THE SPORT OF ROWING “And you believed it, and you went for it and just did it.”5679 Dudley Storey: “I think it was after the 1978 New Zealand Championship Regatta, and there used to be a water ski club where the finish tower is now at Karapiro, and we used to lease the clubhouse for after-match functions. They had an old piano, and this year we arranged to have it left because obviously this was going to be a boozy night. “Rusty could play the guitar, he could sing well, and he played the piano. So Rusty starts playing the piano that night, and everybody gathers around, and we all start singing and it’s getting more and more raucous. So after about five or ten minutes, Rusty says, ‘This bloody piano is too big. It’s got too much stuff on it,’ so he pulls the front board off and sticks it over on the side and everybody cracks up laughing. “Then he says, ‘The bloody bottom board shouldn’t be here. It’s holding the noise back,’ so he reaches down by the foot peddle, pulls the bottom piece off, throws that away, then takes the lid off, then blow me down if he doesn’t start pulling all the notes out. He just reaches inside the piano, and they’ve got these little hammers that strike the wires. He says, ‘I haven’t played this one for a bloody hour, so I’m going to take this one out!’ A few minutes later, he does it again. “In the end, he’s playing this bare piano frame with about four keys left, and he’s playing chopsticks or something. “By this stage, the guy in charge comes in and sees these bits of this bloody piano all around the room. He is bloody beside himself. “Rusty just tells him, ‘It’s okay!’ and within fifteen minutes, he had that whole piano back together, every piece in the right place, and we pushed it up against the wall 5679 Veldman, op. cit. and sang Bye Bye Blackbird as we walked out the door. “That . . . was Rusty!”5680 Tony Brook, who would eventually row bow in the 1982 New Zealand World Champion Eight for Harry Mahon, the next great New Zealand coach, tells a typical story (and you have to imagine it being told in a Kiwi accent): “I first met the grite Rusty Robertson in 1975 in a Colts [Under-23] NZ eight. What an experience! “In 1975, we had just four weeks intensive training before we took on the U23 Aussie eights plus the senior Australian Heavyweight Eight at Ballarat. “Two days before the big race, Rusty woke up his ‘raw recruits’ at 11pm, insisting that we dress up in our No. 1s and all get in the back of his station wagon. Sparks flying from the tailboard, he drove us down to the local pub where the quietly confident senior Aussie Eight was having a few quiet drinks in a corner. “Out of the car, Rusty lined us up and ‘No smiling! No barked out orders. talking!’ “Into the bar we marched from tallest, Tim Logan at 6’ 7” [201cm], to the shortest, me at 6’3” [191cm], where he lined us up and ordered nine No. 8oz5681 glasses of beer, which we downed in one gulp, immediately turned on our heels and out we marched again, into station wagon and back to hotel and in bed again by 11:45. “What the Aussies made of it all we’ll never know, but we felt ‘on a mission’ and we were having a ball . . . “On the morning of the final, Rusty sat us in a circle in quiet corner of the local clubhouse and handed each of us the coveted New Zealand ‘black singlet’ wrapped by his own hand in brown paper, and asked each of us in turn to unwrap it, 5680 Storey, op. cit. 5681 227cc 1562
