All Blacks vs Springboks: Me, my dad and the Boks

Dad called his study the Inner Sanctum. He said this with a smile, but he meant it too.

A basement bunker with a ceiling barely two metres high, it held his books, papers, two-finger-typed sermons, tennis trophies and rugby histories.

An electric fire cheerfully impersonated coal. On important test nights he’d open a bottle of Sapich Bros All Black port and pour himself a dark, sweet sacrament.

Down here, Dad and I would talk rugby for hours. Like most New Zealand fathers and sons, we addressed the big questions obliquely – this being no country for emotional men – but the game gave us a language.

Courage, love, loyalty, loss, grace and greatness arrived disguised as debates about Bob Scott, Don Clarke or Christian Cullen.

His shelves supplied the scriptures: I, George Nepia, Colin Meads, All Black, Fred Allen’s On Rugby and, holiest of all, Men In Black. I read them, then read them again.

In my teens, boarding at Wesley College, I sent Dad long, demented letters naming imaginary All Blacks squads.

My selections were shaped by recycled wisdom from Rugby News, skewed south by the first two years of my life, spent in Bluff.

The uncapped Alan Byrne was my lock; Greg Cooper my fullback; Dean Kenny my halfback for his “massive punts”. Jamie Flynn made the reserves on the strength of one try I saw on the news. Mike Clamp’s “extreme pace” put him ahead of John Kirwan; David Kirk, I declared, had had “rather too much made of him”.

One judgment stands up still: “Michael Jones runs like a cheetah and tackles like a lion”.

Our overblown, overwrought over-analysis was hardly informed by our modest playing careers.

Dad, a centre, captained a Wellington College Second XV that didn’t win a game. I played first five-eighths for Wesley’s Under 60kg side and briefly operated outside Rhys Duggan, later an All Black. I could pass. Kick. Run a bit. But I couldn’t tackle.

No matter. In the Inner Sanctum we were infallible selectors, coaches and historians. Dad had his all-time All Blacks XV; I had a better one.

Over Milo – or with the port glowing in his glass – our teams contested imaginary tests. Bryan “Beegee” Williams was an automatic selection.

At 19, he scored 14 tries in 13 games on the 1970 tour of South Africa. Dad would evangelise over his sprinter’s pace, kauri-trunk thighs and the sidestep wider than a house.

Better than Ron Jarden? I would ask.

Better, Dad said. Better than the best.

Looming above all these conversations was the same dark spectre – one part Attila, one part Green Goblin, one part Darth Vader; the force that New Zealand rugby measured itself against.

The Boks!

Dad was a quiet, thoughtful man, a Methodist minister by vocation. But mention the Springboks and Captain Ahab took the pulpit. They were his white whale: huge, hard, remorseless, forever surfacing in our rugby history. The All Blacks intimidated most of the world. But the Boks looked back at us without blinking.

Dad’s warning became a household incantation: “Never underestimate the Boks, my boy”.

The record supported him. The 1921 series here was drawn; so was the 1928 return.

In 1937, the Boks beat us two tests to one, finishing with a 17–6, five-tries-to-nil thrashing. Ask an old-timer to name the finest team ever to leave New Zealand shores and they’d ruefully smile: the 1937 Boks when they took the boat back.

The Boks also stalked Dad’s parables of stoic manliness, summoned whenever you were a bit crook and fancying a day at home. Colin Meads took the field against the Boks with a broken arm. The flanker Red Conway had a slowly healing finger amputated so he could confront them.

So. Harden up. Hurry up. Get out the door and go to school.

Dad was 10 when the All Blacks toured South Africa in 1949. He kept a scrapbook and listened beside his brother as the radio commentary crackled through the night. Decades later, he could still reconstruct the tests.

In the first, New Zealand led 11-3 at halftime. Dad thought it was won.

“Then their ref took over,” he’d say. “Started whistling like a kettle. Penalty. Bang. Penalty. Bang.

“Bang. Bang. Bang.”

