An All Black captain, a jazz crooner and an inspiration to generations of young Americans. The incredible legacy of Pat Vincent.
He was an All Black captain, a jazz crooner and an inspiration to generations of young Americans. He was also probably gay — and until now his full story has never been told. Dylan Cleaver and Carolyne Meng-Yee look at the life of a rugby enigma.
Pat Vincent is New Zealand rugby’s best-kept secret. Did he also die holding onto a long-held secret of his own?
If that sounds enigmatic then it is apt. Vincent’s rugby career followed a conventional arc — from 1st XV to club to province to country — but his life did not, and it is his life that holds a fascination some 35 years after his death.
“You have to do a story on Pat Vincent,” says former Waita¯kere mayor Sir Bob Harvey.
“He had great leadership qualities. He had terrific charm about him, charisma. A great crooner, a fantastic rugby player ... and he was gay.”
While New Zealand waits on its first openly gay All Black, Vincent was probably its first gay captain.
While one of his closest confidantes in New Zealand, internationally acclaimed jazz singer Malcolm NcNeill, said of his homosexuality, “Who cares? Get over it,” the fact remains that even in these enlightened times, the All Blacks seemingly represent the last bastion of macho sexuality.
So we set out, as Harvey suggested, to tell the story, the whole story.
It eventually took us more than 10,000km to San Francisco, and though we came a little closer to learning about his sexuality, we did discover that it was borderline incidental.
What we found was much more captivating.
If a life is measured by the impact he had on those who met him, Patrick Bernard Vincent might be New Zealand’s greatest rugby export.
At the Monterey Heights, San Francisco, home of Mark Murray, hooker and captain of the 1983 St Mary’s 1st XV, nine men are gathered around the table for dinner. At the sound of silver tapping crystal, each man rises from his seat to share an anecdote about Vincent.
“Alongside my father and grandfather, he is the most influential man in my life,” says Murray, a lawyer.
“I don’t have many photos on the wall of my bar at my home,” says John Krpan, a doctor and former lock forward. “One is my dad, one is Pat.”
This story is repeated around the table with minor variations.
Typically less self-conscious than New Zealanders, these men loved Vincent and they had no problem using the word.
More than that, they still miss him.
VINCENT WENT to America, in part at least, because of his obsession with American music, says Greg Schneeweis, an early St Mary’s College protege of Vincent’s who would go on to play first five-eighth for the US Eagles, the national rugby side.
“Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme — he loved those jazz guys,” Schneeweis says. “Jazz was a beacon. He was a renaissance man before there was a term for it.”
To Vincent, anything that hinted at musical progression was to be treated with suspicion. He was a fan of American standards. He loved Sinatra but Murray had noticed that Vincent never sang My Way, perhaps the most celebrated song of the era.
Murray quizzed him on the omission. The answer was vehement: “Why sing a song about death, phrased in the past tense, if you had something to live for?” Vincent reasoned.
The halfback’s love of song and the occasional dance was already local lore. In Christchurch he piggybacked on pianist Douglas Caldwell’s established trio and in 1960 released an extended-play 45rpm 7” record of four songs for Peak Records called Four of the Best.
There is some debate as to whether Vincent was a genuinely good singer or a genuinely good impersonator.
“He was a poor man’s Frank Sinatra,” Caldwell says, laughing at the memory. “I said, ‘You should try and get a style of your own’, but it wasn’t that important to him.”
McNeill, who under Vincent’s prompting started singing in coffee bars as a teenager, was a little more encouraging when it came to Vincent’s range. “He was a good singer, with a light baritone and easy, relaxed manner, reflecting his personality.”
In Avignon, on the penultimate night of St Mary’s
1983 Easter tour to Spain and France, Vincent told Murray that he wanted to find a bar where he could sing. At 57, he was a little overweight and his chronic asthma was crippling.
When he got up to sing that night he was “no more than about
70 per cent”, says Murray, who nevertheless sat there stunned as Vincent launched into a passionate rendition of My Way.
“I reckon he knew,” Murray says. “I reckon he knew he was out of time.”
VINCENT’S ALL Black career was short. His rugby fame was largely contained to Canterbury, where he captained the team through a 23-defence Ranfurly Shield era between 1953-56 and became the first player to make 100 appearances for that province.
Not that he was a Canterbury blue blood.
The youngest of nine siblings, Vincent was born in Whataroa, a tiny smudge on the map of the West Coast between Haast and Hokitika.
His mother Catherine, older sister Moya and father William moved to Christchurch in 1928 in the hope the drier climate would alleviate Vincent’s asthma symptoms, though William soon moved back to the Coast.
