The 19th Warrior Sir Peter Leitch
OPINION: I want to thank Stuff for letting an old butcher come out of retirement and resurrect his column as a one-off.
Without that generosity I’d be unable to pay tribute to rugby league legend Olsen Filipaina, who died from kidney disease last week in Australia aged 64.
A whole load of people who are better writers than me, who are far more knowledgeable about league, and who understand Olsen’s trail-blazing role in the game, have written eulogies for him and it’s been wonderful to see the outpouring of affection and respect for him.
He’s been called a pioneer, a gentleman, a great, a legend, an immortal and everything up to a colossus.
To me he was all those things, and more importantly, he was my friend.
I can still recall my first encounter with Olsen.
He was years away from becoming a league star, just a young boy who used to come into my Mangere butchery hanging on to his mum Sissie, looking quiet, shy and always on hand to carry dinner home.
I always used to joke with Sissie but Olsen didn’t like it much and Sissie once told me he had said that when he got older he was going to come back and knock me out.
Considering how much bigger he did get, I dodged a bullet because instead we became firm friends, most certainly through our involvement with the Mighty Mangere East Hawks Rugby League Club, just down the road from my shop.
The rest as they say is history. Olsen would cross the ditch and face terrible homesickness and blatant racism yet forge a career that opened the door for the large number of Polynesian and Māori players who fill the NRL today.
And he would wear the black and white of my beloved Kiwis too, leading us to wins we had no right to have, including of course the famous day at Carlaw Park