious romance. Leonie Denny worked at the Payless Shoes shop in Cronulla. He thought she was really cute. Greg did some homework and found out she was a friend of a friend. Leonie's sister Michelle was keen on Tony Unicomb, an out-standing triathlete, who was due to compete in the upcoming 1985 Great Lakes International Ironman. Greg snapped into action and did some lateral thinking. He found some accommodation and offered to drive Michelle to Forster to watch Tony. ‘Tony had a crash that day but he did finish. I ran the last 25 km (15.5 miles) with him. Michelle won Tony. I won Leonie over and eventually got the girl.'

Greg was around 20 when he started going out with Leonie. The romance would last about five years. Leonie was a fine water polo player and Greg would follow her to games, running there for training; he would sometimes run 30 km (18.6 miles) to help out with the scoring or timekeeping. ‘We shared a lot together. We became very close, a great girlfriend and boyfriend. We're still good friends.'