Rugby legend Meads ‘thought he wasn’t liked’
OPINION: The first time I met Colin Meads was on the morning of Saturday, July 2, in 1977 in Lower Hutt.
I can be so exact 40 years later because that afternoon the Lions were playing the All Blacks. The previous night I’d spoken at a local rugby club, and when I walked into the dining room of the motel in the morning, just one man was sitting at a table, Colin Meads.
Summoning up my limited courage, I approached him.
‘‘Excuse me, is it Colin Meads?’’ He looked up from under substantial eyebrows. ‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘You don’t know me, but my name’s Phil Gifford, and I write a thing called ‘Loosehead Len’.’’ ‘‘Do you?’’ ‘‘Yes.’’ The next three or four seconds dragged like hours. ‘‘We like him down our way. Sit down.’’
The next two hours, for someone like me, who had first seen Meads play a test in 1959, and sat on a press bench at Eden Park to watch him play his last, in 1971, were rugby nirvana.
On the field Meads presented as a solo Horseman of the Apocalypse, a fearsome destroyer, whose default setting was a threatening glare, backed up by fearless, thunderous physicality.
One on one in 1977, at the breakfast table, and then in his room, he not only rolled out wonderful anecdotes, but revealed a very human side, which included the feeling that he believed he probably wasn’t liked by many All Black fans.
One of his best friends, Brian Lochore, Meads said, could say something, and everyone would greet the remark with delight. ‘‘Then I could say the same thing, and people will go, ‘I never liked that Meads. He was a dirty bugger when he played’.’’
He talked about how shy he was when he found himself, a 20-yearold farm boy from Te Kuiti, in the All Blacks, alongside sophisticated Aucklanders like Wilson Whineray.
His unease wasn’t helped by the then secretary of the NZRU, George Geddes, bailing him up when he was first selected, and saying to him, ‘‘Now listen very closely. If you want to stay in the All Blacks never speak to a reporter, and especially don’t speak to Terry Mclean.’’
Mclean was then the king of print journalists, and Meads says ‘‘he must have thought I was an ignorant sort of joker. I was so scared of being seen with him he came up at breakfast one day in Australia, and asked if he could join me. I mumbled, ‘yeah’, but then put my knife and fork down on my half finished bacon and eggs, and without a word to him, rushed out of the room.’’
A great pleasure as the years rolled on was to see Meads blossom as a public speaker, and how, I think, he realised with time that rugby people, who had always respected him, had actually grown to like, revere, and even love, him.
How could a rugby fan not love the real person? In front of an audience he was spell binding.
Deeply modest, his true stories tended to place him as the butt of the jokes, and they rolled out so casually you felt as if he’d brought a jug to a leaner in a bar (an impression enforced by way he mowed through pint after pint while he spoke) and decided to share yarns just with you, even if there happened to be another couple of hundred people in the room listening in.
We’ll all have our own favourite yarn from his speeches. My pick was what happened after Meads was viciously kicked in the back of the head during a 1967 test with France in Paris.
He returned to the field stitched, swathed in what looked like a sticking plaster turban, and far from happy.
‘‘I was sure,’’ he’d say, ‘‘it was the French lock [Benoit] Dauga who’d kicked me. We’d heard all tour about what a big tough rooster he was.
‘‘Our coach, Fred Allen, built him up to me. ‘You’d better watch out Piney, they say this Dauga can knock blokes out with one punch.’ Anyway, when I came back on I gave Dauga a bit of a poke.
‘‘At the after-match function he came up to me with his nose spread all over one cheek, pointed at it, and said, ‘Why? Why you do this?’
‘‘I said, ‘You know you dirty bastard.’ Then he said, ‘Non, non. Not me. It was [French No 8, Walter] Spanghero!’’’
Wilson Whineray once told me that he doubted he ever played with a man to whom the All Black jersey meant more than it did to Colin Meads.
‘‘He was just determined to never be bettered when he wore it.’’
In a way media people, and I was always as guilty as anyone, did Meads the player a disservice in that, in print or on air, we focused on the hard man aspects alone.
He was actually hugely skilled. He could run, step, kick with both feet, and was holding the ball in one hand to bemuse defenders long before Sonny Bill Williams was even a glint in his Daddy’s eye.
Meads allied those gifts with physical strength beyond his size, and core power developed with hard farm labour that allowed him to endure the sort of knocks and pain that a gym bred athlete might have found a bit much.
How much suffering could he handle? Well he actually did, in 1970, play test rugby against South Africa with a broken arm that hadn’t fully healed.
The last time we spoke was in March, for a magazine story about the Lions, who he faced on three tours, in 1959, 1966 and 1971.
By March it was common knowledge that his cancer was well advanced, but he managed to genuinely laugh about it. ‘‘I take so many pills I’m full-up before lunchtime.’’
For those of us who watched him play, heard him speak, or were lucky enough to meet him, losing Colin Meads feels a bit like being told that a favourite uncle, the one who at Christmas time always had a great yarn to tell, has gone.
Hopefully it may be a small consolation to his family, especially Lady Verna, who for decades kindly put up with constant intrusions from pesky journalists like me, to know how much Colin meant to so many of us.