Okay Geffin kicked the Springboks to a 15-11 victory – all kicks, no tries. That set the tone. We played the rugby; Geffin scored the points.

Meanwhile, Bob Scott – who had once visited Dad’s school and kicked a goal from halfway in bare feet – kept missing.

Four tests. Four defeats. “Forty-nine” became shorthand for failure: a scar with a year for a name.

More than 60 years later, just a few months before he died aged 92, I spent half a day with the captain of that side, Fred “The Needle” Allen. Even then he was still trying to process it all, bristling at any suggestion that his team had been outplayed. Across 23 matches they conceded only six tries, he said, and in the tests scored more tries than South Africa.

The margins were nothing – and everything. The team lost conditioning during the 27-day boat trip to Cape Town. Once there, they criss-crossed the country over and over on train journeys lasting up to 35 hours. The South African referees, Allen said, were “bloody cheats”. And Geffin kept banging over his kicks.

But the gravest injustice of ‘49 had nothing to do with the refs. The year before, apartheid became official state policy in South Africa. To appease the new regime, New Zealand left our Māori players at home.

New Zealand’s administrators should have insisted we take our best team, Allen growled. Johnny Smith, Vince Bevan and Ben Couch would’ve changed the series.

“We should have told the South Africans where to stick their tour. But, no, we rolled over. Bunch of bloody gutless wonders.”

Six decades of rage and rumination haven’t altered the result: 4-0.

On the voyage home, Allen assembled the players on the deck of the Dominion Monarch. He told them they had honoured the game.

“No captain has ever been as proud of his team as I am of you,” he said.

Then he placed his boots on the deck, stepped back, moved forward and kicked them into the Indian Ocean.

He was 29 and never played rep rugby again.

“It hurt me so much for a long time,” he told me.

New Zealand rugby shared his pain. The adventurous 15-man style of Charlie Saxton’s great Kiwis gave way to 10-man security: territory, slogging forwards, the ball kept away from dangerous ideas. It was not beautiful, but beauty hadn’t helped us in 1949.

The Boks had done more than win four tests. They’d broken the All Blacks, then forced them to rebuild in a grimmer image.

There are the mythical teams: the 1888 Natives, the 1905 Originals, the 1924 Invincibles. But the greatest series ever played in New Zealand – by miles, Dad reckoned – was the 1956 Springbok tour.

Dad was 17, straight from a season scouring wool at the Petone freezing works and now a fresh-faced BNZ teller. In his memory, the entire country prepared for war, armed largely with extravagant metaphors.

“We all were ready,” he said. “It was now or never. The country was mobilised. At action stations. Beating the Boks was the Holy Grail. A national crusade.”

No country had beaten South Africa in a test series any time in the 20th century. In Old Heroes, writer Warwick Roger interviewed the surviving players, including 1955 All Blacks captain Ian Clarke.

“Social life was non-existent,” Clarke said. “I worked on the farm, I trained, and ate and slept, and always I thought about beating the Boks. They were the ultimate opponents, unbeaten in a test series. And 1949 had to be avenged. It was an obsession.”

Roger was Metro magazine’s founding editor, a prickly, acerbic man who’d anointed himself godfather of New Zealand long-form feature writing.

We, his acolytes, called him ‘The Master’, half in homage, half to tease. With characteristic humility, Roger would tell you that Old Heroes was the greatest sports book ever written by a New Zealander. He may possibly have been right.

The Master recorded the near-monastic preparation:

“Lock Tiny White advised Nev McEwan to extend the limits of his lineout jumping – of jumping for the clothes-line in the backyard and the crossbar of the goalposts... Tiny White went for 10-mile runs in the long evenings after finishing his day’s work on the family sheep farm near Gisborne.

“In Canterbury, Stan Hill the soldier was cutting wood to build up his strength. In Frankton, the railway worker’s suburb of Hamilton, hooker Ron Hemi practised dribbling the ball at his toe for half an hour at a time.

