Banner legend retold
Polson Banner rugby matches are customarily played in convivial spirit between the first XVS of Palmerston North and Napier Boys’ High Schools. No so the ‘‘battle of 1986’’ on a hot day at Napier. With a quarter of the biggest match of the year remaining, it exploded into a pitched battle and the Napier referee terminated the game.
From 1960, Palmerston North had virtually owned the banner – 22 wins from 25 games until 1985. The previous year they had snatched the Moascar Cup from Napier, so this was a grudge match. The all-in brawl escaped our notice at the newspaper, perhaps because the national provincial championship season was in full swing and the schools would hardly have been banging down our door to reveal their most famous game had been called off 17 minutes early.
Two of the foremost protagonists were Napier’s Richard Turner and Palmerston North captain Hamish Ruawai.
Last Wednesday, after Palmerston North regained the Banner in the bog, Turner, a Sky TV employee, found himself interviewing the home captain, Tamati Ruawai, son of. His father Hamish appreciated the irony of that as he sloshed about recording it on his device.
Napier had a strong team that year and most agree they would probably have gone on to win the game anyway. Turner broke into the full Hawke’s Bay rep side that year while Stu Forster later became an All Black halfback. Both teams had been unbeaten.
The donnybrook was apparently provoked by the use of the slipper, but which team put the boot in is not clear. Palmy had cunning nigglers in the front row – Ruawai and Peter Butler as props and Henry Collier at hooker – and, as the players relate, there was always biffo with them around.
From that area the conflagration spread and spiralled out of control. Up to that point, Ruawai remembered the game had been ‘‘a bit intense, people climbing all over each other in the rucks’’. That was sort of the game back then.
The previous week the first XV, coached by John Whyte, had won a ferocious clash at New
Plymouth’s Gully Ground when there was another ‘‘decent scrap’’ during which a home reserve had come on and clocked a Boys’ High wing.
At Napier, first five-eighth John Stewart, father of world champion cyclist Campbell, was the only player in white running about trying to settle things down, even though he was one of the only boxers in the first XV. Everyone else, backs and forwards, white and blue, were slugging it out.
At one end of the field kicking a football around with other Napier fifth formers was one David Bovey, now the Palmerston North rector. When the roar went up as mayhem broke out, he and his mates dashed to witness the great bout.
‘‘We were young fellows and we all thought it was incredibly exciting,’’ he recalled.
School magazine The Palmerstonian recorded it this way. ‘‘Unfortunately abysmal refereeing saw the match abandoned. We were down, but not out.
‘‘Only top-line refs should be appointed to these matches because invariably they can’t hack the pace if the experience is not there.’’
No mention of the slugfest, instead claiming the catalyst was ‘‘a sin-binning’’. Nowadays this match is filmed by Sky TV, there would be a commission of inquiry into such a brouhaha and it would make the national news.
A day after the battle, Ruawai, who was also the deputy head boy, was summoned to the office of rector Eric White and admonished.
‘‘We were pretty embarrassed at the time, especially as half of us were prefects,’’ Ruawai recalled.
The punch-up hasn’t blighted his career. He now commands 750 kids as Palmerston North Intermediate Normal School’s headmaster.
Napier deputy principal Bob Mccaw was said to have remonstrated with his students at the next day’s assembly and promptly celebrated ‘‘the win’’, as if they had won the Ranfurly Shield. To this day Palmerston North still considers it ‘‘match abandoned’’.
Once were whites
Domesticated types last Wednesday pondered how the mud-caked Palmerston North Boys’ High first XV jerseys are returned to their pearly whites.
They might have followed the example of the late Mike O’halloran, a Rongotea dairy farmer who managed the Manawatu¯ B team that played in the Masterton mud in 1986. It took three muscled men to removed the heavy jerseys from the dressing-room alone.
They were in no fit state to be presented to the drycleaners. Instead, O’halloran carted them on his front-end loader to his cowshed and blasted the jerseys with his high-pressure hose.
Mud has always been a staple at Boys’ High’s North Street ground, so the players have to shower in their whites and even then the fire hose in the grandstand is brought into play.
Two years ago after one game, the jerseys had about seven washes at the laundry, but were never quite white again.
Nowadays this match is filmed by Sky TV, there would be a commission of inquiry into such a brouhaha and it would make the national news.