THEY’VE donned the green and gold and now the north’s sporting heroes will adorn the walls of the Tamworth Sports Dome.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The new Tamworth Regional Sporting Hall of Fame was unveiled yesterday along with the 47 inaugural inductees.
They represent an array of sports from national sporting passions like rugby league and union, and cricket, to sports Tamworth has been a real force in such as hockey and water polo, to the less mainstream like croquet, aerobics, tent pegging and polocrosse.
The earliest inductee is rugby league centre Cliff Pearce.
After being plucked from North Tamworth to play for NSW, Pearce represented Australia in the Third Test of the 1928 Ashes series, scoring a try on debut.
He went on to play all three Tests against England in 1932 and tour with the 1933-34 Kangaroos.
Not long after him was Barraba’s Jack “Jock” Kelaher.
Kelaher made his Wallaby debut against South Africa in 1933 on the wing and was touring the British Isles in 1939 when World War II broke out.
He’s one of five rugby players to grace the wall, joining Bill McKid, Tom Bowman and Paddy Ryan, and Australian sevens representative Pip Carter.
Twelve of the inductees also feature on the Olympians’ honour wall.
Among those is Tamworth’s earliest known Olympian, Mike Moroney.
Moroney competed in the long jump at the Melbourne Games in 1956 and will share the distinction of being in the Hall of Fame with son Nicholas.
Also a jumper, but high jumper, Nicholas represented Australia at the 2002 and 2006 Commonwealth Games, just missing the medals at both.
The wall also includes two sets of brothers – shooting brothers Clive and George Barton, and golfer Mark Hensby and water polo-playing brother Jason.
Ten of the inductees were present for the unveiling, with some travelling a fair distance to be part of the celebrations.
Kim Small (Tuckwell) came down from the Gold Coast, while former team-mate Anne Stevenson (Stevenson-Brown) made the journey from Canberra.
The two played together most of their careers, first at school and then for Australia.
Not that hockey was necessarily the career Stevenson-Brown envisaged for herself.
“I was an athlete before I became a hockey player,” she said.
A pretty accomplished one at that too, representing NSW at the Australian Track and Field Championships.
She did play a bit of hockey, and was part of the Tamworth High side that won the Tamworth women’s competition when they were in Year 10.
“Kim and Vicki Cox (Constable) were also in that team,” she recalled.
She also played a bit with Kiwis, before brighter things presented themselves.
“I had a call in 1984 from the AIS offering me a scholarship for hockey,” she said.
Stevenson-Brown jumped at the chance and a year later found herself touring the Netherlands, West Germany and Scotland with the Australian women’s side.
She went on to play for the Hockeyroos up to 1990, and described being part of the Hall of Fame as a “real honour”.
“I’m just amazed and really thankful.”
“It was quite moving actually.”
