A family mourns
emma.greenwood@news.com..au ELITE surf lifesaving may not have the same presence it once did but the past week shows it remains a part of the Australian sporting DNA.
Ironman racing – and it was just the men in the early days before the professional series paved the way for the women’s equivalent – was as big in the late 1980s and 1990s as NRL and AFL are today.
With pay television and multiple free-to-air channels still a distant dream, the sport was broadcast to a captive audience in those days, with the Mercer bothers, Trevor Hendy, Grant Kenny and Guy Leech household names.
Audiences of more than a million were not uncommon as families gathered around the TV on Sunday afternoons to watch some of the fittest athletes on the planet do battle.
That’s why Dean Mercer’s death on Monday hit so hard.
It was a dreadful shock that a fit 47-year-old could be taken so quickly and heart-breaking that a young family had lost their husband and father. But it was that much tougher be- cause we all felt we knew “Deano”. Everyone could see a bit of themselves in Mercer.
He wasn’t the history maker, like Kenny, who won the Australian junior and senior ironman titles at the same day, or Leech, who won the inaugural Coolangatta Gold.
He many not have been as naturally talented as sublime oceanman Hendy or even brother Darren, who he waged monumental battles with for years. Mercer was the great fighter. The larrikin who seemed to never take for granted the gift of making a living out of the sport he loved.
And he was part of a family. Not just the one he made with wife Reen and sons Brayden, Rory, Lachlan and Joshua; or the ‘royalty’ he came from with brother Darren and niece Jordan, both, like Dean, Kellogg’s series champions.
There’s a reason they call surf lifesaving a “movement”. People join clubs as nippers and are quickly brought into the family fold, making mates for life. Those mates are hurting this week. As are we all.