No one messed with the mightiest of all
One night over some beers in the rugged habitat of his native King Country, Sir Colin Meads revealed how a ‘twist of fate’ changed the course of rugby history.
Of all the stories that have long since branched out from the man known as ‘Pine Tree’ into a veritable forest of folklore, none is more relevant from a British perspective than the one about ‘the skinny english kid’ working as a bank clerk in nearby Taupo.
Martin Johnson became a Junior All Black on the strength of a nod from Meads.
‘The new Zealand Under 21 selectors contacted me to say they were interested in picking Martin,’ said Meads that night. ‘They asked, “Is the boy going to stay here or is he going back to england?” I had talked with Martin and I told the selectors that, as far as I knew, he planned to spend the rest of his rugby career in new Zealand.
‘I told him to tell the selectors he was staying and that’s what he did. Martin was a young beanpole, slightly ungainly but he had all the courage in the world. In the end we lost him over a twist of fate.’
With a Kiwi girlfriend — Kay Gredig, who would become his wife — a steady job and a winning launch as an All Black colt against Australia in Sydney, Johnson intended to stay. He would have done so had a shoulder problem not required specialist attention back in the east Midlands. Once home, england never let him go until he delivered the World Cup.
The Pine Tree knew long before then that the All Blacks had lost an immovable english oak, even if he misjudged Johnson in one respect, thinking he ‘lacked aggression’. Meads’s laughter at himself amounted to the jovial admission — how wrong can you be?
nobody sounded more eminently qualified on the subject of aggression than Meads. He made his name during the Fifties and Sixties when referees turned a blind eye more often than not, happy to let the players dispense their rough brand of justice on the hoof.
nobody messed about with Meads. In an era of sluggers and desperadoes, gougers, biters and hitmen, his ability to rise above the skulduggery and impose his own law and order allowed him to clean the opposition up like a latter-day Wyatt earp.
Meads never forgot a lesson from boyhood to get ‘stuck in’, content to use that as a euphemism for all manner of mayhem. He never got mad but invariably got even, not least during a gruesome match when a French hoodlum kicked him in the head hard enough for the wound to need 18 stitches.
If he felt pain, Meads had a strange way of showing it, playing on with a broken arm in South Africa in 1970. His modesty ensured swift dismissal of any suggestion that he was the hardest of them all.
Instead, he would point to players like Martin Pelser, a one- eyed Springbok of the late Fifties who was so hard, according to Meads, that after five matches the Kiwis still couldn’t work out ‘which was the good eye and which the blind one’.
Just as earp got away with murder after Tombstone, so Meads escaped with the blue equivalent. Many old players, not just in Australia, never forgave him for twisting Ken Catchpole’s legs like a chicken bone in Sydney in 1968. A hamstring torn off the bone and his groin ruptured, Catchpole, then the best scrum-half in the game, never played for Australia again.
The official communique of Meads’s death glossed over that as ‘a tragic accident’ which it may have been.
He had a strong sense of right and wrong which explains why, after being sent off the previous year at Murrayfield, he felt so engulfed by a ‘terrible shame’ that he told himself: ‘That’s me finished.’
He wasn’t. His Test career, then a decade long, still had four years to run, the phenomenal stamina behind his ability to lock the scrum and run like a threequarter having turned him from a very good second-row forward into an all-time great, a colossus in every sense.
He exuded indestructibility, which makes his passing from pancreatic cancer at 81 all the more of a shock despite its inevitability.
‘I’m not my old self,’ he said when we last spoke in April. ‘I inject myself five times a day and the support I’ve had from people in the UK has been wonderful. I’d like to thank each and every one.’
They unveiled a statue of him in the main street of Te Kuiti, alias Meadsville, during the Lions tour. Above the town, in the rolling hills where he farmed 700 acres, the landscape will never be quite the same. The mightiest Pine Tree has fallen.