“Pound for pound the best of all”
Tree felling is the most spectacular and dangerous of all chopping events – a crowd favourite. It also requires a high fitness level. Matthew Gurr compares it to the long ache of the 800 metres but with the unpredictability of the wood to consider. “If the wood is hard, axemen need to slow and pace themselves. If the wood is soft, they’ll have to cut as hard as they can.”
“It’s a sport where you can’t just run down to the sports store and buy an axe and pay your membership and just start – you just can’t do that,” Matthew said. “You’ve really got to have somebody…a family member or somebody that can introduce you to the sport, because there are so many things involved – axes, shoeboards – everything’s got to be prepared,” he told a Sydney Morning Herald sports writer in 2015.
Matthew had the good fortune to have Bill Youd as his mentor. Bill spotted the potential of this “cocky cheeky little fella” at a coaching clinic in Deloraine. The 17-year-old was a good footballer but had never chopped. Bill taught him the basics and introduced him to the special technical skills of tree felling. At 18 he won the 1984 Tasmanian Thousands using Bill Youd’s axe. By the late 1980s he was beating his coach and mentor for the honours in the tree felling at the Sydney Royal Easter Show…still using the axe Bill gave him.
(Jacob Saulwick, Tree-felling dynasties at the Easter Show, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4th April 2015)