In April 1993 we enjoyed our reward for finishing in the top four of the NPC when we flew to South Africa. It was my first visit to the country. Johannesburg Airport was small and antiquated. This was before it was renamed O.R. Tambo and became today’s modern hub.
From there we set off for Bloemfontein, where we were to play Free State in our first game, and it was quite a hectic drive. The bus driver seemed to go at about 150 kilometres an hour, happily waving at all the cops we passed along the way.
We stopped somewhere along the N1 at a takeaway brand I did not know, and all the burgers we ordered got completely mixed up. Eventually we pulled into the Holiday Inn on the main road leading into Bloemfontein, which, in those days, had a Hard Rock Cafe attached to it.
After our first training session at altitude, with everyone feeling scratchy and fatigued after 30 minutes, we piled into the restaurant, desperate to relax and enjoy some downtime after the long journey – after all, a bus trip from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein is quite something to endure after a long international flight.
South Africa was going through a transitional period back then, and it wasn’t long after the assassination of the popular politician Chris Hani. Well, popular to some, but perhaps not to others, I gathered, for the entertainer in the restaurant was singing The Doors’ hit song, having adapted the lyrics to ‘Come on baby, light my tyre and set my body on fire’. We wolfed down a good steak and couldn’t get out of the restaurant quickly enough!
We fielded a mix of our A- and B-teams against Free State because they were not in the Super 10 that season and the match was just a compulsory friendly, a warm-up to the game, at altitude, against the excellent Transvaal team, led by François Pienaar, the following week. One of the features of South African rugby that we found interesting was the ploy of kicking the ball over the dead-ball line to slow down the game. They could do that quite easily at altitude, as the ball flies further in the thin air. I remember that their fullback was about six foot six, and when he exchanged jerseys with our little scrumhalf, Matt Greene, after the match, he towered over Matt and almost looked like he was cuddling him.
When we returned to Johannesburg to begin preparations for the Transvaal match, we stayed at the old Sunnyside Park Hotel. This was the start of the SANZAR (South Africa–New Zealand–Australia rugby) partnership. At that stage, it was still a loose, unofficial arrangement, and there were no specific competition rules set down for certain aspects of the game. We called a meeting with referee Freek Burger to discuss this. Transvaal coach Kitch Christie and François Pienaar were sitting at one end of the table and I was with Kevin Green, our coach, on the other. Freek Burger was standing and Transvaal Rugby Union head honcho Louis Luyt was sitting in the middle.
It was our first experience of Luyt and we got a taste of his notorious bullishness and how he took charge of everything himself. Early in the meeting, someone asked what would happen if there was a fight – would there be red or yellow cards?
Luyt jumped in: ‘There will be no red cards,’ he said in a stern voice that suggested that no further dialogue should be entered into.
The referee never even got a say – nor, for that matter, a seat – and I got the sense that both camps were rubbing their hands in glee.
For some reason, the rugby gear we had been given when we arrived in South Africa was way too big for us. The South African part of the tournament was sponsored by the SABC’s Topsport, who presented us with tracksuits that were all XXXL, with the legs ballooning out when we wore them. We figured they might have been trying to intimidate us. I mean, how big are these guys?
There were two young women assigned to us as liaison officers, which made me think that it was a really well-run tournament.
Before the Transvaal game, Warren Gatland, who could at times be the funniest teammate, instituted a prank he called ‘Slave for the Day’. We would play each other in Xbox games or cards, and whoever lost a game to Gats would become his slave for the day. For 24 hours someone would have to make him tea and do other tasks for him, like fetching his coat or ironing his clothes.
One day, I got a call from teammate Tony Rae, a great club footballer and an incredibly funny guy. He had lost three games to Gats in a row and he told me he was now sick to death of being Gats’s slave, ironing his shirts and having to get up to bring him things at an ungodly hour.
‘I’ve got to get him,’ said Tony. He pointed out that he had sleeping pills, but not enough to pull off what he was hoping to do.
So he collected more pills from the other guys and we crushed them up. Tony put the mixture into a cup of coffee he had to take to Gats’s room. I accompanied Tony and laughed with Gats when he greeted Tony with the words ‘thank you, slave’. Gats took ages to get around to drinking his coffee, and for a long time Tony and I stared at each other, as you would in that kind of situation.