“Not far away, in a farm paddock at Kereone near Morrinsville, a huge young fullback named Don Clarke was perfecting his goal-kicking in the long summer twilight while his brother, prop forward Ian... lifted a homemade barbell made from a length of iron fencing post set into a kerosene tin of cement at either end.”

Five All Black trials were held. On June 5 – the day Elvis performed Hound Dog on television – the Springboks landed at Whenuapai.

“At last,” Dad remembered thinking. “The Mighty Boks. These giants off the veldt.”

Their arrival swallowed the newspaper’s front page and several inside. Dad marvelled at their train with its Springboks headboard.

There were actually two trains, carrying them 3380km from Whangārei to Invercargill. Towns met them with brass bands, bagpipes and marching girls; citizens came by the tens of thousands. The men wore gabardine coats and fedoras, often with, as Roger wrote, “a Craven A or a Capstan Plain dangling nonchalantly out of the corner of the mouth”.

The tour began with a portent: Waikato beat the Boks 14-10, the first provincial defeat in their history.

“A sign from above,” Dad thought.

The tourists recovered. Dad watched them come from 6-0 down to beat Wellington 8-6. They won eight consecutive matches before the first test in Dunedin, which Dad followed on the radio, gripping it tight.

At the first scrum, the Boks drove us backwards 15 yards and popped Otago prop Mark Irwin like a pea from its pod. He left at halftime with broken ribs. With no replacements back then, 14 All Blacks somehow held on to win 10-6.

Dad camped overnight outside Athletic Park for the second test. A freezing southerly drove the rain through two jumpers, a coat and two pairs of socks. He did not sleep. When the gates opened at 10am, he joined the charge towards the Western Bank.

“It’s funny. I can remember every minute sitting, standing, waiting, but the game itself is a blur. I just remember how hard it was. Vicious even. No quarter given.”

The Bok props, Jaap Bekker and Chris Koch, again wrecked the New Zealand scrum. Frank McAtamney’s ribs were broken; he never played another test. South Africa won 8-3. Dad said scarcely anyone spoke on the journey home. In just over an hour, the nation’s collective will had imploded.

Never underestimate the Boks.

Years later, when I was just a kid, I’d sometimes go for runs with Dad through Waikumete Cemetery in West Auckland. One day we detoured through Glendene and he pointed out a house.

“That’s where Kevin Skinner lives,” he told me. “The Bok-Buster.”

Back in 1956, Skinner was a Dunedin grocer – and retired All Blacks prop and former New Zealand heavyweight boxing champion.

Desperate times, desperate measures: the grocer was press-ganged in for the third test because he was considered the only man in the land who might be able to stand up to the Boks. Peter Jones, the 105kg Northland No 8, and Don Clarke, an even bigger fullback, joined him.

Skinner shored up the scrum and dealt with one Bok prop, then switched sides and dealt with the other. Exactly what happened has disappeared beneath bodies and mythology, but what is known is that both Boks stumbled, bleeding, out of the scrums. The terrace verdict was emphatic and gleeful: the Boks bent the rules; Skinner straightened them.

With two minutes left, New Zealand led by one. Ron Jarden scored, then Tiny White crashed over a minute later. The All Blacks won 17-10.

So to Eden Park, where 61,240 people – then New Zealand’s largest sporting crowd – gathered for the decider. Dad again held tight to his radio as Winston McCarthy described Peter Jones rampaging over the line.

“It’s a try for New Zealand. It’s a try to New Zealand ... I’ll tell you about it when the crowd stops roaring.

“Listen to them! Listen to them! The crowd is going absolutely crazy.”

New Zealand won 11-5 and the series 3-1.

Across 23 matches, 686,760 people had attended a Boks match – nearly one New Zealander in three.

Writer Finlay Macdonald saw the tour as both summit and slope.

“The Springbok tour of 1956 was like a high tide,” he wrote.

“At the moment of rugby’s apotheosis it began to fall away again. This isn’t to say that the game ceased to capture the collective imagination of a country, or that sensational games and tours didn’t take place from that point on. Only that there would be other things on the minds of New Zealanders.

