Movers & Shakers:Sport

With an Australian cricket legend and an England football star

Can competitive sport help slow the progress of Parkinson’s? We have already covered the benefits of exercise on Movers and Shakers but this week we look at whether a game of tennis, a round of golf or a race down a mountain on skis can play a positive role in keeping your symptoms at bay. As part of this episode we have a real scoop - an interview with Australian cricketing legend Allan Border.

A team of sporting legends - not!

But we begin with some rather less eminent sporty types - us. While Nick “Judge” Mostyn boasts of his exploits on the golf course, the tennis court and the ski slopes and Gillian Lacey-Solymar has not let her often severe Parkinson’s symptoms stop her enjoyment of skiing and pingpong, the rest of us are pretty hopeless. Paul Mayhew-Archer tells us he was so terrible at cricket at school that he was made to be an umpire, only to reveal that he did not know the signal for a boundary.

I had the misfortune to be as hopeless at sports as Paul, while being rather keen on playing and watching them. Then as. an adult I discovered two sports, skiing and long-distance running, at which I was at least competent - before Parkinson’s brought both to an end. As for Mark Mardell, he has been consistent in hating sport either as a player or a spectator, and Jeremy Paxman, who I somehow imagine hitting devilish dropshots to bamboozle tennis opponents, has retired from competitive sports.

But all of us, sporty or not, are lost in admiration for our first guest, Nick Taylor, who combines a career in legal academia as Professor of law at Leeds University with the captaincy of the England football team. The Parkinson’s walking football team, that is.

Nick was diagnosed with Parkinson’s ten years ago and had played walking football with just a few friends but stopped when his wife died two years ago.

“But the football team came looking for me to make sure I was okay, which is fantastic. And that sort of took me back into the fold. And then we started a national team.” They have travelled the world over the past year or so, playing games in Guernsey, Singapore and Malaysia. “We meet every two months, at a training camp and in between we have our matches which might be at home or abroad.” It seems to be the camaraderie that Nick values above everything:”Going to an airport can be an absolute nightmare for a ‘Parky’. But when there's 20 of us going through together, it's fantastic, so funny - we just have a good laugh together.”

To those of us who could barely kick a ball when young and in good health, the idea of even walking football, where running is penalised with a free kick, now seems far too. demanding. But Nick says this is a game for everyone with Parkinson’s:

“One of the bizarre things about Parkinson's is if you roll a football to somebody with Parkinson's, they can suddenly play football. They can move quickly, they can control the ball, they can pass, they can shoot in a way that you would never believe - it is astonishing. Some of my colleagues have got Parkinson’s pretty seriously now, but roll them a football and they can do anything.”

The Movers and Shakers are impressed, if not totally convinced that any of us will become the Messi of walking football.

If you want to know more about England’s Parkinson’s walking football team this video by David Sangster is a useful guide:

Our next guest, Charlie Appleyard of Sport Parkinson’s, is also inspiring. He has been instrumental in getting Parkies involved in a range of sports, including golf and cricket, and like Nick thinks that it is the social aspect of these activities that matters most.

“There's no judgement on ability or competence or background. We want people just to come along, just enjoy yourself, find your way to play, and we do know ‘Keep healthy and strong until a cure comes along’ is definitely a good motto.”

With 156 Test match appearances, scoring over 11,000 runs and captaining Australia to its first Cricket World Cup in 1987, Allan Border’s status as a sporting legend is not in doubt. So it was big news when in June last year he revealed that he was living with Parkinson’s. After giving a few. interviews to the Australian media, he went quiet again, focusing on his work as a television pundit so we were delighted when he agreed to speak to Movers and Shakers in a Zoom interview conducted by Nick Mostyn.

He tells us how his diagnosis came in 2016 when he saw a specialist after experiencing chronic pain in his hip:

“As soon as I walked in the door, he said, I'm sorry Allan to tell you this, but you've got Parkinson's disease. He just knows that straightaway. I just couldn't believe it.” He says his disbelief was because he felt quite fit, and had been doing plenty of walking and cycling and going on treks with his wife. But he says his immediate thought at the time was of watching Muhammad Ali, stricken by advanced Parkinson’s, lighting the flame at the London Olympics in 2012..

He went on medication straight away but he was also taking tablets for asthma and low blood pressure and suffered a series of side effects culminating in a bad fall at home where he broke two ribs. Eventually, the doctors worked out the right combination of drugs and he was back on an even keel.

Meanwhile he was told to keep active:”I've tried to do that as much as possible. I played golf today. So I still do that - no problems.” But he admits “I don't know whether I’d want to walk the golf course anymore.”

And he says the drugs, which he has had to begin taking more frequently, are enabling him to carry on working as a television pundit. “I do less and less in front of camera stuff, I just do a lot of commentary. Generally speaking, I can hold things together pretty well, for the half hour stint that I have to do three times a day - the drugs seem to be working quite well.”

Allan Border may have come across as a forceful figure on the cricket field, but off it he apppears quite a private, even shy person - witness the fact that it was seven years after his diagnosis that he went public about his Parkinson’s. And even now he appears not to relish the attention that brought him.

“People have been very, very positive, embarrassingly so - I get a bit uncomfortable, the way people do treat me just a bit over the top nice, you know, I'm not used to it.”

That makes him cautious about any role as a standard bearer for people with Parkinson’s. Nevertheless, we were impressed by his stoicism and his determination just to get on with life without too much fuss. And when he talked about the future he was upbeat:

“I'm a bit of a glass half full sort of person. I think that medical science is getting better and better all the time. And there's different things happening in that area that you're hanging on to, that as I, in theory, degenerate things will be found to delay that or even stop it totally.”

Judge Mostyn could not let Allan Border go without seeking to nail down the story of one of the greatest pieces of sledging in the history of Ashes encounters between England and Australia. Tune in to find out what Border really said in 1989 to England’s Robin Smith when, stricken with a hangover, he asked if he might have a glass of water.

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