Don Clarke: Makes Iain Balshaw look like Minnie Mouse...There have been a few prodigious goal-kickers in our time, but only one has earned the nickname, 'The Boot.'
Deemed too big as a child for school rugby, Don Clarke instead played netball and club rugby for Kereone third grade under-18s, when he was only 12.
He joined Waikato at 17. At 6”2 and a nudge over 17 stones, critics called for him to join the pack, but his father, who had to console a then ten year old for arriving late for a Taranaki primary school trial after a 12-mile hike, encouraged him to hold firm his ambition to be a fullback.
Clarke scored 781 points in his 89 matches for New Zealand, which included 31 tests.
One of five brothers to play for Waikato, Clarke was also a talented cricketer, representing Waikato, Auckland and Northern Districts as a lively quick bowler.
Clarke was seriously injured in a car crash in 1997 when a 15-tonne truck crushed his utility vehicle. Diagnosed with melanoma in March, he died on December 29, 2002.
Outside of the rugby realm, in 1940, Walt Disney began serving as an informer for the FBI in LA. And in 1933, Hugh Gray supposedly took the first photos of the Loch Ness Monster and on this day in 1980, a formal proposal for the World Wide Web was published, and in 1992, the Church of England finally voted to allow women to become priests.
And it's
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov! As they say in Russian inventing circles, to young French whippersnapper, Francois Trinh Duc (22), Argentinean centre, Gonzalo Canale (26) England's tackle target, Charlie Hodgson (28) and Australian prop, 'Big' Ben Alexander (24)