Sportsman Of The Year - Excerpts

Excerpt from the chapter Hound Dog. Introduction

HOUND DOG

Looking back I realise some of the worst things ever, just happened to be some of the best things in disguise – I just didn’t know how to read the signs.

 This project has taken a long time to realise. Not so much the writing of the songs part, as I always have an idea for a tune, but more about how to present the body of work. I didn’t want to just throw this album up online so it could be dissected as a bunch of singles, hit the chart for a few weeks and then disappear into a sock drawer. I also didn’t want to be confined by the rules and regulations of a music industry dusted by law, statistics, accounting and ageism so I decided to rely on gut instinct and see where that took me.

 Where my hunch decided to take me was the deliverance of this beast.  A book with a sound track, or is it an album with a book attached?  I don’t know exactly but I am happy either way because it’s uncharted territory in terms of album releases and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 A few years ago I was inspired by something Richie McCaw said in an interview about his career. He said something along the lines of, “To be the best player I could be, I made sure I knew all the rules of the game.” I also interpreted this to mean that knowing where the boundaries are gives you freedom and that to me was an exciting prospect.

SPORTSMAN OF THE YEAR – A SUBURBAN PHILOSOPHY

Life is a series of victories and disenchantments. Once you embrace the disappointments, your triumphs will be greater.

My career has been nothing short of soul-destroying at times and even though I have tossed my music aside on more than one occasion I am glad I decided to persevere because through hardship came the wins, through the wins, more hardship, more flops, more lessons, more growth.  Every time I failed, I learned something new and I always got back up and kept going.

 Sportsman of the Year – A Suburban Philosophy is a celebration of life and its foibles as well as its perfect imperfection. It represents the journey not the destination and tells the tale of grit and never giving up.

 Each chapter represents a song from Sportsman of the Year because this album is a reflection of my years embroiled in and tussling with what I call ‘Suburban Philosophy’, however the connections are not that obvious all of the time. I tend to write in a scattergun approach and words and their meanings fly in from all over the place so I can’t always say the process is linear. Sometimes it is clear which stories are directly related to the thematic imagery of these songs, other times the meanings are open to interpretation.

 In these pages you will find stories, photos, quotes, musings and a little bit of everything I felt like putting in. It’s not totally random – more like a scrapbook of discovery and anecdotal examples of some of the experiences that propelled me to here and gave me the courage to keep going. The songs can be digested on their own or go hand-in-hand with these chapters – they don’t need to be bound together all the time, but they are friends.

Excerpt from Chapter 11. Winner

WINNER

 I’ve failed now so many times, I’ve remembered how to win.

This song is dedicated to everyone who has jumped on an idea and seen it through to fruition, even if it’s just planting tomatoes in a pot or having the gumption to sweep the floor in the kitchen because you finished what you set out to do – and because of that you are, and will always be, a winner.

Every day we are bombarded with social media, news, statistics, numbers, and figures which tell us stories about what other people are doing, how much money they make and how successful they are. This culminates in a whole lot of inner judgement and it can attack our self-esteem because we measure our success in terms of how we compare, making us feel powerless and useless.

Whenever I feel I am not getting anywhere with what I am doing I remind myself that some people come from absolutely nothing, or worse than nothing and go on to achieve great things just because they believe they can and they never give up.  You may think, “I am pissed off because they have a bigger car, house, biceps than me, or their life is so perfect and it’s not fair,” etc. But the irony is that there is probably someone saying the same thing about you, only you wouldn’t believe it. When you are comparing yourself to others, you are tying yourself to a continually moving benchmark that works very much like a rainbow; no matter how fast you chase it you will never find the beginning or the end because it just doesn’t exist.

When you start competing and comparing your life with another it will slow you down – I liken this to a swimming race because I used to love competitive swimming and a coach told me, “If you keep looking from side to side to see where everyone else is, you end up losing traction – so focus on your lane.”

In this life, no matter who you are, there will always be someone in the next lane either in front of or behind of you, but when you are only thinking about your lane and where you are, then you can swim at your own pace, get out of the pool, have a cup of tea, grab some lunch, buy some new togs, jump back in and keep swimming. There is no deadline or hurry – there is just the end of the pool, and you will win your race in the end.