Age 16

16

I turned 16 in 1990 shortly before the Hammer Circle Reunion. I was dating a girl called Diane. Her mother is South African (Jenny) a lovely woman, still says hi when I see her. Diane was a trampolinist and a pretty good one. The lads in my class at school all thought I was some kind of stud because Diane was at college and therefore “the older woman”. What I find amusing is that I met her at my cousins wedding. My cousin Esthers’ husband Russell’s mother worked with Diane, thats how she was at the wedding. That in itself isn’t particularly amusing but more the fact that Diane actually lived over the road from me but I’d never even seen her before. So we dated for about 6 months all told. I took a job as a glass collector in a pub called Scott’s in Sunderland town centre. It was a crap job and the wages were terrible but it helped to pay for my training. A lot of the barstaff there knew Diane from college and I got wound up a lot about being her boyfriend. It didn’t bother me though. It wasn’t long after my birthday that we split up. She was off to join the Navy of all things so it had to come to an end.

Winter training began at the start of November. The first 4-6 weeks involved a lot of circuit training, running and medicine ball work. It was exhausting. We also started learning to lift weights. We concentrated on the Olympic lifts and added Front squat, back squat, deadlift. We never really bothered with Bench Press as it was never regarded as being of much value to hammer throwers. Steve my coach made us practice the techniques repeatedly with a broom handle until he was happy we had a solid grasp of them before allowing us to enter the gym. We started with obscenely light weights. Much lighter than we could have lifted but this is where I learned that form over ego is vital when lifting. There are too many beach weight pricks out there who lift with sacrifice form to try and look good lifting heavy. It’s a nonsense. They actually look ridiculous. There was a small group of us training together now. Steve conducting the sessions, Myself, my sister Kimberley, Steve Dolan and Peter Dodsworth one of Steve’s mates who also threw for Sunderland. Steve would hire out a community hall at Doxford Park and we would train there. It was freezing in there but we didn’t care. If you were cold, you worked harder to get warm was Steve’s take on it. We all worked like demons that winter. After finishing second best to Steve Dolan I pushed myself a little harder at everything. I can honestly say that every session i gave 100% no matter how tired if was I gave it everything.

I came out of winter training in the best shape I had ever been. Slim and fit. I could run a mile and a half in a little over 10 minutes, I could squat 150kg, Deadlift 160kg, Clean and jerk 90kg and Snatch 80kg. Throwing felt good and at our seasons opening competiton in February I threw 56.22m I was happy. I was sports captain and house captain in school. Then I got my results back from my GCSE mock exams. I had pretty much flunked them all. I was devastated. Whilst I have never been an academic prodigy I have always been up towards the top of my classes. I had no idea what had happened. Looking back I think I had become so obsessed with training that I had basically let my studies slide further than I realised. I had to do something and quickly in order to get my grades up. I went to see my house master Mr Pauc and I proposed dropping I.T. and R.E. (which I was kicked out of most of the year anyway) and use that time to work on my other subjects. I wasn’t expecting him to agree, but agree he did. I should stress at this point that dropping I.T. was no big deal. When I was at school there was no internet, and none of the programmes available nowadays. I.T. consisted of using a very basic word processing programme, doing the odd spreadsheet and learning a bit of programming. As I had no interest in learning endless sequences of binary, it was no great loss to me. The extra training I was doing also meant I stopped going to Army Cadets. If I’m honest about it I didn’t really miss it. The only thing I missed was the curry batter bun on the way home. They were a strange but tasty culinary treat. A bread bun filled with fried batter and smothered with curry sauce. They cost 15p from Merrills chippy on Chester road. Totally unhealthy but bloody tasty. I didn’t miss the constantly having to polish my boots, and ironing my uniform a certain way. The dirty tricks being played on weekends away. Many of which I wouldn’t be able to attend due to training or competitions anyway.