Then, all of a sudden, Gats picked up his cup and swallowed down the coffee in one gulp. I went back to check on him later and to find out how he was doing, but he was still awake and looked fine. The only problem was that he kept saying, ‘How good was training today? How great was it? We’re really up for this game. But I feel so fucked. I can’t understand it …’
I said, ‘Maybe it’s just the altitude, mate.’
He was the last down to lunch, looking quite a sight as he waddled along in his outsized tracksuit. Afterwards, we had the choice to go shopping or on a safari drive. I chose to stick around and do some shopping, while Gats went off on safari. As the bus pulled out, Tony gave me the thumbs-up. And, apparently, within two kilometres, Gats was out like a light. I am not sure what he thinks he saw on that safari drive, but it wouldn’t have been what he was hoping to see.
The guys on the bus later woke Gats up to play cards with him, and almost all of them ended up getting their own back by booking him as their slave for a day. We went to Louis Luyt’s house for a braai that night, and Warren still wasn’t suspecting anything. He was concerned he had altitude sickness.
Then the team doctors got wind of what had happened and told us off because we had put way too much medication in his coffee. It had sent him off to sleep for four hours.
Seeing the Ellis Park cloakroom for the first time was quite an experience. It is an impressive stadium and it was chock-a-block on match day, as Transvaal were riding the crest of a wave at the time. In fact, they would go on to win the Super 10 competition that year.
As planned, we got into the Transvaal 22-metre area early in the game, and it was then that I first got acquainted with the intensity with which South African players approach the game. Uli Schmidt, Balie Swart and Johan le Roux took turns chesting me up, and before the scrum was set, they shouted, ‘We are going to kill you!’ They reiterated this sentiment several times. I remember thinking that I had never heard that expression used on a rugby field before. I know I am competitive and I play to win, but I didn’t realise my life was at stake!
It was a close game and everything I had expected from a match against a South African team. I had had 28 stitches removed from my face before that game, courtesy of a cut I had sustained playing against New South Wales en route to South Africa – that was how desperate I was to play. I was just thrilled to get onto the field on South African soil – it was every New Zealand player’s dream, as so many of our predecessors had missed the opportunity.
We didn’t play well enough that year at home to get another chance to tour South Africa in 1994, but I did play against the touring Springbok side in Hamilton that season. Again, the South Africans didn’t disappoint us, with their tough approach to the game.
The match was played between the first and second Tests, and it was a Saturday game, which was unusual for Waikato against a touring team. The build-up to the match was intense, as Waikato were playing well at that time and no one had forgotten the pitch invasion that had disrupted the game during the South African tour of 1981. So this would be the first time the Boks had played Waikato since 1956, when Waikato had beaten them 14-10.
The Boks mugged us that day, they absolutely dealt us, and the incident where James Small took out our lock Steve Gordon, who had played for the All Blacks, sticks out in my mind. Gordie went down like a sack of potatoes and I tried desperately to get him back on his feet. ‘Get up, mate. Mate, get up. Gordie, get up. Mate, it was a back. It was a back!’ Gordie kept saying he didn’t know if he could continue, and I just kept repeating that it was a winger who had taken him out.
And Gordie wasn’t the only player to suffer in that game. Later, when we were well behind and were playing for pride, I came out of a ruck with my jaw almost broken after being clobbered by Adri Geldenhuys, and South Africa’s Mark Andrews was pissing himself laughing.
I had to be interviewed on television afterwards, and I was in agony. I am not sure if the Boks targeted certain people in those days, but I felt like I had a whole nation after me. And it seemed a very angry lot.
Japie Mulder played really well for the Boks that day. He was sitting alone near the podium when the speeches were made, so I took the opportunity to congratulate him on his debut game, but remarked that he looked worried. He told me that he was worried about the initiation he was going to have to go through later in the evening with his teammates. After what I had experienced at their hands earlier in the day, I was able to commiserate with him.
On the subject of touring games, the British & Irish Lions had toured New Zealand the year before, in 1993, and we beat them 38-10. The side we beat was known as Will Carling’s Mob, because the England skipper was the midweek captain after having been overlooked for the squad-captain role, which was filled by Gavin Hastings. It was a big game on that tour, as we were the national champions at the time.
Although we didn’t retain the championship in 1993, it was still a good year for us, as we got to where we wanted to be by winning the Ranfurly Shield, which, as I am sure even people from outside New Zealand know, is steeped in Kiwi rugby tradition.
