Portrait of a commentator
As an eight-year-old kid, Keith Quinn would sprint from a rugby game at Athletic Park to Wellington Hospital where his father lay dying to give him a blow-by-blow account of the match.
The young Quinn would respond to his father’s written questions about the game, throat cancer having robbed him of his voice.
‘‘I would give him a running commentary, the scores, the players, if there’d been a fight on the pitch. And here I am, 60-plus years later still talking about sport.’’
Quinn – with more than four decades behind the mic as a commentator – is the David Attenborough of sport.
His CV reads like a bucket list for the sports obsessed: Ten Olympic Games, three Paralympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, one Youth Olympics, 110 cities on the sevens tournament circuit.
His obsession stems from his Canadian father, whose love of softball inspired him to establish a pumice-white diamond pitch in his local town where teams would come from miles to play.
‘‘My first sporting memories are of these games. Teams used to come from all over the North Island to play the Benneydale Tigers on their own diamond pitch.’’
Quinn grew up one of five sons in that small King Country town.
His father, who died when Quinn was eight, would come home from work, gather his boys for a game of rugby – five minutes a side – father against sons, commentating throughout play and rehashing the game over supper in his ‘radio voice’.
The family moved to Wellington when his father became ill, moving into a house overlooking Athletic Park – holy ground for Quinn from the get-go.
The young Quinn harboured an ‘impossible dream’ to become a ballboy there. ‘‘I used to wonder if it was beyond all hope that I could be chosen to be on the field, close to the game.’’
He invented teams and played them in imaginary games. There were the ‘All Blacks’, with names gleaned from the phone book for players save one – Keith Quinn, the star and big-time scorer, obviously.
He would read Sports Digest stories as if he were broadcasting them to the world.
After listening to his hero Winston McCarthy commentate a 1956 test between the All Blacks and the Springboks, Quinn went into his back yard and re-enacted the entire match, both playing and commentating.
Leaving Wellington College at 17, he knew he wanted a career in sports broadcasting.
His mother, a cracking croquet player, wanted all her sons to follow their dreams and so put in a word with a friend at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation.
He was immediately offered a cadetship.
But while his friends expected to hear him commentating an All Blacks game by the weekend, Quinn was making tea and changing the roller towel in the men’s loo. He would spend years shifting around from record archiving (fascinating) to accounts (horrible beyond horrible) before finally landing in sport and eventually, his first radio commentary – the Gallaher Shield final at Eden Park in 1971.
From there his career was on a roll.
In 1972 he was dispatched to the Olympic Games in Munich, though he ended up reporting back about the terrorist attacks in the Olympic Village more than any sporting triumph.
The first All Black game he commentated was a test against England in Eden Park in 1973.
Quinn’s colleagues still rib him, saying we would have won if only if Bill McCarthy had commentated.
He’s toured with the All Blacks 35 times. In the early days he used to be fairly cosy with the All Black camp, even travelling on the team’s bus. He could ride along provided everything said on the bus was off the record.
As the media grew and developed he was consigned with all the other journalists to their own bus.
Picking the top All Blacks during his career is easy for Quinn: Colin Meads and Jonah Lomu. Both changed the game by the way they played it. Top coaches include Laurie Mains and John Hart.
The only time Quinn has ever been lost for words in his long career was Lomu’s remarkable stampede in the World Cup semifinal of 1995 when he trampled over and swatted his English opponents away to score an early try. Quinn dropped his notes and all he managed was a ‘Lomu, oh oh!...’
He considers himself a lucky man, indulging his love of sport for his entire career.
He was circumspect in 2007 when he was axed in a TVNZ restructuring, saying he’d had a good run. (He switched to Maori TV and later went freelance.)
For the past few years, he’s been working on the World Rugby Sevens circuit.
He’s just back from Rio Olympics and having a breather before the next gig.
At 70 he’s still raring to go.