The kids should have been there for the book launch – their Dad's biography, ‘Victory: The Vic Furlan Story'.

'They would have been so proud,” says an ever so slightly emotional Vic Furlan, probably because he's had time to process his feelings. And some harsh life experiences have given him a bit of a steely edge. 'We were so close. The family did everything together.”

The kids Mark and Vicki Furlan won't be at the launch tomorrow evening because fate twice intervened in the cruelest of fashions. And it left the stories of son Mark and daughter Vicki to become sad and tragic threads woven through the tale of their Dad's life.

Mark, aged 39, a Commonwealth games 10,000m runner and triathlete, was struck by a car while cycling on Tauranga's Chapel St one chilly April eve in 2000. Ten days later they turned off his life support.

Thirteen years earlier his sister Vicki drowned in a freak accident when she was trapped in a crashed car in a swollen river. Both Vic's kids were gone. But their memory became the catalyst for ‘Victory: The Vic Furlan Story'.

Inner strength

'It built an inner strength to survive and thrive through tragedy and heartache,” says the stoic 86-year-old from Matua, who also lost his wife Helen just six years ago. He could have been forgiven had he become a sad, bitter and cheated old man.

Yes, he did lie in bed some nights and wonder ‘why me?' Yes, he did crawl away into the bathroom and have 'a bit of a bawl”. But he knew he had to deal with it.

'You can't let it control your life because life is for the living. You can't let it dominate you, or define you.”

And without that message, Vic's biography may never have been written. 'I want my story to inspire others to face and overcome their own unique challenges. There's always light at the end of the tunnel.”

The author Graeme Wilson knows his subject matter intimately; he's known Vic for more than 40 years. He's sitting alongside for Vic's chat with The Weekend Sun and you sense a profound kind of blokey chemistry.

”You are making me teary,” says the author. Vic, the listener and advisor, guided Graeme through some romantic turmoil many years. Definitely a second father figure.

'He may have lost two children but he never sat in the corner and rocked. He has always embodied the ‘no guts, no glory' approach to life and it's been inspirational to witness.”

Vic's tribulations started as a child. It was the beginning of World War II, and the then three-year-old son of Italian immigrants watched two burly cops remove his so-called 'enemy alien” father Giovanni from the family home to detention on Somes Island in Wellington Harbour. The time and circumstances dictated he was some sort of national security risk.

‘Peewee'

The author affectionately and respectfully calls Furlan his 'little mate with the big heart”.

'Little” because, even today, Vic Furlan is pint-sized - just 5ft 3in and 9 ½ stone. '‘Peewee' was my nickname.”

His size impacted his whole life. He left school at 14 to become a jockey. He was just 30 or 40kg. 'And I was bullied mercilessly. Smaller people always get picked on. So I learned to box so I could defend myself, so I could look after myself.” And he tells the clinical but colourful yarn about how he bounced a 15 stone guy who had given him niggle. 'He chucked me around so I just kept hitting him. My knuckles were raw. He came back and apologised to me a couple of days later.”

Boxing could have taken this featherweight to the 1958 Commonwealth Games until he broke his thumb. But he kept winning – 44 straight – and could have turned pro.

'When I told [wife-to-be] Helen about the offer, she flew off the hook, saying there would be no wedding because she couldn't bear the sport.” He had one last fight, got beaten in a split decision and gave it away. 'It was another early reminder to take the good with the bad.”

And this was the Helen with whom he would have '58 years of perfect marriage”.

Even after 'a honeymoon from hell”.

'Helen had been quite firm there would be no hanky-panky before marriage, and there was certainly none on our wedding night.” Consummation would have to wait because Vic had ordered chicken soup at their Wairoa honeymoon destination and was 'up spewing all night”.

Not a quitter

There is a lot of light and shade in what Graeme calls this 'story of ordinary man who showed extraordinary strength to meet life's cruel twists and turns head-on with courage and dignity”.

Vic, the cyclist and runner, the man who never feels the need to taste alcohol. Not a quitter. Life had set him up to cope.

As he says in the book '…we have a responsibility to life itself, to our own lives. To live them fully whatever tragedy may befall us. Otherwise we are wasting that precious gift of life itself”.

‘Victory: The Vic Furlan Story' will be officially launched at a function in Pāpāmoa tomorrow. It is available on Amazon as a paperback or e-book.