The Eagle has landed with Annesley

Houston, we had a problem. Project Apollo failed to engage this week, but no one bothered to tell one of the key participants.

Jan Frodeno completed an ironman triathlon without leaving his Spanish home

Houston, we had a problem. Project Apollo failed to engage this week, but no one bothered to tell one of the key participants.

NRL head of elite football competitions Graham Annesley, who could be in the Guinness Book of Records for most different jobs in rugby league, set off from his home on the Gold Coast on Wednesday morning to attend a Project Apollo meeting in Sydney later in the week.

Project Apollo, for the uninitiated, is the fancy name given to the committee put together to oversee rugby league’s return to the field in late May.

Something about achieving the impossible.

The committee is run by ARL commissioner Wayne Pearce, famous for such leadership decisions as the 1999 NSW State of Origin team’s horseriding bonding session, which resulted in a busted shoulder for Robbie Kearns.

But we digress. The meeting was an important one, expected to dot the Is and cross the Ts of the new competition, so worth Annesley making the 10-hour drive south.

After arriving in Sydney late on Wednesday, Annesley rocked up at Rugby League Central on Thursday morning and wondered why everything was so quiet. He was later told that Pearce had decided to postpone the meeting until next Wednesday due to the uncertainty surrounding the NRL’s relationship with broad­casters.

He’s not going to be fooled again, though.

Annesley has decided to hang around in Sydney until next week and will no doubt be the first in the room for the Wednesday meeting.

Possibly that could be something to do with the fact that he will have to self-isolate for 14 days when he crosses the border back into Queensland.

Triathlete’s home run

AWAAT’s good bloke award for imagination in a time of coronavirus goes to German triathlete Jan Frodeno, who has proved you can’t keep a creative, determined athlete down.

Frodeno, who won gold in the triathlon at the Beijing Olympics and has claimed three Ironman World Championships, had been training for a fundraising triathlon in Bavaria when the pandemic intervened.

But he decided he wasn’t going to let the lockdown stand in the way of raising some cash for healthcare organisations in the Spanish city of Girona, where Frodena now lives, and the Laureus Sport for Good foundation.

So he completed an ironman triathlon without leaving home — in a remarkable time of 8hrs, 33mins and 39secs.

That’s 3.8km in his countercurrent swimming pool, 180km cycling on his roller trainer and a 42.2km marathon on his treadmill.

“The situation here is really dire,” Frodeno said. “That’s why I’ve been training at home. However, when I see what the people here in the hospitals are doing for us, this small sacrifice is one I wholeheartedly make.

“In the beginning it was actually just a crazy idea, with me thinking: ‘If I can’t do my race, I’ll just do it at home.’ Then we thought more about how and why we should actually do this. I just wanted to attract attention in order to raise money.”

Fans around the world tuned in to a live stream of Jan’s #Tri­atHomeChallenge. Throughout the day, he was joined on the stream by sporting legends, including Laureus Academy members Boris Becker, Fabian Cancellara and Chris Hoy.

The result so far is €200,000 ($341,000), but the cash is still rolling in.

Taking the pith

It sounds like heresy, and is scarcely believable given the reverence for the baggy green, but in Don Bradman’s time a cricketer’s choice of headwear was no big deal.

Players routinely wore their Australian or state caps in club cricket — an act that today would push the limits of alpha audacity.

And if flouting of tradition wasn’t confined to club cricket — when Douglas Jardine deployed Bodyline he did so under a harlequin cap, not English dark blue.

Bradman himself took a particularly laissez-faire approach after returning from the 1938 Ashes. The Don took the field in a pith helmet. Yes, in researching the history of Bradman’s Kensington club, our man in Adelaide Andrew Faulkner has discovered that Bradman might have passed for Dr Livingstone and the verdant Kensington Oval sub-Saharan Africa that day in November, 1938.

Whatever possessed him to run out on to a cricket field looking like a character from Kipling? Well it was the sixth day of an unseasonal heatwave. No doubt Bradman picked up the hat during the Ashes tourists’ stopover in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where the Australians played a game in pith helmets.

“It may have been that this week’s heatwave reminded Don Bradman of Colombo … because the Test captain took the field at Kensington today in a topee,” The Mail reported. “It was a khaki helmet and the crowd gave him an unusually hearty reception when he led his men on to the field against East Torrens. Smart and cool as the helmet looked, it had its drawbacks, for, twice during the first couple of hours, it fell off when Bradman stooped to field a ball.” Only he could get away with it, of course.

Anger therapy misfires

AWAAT took another dive into the lockdown tales emerging from European Tour golfers past and present, and found this gem from England’s David Lynn involving West Australian Jarrod Moseley and a case of mistaken identity.

The two were playing together at the French Open in 2002 and Moseley, described by Lynn as a “feisty, hot-headed Aussie but a great lad”, had an eagle putt from around 20 feet, which he missed, then missed the birdie putt and tapped in for a three-putt par and walked off the green.

Seconds later, as Lynn has tapped in his own putt, Moseley has erupted by the side of the green and taken quite vigorously to his Taylor Made bag with his putter. Says Lynn: “He’s started beating the shit out of what he thought was his bag … He’s hitting it so hard, the clubs have started coming out and he’s cursing, then throws his club down and walks off.”

But it wasn’t Moseley’s bag that took the beating. It was Lynn’s identical Taylor Made bag the Aussie had vented his fury on.

Lynn continues: “So I’m laughing and I trot up behind him and say, ‘You all right now Mose, feel a bit better after that?’ ”

As the reality dawned, a horrified Moseley stopped and said: “Shit mate, is that your bag?”

Fortunately both players saw the funny side and laughed their way to the next tee. But it was a turning point for Moseley, who saw the need to change his ways. Later that year he shared the Australian PGA title with Peter Lonard.