Out of the Box: the Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler PDF
Preview Out of the Box: the Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler
Reg Spiers arrived in England in 1964 as a world-class athlete. He returned to Australia in a box, but that was only the start of his adventures. Crazily impulsive, romantic, and free-spirited, Reg became a national hero for smuggling himself 13,000 miles home as air freight. But as his fame and sporting career faded, Reg decided to smuggle something very different. Soon he was on the run with his girlfriend, playing a cat-and- mouse game with police on three continents. A wild road trip across India and Africa—idyllic beaches and prison hellholes, shady friends and shadier cops, gun-toting militias and drug-running gangsters—led to a courtroom in Sri Lanka and the fight of his life. Could Reg beat the death sentence he’d just been given, or was this box too big to climb out of? The Incredible True Story of a Champion’s Life on the Run $15.95 ISBN 978-1-938901-32-4 51595> 9 781938 901324 OUT OF THE BOX OUT OF THE BOX THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF A CHAMPION SMUGGLER J M S M M S ulie c orley and arcuS c orley Roaring Forties Press 1053 Santa Fe Avenue Berkeley, CA 94706 www.roaringfortiespress.com This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events described in this book took place. Conversations, of course, were not recorded at the time, and have been re-created based on memory and research, or reimagined by the authors. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved. Copyright © 2015 Julie McSorley and Marcus McSorley All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Cover design by Anna Morrison; interior design by Nigel Quinney. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. I978-1-938901-32-4 (print) 978-1-938901-33-1 (PDF) 978-1-938901-34-8 (ePub) 978-1-938901-35-5 (Kindle) For the late, great Bille Brown, who insisted that “there was room for mad bastards,” and set us on our path “I’ve seen so much and lived it all. I wanted to bite the earth and taste it. It is both bitter and sweet, and if I had my time to live over again, I wouldn’t change a damn thing.” — Reg Spiers C ontents Foreword, Lynn Davies CBE ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii Prologue 3 Part One: Early 1980s 9 Part Two: 1960s 99 Part Three: 1980s 171 Part Four: Late 1980s 263 Afterword 307 An Australian/British and American Glossary 310 About the Authors 312 F oreword B l d CBE y ynn avieS Chatting with friends about the “box story” recently, I joked that perhaps male throwers are the “wild men of athletics.” The jury is still out on that one. There have been few comparative studies on the personality traits of track and field athletes, but the eventful life of one javelin thrower, the aptly named Reg Spiers, may fuel further speculation! Elite track and field athletes of Reg’s era operated in a very different environment than those of today. Most of us were forced to fit our training programs and international competi- tions around employment commitments. Sponsorship for ath- letes was scant and access to coaches and mentors often de- pended on geographical location, the knowledge base of local athletics clubs, and a fair amount of luck. Imagine these condi- tions against the backdrop of the swinging sixties, and Reg’s saga is all the more intriguing. Most athletes, including myself, are opposed to drugs in any circumstances. Reg is thus somewhat of an enigma, because his misadventures began when he was a talented, high-profile sportsman: Reg won the National Australian Javelin Champi- onships on two occasions and came fifth in the 1962 Common- wealth Games.
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