Bickerstaff's parents divorced while he was a pre-schooler and he and his brother Dale stayed with extended family until his father remarried Mary Patricia Jaffray (known as Molly).
Journalist Phil Gifford, a fellow sports specialist, said the Broadcasting Corporation style of "the BBC crossed with a conservative insurance office" was never going to suit Bickerstaff's volcanic personality, and when he returned to New Zealand from Australia he was ready for something different.
"At the NZBC his most memorable moment was the time during the Saturday night television news when the camera panned down to reveal he was reading results directly from the 8 O'Clock sports newspaper".
Phil Gifford said Tim Bickerstaff didn't just blaze a trail in sports talk on radio in New Zealand as much as "dynamite the landscape, and change it forever.
[8] He earned notoriety for the on-air Punch a Pom a Day campaign he initiated when All Black Keith Murdoch was controversially sent home from a British tour in 1972.
Beginning with world champion mile athlete John (now Sir John) Walker, they included Glen Campbell (singer), Mickey Rooney (actor) Billy Connelly (comedian), Ruth Westheimer (sexologist), Jack Nicklaus (golfer), Jean Houston, (psychologist) Jackie Collins (author), and Xavier Hollander (porn actress).
Said journalist Phil Gifford: For several years I had the pleasure of talking for 20 minutes every week with him when he moved to Radio Pacific, and to this day I have never worked with a sharper mind, or a more attentive listener.
Rather he developed his own list of advertisers and sold their product on "time" – a certain number of minutes an hour – the station gave him in lieu of salary.
TVs, refrigerators, microwaves, or Souvenir editions of All Black or All White books – Bickerstaff sold them all, while at the same time drawing listeners with his controversial commentaries on sport.
Sir Peter, then a dyslexic former grave digger just beginning in business with Rosella Meats, took exception to Sportsline getting stuck into the Mangere East Rugby League Club, of which he was already a keen supporter.
Leitch said in a newspaper interview he was sipping beer with Bickerstaff "and this Maori guy walks in, points to him and says: 'Hey, there's that ----ing mad butcher!'"
Sportsmen covered included cricketer Sir Richard Hadlee, yachtsman Chris Dickson, John Adshead, and Charlie Dempsey, the men behind the 1982 All Whites Soccer World Cup campaign, and All Blacks Buck Shelford, Don Clarke, and Keith Murdoch.
In 1997 he founded a health products company, Happy Families Ltd with partner Jenny Wheeler, and became the first to advertise honey with added bee venom as a joint supplement.
When he heard Nelson apiarist Phil Cropp was making Nectarease, a honey with added bee venom, he offered to market it[14] if he could have exclusive rights to directly sell it.
Within two years Happy Families developed their own brand of honey and bee venom products, known as Honeybalm and BV Relief, and for several years continued to focus on marketing honey-related products including honey and bee venom capsules, an Active Manuka cream, and Honeybalm For Pets for arthritic dogs and horses.
Before Viagra was a legal prescription product in New Zealand Bickerstaff was buying it off the web and on-selling it to his car dealer and horse trainer friends.
From a keen sporting family, Bickerstaff's athletics career ended almost before it began when he damaged his right knee training in the hammer throw event.
He died of a heart attack, sitting peacefully in his chair waiting for an All Blacks play Australia in Tokyo game to begin, at his Whitianga home on 31 October 2009.
Even in death, Bickerstaff made headlines around the world, after Halloween trick-or-treaters found the 67-year-old diabetic through a window, but when their door-knocking failed to rouse him, they entered the house and set off his medic alert bracelet.