My life this year pretty much revolved around hammer throwing and not a lot else. I resubmitted a lot of my school work for re-marking and my grades were getting back to normal standard. And along came the North Eastern Counties championships. It was held at Gateshead Stadium this year and the hammer was to be held on the Friday evening. It was great throwing under floodlights in a big stadium. Even though there wasn’t a lot of spectators there it still felt “big”. For those of you unfamiliar with the way a throwing event is held, here are the basics.

Once the thrower enters the circle and begins to throw they must remain in the circle until the implement has landed. The implement must land between the sector lines to be a valid throw. Once the implement has landed the athlete must leave the throwing circle by the rear. If any part of the body touches the ground outside the circle between starting the throw and the implement landing, its a no-throw. In a competition all athletes get 3 attempts. If there are more than 8 athletes the best 8 after 3 rounds will get a further 3 attempts. If an athlete gets 3 no-throws they are disqualified. (even if there are less than 8 athletes).

With my first three throws I managed mid 50metre range. There were only 4 of us in the competition so I knew we would have 6 throws. Steve Dolan was leading the competition going into the final round with around 56metres. I was less than a metre behind him. Steve had his final throw and didn’t extend his lead. I stepped into the circle and I remember my coach shouting “This is it, shit or bust”. I just went for it. Everything just fell into place, the hammer flew and I knew the moment it left my hand that I had won. You can genuinely just feel it. When a throw feels like you have put absolutlely zero effort into it, it is usually a great throw. This is where the problems started. Despite being an international stadium, they only had 50metre tapes. It hadn’t been an issue up to this point as no meeting records were under threat. My throw however was challenging the record which had stood since 1974 (my year of birth). Now a record has to be measured 3 times (or it did under the old rules. First one way, then you turn the tape and measure in the other direction, before measuring back the normal way. So they measured it 3 times then the field referee decided that despite it being measured at 59.84m they could only allow me to equal the old record of 59.12metres. My coach went apeshit. But despite this the field referee wasn’t budging. So I won in the final round with a record equalling mark and new personal best. I was happy with that but pissed at the incompetence of the officials.  We marked the hammer crater and the next day Steve measured it with a proper 100m tape and I had just crept over 60metres but obviously it didn’t count. Just had to put it to bed and move on.

For most of the rest of the season I was throwing around the 58-58metre mark. I won the Scottish championships, the Durham schools again and set a new schools record in the process. More importantly I was beating Steve Dolan week in week out. I was top dog again. The bus company my dad worked for sponsored me (well I say sponsored, they gave me a new tracksuit). In June I took my GCSE exams and left school. That summer I worked as a leisure centre attendant at the Seaburn Centre. during the summer holidays. I earned £2.20 per hour, but made a lot more fiddling the playpark ticketing system. It was a hot summer and a good summer. Steve’s endless harassment of the local council resulted in the erection of a new throwing cage for us. This helped immensely. It meant we didn’t have to travel to Gateshead to throw every time.

It was the first time I really recall getting into music. That summer I was listening to INXS, The rolling stones, The Charlatans, The Stone Roses. My love of indie rock was born. CD players were really just being born around that time but I had my Sony Walkman. I listened to U2 a lot too. I still think their stuff back then was their best work.

The English schools championships this year were in Stoke. Another wet weekend. This time our team stayed in an outdoor activity centre. Separate dorms for the boys and girls. We managed to figure out a way to bypass the alarm on the fire exit door and leave the dorm at night and meet up with some of the girls. Fun times. Come the day of the competition. There were two pools from which the final competitors would be. I qualified with the absolutely shocking distance of 54.82m. Way down on what I was throwing each week. But still I was in the final. A few hours of waiting around followed before final time. I wasn’t having a good day and only just scraped through in the top 8. Leading the competition was Glen Kerr from Bedford. He was my nemesis. A guy short in stature but ridiculously fast. He had gone over 60metres a couple of times that season. In second place was Alan Macnicholas also from Bedford, not as fast as Glen nor as technically gifted but strong as an ox. In third was Simon Bown from Essex. Long haired and defying all the conventions of good technique he somehow managed to be a good thrower. Mark Tully managed to pull one out of the bag from nowhere to sit in fourth place and in the final round I found a 57.98m throw to finish in fifth. I was gutted. I should have done so much better. But that’s life. You can’t dwell on the what if’s. The next big competition would be the AAA under 17’s champs at Crystal palace. I knuckled down and we revisited an earlier phase of training attempting to peak for that competition. So instead of the usual maintenance phase of training we were doing throughout the season, designed to maintain power speed and strength, we went back to a pure power phase. This would be turned to a speed phase in the last couple of weeks.

