**Sports journalist Bevan Choat was passionate about local sport in print and in radio commentary.**

Alongside a 35-year career in teaching, including 18 years as principal of Waipahihi Primary School, Bevan Arthur Choat will be remembered in Taupō for his unceasing dedication to reporting on sport in the district and recording its history.

By Chris Marshall

From 1968 to the early 2000s Bevan would drive around on Saturday mornings to gather results, anecdotes and make observations for radio from the town’s netball, rugby, cricket and hockey venues.

At the Taupō Times he would be the first journalist in on a Monday morning, smashing away at the keyboard to complete material for the Tuesday edition, and making phone calls to clubs or team managers tardy with the results they had promised to get him on Sunday.

For those three decades he was a radio sports commentator for Radio Lakeland, NZBC and later Radio NZ, doing cricket commentaries for national and international cricket in Rotorua and national provincial rugby commentaries for King Country, including one Ranfurly Shield match and the first match of the Springbok tour of NZ for Radio South Africa and Radio NZ in 1994.

In print he was the resident sports journalist for the NZ Herald, NZPA, Dominion, Sunday Star Times, Sunday News 1968-2002 and from 1987-2002 also served as a sports journalist for the Taupō Times.

As well as all this, mourners at his funeral, on what would have been his 89th birthday, heard he was humble, hard-working and dedicated to family; more than the bylines, the columns, reports or forecasts (he also became the Taupō resident weather man following Walter du Bont).

Bevan was born in Invercargill to Arthur Leslie, who worked for the State Advances Corporation (a precursor to the Housing Corporation of New Zealand) and Daphne Veronica Choat. The family then moved to Christchurch where Bevan attended West Spreydon Primary School. In 1945, they transferred to Auckland, where he attended Remuera Primary School, until the Choats then went to Wellington in 1949 where he attended Rongotai College as well as spending a brief time back in Christchurch.
Bevan lost his father when he was 15, and son-in-law Greg Maughan said with older brother Trevor at university, Bevan took on some of the duties of helping bring up younger brother Neville and sister, Jeanette.
“He made a real effort to be a father figure for everybody that he came into contact with, his own children, his grandchildren, and people that he met in his sporting pursuits… he just affected every life, every person he met.”

He trained as a primary school teacher at Wellington Teacher’s College.
Sport was a passion; particularly rugby and cricket and from schoolboy and teacher’s college teams he went on to play senior rugby in Wellington for several clubs before taking up rugby refereeing, going on later when living in Taupō to referee several top provincial matches in Hawke’s Bay.

He played several seasons of senior club cricket as an opening batsman for the Wellington Cricket Club, provincial cricket in the Wairarapa and was an Otago junior representative during his compulsory military training in the Air Force.

When teaching in England for a year he played for London New Zealand XI at cricket. He also played rugby in London for Streatham and was selected to play cricket for a Commonwealth XI.

Maughan said Bevan’s sense of humour was evident in his recount of how he and his fellow Kiwi 20 year olds were asked to leave Lord’s, “probably the first ever cricket team to be booted out of the home of cricket.”
Legendary in the family was also the tale of Bevan running brother Neville out at the non-striker’s end, first ball, in the first game of Neville’s first-class cricket career in Wellington.

Bevan first met Pauline, his future wife of 64 years, when they were around 12 as neighbours in Wellington.
Said Maughan: “Pauline whispered to me the other day ‘I met him at 12 and he was a little sh**.’”

Then admitting he himself had got in a bit of trouble with his father-in-law.

“All good, clean fun, and I think a few others have as well. But Bevan had a humility that was hard to beat.”

The depth of his relationship with Pauline was illustrated by a story Bevan himself would keenly relate from his refereeing days.

He kept hearing a sideline spectator yelling: "Ref! Stick the whistle up your ****!"
"That's a voice I’m familiar with,” Bevan would say, “it’s Pauline.”
He was active in the administrative side of sport in the Taupō/Tūrangi area for four decades and became an active and keen lawn bowler at the Taupō Bowling Club.

He also became a Justice of the Peace in 1992 and marriage celebrant in 1994. Other dedicated community service included Taupō Lions and Pakeke Lions.

But to many he is known as the historian of local sport.

In a 2012 story by former Taupō Weekender editor Laurilee McMichael about his unpublished book 'The History of Taupō Sport', Choat said during his years of reporting he had especially enjoyed raising the profile of talented Taupō athletes, including Dion Waller, Noeline Taurua and Bevan Docherty.

He spent 10 years compiling the history which covers from the 1920s through to 2002. Source material included all his meticulously organised radio scripts and newspaper stories and hours searching other newspaper archives for sports records, as well as talking to contacts.

Said celebrant Lianne Fraser at Bevan’s funeral: “His words gave depth and meaning to the world of sport, the thrill of a match, the grip of a player, not just the outcome, but the story behind it. He noticed the details, the sideline conversations, in the way sport can reflect life itself.”

Bevan is survived by his wife Pauline, daughters Di, Lyn, Helen, seven grandchildren and one great grandchild.