Old hands have the advantage

My dentist is playing international hockey again. He turned 63 last week and is just back from Singapore with the New Zealand Over-60s. So it isn't just Shayne Warne (42) and Martin Crowe (49) who are keen to get back into the top stuff at a ridiculously advancing age. Old men in sport is the new food television.

My dentist is a professional man with a reputation honed from years at the drill. He would not wish his name to be just bandied about willy-nilly, so I shall call him Peter Ashton. Two years ago, at the International Grand Masters Over-60s hockey tournament in Cape Town, he tore the hamstring from his pelvic bone when a German attacker, resplendent in the heartless efficiency and precision Germans are so well known for, ran over Pete's body like a tank would run over a rabbit. He was carried from the field.

Clearly, my dentist would never play hockey again; the question was whether he would ever swallow or breathe.

But man is a fierce beast who can withstand degrees of punishment, pain and disease women cannot even pretend to comprehend, so last September, one month out from an international over-60s tournament in Singapore, Pete was asked if he had another game left in him. They were desperate. He finished up playing six games in 10 days. Now, his sights are set on the big post-Olympics tournament in London next August, where all the top nations will be turning their toughest offenders loose on my dentist's unyielding injury-challenging defence.

Right now, he's confident. The right hand doesn't go until you reach your 80s, he says - heartening news for me as a patient. If there is one thing I fear late in life, it is being dentally amended by a weak-handed man.

Shane Warne's right hand has been working fine in the IPL, so now he's talking serious cricket again. He, like Sean Fitzpatrick, has become incomprehensibly thinner as he runs into his 40s, though clearly Warne's body has been honed through repeated ascents of Mt Lizhurley.

Crowe, at 49, is, not surprisingly, finding it harder. On his first day in Auckland club cricket, insultingly one grade down from premier, he ground out 15 runs from 41 balls and was roundly abused by whippersnappers young enough to be his grandchildren.

He went first ball the following Saturday, and was promptly promoted into the top grade, the sort of perplexing selection decision he has been ranting at as a sideline expert for years.

Inevitably, I myself am now thumbing through the various sports on offer, especially those with world travel and attractive uniforms. Croquet is looming large in my thoughts. I have frequently been on the Punga croquet green after spraying drives on the 9th hole at Belleknowes. How hard can it be to whang a ball through a hoop with a stick?

In addition, former New Zealand table tennis legend Bob Jackson later became a top croquet player, and table tennis was the only sport where I managed to garner what sporting historians refer to as Otago colours. The two sports therefore must be neurochemically related.

Advancing years are tremendously useful in sport. Tiny things like failure and bad luck mean nothing to a man in his 60s when every time he bends down to do up a shoe, he is positively devoured by failure and bad luck. The loathing of conceding a point to the young is phenomenal motivation, and weapons the young can only dream of - dishonesty, stealth, deviousness, personal abuse and bluff - are second nature to an old man defending his turf.

I am quietly confident wisdom will triumph over medical chaos and I will follow these great men, Warne, Crowe and Ashton, into the international sporting arena.

• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.