We travelled down to Crystal Palace on the Friday night. Myself, my coach Steve, Steve Dolan and a Javelin thrower we knew called Neil Elliott. Now just for a bit of perspective here, Steve’s car was a 1 litre Nissan Micra. At the time I weighed around 90kg, Steve Dolan much the same. Neil must have been at the 115-120 mark and my coach up at 125. Then all of our bags and hammers in the boot. The total payload must have been half a ton. How that Micra managed the trips it did is still a mystery. We were staying in the Finsbury Park hotel. A bigger shit-hole I can’t even describe. You know it’s not a fancy establishment when you peel the covers back on the bed and the cockroaches scramble for cover. Still the 280mile drive had taken it out of us. We went for a wander through Finsbury Park, side-stepped all the prostitutes that frequented every inch of pavement got some food then crashed out. 

The day of the competition was a beautiful sunny day. Hot but with a light and very welcome breeze. We arrived at Crystal Palace early so decided to have a look around. Its a pretty expansive site with facilities for many different sports. As we walked around we inevitably bumped into a lot of the other athletes and coaches. A lot of the athletes I had figured out by now and knew what made them tick. That can be pretty handy when you want to play mind games. There was Andy Irving, he always wanted to know how your training was going. I always followed the other athletes progress so I knew what he was throwing and I always just bullshit him and told him my distances, making them slightly further than his. His “Tell” was that he would frown. If I got that frown I knew that was him done for the day. You can win a hell of a lot of competitions before you even step into the circle if you do things right. Other methods I employed included telling some people nothing at all. Ian Hay always hated it when you told him nothing and got so wound up that was him finished. Some lads would like to take up a certain position relative to the cage with their bag and they would lie there in between throws. I would either steal their place or just empty a load of water onto the floor in that area so they couldn’t lie there. I know this probably all sounds very petty and childish but I was not the only one doing it and it was par for the course. Everyone trying to get that extra edge before the throwing started. After all, winning is EVERYTHING. Anyone who says it’s the taking part is full of shit. They probably never won anything in their lives. If winning wasn’t important then why did we all put ourselves through long hard winter training? Why did we travel the length and breadth of the country investing time, money and effort to compete? Yes I loved my sport but I loved it more when I won. My signature mind game was usually played out during the warmup. Normally each athlete would get maybe two practice throws before the comp started. Many of the athletes would bring their own hammer to use. I always thought of this as being a bit of a comfort blanket. Yes there can be differences between hammers but I think it’s largely negligible. However, personal preference can become a mental crutch. The thing with bringing your own hammer back then is that you had to allow other athletes to use it. They were all weighed in and measured to comply with the rules but they had to then be put into the pool of hammers available for everyone. I used to decide who I wanted to psych-out and take their hammer into the circle for a warmup. It was promptly thrown in such a way as to wrap it around one of the cage uprights rendering it useless. Harsh? Yes. Effective? Yes. Did I care what people thought about me doing it? No.

 I was trying out a new method of swing and entry. I suppose I should explain that the hammer is divided into 4 distinct parts. The swing, the entry, the turns and the delivery. If the swings are bad the entry will be bad making the turns bad and the delivery bad. So basically the swings are vital. They set up the whole throw. Everyone does it differently too. Heinz Weiss (one of the great German throwers) used to perform 8-10 slow lazy swings before a step in and entry. Yuriy Sedykh (The greatest thrower of all time and world record holder 86.74m) did 2 or 3 fast swings and had a very whipped entry. Its preference. I’d changed form a very static torso swing to one whereby I rotated to catch the swing earlier. This set up my radius much better and gave me a more consistent entry. Sorry to bore you with this but I will anyway.

