My brother, Paul, played top-grade provincial rugby in New Zealand, and I went on to become an All Black. But although these success stories might indicate the contrary, we were not a traditional rugby family. My father, Eric, never played the sport. Instead, he and my mother, Pauline, were involved in basketball. My earliest sporting memories revolve around tagging along to basketball tournaments.
While our parents were socialising after their tournaments, Paul and I would shoot baskets with the other kids. It was a great feeling to have the whole court to ourselves, and we both benefited from having parents who were passionate about sport, even if that sport wasn’t rugby.
Maybe we were fortunate that they were sporty, and we had some sporting genes to work with, for the extended family wasn’t at all. My mom was brought up on strict Catholicism. She was an adopted child and only met her biological family when she was 18. My father was also adopted, but within his own family. His mother couldn’t cope with all the kids – I think there were seven – and she sent him to his aunt.
I think the lighter side of my personality, the part of me that likes a good party and to socialise, comes from Dad’s side of the family. There were many aunts, uncles and cousins, and we met every Christmas and played the guitar and drank lots of beer.
I can’t remember any sportsmen among them, I say with a wry smile. So, I was unlike many international players in that I can’t say I followed a role model in the extended family. But the grounding was a solid one. In addition to being a basketballer, my mom was also a marching coach, and maybe that was where my later calling came from. I used to watch her coaching her troop. She was a New Zealand champion at marching, and she represented North Island in basketball.
I was born in Hawera, in South Taranaki, the same place as former Sharks coach, fellow global rugby traveller and my good mate, John Plumtree. The first memory I have of rugby is of going to the Athletic Club, where Plum’s dad was involved, at about the age of five. It wasn’t the rugby that I remember, though: I had no concept of the game back then, and instead spent my time sliding down a muddy bank and getting dirty, like kids tend to do. I loved wearing my blue jersey with a big No. 6 on the back.
Across the road from where we lived was the local intermediate school, which had rugby and soccer fields, not to mention a go-karting track. It was a great place for a kid, and the location helped kick-start my sporting journey. It seemed we were always playing some sport, day in and day out.
We moved from Hawera when I was 10, and went to live in the small rural community of Te Kuiti (pronounced ‘Tekwiti’). This is where legendary All Black Colin Meads hails from, a fact that no visitor to the area can fail to miss.
My physique helped determine my early preference for basketball over rugby. I was built more like a basketballer than a rugby player. Even relatively late in my school career, I was still too gangly for rugby.
We were the stereotypical sports-mad Kiwi family. Because of the time difference between New Zealand and much of the rest of the world, it seemed we were always getting up really early in the morning to watch some major sport event on television. Then, after it was over, be it rugby, tennis or cricket, Paul and I would go to the field to re-enact what we had just watched on the screen.
Although basketball was my main focus as a child, like most New Zealand boys I did play a bit of rugby at primary school, and while I was attending a representative tournament for primary schools, I watched my first senior provincial game – Manawatu against Counties. To my unseasoned eyes, the game seemed to be so fast-moving. Later, after King Country played Counties in a primary school match, I saw Perry Harris being interviewed. He had toured South Africa with the All Blacks in 1976 and had seemed like a giant in both of those games.
Basketball was the sport I excelled at, though, and I made the starting five from my first year at high school. I was selected for the Taranaki men’s team at the age of just 17, and got into the New Zealand Secondary Schools tournament team and the New Zealand Juniors in 1981 and 1982. We used to play against Australia every year for the right to attend the World Champs.
My basketball skills gave me the opportunity to go to Auckland Grammar, known as a prestigious basketball school, and where Peter Schmidt, a legend in New Zealand basketball circles, was coach. I decided not to go, as I was already at a good basketball school. Maybe if I had gone to Auckland Grammar, the rest of my life would have turned out differently.
I had great confidence on the basketball court – it felt as if I had an innate ability. This was probably the cumulative result of all those hours spent on court as a kid. I wasn’t prepared in the same way for rugby. I had to learn about rugby and feel my way along, and I felt like I was way behind most of my peers.
From a mental point of view, I found rugby a challenge. At some point I remember finding it hard to run through opposition defences because I wasn’t heavy enough. I just wasn’t there mentally in the early days. But perhaps having to find ways other than brute force to get through, and being forced to find other ways to get around problems, helped develop the strategic thinking that later underpinned my passion for coaching.
When I finished high school I weighed 87 kilograms, and at the start of my first-class career, I weighed 94 kilograms. I ended it weighing in at 117 kilograms, but my optimum playing weight was probably around 110 kilograms. In those days the No. 8 could get you the scrum put-in again if you could control the ball and go forward. So it was a matter of winning the advantage line and looking after the ball, and it meant that I had to pile on the weight to be able to do that.
