When we came to visit, the two bonded over Jock Hobbs and David Kirk. Although I’m not sure how interested Ichiro really was in the national game.
His real heroes weren’t All Blacks but epidemiologists like Daniel Gajdusek and Richard Doll (the man who proved that cigarettes cause lung cancer).
Ichiro was the ultimate nerd. He rented an extra room in our flat to store his alphabetically arranged scientific papers, manga and novels. As our rotting five-bedroom bungalow shook to The Cure and Prince, he tacked Bach and Hemingway posters to the walls.
After late-night ward rounds at Wellington Hospital, he pored over extramural university papers on statistics, economics and the philosophy of aesthetics. His idea of relaxation was to smoke a pipe and listen to John Coltrane LPs.