Dress code just as important as addressing the code
It’s the car park of Settlers Hotel, Whangarei a sunny early afternoon in 1987 and the All Black trial to choose the first World Cup squad is a couple of hours away.
The young guy, new to the national game joined his colleagues. He wore an open neck shirt, jeans and a sweat shirt. Tidy, but no more.
There before him stood Sir Terry McLean, Don Cameron, Ron Palenski, Alex Veysey, Lindsay Knight, Bob Howitt, giants of New Zealand sports journalism. All wore ties and jackets.
One of them sidled over and, very quietly, said: “You might like to nip back to your room and slip a jacket and tie on.”
There was a definite dress code for the big occasions back then. Option one: respond that you were your own man and you’d wear what you fancied. But I took option two. This was esteemed company for a young man feeling his way into the big time. When these men spoke; you listened.
All of them ( and I include Dick and then you’d find it slipping into your own copy, almost by osmosis,” Young recalls.
Many journalists have called Cameron a mentor.
I was one of them. As an impressionable teenager who had just discovered the joys of cricket, I was mesmerised by his vivid descriptions, and religiously snipped his stories from the Herald, pasting them in scrapbooks.
A decade later, I sat at a desk next to him, and was given the responsibility of posting his hundreds of Christmas cards while he was on tour.
Sportswriter and broadcaster Phil Gifford was another. With “DJ- like accuracy”, he recalls first meeting Cameron on July 29, 1964 at the Brittenden of The Press, a fine man and wonderful crafter of words), had — and in the cases of Palenski, Knight and Howitt have — their individual strengths and distinctive ways of going about their work, but they shared one bond: they loved their sport.
They were men of decisive opinions and initially operated in an era where there were no live television images to allow freedom of interpretation. They painted pictures for the reader.
They were significant as men who helped shape opinions of New Zealand and, indeed, international sport for the country.
Cameron ( DJ from now on) was a mentor and companion on rugby Cornwall Arms hotel in Thames, after the Auckland rugby team had beaten Thames Valley. Gifford was a 17- yearold forestry labourer, who desperately wanted to become a journalist.
“DJ put up with my callow ramblings and said something like ‘ Journalism is a wonderful way to make a living’. Thanks in no small part to his decency, I was lucky enough to be working with him a year later,” says Gifford.
Dunedin- born, and the youngest of seven children, Cameron’s own introduction to the Herald came almost by chance.
Days before he was to start a parttime job selling tickets to the 1950 Auckland Empire Games, he wandered down Queen St and and, particularly, cricket beats from the mid- 1980s through the 1990s. Many an aspiring journalist learned key aspects of the profession from DJ, whether it was sitting alongside him in a press box, over dinner on tour or a “cleansing ale” at the bar. Ask Phil Gifford, or Eric Young or others of a large group who benefited from his wisdom, and willingness to help.
Having grown up reading these men, you wanted their jobs, in the nicest possible way, figuring that next to playing for your country, getting paid to watch could not be beaten.
DJ, as with the others, was unafraid to spare the rod if a player, group or organisation needed to be put right. And their views mattered.
He loved his sailing, before cricket and rugby became his core responsibilities. If they were his twin pillars, he also savoured his days as sailing reporter at the Herald, relishing the company of the straight- shooting old salts of that world. decided to try his luck applying for a job at the Herald.
Within hours of filling in a form where he expressed an interest in sailing ( having being a Sea Scout as a kid), he was employed as a copyholder. Mad about sport, he bided his time until the sports editor, doyen Sir TP McLean, found a role for him as the yachting reporter — a job Cameron loved. The esteemed rounds of cricket and rugby soon followed.
Generous with his time for young reporters and sportsmen, Cameron could also be a stickler for protocol. He saw the press box as a quiet, respectful place of work, and chatting journalists would sometimes get a glare with an ample eyebrow raised above his glasses.
He was unafraid to tackle the largest figures in cricket. He duelled with Martin Crowe and Richard Hadlee, and New Zealand Cricket on occasions, and, most memorably for those who were there, in a Mumbai hotel room in 1988 with John Bracewell, the feisty allrounder.
A few beers were being drunk to celebrate a fine victory.
Bracewell didn’t like something DJ had written and pounced. DJ stood his ground, Martin Snedden and I took a close watching brief.
On that tour of India, the coach Bob Cunis had me in the nets at Goa on a bright green sporty pitch. DJ stood behind the net as Ewen Chatfield, Cunis and a couple of other New Zealand bowlers, flat out, went to work with shiny new balls.
One flew off a length and whizzed past my nose. I turned behind me, expecting a “well left” or similar comment. The razor sharp image remains of DJ turning his head away, one hand covering his eyes. He feared the worst.
“Don was great company over a beer, but could be awkward and gruff when things weren't going his way,” Morris says. “But he was an absolutely top- class sportswriter with a critical edge — less florid than McLean but with the same huge commitment to the job and the paper.”
When he covered his last cricket test for the Herald ( 150 in all) in 1998, Cameron admitted his full career had had its drawbacks.
With long tours ( the West Indies spanning three months), he regretted missing out on time with his wife, Valmar, and their three children, Mark, Fiona and Adam.
And yet, his adult children remember him as a doting father. “He was not only a dad, he was mate. But we also knew he was something
There may be a view that journalists love nothing more than a poor performance for the chance to give full vent. Sitting beside DJ as New Zealand teams threw away chances for precious test wins in the 1980s, I saw exactly what it meant to him.
As he tossed his pen to the bench and let out a sorrowful sigh you were swiftly reminded that here was a man who had endured some of the darkest times for New Zealand cricket in the 1960s and 1970s. He felt the heavy defeats keenly, and so he relished the victories, perhaps even saw them as a sort of balancing of the ledger after so many grim days.
DJ formed friendships of long standing with cricket and rugby people which endured. His circle of admirers was wide.
But to the young hopefuls he helped nurture over decades, on tours overseas and at the country’s rugby and cricket grounds, he’ll be remembered by many, with affection, and gratitude. special,” Adam Cameron says. “Instead of going to mass, I got to go to rugby trainings at Eden Park, and he’d get me a bottle of fizzy from the changing rooms.”
He kept his contacts close right until the end. On most Thursdays he would go to “choir practice” – the code name for a weekly beer at the Auckland University rugby club with his old sports comrades.
In Cameronesque style, he deserves the last word. This is the way he fittingly ends his autobiography.
“So that is that. The captains and the kings of sport depart.
“Life as a travelling sports reporter is not all that bad, especially if you have a sense of humour. A hard life, perhaps.
“But someone had to do it.”