Even though sport was not highly regarded in my household, I became captivated by the majesty of cricket on the radio and watching the game at nearby Waitara Oval from the age of 11. None of my siblings were similarly attracted to sport.

With the expansion of higher education, I gained scholarships to Sydney and Monash universities and Duke University in North Carolina. The six-week voyage by cargo ship to the USA via the Panama Canal was memorable.

The 1960s were a turbulent time with anti-Vietnam protests, the counterculture, and black activism as well as race riots and assassinations. I taught history at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York in a dramatic time when American society was fracturing. I had a ‘hippie’ wedding ceremony in a forest in 1970.

After joining UNSW in 1972, I organised the first sports history conference with Michael McKernan in Australia in 1977. We believed that the interrogation of sport, was an important exercise. I was one of the first Australian academics to become a fully-fledged sports historian.

I produced a number of pioneering cricket studies on cricket crowds, the first histories written on Indian cricket and on Australian women’s cricket and biographies of Fred Spofforth, Billy Murdoch and Yabba

The staging of the Sydney Games provided me with unparalleled opportunities as the director of the UNSW Centre for Olympic Studies. A highlight was when I was selected as a community torchbearer and ran around Enmore Park the day before the Games opened. Afterwards, I completed four books on the legacy of the Games.