Very powerful hitter, very precise and aggressive
Jack O’Toole was an imposing man (188 cm and 101kg), and was reputedly “the toughest man” in the police force as its heavyweight boxing champion for thirteen years. He also played Australian rules football for Hawthorn reserves.
Jack was born in Gippsland, Victoria, working in the timber industry before joining the force. He amassed over 120 titles including 26 world championships competing in Australia, New Zealand and North America with the underhand and standing blocks his favoured events. He won the Britstand Trophy (the “Axemen’s Oscar”) eight times, taking it home for good in 1961.
He was known for ruining more axes than anyone else, incessantly grinding axe edges at the last minute before an event. Other axemen had 40 to 50 axes; Jack had over 100. His rivalry with Tom Kirk was legendary, though Jack once lent Tom his best axe.
Jack commented that a top axeman had to have “a bit of weight, a bit of height and a bit of reach”- a good description of his own attributes. While terse (asked whether he smoked or drank, he replied, ‘well, I don’t smoke’) he had great self-belief. One obituarist wrote: “You loved him, you hated him, you walked around him in fear. If he spoke to you with a word of praise then you were in seventh heaven. If he told you there was a knot in the log, whether there was or not, you lost the event.”
Ironically, he was later seconded as by-laws officer to guard the trees in Melbourne’s city parks. In the 1970s he hosted the woodchopping contests on television’s “World of Sport” and continued to compete, winning the 1982 Police Woodchop at Royal Melbourne Show shortly after his sixty-sixth birthday.