KUALA LUMPUR, March 1 — A book on the late triple international, Daphne Boudville was launched today by her former teammates and well-wishers to commemorate one month of her passing.
The 160-page book titled Daphne Boudville: The Icon is a collection of various newspaper clippings since the 1960’s kept by Daphne as well as her pictures and obituary stories after her passing on January 28.
As current athletes struggle to focus on a single sport, Daphne represented Malaysia in hockey for three decades, in athletics and was in the 1965 women’s football squad.
Besides having won a bronze at the 1965 Southeast Asian Peninsular (SEAP) Games (now known as SEA Games), she was part of the 1982 Asian Games bronze medal-winning women’s hockey team.
That was the only Asian Games medal won by the women’s national hockey team, nicknamed the Malaysian Tigress.
Daphne passed away due to cancer at Tengku Ampuan Rahimah Hospital, Klang at the age of 76.
The book was launched at Wisma OCM through the initiative of former women’s national hockey captain K. Maheswari with the help of former sports journalist Satwant Singh in the presence of Daphne’s former teammates and fraternities of the three sports.
“When I visited her in hospital (in December 2018), she had her scrapbook, a collection of 27 years of data and newspaper cuttings, on her bed. So I asked what she was going to do with the scrapbook. She said when she died, she wanted it to go with her (cremation),” Maheswari recalled.
“I told her it would be a waste if nobody knew who Daphne was, so I suggested to her to publish it as something like a coffee table book. Then she said, ‘Take it and do what you want with it.’ When I took it home, I realised that there were over 400 pages containing thousands of articles on her.
“What we did was extracting and arranging the articles from 1960 to 1987 accordingly. I promised her that we would launch the book in her presence, but unfortunately she passed away before we finished scanning the articles,” she added.
Maheswari said with a limited budget through contributions from her former teammates and well-wishers, only 150 copies of the book were printed to be given to Daphne’s friends and kept in libraries. — Bernama