Vincent began a long association with Christchurch Boys’ High School in 1939, where he made the 1st XV under the captaincy of Bob Duff in his final year.
Joining the High School Old Boys Rugby club in 1946, Vincent’s career took off. Canterbury honours followed and he developed a reputation as a heads-up halfback with great game sense and a leader of men. “He was a damned good captain,” All Black and Canterbury hard man Stan “Tiny” Hill says. “He knew what he was talking about, so we got on well together.”
Hill was throwing praise out in the style of the day, which was hardearned and minimalist. Others were more effusive.
“There was one game when the ball was being tapped back and he got really uptight and that was the only time I’d heard him criticise,” All Black and Canterbury hooker Dennis Young says. “He threw his hands and said, ‘This is just appalling’, and that was the only thing he ever said. He didn’t swear or do anything, he was appalled,” a laughing Young remembers.
In 1956, New Zealand was a place of simple pleasures. Pubs closed at 6pm, television was a few years away and radio was stateowned. In the winter months rugby was king. New Zealanders took great pride in the achievements of the All Blacks, but there was one blowfly in the ointment — South Africa. The All Blacks had yet to beat them in a test series. Worse, the previous tour had ended in ignominy, with Fred Allen’s optimistic
1949ers beaten
0-4. They came home seething about the Springboks’ rough-house tactics and the competency of the local referees. The public thirsted for revenge. “When they came in 56 she was on, she was,” Hill says. “The public went mad.”
The selectors wanted a captain who had proven leadership skills at provincial level. So they picked Vincent, 30, despite his having never played a match for the All Blacks, let alone a test.
New Zealand won the first test at Dunedin’s Carisbrook 10-6 and the reviews for Vincent’s leadership were positive. The Boks went into the second test at Wellington hellbent on winning. On a bitterly cold and windy day, South Africa manhandled the All Blacks, winning by a greater margin than the 8-3 scoreline suggested.
“It wasn’t Pat’s fault. The whole team was just one of those teams,” says Hill, who had been dropped for the second test for punching an opponent.
The public and media were baying for blood and Vincent, who had, by consensus, kicked too much, was gone.
The All Blacks would win the series 3-1 and Vincent’s test career would prove to be finished just two weeks after it started.
VINCENT’S LIFE was rich and contradictory. His genealogy traces back to Paikea, the mythic ancestor of Nga¯ti Porou and Nga¯i Tahu, yet he chose not to represent the Ma¯ori.
McNeill claims that like his sexuality, Vincent deliberately repressed his Maori heritage because of where and when he lived.
“Pat was a closet Maori at a time when it wasn’t okay to be one. He was an educated Maori… who passed as Pakeha and he did so within deeply conservative, hidebound institutions.”
He mingled easily with Christchurch’s conservative polite society, yet he was just at home gently barking instructions to a pack of forwards.
While his teammates sank beers in the clubrooms and relived every bounce of the ball, Vincent would sip from a flute of creme de menthe and try to move the conversation beyond the match.
He loved rugby but refused to be consumed by its importance. Vincent was instead an unashamed Yankophile — seduced by the music, the history and the promise of the place.
Or, as McNeill put it, he was a man out of place.
“The New Zealand he left was a deeply dull, rigidly conservative country, fearful of independent imagination and thinking.”
While teaching at his alma mater, CBHS, Vincent earned the chance to study American History for a postgraduate degree at the University of California. He needed no second invitation.
In 1958, when Vincent arrived, Cal Berkeley was some years from being the epicentre of the anti-establishment movement but it was, by the standards of the day, a liberal college that encouraged critical thinking.
He played rugby for Berkeley, including a match against the touring Wallabies, but he was playing for enjoyment rather than purpose.
Vincent wrote home to a friend from the US, saying: “There is little rugby talk, as we know it… I sometimes wish such was the case in New Zealand.”
Nevertheless, Vincent returned to teach at CBHS and to coach up to provincial level, employing novel tactics like having the Canterbury team take ballet lessons to improve mobility.
America remained a dream and, in late 1967 and without a job arranged, he left Christchurch permanently, to live initially in San Francisco, which was by then fast gaining a counterculture reputation.
Vincent bought a Mustang and was the manager of an apartment building before a Cal Berkeley rugby contact suggested him to St Mary’s, a small college in Moraga.
His effect on the rugby programme was immediate and profound and his influence soon spread to state and national level, but the higher he went, the more heads he butted.
He had strong feelings, “large opinions”, on a number of rugby matters, Austin Brewin, an octogenarian who worked with Vincent to increase rugby’s presence in California, says.
This jarred with the mainly English rugby traditionalists who dominated rugby in the United States.
THE ST Mary’s tour to Spain and France was a great idea; the presence of the coach was not.
