‘Organiser of organisers’ woman ahead of her time
Squash great
WHEN Susie Simcock become the first woman to be president of the World Squash Federation in 1996, she broke a glass ceiling for women that to a less indomitable person might have seemed shatterproof.
Mrs Simcock, who was 81, died in Auckland.
Dame Susan Devoy said Mrs Simcock ‘‘was ahead of her time in so many ways. At the world level the sport was dominated by men then, so it was quite phenomenal that she would become the world president’’.
How maleoriented was the international squash world when she became the game’s leader for six years? At one official dinner in Pakistan she was asked if she would mind having her place card read Mr Susie Simcock so the waiters would not be offended that she was sitting at the top table.
‘‘Everything she did,’’ Dame Susan said, ‘‘was with a smile.’’
During her childhood, on a farm north of Feilding, she once showed the grit that went with her natural charm.
As a 6yearold, she had to bike to school on a gravel road, a round journey of 16km. A boy in her class stole and hid the chain on her bike. A little later he did it again. On the third occasion, she bit his upper arm so hard that decades later at a school reunion he rolled up his sleeve to show her he still had the scar.
Her philosophy of life was shaped while boarding at Diocesan School in Auckland by the headmistress, a dynamic woman called Elizabeth Robertson, who taught her ‘‘you can do anything if you set your mind to it’’, Mrs Simcock’s husband, Jon, said.
A natural athlete, while studying physiotherapy in Dunedin (where she met her future husband while he was at medical school), she represented New Zealand Universities at hockey and athletics.
After graduation, she worked in what is now the intensive care unit at Auckland Hospital where she mainly cared for polio patients, pioneering breathing techniques to allow them to overcome a disease that had put them in ventilators.
Squash became a passion when, as a young mother, she joined the College Rifles club. Starting from scratch as an adult, she was playing A grade within three years.
‘‘She had a wicked swing,’’ Dame Susan recalled.
‘‘If you saw someone with a black eye or a cut lip, the first thing you asked was, ‘Have you been playing with Susie?’ ’’
Mrs Simcock would first manage Susan Devoy, then only 17, in a New Zealand team in 1981, and it would prove to be a brilliant partnership. Their last journey together was to Ireland in 1985, when Dame Susan won her first world title.
‘‘I was really too young to appreciate it at the time but looking back I realise she had the knack of allowing you to be who you were, which was great for me. She was an incredibly hard worker and, because she was a physio, after a long day looking after us, she’d do whatever was needed as a physio to get you back on the court. Then she also found time to cook the best shortbread in the entire world,’’ Dame Susan said.
‘‘Susie was the organiser of organisers. After I won the worlds she set out to bring the world championships here in 1987, and she did.’’
Honours would rain down on Mrs Simcock. In 2004 she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to sports administration and squash. She was a board member of the New Zealand Olympic Committee for 12 years, and was awarded the New Zealand Olympic Order in 2008.
She received the Halberg
Sparc New Zealand leadership award for sports administration in 2009. New Zealand Olympic president Mike Stanley said ‘‘she was a true reformer and champion for what is right in the world’’.
Two days after she was diagnosed with the cancer that would take her life, she attended a meeting of the panel working to reinvigorate New Zealand squash.
‘‘Really, she was just bloody brilliant,’’ Dame Susan said.
Mrs Simock is survived by her husband and their children, Robyn, Andrew and Jeremy. — The New Zealand Herald