“The simple joys of rugby would be compromised by an increasingly complex world. And it would be in the supreme rivalry with South Africa that New Zealand would finally see the other side of the national game. The Springboks were there for the best of times, and they would also be there for the worst.”

Dad felt flat for months after they left. He had spent the winter dreaming of defeating them; with the job done, ordinary life seemed drained of colour. He knew he’d never experience another tour like it.

When I was 10, the Boks came back.

I knew the numbers at least as well as my times tables. Head to head, South Africa led us 19 tests to 13, two drawn. They were the only country to have beaten us more than we’d beaten them.

By now the notion that rugby bound Aotearoa together was risible – not least because we’d repeatedly excluded Māori players, then accepted the insult of Beegee Williams being designated an “Honorary White” so that he could tour South Africa in 1970. The 1981 tour split the country open.

My socialist grandfather had told me all about Steve Biko, Hector Pieterson and Nelson Mandela. In hushed tones, he told me about Ken Gray, the great All Blacks prop who refused to tour in 1970. This time, he noted, even the All Blacks captain, Graham Mourie, refused to play.

My grandfather had been appalled when the All Blacks toured South Africa in 1976, just weeks after South African police slaughtered 176 schoolkids in Soweto.

Twenty-eight African nations then boycotted the Montreal Olympics because of us. For a small country forever fretting about its place in the world, this was more world-famous than even Ed and Everest. We’d been put on the map at last.

To be fair to my father, he despised apartheid as much as any decent person: he knew the “politics and sport shouldn’t mix” trope was a pitiful evasion.

All his Methodist minister mates opposed the tour, some taking to the streets and collecting a police punch or baton. But ‘49, and especially ‘56, still had him by the throat. South Africa remained his white whale.

I inherited his contradiction.

I cheered the protesters who poured through the perimeter fence at Rugby Park and stopped the Waikato match. I followed the Battle of Molesworth Street and watched the Red Squad on television advance behind shields, wielding long batons and roaring, “move, move, move”. I dreamed of joining the crash-helmeted heroes that confronted them.

Yet I watched every match. The All Blacks won the first test narrowly and were hammered in the second. Everything came down to Eden Park on September 12.

The army cocooned the ground in barbed wire. Outside, protesters and police fought pitched battles through Sandringham. Above the stadium, Marx Jones strafed the ground and dropped flour bombs from his Cessna. One felled All Black prop Gary Knight.

Halfway through the second half, the All Blacks led 19-9. I turned to Dad. He was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes as wide as the sky. The series seemed ours.

Ah, the naivety of two boys. The Boks are never beaten.

Ray Mordt scorched in for a hat-trick of tries. With time up, the score was 22-all and Naas Botha – the most merciless goalkicker in rugby – prepared to convert.

Sobbing, I fled the lounge and hid under my bed. I never saw Botha miss. Nor did I see Allan Hewson subsequently kick the penalty, 11 minutes into injury time, that won the test and series.

The tour was so terribly wrong.

But God, I wanted the All Blacks to win.

Fourteen years later, South Africa hosted the World Cup. I was 24 and went to Dad’s in the middle of the night with a couple of mates.

I never drink during a test – I get far too anxious. I prefer to suffer with perfect clarity, mindful that a single lapse in concentration might cost the All Blacks a test. But that night I’d had a few. At kick-off, I sat cross-legged directly in front of the television, close enough, presumably, to exert influence. Very little after that made sense.

We did not know it, but rugby was changing shape in front of us. Jonah Lomu seemed to have been sent from another dimension. Against England he scored four tries, including the tremendous Trampling of The Catt, when he ran over Mike Catt as if the England fullback were a doormat. Jonah had just turned 20: tall as a lock, heavy as a prop, faster than any winger. Whenever he had the ball, time, space, even physics itself seemed to bend.

South Africa countered Jonah with their own supermen. First, a South African Airways Jumbo skimmed Ellis Park, “Good Luck Bokke” painted beneath its wings. Then Nelson Mandela – smiling, laughing, almost luminous – entered wearing captain Francois Pienaar’s No 6 jersey. The uniform of Afrikaner power was now worn by its most famous former prisoner – and its President – before 63,000 largely white supporters.

