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In Dunedin they still recognize her as 'the netball girl'. In the late sixties and early seventies she was the face of the sport in New Zealand. WARREN BARTON catches up with Joan Harnett
IN the late sixties and early seventies some people in netball resented Joan Harnett always getting her picture in the newspapers, so often in fact that she became the face of the sport in New Zealand.
And what a stunningly attractive face. Still is. At 53 years of age Joan Harnett-Kindley is as elegant as ever (she calls it neat and tidy) and still insists that she never thought of herself as a glamour girl; that "the game was the thing".
"Anyway, you are what you are," she smiles and lights a cigarette, a habit that she picked up on her way home from the first world netball tournament in England in 1963.
We're in the Champions of Otago Sports Bar in George St in Dunedin, and we're sitting, rather inappropriately, in a corner that's devoted to cricket and features on the wall above us photographs of Jeff (the Golden Boy) Wilson and his flannelled mates. But nowhere to be seen is a picture of this champion, a product of Otago too, and the first netballer to be elected to the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame.
Probably, she explains, because the family moved from Dunedin to Blenheim when she was still a child then shifted a few years later to Christchurch. That's where she did her growing up and came to grips with what was then a game called outdoor basketball, as well as several other sports.
"I guess I was very lucky. Whatever I wanted to play, whatever I wanted to put my hand to I could do. I won the tennis at school as well as several tournaments after that; the athletics at school. I represented Canterbury at badminton and indoor basketball. I was also good at swimming."
And outdoor basketball, of course. She says it was a toss-up when she left Sacred Heart Girls College between tennis or basketball or both. "But I decided you had to be good at one thing in particular and put all you time and all your energies into that. Basketball won."