But that was all to come later, after my parents had packed me off to boarding school in 1977, when I turned 13 and it was time for high school. I attended the Francis Douglas Memorial College, in a picturesque part of New Zealand’s North Island, inland from New Plymouth. We could see Mount Egmont out of the back window of the classroom and the Taranaki coastline out the front.
My school was founded in 1959, and I would be the college’s first pupil to become an All Black. Beauden Barrett and Conrad Smith, who subsequently followed in my footsteps as old boys, also got to wear the silver fern. In fact, I played First-XV rugby there with Beauden’s dad, Kevin.
The school was great in terms of developing my basketball skills – we had an American coach who had a profound influence on me and taught me a lot. He spent a great deal of time with me and was very persuasive and easy to listen to. I was also fortunate as the dormitory was close to the court and I could conveniently practise my number-one sport in my free time.
Nevertheless, going to boarding school required a big adjustment and it was daunting to leave home, even though I did understand the rationale behind it. The goal was to make me an independent person capable of soldiering on on my own. I wasn’t a rebel but neither was I the school nerd, and while I was thrust into several early leadership roles, I also got myself into trouble fairly regularly. We used to get ‘cuts’ for not following the school rules, such as no talking after lights out. We counted these beatings one by one, and I clocked up 103 in my first year. Fortunately, there weren’t too many in the following four years. So, I wouldn’t say I was a model pupil. I wasn’t a terrible academic, but neither was I ever in the top 10.
At high school I started to get my first tastes of leadership. My role as a leader started with the captaincy of the basketball team. Over time the De la Salle brothers must have seen something in me because they later made me head boarder and school vice-captain. I saw myself as a normal kid, so I’m not quite sure how that happened.
Maybe when I did things, people just followed me. I thought I was particularly shy as a kid, and I still am, so perhaps people followed me because of my actions. Some people are fortunate to enjoy leadership roles at a young age, though you don’t understand then that leadership is all about picking yourself up off the floor and moving forward.
The more you are exposed to leadership – with both its good and bad outcomes – the more it helps: you learn to anticipate things, and you get to understand that leadership isn’t always rosy and that you have to work at ways of resolving problems. I truly believe that the more you get to experience that, the more you develop as a leader.
Many people who are seen as followers were exceptional leaders earlier in life but because they were floored once or twice, they ran away from it. Some of us thrive on the challenges. Personally, adversity has never scared me.
Boarding school wasn’t always a bed of roses, and on top of it there were eight weeks of compulsory army training that we had to put up with.
There were also sad memories. One weekend I left school to watch Taranaki play Waikato for the Ranfurly Shield. Waikato won 12-0; unfortunately, I was supporting Taranaki. I met an All Black called Arthur Stone after the game and it was also during that weekend that, at the age of 16, I got to drink my first beer, with my uncle Trevor. I had a wonderful time, but it all came crashing down on me when I got back to school to discover that two of my friends, Fleming and Bolger, had been killed in a car accident.
That had quite an impact on me, as I am sure it did on many of my peers. You just don’t think about death when you are that young, and I will never forget walking past their rooms and seeing no one in there. I had to get my head around the fact that they were gone forever.
New Zealand was a tamer country at the time than South Africa, no doubt, but we still had our national tragedies. As we were coming out of a school-certificate exam in 1979, we were informed of the Mount Erebus disaster: an Air New Zealand plane had crashed into the mountain while on a scheduled sightseeing flight over the Antarctic, killing all 237 passengers and 20 crew on board. It’s a freaky memory.
And talking about events of national importance, the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand is obviously right up there in my memory bank, particularly as it took place during the year that I played for our school First XV. The school had a policy that in exam years you could play only one sport. In my matric year, my mates asked me to join them and play for the rugby first team, so I dropped basketball and just played rugby that year. Later in the year I did get special dispensation to play basketball too, and we ended up making it into the top 12 in New Zealand for the first time in the school’s history.
The effect it had on New Zealand has already been well documented, but the 1981 Bok tour was a significant event in my own life too, and I followed it with great interest. It may have played some role in later guiding me to choose rugby as my number-one sport.
The tour actually had a direct impact on me, as some of our First-XV fixtures were called off because the opposing schools were protesting against the tour taking place. The issue of the tour made a deep impression on our lives. We had to get written permission from our parents to attend the Bok games. In the match played against Taranaki, the thing I remember most vividly was the size of Flip van der Merwe’s shorts – they were massive.