Even through the fug of alcohol I could see the magnificence of this. And I wanted the All Blacks to wreck the ending.

South Africa contained Jonah. Joost van der Westhuizen, around 30kg lighter, caught him near the line and the green jerseys closed around them. Lomu had scored seven tournament tries. The Boks gave him none.

The final dissolved into collisions and kicks. Jeff Wilson retching. Nine-all after 80 minutes. In extra time, Andrew Mehrtens missed a drop goal to win it. Joel Stransky did not miss his.

South Africa 15, New Zealand 12.

Nelson Mandela presented the cup to Pienaar and the Rainbow Nation had its Invictus moment. At Dad’s, we opened an inquiry. Suspects included Suzie the waitress, Louis Luyt, the ref and his gold watch.

It is no consolation now – and it wasn’t then. I left Dad’s bereft. Inconsolable. It was about 3.30am when I got home. Sleep was impossible, so I went outside and began kicking spiky seed balls from the liquidambar tree out front. I kicked them along the path, across the lawn, into the darkness; then gathered them and kicked them again. Penalty attempts, drop kicks, up-and-unders, under-pressure touch-finders: the match replayed, the result still the same.

I kept going until the sky began to lighten – hundreds, perhaps even thousands of kicks. I realised I’d strained my groin.

We deal with grief in our own ways.

Beneath Suzie’s food poisoning – incidentally, later supported by the testimony of Nelson Mandela’s bodyguard – sat a less comforting answer. The Boks had met the most destructive player rugby has seen and somehow survived him.

Never underestimate the Boks, my boy.

The following year, the oldest New Zealand rugby quest was completed. The All Blacks won a test series in South Africa for the first time.

Dad had this line I’d heard 100 times: “I don’t want to go to the Promised Land until we beat the Boks … IN BOKLAND!”

Now the gates could open.

A friend got Dad a jersey signed by Sean Fitzpatrick. Dad wrote Fitzpatrick a very long letter of thanks. Every test thereafter, he wore it with the reverence of a man entrusted with a relic.

That jersey was worn for the last test Dad and I watched together.

The All Blacks were playing South Africa in Johannesburg. Neither of us wanted to get up in the night for yet another Tri-Nations match, so Dad summoned me to ‘Titirangi Stadium’ for an 8am replay.

He’d made his usual scrambled eggs on Vogel’s. Dad had cancer and, perhaps aware – as I was not – that there would not be many more mornings like this, poured himself a generous Sunday-morning glass of All Black port.

We’d both broken our pact not to hear the result, though neither of us let on.

We knew the All Blacks would surrender a late lead and lose 46–40, each feigning excitement and surprise as the game unfolded.

The troubling part afterwards was not defeat but our indifference. Something had changed. Something had gone. The great tours we once waited decades for had become the endlessly repeating Tri-Nations. South Africa, once reached by sea and train, now materialised on television several times a season. Familiarity had reduced the feared enemy to a fixture.

There was another estrangement. Five years into professionalism, the game no longer seemed to belong to the people. It belonged to an Australian-American media magnate, a German sportswear maker, Japanese-owned beer, Ford and Iveco. Fans became “stakeholders”; affection was upgraded to mandatory “passion”.

In the corporate boxes sat the new rugby establishment: the long-lunching lions of industry with their paws in the pie – Fays and Richwhites, traders and inside traders; old boys and Grammar Boys manufacturing jobs for the boys. Behind them came management puppets carrying paradigms, synergies and best practice, then consultants, strategists and visionaries with no ideas.

We wanted the old game back, the mythical age when rugby was pure and the All Blacks played only for the jersey. Invariably, Colin Meads was invoked as the exemplar of the old ways.

Too many games. Too much selling. Too many geese being throttled for their golden eggs.