Auckland had dominated New Zealand rugby from the time I started with the Waikato Colts, defending the Ranfurly Shield for a record 61 times. With 14 All Blacks playing in the Auckland team, it was clear that Otago and Waikato were going to be the underdogs. We had always had a strong forward pack, but we never had a backline that could take proper advantage of the opportunities created. But we started to put it together from 1990/91, and were quite dominant in 1992 and 1993.
Apart from going to South Africa, winning the Ranfurly Shield was our major goal in 1993 and, once again, as in the championship the year before, we had to play against Auckland. We won the game fairly comfortably, and I still cherish the memory of Warren Gatland asking Sean Fitzpatrick, when we were leading 17-6 with two minutes to go and were scrumming them on their line, ‘So, what is it going to be like without the shield?’
Those were the days when there would be 15 000 people waiting for you when you returned home with the trophy. The bus journey back to Hamilton, knowing that the crowds would be waiting for us at Rugby Park, was fantastic.
The problem was that the heady experience of winning the shield had to be quickly put aside, as we had to defend it the following Saturday, and there was no way I wanted to be remembered as the Waikato captain who lost the shield at the first defence.
There was a sense of déjà vu from the year before because we were due to play Otago, just as we had in the NPC final. I spent the whole week sleeping in my son’s room, thinking, ‘I cannot be the first Waikato captain to lose the shield in the first week,’ while at the same time half the players were still drunk with excitement from celebrating the win in Auckland! It was a difficult week for me.
It turned out to be a really tight game against Otago, with the score locked at 14-all for a long time. I remember saying to our flyhalf, Ian Foster, the current All Black assistant coach, to kick any possession we got down to the referee’s corner, where the big Maori carving stands in the Waikato Stadium. The playing surface used to be cambered, so that when the wind blew from its usual direction at that time of the year, you couldn’t get out of there.
So Ian put the ball over the dead-ball area, a tactic he had probably picked up in South Africa earlier in the year. We had the field position, the forwards got excited again and I dotted down off a push-over. The final whistle went soon after that and the crowd invaded the field. But the referee then realised he had called full time early, so we started again … and I scored another try.
I raced excitedly to the sideline and ran down the passage to the change room, where the shield was waiting for us. There is always a big celebration after a team’s first defence of the shield. When I got there, I found it wasn’t just our team waiting inside. Somehow, one of my mates, Merv McQuilkin, had managed to get in. I asked him what he was doing there, and he said that he had told security that he was my old man.
So I asked him again, ‘What are you really doing here?’
He said all he wanted were my shorts and my socks. With those words, he raised a can of Waikato beer and posed for a photo next to the shield. I gave him my shorts and socks, and he buggered off.
Our forward coach (now deceased) was a guy named Farrell Tamata. He was a very unassuming man and, like on this day, his eyes alone would signify whether your performance had been good or not. If he greeted you by putting his hand on your shoulder, that was his way of giving you credit and recognition, and when he spoke, we used to listen. He was an amazing facilitator.
We had lots of guys in the team with good rugby brains, among them Gatland, Foster, Andy Strawbridge, Tom Coventry, Duane Monkley and Richard Jerram. Brent Anderson, now the head of community rugby in New Zealand, was also part of the group, and he was also a clever player. It goes without saying that Jerram was bright: he subsequently became one of New Zealand’s top specialist vets. He was overshadowed by Alan Whetton during his rugby career, but he had the ability to become an All Black.
A playing group needs strategic thinkers and smart, cerebral guys help a rugby team. We had the right mix.
There is a saying that the Ranfurly Shield creates All Blacks, and that proved the case for me. Zinzan Brooke’s form was plateauing a bit at the time and there was pressure on him, mainly from people who felt he wasn’t Buck Shelford’s equivalent. He had never had a challenger before and, all of a sudden, there was this guy playing fairly good rugby at No. 8. And that brought me – along with Aaron Pene, Brett Pope and Richard Turner – into the frame.
Like all rugby players in New Zealand, I had an ambition to represent the All Blacks. The experience of being left out of the Colts side early in my career, though, had left a psychological mark on me. I wouldn’t say I was bitter, but I just didn’t know what the next step was supposed to be that would enable me to become an All Black. I was disappointed that it was taking so long.