He’d been warned against travelling by many, but some of the team, including future Bay Area construction magnate Mike Ghilotti, convinced him he could do it.
As soon as the plane took off to fly from San Francisco to Madrid, via New York, they knew Vincent’s health was precarious. To ease the congestion in his lungs, his travelling crew would take turns at using percussion or cupping on his back.
“He was in the back of the airplane having people taking turns of hitting him on his back,” says Ghilotti. “That was kind of an indication of the challenge he was having.”
The tour was an eye-opener for the students — they took in the sights from Madrid through the south of France, including Catholic hotspot Lourdes, to Paris — even if the lights were dimming a little for Vincent.
By the time they reached Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on April 10, he looked and sounded awful.
When the first leg ended in New York concerned players took him to a medical centre, where he was cleared to fly to San Francisco.
Krpan still shakes his head at the memory. He feels it should have been obvious that Vincent wasn’t fit to get on the plane.
Brewin, Vincent’s friend and the former head of pulmonary and infectious diseases at San Francisco General Hospital was livid when he learned the circumstances.
“That doctor killed him,” Brewin says. “I called him up and told him that. The guy listened to his chest on a stethoscope and couldn’t hear any asthma sounds. Well that was because he wasn’t moving any f***ing air around his lungs. As soon as he got on the plane and the air decompressed,
The New Zealand he left was a deeply dull, rigidly conservative country, fearful of independent imagination and thinking.
Malcolm McNeill, jazz singer and friend
it killed him.
“I told him if he had been on my team I would have fired his arse.”
The squad was split on the New York to San Francisco leg, with most of the senior students on a later flight. Ghilotti was still in his junior year.
About 20 minutes into the flight, a distressed Vincent attempted to stand up, had what looked like a spasm attack, and slumped to the ground.
“The anguishing part was really the next two-and-a-half hours,” Ghilotti says. “Basically it took an hour-and-a-half to land, then another hour of being there and being a part of trying to give him CPR.”
The plane was given emergency status and clearance to land in Pittsburgh, but by then the story had moved beyond medical emergency to post-mortem.
Meanwhile, on the later flight, St Mary’s senior players landed at San Francisco but were kept on the plane.
A staff member escorted Murray, the captain, off while the rest remained seated. Outside, his dad, a huge fan of Vincent, was waiting.
“He told me he had something to tell me about Pat …”
WE ARE not, we discovered, the first people to attempt to present the narrative of Vincent. Celebrated journalist Warwick Roger, who recently passed away after a long battle with Parkinson’s, was fascinated by his story, as he was about the 1956 Springbok Tour in general.
Harvey, whose initial encouragement provided the impetus to find out more about the man, has considered writing the Vincent tale himself, as has former journalist Wally Thomas and veteran rugby chronicler and columnist Phil Gifford.
The story has never come out because, as Gifford says: “Pat never quite came out.”
If The Five Faces of Pat Vincent — a short, self-published biography written by CBHS teaching colleague Alan Barley — hinted at Vincent’s sexuality, it did so in a very subtle manner." The book revealed Vincent was allergic to a multitude of substances including lipstick, which may have “contributed to the fact he never developed any lasting relationship with a girl”.
Even when they talk about it now, some of Vincent’s All Black teammates use terminology and phrases that some readers might find offensive today.
“Pat had no partner. He never bothered, he was never one to worry about women,” says Hill.
“It came up once before,” he says in a cryptic reference to Vincent’s sexuality. “I look at it this way: you could be lesbian, you could be straight, you could be gay, but does that worry me? No it doesn’t, that’s his life. As long as he doesn’t interfere with me,” he finishes, laughing heartily.
“It [would have been] a very difficult thing for a player to admit to.
“I don’t know what the reaction would be.”
All Black lock and friend of Vincent, Nev MacEwan says: “I had my suspicions when he never married and went to San Francisco to live. . . but he never did anything around the team that would lead you to think he was gay.”
Even the idea that Vincent settled in the Bay Area because he was gay doesn’t quite add up, says Jerry Murphy, who played under Vincent when he first started coaching at St Mary’s and remained a lifelong friend.
“The premise seemed to be that San Francisco was a safe haven at the time Pat came here, he escaped for that reason, and that historically isn’t true. Pat came here in the mid 60s, and the gay scene in San Francisco didn’t really blossom till the 80s, at the earliest 75.
“The reasons that he came here were quite legitimate. He wanted to be a university professor, he wanted to get an education beyond his education in New Zealand.”
However, Jeff Hollings, a New Zealander who has made his home in San Francisco for 40 years, says it was well known Vincent was gay and that the former All Black always “handled it very well” when the subject came up.
