Out of step with administration
We’ve rarely handled eccentricity well in New Zealand sport. Taking on new attitudes has always been a battle, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that New Zealand Rugby has been twitchy about Scott Robertson, a man who doesn’t so much march to his own drummer, but to a whole new band.
The experiment with his Crusaders’ coaching colleague Brad Mooar at the All Blacks has ended in tears, but you’d hope the call-up of another Robertson assistant, Jason Ryan, will not. In an odd twist, it might be that Ryan will demonstrate the Robertson way can work at the highest levels.
New Zealand sporting history shows how difficult it can be for a prophet to be honoured in his own country. Our greatest track coach, Arthur Lydiard, whose charges won four Olympic gold (Peter Snell and Murray Halberg) and two bronze (Barry Magee and John Davies) medals, was constantly at loggerheads with athletics officials.
Lydiard, an Owairaka milkman, overturned all middle and long distance running dogma, using himself as a guinea pig in the 1950s, before applying what he’d learned about the benefits of running up to 160km a week in training.
He was prickly, dogmatic and fearless, all of which played so badly with the men (and it was all men in Lydiard’s day) who ran his sport.
Lydiard had five athletes among the 12 who went to the 1960 Rome Oiympics. There was just one sprinter, a teenager from Waihi, Val Morgan. But the official track and field manager was a sprint coach, Joe Mcmanemin.
The Auckland athletics centre appealed for Lydiard to be included but the New Zealand association — in what Peter Snell, who won the 800m in Rome, would call “the customary manner of remote administrative patriarchs” — passed the buck to the New Zealand Olympic Committee, and the drive to get Lydiard to Rome was smothered in red tape.
He only got there when a public appeal was launched in Auckland, and the money was raised to pay Lydiard’s fares.
“They treated Arthur really badly,” Snell would tell me years later. “In the end they had to swallow their pride, his results were just so good.”
So, Lydiard was in the official party in Tokyo four years later when Snell won the Olympic 800m and 1500m golds, and Davies won bronze in the 1500m.
But results didn’t help Fred Allen, who was running at 14 wins in 14 tests with the All Blacks when, at the end of 1968, he discovered he was under fire at the Rugby Union. For Allen there would be no reconciliation.
Allen, like Lydiard, didn’t suffer fools gladly. He was outraged when he was reprimanded by NZRU chairman Tom Morrison via Allen’s All Blacks manager, Duncan Ross, for allowing a journalist, Alex Veysey, to sit in on a team talk before a test in Sydney in ‘68.
Morrison sent the message that having Veysey in the changing room was “disgraceful”. In his 2011 book, Fred The Needle, Allen, who died the following year, was still smarting. “They didn’t have the guts to say it to my face.”
His reaction to the slight — the last straw in what he saw as a campaign within the NZRU hierarchy to undermine him — was dramatic. He resigned. We’d known each other for 20 years before I asked Allen why, but when I did he was searingly honest: “I quit so the bastards wouldn’t have the satisfaction of sacking me.”
What followed was the most bizarre appointment in our rugby’s history. Ivan Vodanovich, an extremely likeable former All Blacks prop, who had never even coached a provincial team, took over.
Vodanovich and chairman Morrison ran a menswear shop together. Vodanovich’s All Blacks then lost a series in South Africa in 1970, and against the Lions in New Zealand in 1971. — NZ Herald