King’s Birthday Honours: Giant of West Australian media Ken Casellas awarded Order of Australia Medal

This is the story of one of Western Australia’s most remarkable sporting lives — one spent telling the stories of others. Ken Casellas’ name sat atop word-perfect descriptions of some of Australian sports biggest moments. Triumphs, failures, breakthroughs and tragedies. And the Nedlands boy himself sat ringside as Cassius Clay — later Muhammed Ali — fought his way to Olympic gold. He was trackside at Royal Ascot, courtside at Wimbledon and across bars, dinner tables and dressing-room benches from the country’s cricketing luminaries. His pen — with both words and numbers — ruled over the golden era of WA football and he shared Perth’s commentary boxes with Dennis Cometti as a trailblazing statistician. In fact, he is credited with devising the modern method of collecting football data. Casellas never lived out the dreams he harboured in the 1940’s to play Test cricket for Australia and league football for Claremont. He reached heights far more interesting. The journalist, broadcaster, statistician and administrator has been honoured with an Order of Australia Medal. “It’s an amazing honour. I am very humbled and extremely surprised,” Casellas said. “I have enjoyed every moment of my life and sport and in the media.” Casellas’ first brush with his beloved Tigers was as a 14-year-old. He became one of the first people in the country to take football stats — as a teenager. ‘Stats’ would even become his nickname. But not all of the club’s league players were fans of Stats’ stats. The book of numbers he populated in the outer at Claremont Oval earned one prominent player a stint in the reserves. “It was there that I dreamt up football statistics. No one had ever heard of players’ figures being recorded, ” Casellas said. “I used to sit on the grass bank underneath the scoreboard with a large book and record all the Claremont players and the opposition, their marks, kicks, tackles. “Eventually they wondered what I was doing, so I provided all this information to the Claremont footy club. I did that and for some years before I left school, the Claremont coach would take all my information. “I do remember once that a prominent Claremont player got dropped and he was furious, because he found out I had reported all these facts and figures and he had only had a couple of kicks across consecutive matches. “He wasn’t very happy a schoolboy could bring about his demotion from the league side.” Casellas began a cadetship at The West Australian as a 17-year-old in 1954, which included court and crime rounds. He was still a teenager when he became the chief harness racing writer and his byline lived in this masthead for more than four decades. “I had always had a fascination about Gloucester Park, the wonderful gates to the entrance, because I used to go to the WACA Ground as a young boy,” Casellas said. “I was always interested in what happened behind the big facade at Gloucester Park and I started to go to the trots. “I loved horses. Horses are the most wonderful animals in the world.” A resignation — at just 22 — a leap of faith and a ticket to London catapulted his career with a stint as a freelancer, then as a European sport correspondent for the Sydney Daily Mirror and The Adelaide News. “There I covered some Test matches for them in England, I covered the Rome Olympic Games in 1960, the Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1960, I did all the Royal Ascot racing meetings, the English Derby and a variety of other sports,” Casellas said. Growing up in Nedlands together, Casellas ran the half-mile with Herb Elliott. Moments after Elliott crossed the line in world-record time and first-place at the end of Rome’s 1500m race, his old mate was the first to sidle up to him for a chat. “That was probably the greatest moment of sports-writing life, was watching Herb Elliott break the world record — three minutes, 35.6 seconds — when he beat Michel Jazy of France. It was a fabulous occasion and something I’ll never, ever forget in my life.” he said. “We both lived in Nedlands and I used to run the half-mile myself, nowhere near as quick as Herb Elliott. “Also at that Olympic Games I had the pleasure of sitting ringside as Tony Madigan of Sydney in the semifinal of the light-heavyweight boxing championship. His opponent was a guy called Cassius Clay.” He returned to become this newspaper’s chief cricket writer. That meant months-long tours with his feet in all the world’s great cricketing nations and his eyes and mind fixed on some of Australia’s toughest cricketing battles. In one of his final years leading the coverage of the sport, Casellas spent 222 days away from home. Those reporters became ensconced with the nation’s cricket team and life on the road was an up-close-and-personal experience. “Those tours are unimaginable now in that I had far greater access to players and officials than people who work in the media these days,” Casellas remembers. “I remember in 1975 during the Ashes series there I was very good friends with all the guys in the Test side, led by Ian Chappell and at the end of days’ play in that Ashes series, Ian Chappell always said to me ‘pop into the dressing room straight after play and have a chat with me’. “Twenty minutes or 10 minutes after one day’s play I walked into the dressing room and he said ‘it’s been a hot day out there, I’m going to have a shower’ and there I was, outside the shower, chatting away with Ian Chappell about what happened during the course of the day. “I also remember on one occasion up in Birmingham during the Edgbaston Test, the Australian players were invited out to a nightclub and I was good friends with Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh and Ross Edwards and others and I went along with them. “The players all went in, but they refused me entry because I wasn’t an Australian Test player. “But that didn’t stop Rod Marsh, he said ‘come here’, he took off his Australian blazer and I wore Rod Marsh’s Australian blazer to get into this nightclub.” Later, when Mark and Steve Waugh, Glenn McGrath and spin king Shane Warne came to town, they would have dinner with the Casellas family. While he was a brilliant sports writer, Casellas had his say behind a microphone, too. He was a presenter and statistician on the ABC’s football coverage. As an administrator, he founded guilds for media covering cricket, football and harness racing, sat on the board and was the vice-president of Claremont. He is also a life member of the WACA, WA Football and Racing WA hall of fame inductee. Now, WA’s best cricket reporters vie for the Ken Casellas Award for their coverage. The harness racing writers? You guessed it: the Ken Casellas Award. But his longest and closest association is with Claremont. Casellas still pens features for the club’s website and produces a pre-season magazine. That is in between travelling the world. Casellas spoke to The West during a trip to Norway. “I still love the football club, I have got so many lifelong friends at the Claremont Football Club,” he said.

King’s Birthday Honours: Giant of West Australian media Ken Casellas awarded Order of Australia Medal

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