Happy 80th Birthday to Life Member - MARK BURGESS!

Happy 80th birthday to life member, MARK BURGESS!
The club’s best-performing and most-capped international, Burge captained New Zealand to our first Test victory over England in 1978 and the semi-finals of the 1979 World Cup. He scored five centuries and 14 half-centuries in 50 Tests.
For Grafton, he captained the club to five of the six trophies we won during the 70s. Grafton for life!

A bit of history

Mark Burgess played 59 tests and scored 2,684 runs with 5 centuries and a high score of 119*. He played 26 ODIs and captained the NZ team, though he thought he was better at football. He played 1 game for NZ Football and was the NZ Player of the Year in 1965.

Mark played back when he had to miss tours to keep his job, and remembers the days when one-dayers were a novelty.

You had to mix cricket with work.

If Australia would come here, there'd be a Test match, then Australia would play another tour game and we'd all go back to work. Then the week after that there'd be another Test match. There sometimes wouldn't even have been Auckland practice going on, so I'd go down to Grafton club practice, in conditions that Test players these days would be very unhappy to be experiencing. But we had a lot of fun.

Content borrowed from Wikipedia and an ESPNcricinfo article by Brydon Coverdale in 1995. See more here and here.