Category: Sports

A New Zealand cult hero has become the country’s first male cricketer to come out as gay.

Heath Davis, 50, played five Test matches and 11 one-day internationals for the Black Caps between 1994 and 1997.

He was known for his express pace but erratic accuracy with the ball. For a period he was widely considered the most feared fast bowler in New Zealand, and his highlights feature short balls making batters duck and dive out of the way.

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His most famous YouTube video is, unfortunately, titled “worst first ball in Test cricket history” – showing his first ever Test delivery flying wide past the batter and wicketkeeper.

Davis retired from professional cricket in 2004 and later moved to Brisbane, where a workplace accident resulted in his foot being amputated.

In a documentary series by The Spinoff titled, “Scratched: Aotearoa’s Lost Sporting Legends”, Davis opens up publicly about his sexuality.

He reveals while on tour with the Black Caps he would regularly venture out on his own, “going to saunas and seedy places to get sex because you didn’t want to be seen”.

“It was lonely,” Davis said, in becoming the first professional male cricketer from New Zealand to come out publicly.

“On the other side of the world no one is going to know you. So I went out to Soho and a couple of places by myself, did what I needed to do, and left that part of my life there.

“I was repressing it. I wasn’t leading a gay life, I wasn’t out in Wellington.

“I just wanted a normal life. There was a part of me that needed to break free and I wanted a partner to love. That was really all.”

Davis’ parents are religious, and he has now found religion and is “living single” in Australia.

“I’m seeking Christ now. I’m living single, part of a men’s Christian group,” he said.

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Tiger Woods turned down an offer that Greg Norman says was in the region of $700m to $800m to take part in the Saudi-funded LIV Golf series.

During an appearance on Fox News with Tucker Carlson that aired Monday night, Norman confirmed what he told the Washington Post in a story two months ago. Norman told the Post in June the offer was “mind-blowingly enormous; we’re talking about high nine digits.”

Woods has been opposed to LIV Golf since late last year, and he delivered his strongest comments at the British Open when he said players who took the money funded by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund had “turned their back” on the PGA Tour that made them famous.

When an offer was made to Woods it was not clear.

“That number was out there before I became CEO. So that number has been out there, yes,” Norman said in the Fox News interview, which took place Sunday at Trump National in Bedminster, New Jersey, where the third LIV Golf Invitational was held.

“And, look, Tiger is a needle-mover and of course you have to look at the best of the best,” Norman said. “So they had originally approached Tiger before I became CEO. So, yes, that number was somewhere in that neighborhood.”

Various reports out of the United Kingdom have said Phil Mickelson received a $200m signing bonus, while Dustin Johnson received $150m. The 48-man fields, which play 54 holes with no cut, offer $25m in prize money at each event. Norman announced a 14-tournament schedule for next year.

LIV Golf currently has only one player – Johnson at No 18 – from the top 20 in the world.

The source of the funding has led to sharp criticism of the series and the players who have enlisted because it is viewed as an attempt to distract attention from its human rights record and links to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Asked why his rival tour has caused such an uproar among American golf fans, Norman responded plainly, “I don’t know.”

“I really don’t care,” Norman said. “I just love the game so much and I want to grow the game of golf and we at LIV see that opportunity not just for the men but for the women.”

The LIV Golf Invitational is off for a month during the FedEx Cup playoffs on the PGA Tour, returning over Labor Day weekend about an hour west of Boston, and then two weeks later plays in the Chicago suburbs.

Former New Zealand Test player Heath Davis has become the country’s first male international cricketer to publicly speak about being gay.

Davis, 50, played five Tests and 11 one-day internationals for the Black Caps between 1994 and 1997 and was known as an intimidating, if inconsistent, pace bowler.

Three decades after his Test debut, Davis publicly revealed his sexuality for the first time, in an episode of the documentary series Scratched: Aotearoa’s Lost Sporting Legends.

The first international male cricketer to come out publicly was the former England wicketkeeper Steven Davies in 2011.

It was during Davis’s first tour to England in 1994 when he started to really discover himself, he told The Spinoff, though he had told his mother at an early age he was gay.

“I went to a few bars and things privately, just to see what life was like. You’re on the other side of the world, no one’s going to know you,” he said. But he left that part of his life there. “There was a lot of that, keeping your personal life separate.”

He guessed some of his teammates knew he was gay before he told a couple of them in 1997 but he was never questioned about it. “I certainly wasn’t living a gay life, wasn’t part of the scene, didn’t have a partner. There was nothing to tie it to, if you know what I mean,” Davis said.

Davis entered his first gay relationship when he was 27 years old, while playing for Wellington, but he was reluctant to appear in public as a couple. When an offer of a contract came from Auckland, Davis saw an opportunity to move away from the city he did not feel comfortable being out in.

After the couple made the move to Auckland, Davis told his new team’s manager he was gay, which was passed on to his team members and “didn’t seem to be that big an issue”.