I went to watch a game in Wellington with my uncle Jon. We sat in the Millard Stand and had a clear view of anti-apartheid protestors climbing over the barbed-wire fences. I saw people being batoned, and I can recall a brand of sweets called ‘Minties’ being renamed ‘Minto Bars’ after activist leader John Minto.
I was also fortunate to attend the final deciding Test match, at Eden Park in Auckland. I remember the excitement we felt once we were inside the stadium, as there had been protests outside the ground and it felt good to be away from the disturbances and be able to watch some rugby.
But we had a clear view of the infamous Cessna aircraft that made an appearance during the match, dropping flour bombs onto the pitch in an attempt to disrupt the game. It was quite frightening, as the plane descended six times, slowing down over the stadium and then accelerating away again.
I was sitting in the corner of the stadium near where Ray Mordt scored three tries for the Springboks. Naas Botha had been responsible for the build-up to some of those tries by making the final passes. It is funny how life works because, later, I was to get to know both those guys, as well as Wynand Claassen, once he took over as head of rugby at Pretoria University.
The Springboks were New Zealand’s old foe, and for rugby lovers the contest between them and the All Blacks was huge. They were the two powerhouses of world rugby.
My first recollections of the Springboks, though, are from the 1976 series in South Africa. My father used to wake me up early in the morning so we could watch the games on television. The colour of the grass and the quality of the light in South Africa seemed palpably different from any in New Zealand and, to my eyes, it seemed like another world. Then there would be rain at Newlands, and it was hard to comprehend from afar what South Africa was like: it seemed such a vast country with so many contrasts.
But 1981 was an unpleasant year and the tour drove New Zealanders apart. We knew the All Blacks and the Boks were sleeping in their change rooms the night before the fixtures so as not to present a target to protestors if they arrived by bus, and rugby clubs had to be protected as well.
People slept at some clubs armed with baseball bats to protect the property. Farmers brought cattle trucks to act as barriers. Many of the police who were deployed during that tour were emotionally scarred by the experience, and those scars were still present years later.
After I left school, I got to know a couple while I was lodging near the Fraser Tech Rugby Club, in Hamilton. Lance played hooker for Fraser Tech; his wife, Robin, was studying at university. When the Waikato game on the 1981 tour was called off, there were rumours that the police had deliberately thrown tacks onto the field so that it would be cancelled. Years later, however, Lance would discover that it had actually been Robin sabotaging the field that day with tacks, which caused a major rift between them.
All the clashes between South Africa and New Zealand around that time seemed to be shrouded in controversy both on and off the field. There was also a rift within New Zealand rugby when the unofficial side, the New Zealand Cavaliers, toured South Africa in 1986 without the sanction of the NZRU. An official All Black tour of South Africa had been cancelled the year before. There were rumours that the All Blacks were being paid big bucks to be part of the rebel tour.
There was enough interest in the tour for the Cavaliers games to be shown on television, but the feeling was that they weren’t real-deal All Blacks, even though all but two players who had been selected for the cancelled All Black tour in 1985 were part of the group. The skipper, Graham Mourie, was one of the guys who didn’t tour, but I wonder if we might have seen the Cavaliers accepted as All Blacks had they won the series, remembering of course that at that stage the Kiwis had yet to win a series on South African soil.
As well as for the protests, the 1981 tour was also remembered for referee Clive Norling’s controversial officiating, when Alan Hewson won the deciding game of the series for the All Blacks deep into injury time by kicking a penalty awarded in dubious circumstances and long after most people felt the game should have been over. The Springboks must have felt robbed by that, just as I believe the 1976 All Black side had felt robbed by the referee five years earlier.
That 1981 season was when I really started concentrating on rugby for the first time. I realised that, as much as I enjoyed shooting a basketball hoop, I got a bigger kick out of playing a role in a bigger team. I loved the camaraderie and physical nature of rugby.
After school I had the opportunity to go to Simon Fraser University, in Canada, on a basketball scholarship. That would have been a disciplined route to take, with my sporting career all mapped out for me. But I chose not to take it.
There were probably two events in my life that were pivotal in determining that rugby would become the sport I would specialise in. The first was my failure to get into Dunedin University to study physical education. My heart had been set on becoming a physical-education teacher and I still maintain that, had I got into phys-ed school, I might not have become a rugby player. I was handy at mathematics, struggled a bit with English, but it was my biology mark that let me down. A good biology mark was a prerequisite.
The second event was that I got a girl pregnant when I was 18. Picture the scene: I see this girl through the window of the office where I am working as a trainee survey draughtsman. She is with her parents. I know who she is – I remember my one-night fling with her at a party. It makes me nervous and I think to myself, ‘Are they coming my way, or are they going to the working men’s club next door for lunch?’