“He didn’t emphasise it, he didn’t deny it; he sort of nodded and went on with whatever he was doing.”
Hollings said he doubted Vincent would have found it easy to be openly gay, even if the Bay Area was more progressive than the Canterbury he had left.
Despite the general acceptance among some of the US rugby fraternity that Vincent was gay, there was scant evidence beyond the anecdotal.
Vincent’s nephew Robert, the keeper of the family memorabilia, said his uncle was “flamboyant” by nature but had no inkling he might have been gay.
“There was no hint of anything like that with the family or anybody I associated with the pupils at school.”
If he was in a long-term relationship – and responses to that question have ranged with equal certitude from, “yes he did have a life partner” to “no, he never had a long-term relationship” – then he made sure it never encroached on other areas of his life.
It would have been profoundly difficult for Vincent to lead the life of an openly gay man. Even now, his old friends, teammates and students feel compelled to defend him, as if being gay wasn’t part of his character, but a slur on it.
“Pat’s a lovely chap, I liked him. I don’t like to see him damned,” former All Black Mick Bremner says.
“Look, he was a bit bloody unusual. I mean, what the hell was he wearing a bloody sombrero and boots for?” he says of one outfit Vincent adopted after living in the US. “I said: ‘Where’s the horse?’”
Those in California, are more relaxed about it, but remain coy.
“I would guess some suspected, but I'm not aware of anyone who knew for sure,” says Paul Stich, the
Weekend Herald’s point man in California and principal upholder of Vincent’s memory. “We all had such great respect for him, and cared for him, that if he brought it up, fine, but we never did. It just didn't matter.
“What I’d hate,” he says later, “is if that was to become Pat’s legacy.”
crisp November Saturday night in Moraga, with the acrid smell of the wildfires that have razed Northern California hovering in the air, more than 300 guests pull up in a carpark at St Mary’s to attend the annual Pat Vincent Memorial Dinner. To get there, they would have driven past the Pat Vincent Memorial Field.
Part of the purpose of this year’s dinner is to raise funds for a rugby clubhouse, inspired by those who have visited the High School Old Boys clubrooms in Christchurch.
If Stich is worried about Vincent’s legacy, he needn’t be.
This is where it resides and, as much as these things can be, it’s immovable.
Even on the day this story was completed, emails were still dropping in from those whose lives were shaped by Vincent.
Wrote Geordie Hawkins, who was on the plane the day Vincent died: “Pat was like a second father to me… There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about Pat and the effect rugby has had on my life in general. New Zealand has a special place in my heart because of that.”
This is Vincent’s legacy.
St Mary’s is a small university by American standards. Its greatest rugby rivals, Cal Berkeley and Brigham Young University, have student populations that dwarf it.
Yet St Mary’s has won three national championships in the past five years under the coaching of former USA Eagles Tim O’Brien and Johnny Everett.
“I consider Pat Vincent to be the Godfather of rugby here,” O’Brien says. “Everything we do has roots in what he did.”
This is Vincent’s legacy. When Vincent died, his closest friend, Brother Martin Ash, who suffers dementia and lives in assisted care in the Napa Valley, travelled to New Zealand to deliver a poignant eulogy, mirroring the one he also delivered at St Mary’s chapel.
“Pat Vincent treated every one of us as an individual, not as numbers, not as rugby players. Pat treated us as individuals because he believed that each person is unique.”
While rugby is a big part of his story, Vincent never failed to broaden the horizons of those he met.
“I met Pat talking about music,” says Stich.
“He took me to see Carmen McRae and Ella Fitzgerald and ended up introducing them to me. So somehow he knew them before we got there.” This, too, is Vincent’s legacy. He was a teacher. Because of the unique range of his skills, it is sometimes overlooked what an impression he made on his students.
“He gave me confidence to feel my input was valid,” McNeill said This, certainly, is Vincent’s legacy. Friends say Vincent could be cryptic. He could light up a room, a bar, a practice session with his wit and knowledge.
He could, in the words of Murray, “talk a dog out of a meat wagon”.
Except when it came to his life in New Zealand — Vincent described his homeland to McNeill as a “hotbed of apathy” — or his personal life.
Vincent did more than anybody to revive rugby in the United States, he profoundly affected the lives of those he taught and coached for the better. His death left lasting scars on those who saw it but his life is still celebrated, more than three decades later. “He was our coach, our friend, and we were blessed to have him,” says Jerry Murphy.
Ultimately, this is his legacy.
“Pat had no partner. He never bothered, he was never one to worry about women. I look at it this way: you could be lesbian, you could be straight, you could be gay, but does that worry me? No it doesn’t, that’s his life. As long as he doesn’t interfere with me,”
Tiny Hill