The competition started and after 3 rounds I was sitting in 5^th place having recorded a little over 58metres. Glen Kerr was winning with Alan Macnicholas in second. I wasn’t worried, I knew I had a big throw in there waiting to happen and that I was a bit of a final round specialist by now. As per usual all the coaches and athletes families (normally the only people who watch the hammer) were assembled in the stand behind the cage cheering on their respective athlete. I seemed to have gained my own little cheering section away over in the main stand. Ron and Margaret (whose surnames I fail to remember) the team managers from Middlesbrough and Cleveland Harriers, leading the way with shouts of “Come on Scott” which was followed by cheers from the stand. I think it’s impossible to describe how good that kind of support makes someone feel. So the final round arrived. I had been relegated to 6^th place. As I stepped into the circle amid the cheers I heard my coach shouting “Shit or bust” as per normal. I set myself and started the swings. Then strangely for the first time I remember I stopped thinking and just let it happen. Next thing I knew the hammer was flying. It landed at 59.12m. Exactly the distance I had been given in Gateshead earlier in the year. I hadn’t won, but I had moved into bronze medal position where I finished. I was happy. 3^rd in the British championships. I was less than a metre behind Glen in first and finally felt like I had done myself justice. 

The rest of the day was spent lazing around and chatting to other athletes I knew and cheering them on. I loved everything about athletics. The camaraderie, the support, the sense of achievement.

Finally it came time to head home. If only things were so simple. We got to the carpark only to find that some idiot had parked across the back of the Micra meaning we couldn’t get out of our parking space. After much pondering, it was decided we would have to move it by hand. This was where having 4 big lads in a car together was handy. Each one of us grabbed a wheel arch and bounced it down the carpark and up onto a grass verge. Not a bad effort considering it was a Range Rover. That obstacle removed, we jumped in the car and were homeward bound.

August came and it was time to get my GCSE results. When they came through it was one of the only times in my life I can genuinely say I was scared to look. I opened them slowly (like that would make a difference) and the relief was obvious when I saw I had passed them all. 1-A 1-B and 6-C’s. Not results to set the world alight but I’d passed and that was all that mattered to me. I could now go to college in September to do my A-levels. This literally meant moving buildings in terms of geography, but meant meeting new people, new teachers, new timetable, new challenges.

When you throw hammer you have to wear a leather glove on one hand otherwise the handle will literally rip your hand to shreds. I’d had an idea earlier in the season after watching Igor Nikulin (one of the top Russian Hammer throwers) using tapes on his fingers instead of a glove. I approached a guy who was starting out making hammer gloves and gave him my design for a glove that was basically 4 tubes of leather for the fingers attached to a Velcro wrist band via leather straps on the back of the hand. He made a couple of them for me and they were amazing. Much more comfortable than a standard glove and they didn’t slip like a glove did. I started using this instead of a glove straight away and the condition of my hands improved massively. Well until breaktimes in college started and we would play cards with the losers getting “raps” this involved the winner taking the pack of cards and smashing them repeatedly over the back of the hand of the loser. Blood was often drawn and bruises were extensive. Why did we do this? Who knows, but do it we did. The stupidity of youth. When I started college I started dating more. I was never a big one for going out on the town like some of my mates. I was too dedicated to training. That was my choice. It annoys me when athletes talk about sacrificing things to succeed. No that’s not true. It’s not a sacrifice. It’s a choice you make. You decide what you want to do and what you need to do to achieve that. If giving something up or missing out on something meant enough to you then you would choose to do it anyway. To my mind, a sacrifice is giving up something you love to do something you have little choice but to do. Giving up something you love to do something you love or want, is therefore not a sacrifice. Well not in my opinion anyway. So the dating was in the main with girls I met via athletics or college. Jennifer Marsden, Joanne Yarrow, Nicola Clarke, to name but a few. None of them were serious, the longest only lasting a few months really.