Then, a breakthrough in my quest to represent my country on the rugby field came from an unexpected source. Early in 1993, I received a call from a personal-motivation company, SMI Personal Dynamics. The woman who phoned said she wanted to meet with me. At first I was reluctant, but she said it would take up just 10 minutes of my time, so with nothing to lose, I agreed to meet her.
It turned out to be the best 10-minute investment of my life and a real career-changer. She asked me where I was heading in my career and what I wanted to do. I told her that I would have loved to play in an All Black trial, which was still part of the annual rugby landscape in New Zealand in those days. I told her I wanted to do that because I would love to be able to prove that I could hold my own against the best.
She told me that in many ways, my goals were self-limiting. She asked me why I didn’t start from the real goal and work back from that. In other words, she said, I should aim to become an All Black and go on the end-of-year tour. I saw her point: in basketball I had always possessed total self-confidence, and I am sure that if I had carried on in that sport, I would have played for my country. I had total self-belief when it came to basketball; with rugby, though, that wasn’t the case when it came to driving my playing career forward.
That session played a significant role in my future. It made me realise that I had been placing a ceiling on my ambition and helped ensure that, six months later, I would finally achieve my goal of becoming an All Black: I would be going on the end-of-year tour to Scotland and England.
That year, I had become comfortable in my ownership of my own play, as the team had grown to a point where it didn’t need quite as much looking after as it had before. This helped me focus on my own development as a player. Before that, I had been more concerned about looking after the Waikato team than furthering my own career, but after speaking to the SMI Personal Dynamics lady, I started thinking that I could make the All Black team.
Certain processes I went through with SMI Personal Dynamics helped me to become an All Black. And I put myself through the same processes the following year, when I tried to make it into the World Cup squad, but unfortunately I didn’t get selected. Nevertheless, by going through these processes, I knew exactly where I had fallen short, and it is much easier to deal with poor outcomes when you know where you have failed.
After having beaten Otago in our defence of the Ranfurly Shield, I thought to myself that the night ahead was going to be fun, because the shield was safely stored away in the trophy cabinet and the new All Black squad members would be named later that evening. But someone was going to be let down because their expectations would not be met.
I arrived at the team hotel at Aaron Court and had a few beers with the coaches. The television was switched over to sport at 7 p.m. for the naming of the All Black squad for the tour of Britain. It was read out in alphabetical order and, when they got to the letter ‘M’, there was incredulity in our group – Duane Monkley had not been included.
But while everyone was absorbing this, my name was then announced: ‘John Mitchell’. I immediately said to myself, ‘You have got to be kidding!’ and half-choked into my Waikato Draught beer.
There was a lot of congratulatory handshaking and backslapping, but at the time I was more concerned for my teammate. Duane was a seriously good player and I couldn’t believe he had been ignored again.
Kay came over from her parents’ home to join me in the celebrations, and Richard Loe called me, as did my parents. I also caught up with the Otago team, as I had a lot of time for Gordon Hunter, their coach, and enjoyed chatting to him.
Becoming an All Black was a significant moment in my career. I don’t think I would have had the later coaching opportunities if I hadn’t worn the famous black jersey.
I only played six games for the All Blacks in all, three of them as captain. In one of the books that deals with my tour, The Jersey, it is mentioned that I wore my All Black blazer everywhere I went on that trip. When asked why, I explained that I was convinced I wouldn’t be playing for the All Blacks for very long, so I might as well relish the experience to the full. And I did make the most of my opportunity.
If the then All Black coach Laurie Mains were to explain it with complete openness and sincerity, he might well say that the reason I was selected was that the All Blacks had toured Australia in 1993 and the midweek team had been hammered. Mains wanted to take pressure off himself and needed better leadership in that team.
During the tour, in Newcastle, I was surprised when he approached me and asked me to take a training session. I took the responsibility on board. Assistant coach Earl Kirton’s nose was put a bit out of joint when he issued an instruction about restarts, which I overruled. Laurie hadn’t told Earl beforehand that that was my area of responsibility.
It took me two weeks to feel I belonged in the All Black side. Training was tough, particularly after a long season in New Zealand, and Laurie was the kind of guy who, if you felt anything was easy, you were better off shutting up or he would just make it harder for you.