It quickly became apparent that they were coming my way. It had just been a one-night stand, but I had somehow managed to get one past the goalkeeper. It was a big talking point in that small rural community, and afterwards a lot of my friends disowned me. Remember, this was Colin Meads’s community, and I got the feeling that everyone was thinking I would never be considered worthy.
It took a long time for me to get over it. The girl’s parents forbade me to see her or the child after she was born. It was only relatively recently that I have become comfortable sharing this episode in my life, and for a long time it was something I internalised and had to deal with on my own.
I lived in an unknown space for many years but, fortunately, I have now met my daughter. She is a beautiful young woman and we get on really well. We have a good friendship. At the time, though, I felt nothing but shame and worthlessness, and there was also a bit of self-loathing. I kept thinking, ‘Why me?’ The situation did not feel right to me, because it was not what I had planned.
So, I needed to get away from Te Kuiti, and the pregnancy was a catalyst for my move to Hamilton. I felt that I would go backwards if I stayed.
I had to make a choice …
‘I can stay here and drink beer with my mates and feel sorry for myself, or I can get on with what I want to do,’ were my thoughts before making the decision to leave.
At the end of the day, I was being judged for my actions. When I look back now, I wonder what all the fuss was about, but it was a big drama at the time. So I had to put all of that behind me, which is exactly what I did. At least, outwardly, that is what I did.
Ironically, that experience did help me. When my friends abandoned me, I was forced to deal with a problem that only I could sort out. That helped me to stand on my own two feet and I bounced back – something I feel I have done repeatedly throughout my rugby coaching career.
Not that I always acted responsibly afterwards. In that period, from the age of 18 to about 20, I did drink a lot of beer with my mates. But I also played basketball for the New Zealand Juniors. I would play national league for the provincial basketball team in Hamilton, and then sneak back to Te Kuiti every now and then for a rugby match. My basketball coach must have known what I was doing, as I frequently had grazes and bruises (not to mention the damage being done to my ears!).
Having been a star at school when I played national league, I couldn’t understand why my basketball stints started being limited to three minutes a game. I tried to play like a hero in those three minutes, but it quickly dawned on me that I was getting much more enjoyment from whacking away on the rugby field for 80.
So, I sat down and thought about where I wanted to go, and it was then that I turned down the offer of the scholarship in Canada. I started survey draughting, initially as an extramural, and then ended up going into quantity surveying. I got a job doing draughting at an engineering company, but while I understood the maths, I was constantly petrified of my boss. If a line wasn’t straight, he would come down on me really hard.
I liked the type of work involved in quantity surveying, but sport was my passion and, at the age of 20, I decided to fully devote myself to rugby. I hopped onto a mate’s scooter and drove to the club that had been suggested to me. When I walked into the clubhouse at Fraser Tech, there were some guys having beers. A bloke named Stu Bason asked me what I wanted and directed me to the form that I could fill out to become a member.
I signed up, and by the following week I was playing for the Fraser Tech Senior B-team. I must have done okay, because the next week I was playing for the seniors. I played a mix of No. 8, blindside flank and lock for my club.
I made my debut for the senior team against an All Black, Geoff Hines, who had been on the 1980 tour of Australia and was nicknamed Chainsaw. But we won. It was such a thrill for me to be playing senior club rugby. I was young and single, and all the older guys looked after me. I went on to play and coach at that club for the next 13 years.
Of course, it was the school of hard knocks. When we lost a game quite early in that first season, senior players Ross Bougen and Bruce Keys pulled me aside and said I needed to have a Plan B for when things weren’t going well. So, the following week, against the university, I knocked out an opposing player with a punch and was sent off. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Never again, please.’ The same senior guys pulled me aside afterwards and told me that that wasn’t the Plan B they had had in mind.
The older guys really did help the youngsters, and in those days I learnt more from them than from the coach. There was a former Maori All Black in the club, John Porima, and he arranged for me to play in a Harlequins invitational match. It was a prestigious game to be involved in and I played it with 20 stitches in my cosmetic left ear. On the back of that match, I was named Waikato Colts captain for the provincial season.
We ended up playing Auckland in the final, with Zinzan Brooke and Sean Fitzpatrick in the Auckland side. That day marked the start of my long rivalry, as well my relationship, with those two future legendary All Blacks.
Although we lost the deciding match, at the end of it I felt that maybe I could actually handle this game. At around the same time I went to watch Waikato play Canterbury for the Ranfurly Shield, and, as I sat in the crowd that day in 1984, I thought that perhaps I could play for Waikato the following year.