And so we told ourselves it was only sport and pretended we didn’t care. Of course it was a nonsense. The most obsessive adherents are usually the lapsed.

Dad died that October.

For most of the 20th century, rugby was the only game in town. The local club ruled Saturdays. Then the weekends opened up: shops stayed open, TV channels proliferated, and basketball, football, the NRL and a hundred other distractions competed for our kids’ hearts and minds.

Rugby, Racing and Beer lost its old empire.

Something communal went with it as our lives became more atomised and individualistic. But it’d be a mistake to succumb to false nostalgia.

Because old New Zealand was also narrow, boorish, incurious and often cruel. Its men mocked gay men while embracing one another in scrums. They’d tell tedious blokey yarns that no one really listened to as each itched to jump in and one-up the last.

Women were kept out the back making the food, left at home looking after the kids, or reduced to lurid conquests on a sexual scorecard. Then everyone drank until someone spewed and … then you carried on. Brilliant.

There was fellowship in the old game, and tenderness too, though the men would never have called it that. There was also a great deal of dimness.

Whaddarya? Who really misses that?

Meanwhile, the All Blacks still won and lost, sometimes gloriously. I kept watching and told myself I cared less, though this contrived detachment – a coping mechanism to deal with a quarter-century of World Cup calamities. The victory in 2011 drew me back; the magnificence of 2015 completed the seduction. I was lost to it again.

So, more than two decades after that last breakfast with Dad, there they were again – the Boks, facing the All Blacks in the 2023 Rugby World Cup final. I watched at home in Napier with my son, Pierre.

South Africa were defending champions. They snuck past France in the quarter-final by one point, then England in the semi-final by one.

Rain fell in Paris. The Boks slowed the game down, as we knew they would, and dragged us into the arm wrestle we feared. Then Sam Cane caught Jesse Kriel high. A yellow card was upgraded to red. No player had been sent off in a men’s World Cup final; now the All Blacks captain would watch the biggest match of his life from a chair.

I wanted to give Pierre a measured parental explanation: heads must be protected, rules were rules etc. Instead, the boy who once hid from Naas Botha came raging back.

Soon after halftime, Siya Kolisi’s head smashed into Ardie Savea’s. Yellow. The same offence, I cried; the same head contact – worse, in fact – yet Kolisi’s card stayed yellow.

Siya might be the most wonderful man to ever play the game but this was unjust.

Unfair. Un-bloody-believable.

Sure, there were technical distinctions: force, body height, mitigation, slow-motion fractions interpreted by the bunker. Perhaps both rulings were right; I don’t know. It didn’t feel that way. And I will never watch the game again to work it out.

Down to 14, the All Blacks kept fighting. Aaron Smith’s try was rubbed out; Beauden Barrett scored one. Richie Mo’unga’s conversion faded wide. Jordie Barrett missed a long penalty. One kick, one bounce, one small act of compensation from the gods would have done it.

The Boks yielded nothing.

South Africa 12, New Zealand 11.

I looked at Pierre and the years crowded in the room: Dad’s 1949 scrapbook; the 17-year-old bank teller freezing outside Athletic Park; a boy crying under his bed at 22-all; Jonah’s No 11 and Mandela’s No 6; liquidambar balls flying into the dark; Fitzy’s signed jersey; a chair-bound captain in Paris with a thousand-yard stare as father and son remonstrated at the telly.

I heard myself explaining the laws, denouncing the laws, then insisting it was just a game.

It was later that I noticed the family arithmetic. Pierre was 10. Dad had been 10 in 1949. I’d been 10 in 1981. The Boks had found each of us at the same age.

Pierre may never love rugby quite as much as Dad and I did. Good, because the game has at times unhinged us.

But I hope some smaller, kinder version forms in him – enough for us to sit together and talk around the important things.

That, I think, was what Dad had built in the Inner Sanctum: a place where the electric fire pretended to be coal, the port glowed in his glass, the Milo in mine. All that time I thought we were talking about rugby. Mostly, it was how we loved each other without having to say so.

Never underestimate the Boks, my boy.

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