He also caused a few surprises with his selections and, as the captain of the midweek side, I once again found myself having to be much more than just a player. I had to work hard to prevent the existing rift between the Test side and the midweek team from deteriorating to the point where it could become a crisis, especially when Laurie selected Michael Brewer onto the Test bench ahead of Liam Barry, who had been the original selection. Brewer wasn’t even officially on tour: he was there as the Canterbury clothing representative. But Mains felt Liam wasn’t up to it. Understandably, because Brewer had not been an initial selection, his elevation into the first-choice match squad went down like a lead balloon with the midweek players, who felt Laurie was ignoring form.
I had to let Laurie and Sean Fitzpatrick know that the players weren’t happy. I told them they had to engage with the players and justify their decision. To their credit they did that, even though they didn’t change their minds.
Laurie had to endure heaps of criticism for that selection after we got home, but credit must go to both Liam and Laurie because Liam recovered from the rejection by knuckling down and working hard, and he finally earned Test selection towards the end of Laurie’s career as All Black coach, where he played superbly against France.
You have to understand the ethos of the midweek team to appreciate why they were upset. The players’ objective on tour was to make the Test team and we felt there were guys who deserved to play. As midweek-team members, we were thrilled when one of us was elevated to the Test side. We never lost a game as a midweek team on that tour, which was a huge improvement on earlier in the year, when we had played poorly.
I was given the freedom to be both the captain and the coach on that tour. Little did I know it then, but this would help me later in my career.
I was one of the older players on that trip, but a novice in terms of being an All Black, and that led to some interesting situations. According to All Black initiation protocol, you take your seat on the bus according to the year in which you were selected – which means the most experienced guys occupy the rear of the bus, and the newest guys sit in the front. The tradition may seem arcane to an outsider, but this rite of passage is taken very seriously.
In my year as an All Black, I had to sit next to Jeff Wilson, even though I was 10 years his senior, whereas all my teammates whom I captained at Waikato were halfway down the bus. At first, once the bus got moving, I would move up the ranks to join them where they were sitting, but every time I did this I was told in no uncertain terms that it was not acceptable and I was warned to return to my position.
There is another tradition that has been passed down through the All Black rugby generations: at some stage of every tour, the back-seat occupants get attacked by those in the front. You always know it is coming – the guys in the front wait for the right moment, when the guys in the back show a lapse in concentration, then they attack.
But the back-seat guys are always well organised, and they have allies strategically placed in rows three, four and five who are ready to clobber anyone who dares make a move. This tradition spills over to the provinces too, and I remember Kevin Putt getting his nose broken on a Waikato trip after he tried to sit at the back of the bus.
Doug Wilson, who is now on the board of the Chiefs, beat all the top teams in his first year with Waikato, and was a valuable player for us. But when he tried to move down the bus, he got his teeth loosened for his efforts. These days, the practice has calmed down a bit because we don’t bus as much as we used to a few decades ago.
We’d fly to the South Island for that phase of the National Championship and then bus around on a mini-tour, with a match against a second-division province usually scheduled for midweek. Those were the days when you could always tell a North Islander had returned from a tour to the South Island because we would have ruck marks all over us.
After touring with the All Blacks, I thought I had a chance of making the Rugby World Cup squad for the 1995 tournament, but I read somewhere that Laurie would only be taking one No. 8. I started to work out the permutations.
I captained the New Zealand development team on their tour of Argentina that year, but I was like the granddad in the team. I didn’t see my selection as anything significant, as it seemed I was there just to add experience to the squad.
The group was made up of just fringe players, with Laurie coming along as assistant coach. It wasn’t an enjoyable tour, and the mood wasn’t helped when one of the assistant coaches, Lyn Colling, gave us a lecture about our bootlaces being untied when we boarded the bus before the game against Buenos Aires. We all looked at each other with expressions that said, ‘What is this guy on?’
In fact, the leadership on that tour was atrocious, which is putting it mildly. Again, I had to go beyond my responsibilities to keep that group together. We played seven games in four weeks and because it was not considered a high-profile tour, we didn’t get to stay in the top hotels that the Springboks or All Blacks would stay in during an international tour.
Then I started to buckle physically. I was 30 by that stage, and one of my knees started to get niggly. I wasn’t at my best and I knew I couldn’t go on for much longer. I sat down after that Argentina tour and assessed where I was and where I wanted to go. I knew I wasn’t in the picture for the World Cup and I thought I might have achieved everything possible as a player: I was an All Black; I had represented Waikato in the Super 10 and played in South Africa; I had won the NPC with Waikato – the first time in their history – and the Ranfurly Shield.
There weren’t many rugby worlds left for me to conquer as a player.