Heart of a Pinetree
By his own admission no angel as a player, All Blacks legend Colin Meads surpassed all in our esteem.
By his own admission no angel as a player, All Blacks legend Colin Meads surpassed all in our esteem.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote of Colin Meads: “Like the mythical frontiersmen of the American West, he came to personify his countrymen’s masculine ideal: practical, devoid of airs and graces, stoic, resilient, resolute, fair-minded but uncompromising and always willing to take up a physical challenge. He cleared a 200-acre block of hill-country scrub, he carried a sheep under each arm, he took on the Springboks with a broken arm, he was held in fear and awe by opponents the world over.”
The consensus around that ideal has frayed somewhat in the intervening years, but “Pinetree” Meads remained larger than life, the hill-country farmer from central casting, a heartland icon and legend of our national game. He inspired nostalgia for a simpler, homelier, more-egalitarian New Zealand in which Jack and his master weren’t on dramatically different pay scales, a time before gridlock, P, pay television, coloured boots and busybodies poring over match footage for anything resembling over-vigorous play; when what happened on the field stayed on the field and what happened off the field stayed behind the airport toilet door.
As generally happens with largerthan-life figures, his reputation took on a life of its own. Peter Bush, the famed photographer and Meads’ friend, touring companion and out-matched drinking buddy, observed in his autobiography that “Piney’s aura made him a very hard act to precede or follow. When we appeared together at a charity do, I was working on my speech right up to the last minute. ‘You’re looking pretty tense,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you like this.’ What he didn’t seem to grasp was that I actually had to make
a speech; he just had to remain upright and be Pinetree Meads.
“He started off by draining a beer; that just about had them rolling in the aisles. Then he made a few innocuous remarks and they went nuts. If he’d said, ‘You look like a bunch of chimps with red arses that got loose from the zoo’, they still would’ve roared their approval.”
GIANT, NOT SAINT
Sir Colin Meads, who died last weekend aged 81, was an All Black from 1957 to 1971 and the first to play 50 tests in an era when there were a few per year as opposed to more than a dozen. As a player, he was way ahead of his time in his range of skills and athleticism and very much of his time in his mastery of the dark arts. The chapter heading “More sinned against than sinning?” in his 1974 autobiography Colin Meads: All Black, written with Alex Veysey, must have caused incredulous sniggers wherever rugby is played.
He confessed that he was “no bloody angel. If I can gain the advantage by a bit of gamesmanship, I’ll be the first to do it.” His repertoire included intimidating his opposite numbers into not competing at lineouts, which were then messy affrays bearing little resemblance to today’s intricate ensemble manoeuvres.
Bush shared a story told to him by long-serving Taranaki lock Ian Eliason. In the dressing shed before a match against Meads’ province, King Country, the Taranaki and later All Blacks coach Peter Burke urged Eliason to assert himself: ‘Don’t fall for this Pinetree bullshit – just give him the elbow.’
“I thought he’s right – this guy’s full of bullshit and I’m not having it. So at the first lineout, I pushed off his inside shoulder and won the pill, no trouble. He gave me a look. I thought, ‘Oh yeah, big bloody deal.’ Second lineout, same thing. He said, ‘Don’t do that again, pal.’ Third lineout I did it again and woke up on the sideline half an hour later.”
One could be appalled, and it’s fair to say Meads wasn’t universally admired by his contemporaries. One could quote Mark Twain: “To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character, one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.” And one could point out that true hard men take it as well as dish it out: over the course of his long career, Meads copped the lot without protest or complaint and kept coming.
When Meads was sent off – for a harmless indiscretion – in a test against Scotland at Murrayfield in 1967, he was sporting both a bandage and headgear to protect a 14-stitch wound, the result of being kicked in the head by a Frenchman a week earlier. Irish and British Lions halfback turned journalist Andy Mulligan wrote that Meads “knew no fear. And no limit to the drive of the mind over his own matter.”
His post-retirement involvement in rugby was varied, sometimes distinguished, occasionally questionable. For all his apparent lack of guile, he ended up becoming a power behind the throne on the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) council. His prominent role in the 1986 rebel Cavaliers tour of South Africa while he was still an All Blacks selector was naive, to put a generous spin on it, and foreshadowed his somewhat equivocal behaviour for an All Blacks manager and NZRFU councillor in 1995 when a Kerry Packer-backed Australian entrepreneur sought to hijack the elite game. In both instances he put loyalty to the players ahead of loyalty to the NZRFU and, some would argue, the game.
But these episodes did him no lasting harm. If anything, by dislodging him – briefly – from his pedestal and revealing a tendency to follow his heart rather than his head, they topped up the reservoir of public affection and admiration.
Meads never claimed to be rugby’s conscience – he had too much dirt under his fingernails for that – but his oldschool views delivered in an authentic Kiwi-bloke voice spiced with sly, straightfaced humour made him a talisman for those who felt disenfranchised by rugby’s abrupt and sometimes clumsy embrace of professionalism.
MAN OF MANY TALES
Of the multitude of Meads stories, perhaps the definitive one emerged from that unhappy game at Murrayfield half a century ago. George Mitchell, a 24-year-old debutant, was handed the daunting assignment of marking Meads. Afterwards, he recounted to wide-eyed teammates an exchange that took place as the first lineout of the game assembled. It was more monologue than dialogue, essentially a detailed exposition of the terrible things Meads would do to him if he had the temerity to compete for the ball.
After a long silence, Mitchell was asked, “What did you say?”
“I told him to f--- off,” said Mitchell. “But I didn’t say it very loud.”