Davis is now on a new journey – one that exists in tension with his sexuality. “I’m living single, part of a group of other men as a Christian group.”

An international study on homophobia in sport, released in May, revealed that New Zealand gay and bisexual men were the most likely to keep their sexuality secret in both youth and adult sports, with many saying they feared bullying from teammates and discrimination from coaches and officials .

More than half of all participants believed team sport is more homophobic than the rest of New Zealand society, while gay men were much more likely to believe this (69%) than anyone else.

Former Wellington Firebirds player, Stephen Mather, said Davis told him about his sexuality in 1997, when there were no other outwardly gay men playing first class cricket at that time.

“There were 80 or 90 men – so that doesn’t make a huge amount of sense on a probability scale,” Mather said in the video. “There was some pretty free thinking people in the cricket circles at that time but there were also some pretty old school attitudes as well.”

Homophobic attitudes in sport still very much exist, said Madeleine Chapman, The Spinoff’s editor and producer of the documentary series.

“But I do think that [Davis’s story] could potentially be an opening for other athletes to share parts of themselves if they’re comfortable with it,” Chapman said.

The responses have so far been very positive, she said. “I think other athletes, particularly young athletes being able to see that sort of honesty and vulnerability be warmly accepted by readers and viewers can only be encouraging.”

Winning is a powerful tonic. The fissures within many a sporting team have been healed by victory; fatigue, fatigue and past failures all soothed by the balm of success. When Kyle Chalmers stormed to the 100m freestyle gold medal at the Commonwealth Games on Monday night, his triumph offered him relief and vindication. As he brought a finger to his lips from him in a pre-meditated gesture, it was clear that Chalmers wanted to silence his critics from him.

If only it was so simple. Chalmers’ gold medal – his first individual success in the frenetic 100m freestyle since becoming Olympic champion as an unheralded teenager in 2016 – offers a potent riposte after the media storm of recent days. Taking to Instagram after the win, I posted: “A million things I could say, but this photo sums them all up and says it perfectly.” But the fall-out from this saga may only just be beginning.

Clouds began to form in May, when Chalmers beat Cody Simpson – the swimmer turned pop star turned swimmer again, who now dates Emma McKeon after her split from Chalmers last year – in the 100m butterfly at the national championships, a selection event for the world championships and Commonwealth Games. Chalmers had considered missing the world titles, which would have allowed Simpson to take his spot from him, but ultimately elected to contest both international meets.

Chalmers qualified faster, so this was very much his prerogative. But some sections of the media, led by News Corp titles, manufactured a “love triangle” and implied that Chalmers was the villain. Chalmers was set to “destroy” Simpson’s dreams; his decision was “brutal”. The coverage had a negative effect on Chalmers, who went to ground and issued a statement decrying the “massive toll” the furore was having on him.

In Birmingham, it went from bad to worse. The degree of celebration between Chalmers and McKeon after the pair won gold together in a mixed relay was dissected, and there was a suggestion the freestyle specialist had snubbed his ex. When Chalmers went on the attack, criticizing the media for focusing on his personal life rather than his swimming, sections of the press doubled down.

Viewed from a distance, the saga has been absurd. There is no public interest in invasive coverage of the private lives of these swimmers.

And it is having all too real consequences. Chalmers has spoken openly about the impact of the drama on his mental health, saying his wellbeing was at “rock bottom”. At one point I have decried the ongoing controversy as the “hardest 12 hours in my sporting career”. He has spoken of his mother crying on FaceTime from the other side of the world; his father broke down on radio, telling Mix 102.3 “it’s a form of bullying and harassment, these people get away with it, they destroy people’s lives”.

At its best, sports media can relay the joy of elite competition to the community and shine a light on corruption and abuse within powerful institutions. Sports journalists should never be afraid to ask tough questions. If this saga involved Chalmers disliking questions about poor performances, say, or misconduct within the camp (something hardly foreign to Swimming Australia), there would be no sympathy. Those are questions journalists are entitled to ask – even if the recipient may not like hearing them. But this is not that.

There has been an element of goading in the way Chalmers has been interrogated about his personal life, regardless of the impact this is having on his mental health. It may be an enticing narrative to paint the macho, tattooed swimmer as the bad guy – and it no doubt gets plenty of online traffic – but it is actively undermining at least one athlete’s wellbeing.

The continued pile-on even after Chalmers went public with his mental health concerns is perhaps the most alarming aspect of all this. It suggests a troubling regression from the positive response to athletes opening up about their challenges in recent years (such as gymnast Simone Biles in Tokyo). The media must do better; with great power comes great responsibility.

No-one knows how this ends. Chalmers has threatened to quit the sport entirely – which would be a major loss for swimming; he remains one of Australia’s best. In the coming days, once the swimming finishes and attention switches to other events in Birmingham, the media will move on. But there is the possibility of some real wreckage being left behind.