Your Lifestyle

Still Inspiring: April - Max Cherry

"I'm a middle distance and sprint coach and I think I've coached over a thousand athletes during my career. You encourage, you goad, you cajole. And you just keep lifting the bar. It's not easy and evidently, so people tell me, I do shout out and so on. And evidently I say things that people don't always want to hear. But I'm generally pretty good at getting people to give of their best.

Running is very tough, it's the hardest sport and I've played a lot of them. It's the hardest thing I've ever coached too: and I've coached football, cricket and the lot of it. You can't get any help from anybody else when you run. Sure, your coach is there on the sidelines but really, you're on your own. Some of my girls that I train, they swim too and I say to them, ‘Oh that's pussy-footing, that swimming. Dead easy! Three quarters of your body weight is supported by the water: when you run you've got to carry the lot!'

I was an athlete myself. I started voluntary coaching about 1956 because there wasn't anybody else to do it. And when I retired from work in 1993, I stepped it up. I'm eighty one this year and I do more now than ever I think. I've coached veterans to win the world championships and break the Australian records. I've coached people in America, all over the place. Athletes from ten to forty. And I teach coaches to get them to the next level of coaching.

It's great being involved with so many young people. I think it keeps me young: I don't have time to get old. I train every night except Friday and I'm out so much that my wife Jo says, ‘Who are you?' when I come in at a night. (That's her sense of humour!)

I met Jo when I was coaching one of her sons when he was about twelve. Jo was the first lady manager of a basketball team. There she'd be, walking through the dressing rooms and the boys were all shy. Towels around them, especially the Americans, funnily enough. They got used to her though, like a mother she was. She's the chief referee for Athletics Tasmania and has been to the Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games. There's no messing with her. Chief referees are in charge of everything…including me. Sport is really a family act with us – though my children hate sport. (Probably because I spent all this time doing it.)

The week goes so fast. Every morning, first thing, I go over to see this ninety three year old lady. (When I do that I'm feeling like about twenty!) She's just so marvellous this lady. She's been mixed up with our club since 1928 - her husband coached me. And so what happened is that he died and I've gone for the last fifteen years or so every day to help out with the gardening and things. And I hate gardening, by the way. (Jo will tell you that too!)

I've always been a volunteer - never accepted a cent in my life. I really want to give something back to the community. I don't know why I feel that. There's a very good school here called the Hutchins School. Well, I've coached athletics there for forty two years and they wanted to give me a presentation. I told the principal that I don't want any recognition - nothing at all. But there I was and all the kids were there and the headmaster said, ‘Mr Maxwell Cherry, will you come forward please?'. And well, all the kids there know me and they all know I'm a bit strange and different and funny and the whole damn lot of them, twelve hundred kids, stood up and clapped. It was so embarrassing. I went up to receive the award and I moaned to the principal, ‘I told you I didn't want any of this.' And he said, ‘Well, whether or not you wanted it, you're getting it Mr Cherry! And you deserve it!' The kids clapped me all the way back again. (Jo reckons I loved every bit of it!)

I never think of retiring. I don't know how to. Like the other day, this little boy rings up, ten or eleven and as I've said before, I'm never home, so Jo talks to him. And he says, ‘Is Mr Cherry there?' And then he said, ‘I looked on the internet and I want Mr Cherry to coach me.' And so I spoke with his Dad and his Dad said, "My boy really just wants to run.' And so I said, ‘Well, if he really wants to run, I'll help him..'

And that's what's happening…..



Max received the Australian Sports Medal in 2000