Barry Wynks puts able-bodied athletes to the sword
Barry Wynks has never had a disabled car park.
Despite being born with a disabled arm and leg, he will tell you he has spent 45 years of his life trying not to be disabled and the past 20 working in that field, helping disabled people into sport to enhance their lives.
The three-times Commonwealth Games bowler, a silver medallist from Glasgow 2014 and best known as Winkles or Wynksey, was recently crowned Manawatu¯ ’s latest legend of sport.
He has never dwelled on the cause of his disability.
He was born in 1952, pre-thalidomide, otherwise he quipped he might have won millions in compensation.
In his remarkable life, there have been many impediments.
When the Takaro Table Tennis Club nominated him to play in the A grade, the Manawatu¯ association deemed him too disabled to play in such a prestigious grade.
Soon after, on a ladder night, he fixed that, when, as a B grader, he beat all of the lower A graders. He went on to a high rank of 11 in singles, and that was a national ranking.
Years later, in the Takaro bowls singles when he played Ken Galloway, the bottom half of Wynks’ artificial wooden leg snapped as he played a shot.
That would happen every three weeks. Now, they’re made of fibreglass or titanium.
Wynks asked if he could fetch a spare leg from his car, only for Galloway to insist play be continuous and an incensed Wynks went on to beat him, hopping about on one leg.
In his youth he did a lot of competitive swimming – yes, with one arm when he would knock out one kilometre every morning at the Lido pool.
That led to him receiving the seond-highest distinction award for lifesaving.
At 12, he played water polo for Manawatu¯ with one arm, alongside Peter Shaw, the future international bowler.
When Wynks took up bowls in 1998-99, he was 45 and he believed no-one wanted to play with him.
So, he had to cajole table tennis mates and leftovers to play pairs.
At golf, in about 1997, he remembers shooting 83 at the Palmerston North Golf Club, dropping putts and chips with one arm using Bob Charles left-handed clubs.
He’d always wanted to break 90 and when he went to bed that night, reliving each hole, he figured he would never beat that so it was time to move on from golf.
His table tennis started at home on the kitchen table when he was 10, 200 metres away from St Stephens School on the corner of Ferguson St and Botanical Rd.
Sometimes it was with future golf pro Craig Perks, after they had played driveway cricket.
Wynks joined the Takaro Table Tennis Club in 1962, when he was the first of the ‘‘poached players’’, and has been there ever since, being club captain for pretty well 40 years.
A committee meeting had to be convened to admit him.
One year, he won the Manawatu¯ under-16 boys’ table tennis singles and a woman named Linda won her title in the same hall. Years later, she came back to table tennis. They met and married and have two daughters, one of whom, Hayley Underwood, recently swam the length of Lake Taupo¯ .
As a youngster at Freyberg High School, Wynks even tried rugby, as a halfback, because he had the attitude and aggro for it.
One day, Murray Sisley brought him in to a senior cricket match to bat at 11, facing pace bowler Alec Astle. Trouble is, Wynks couldn’t wear pads and had never worn a box, and his good leg was only good for a gallop of five yards, 17 short of the length of a cricket pitch.
He is now a life member of Takaro Table Tennis and of Manawatu¯ . As far back as 1982, aged 30, he was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal at Government House in Wellington for services to the sport. As a perk, parliamentarian Bruce Beetham took Wynks to the Beehive for lunch.
His eyes were opened to supposed disabilities when he was in a bus at the Manchester Commonwealth Games.
A team of Kenyans walked off the bus, pulled out their wheelchairs and wheeled themselves on to the bowling green. Wynks and co beat them, but after that it took a few years for disabled bowls to be brought back to the Games.
Another time, he heard a supposedly blind Australian bowler call out: ‘‘Oi, they’re using a pink jack.’’ Then he walked around people, despite being technically blind.
Bowls selector Denis Duffy picked Wynks as a 4-year bowler for the Manawatu¯ team in 2003, which Wynks said was a disaster. But, in 2018, he was still in the rep team, with 15 centre titles to his name – 14 from Manawatu¯ and the other from Whanganui.
The Takaro Sports Club has been his life, aside from one year when he went to bowl for Te Kawau when he had been unbeaten in singles, only to be left out of the club interclub team. He figures his funeral will be held at Takaro.