Gone Bush.
Jim Tucker tracks down former All Blacks wing Grant Batty who is living in rural Australia.
You won’t find a signpost directing you to All Blacks legend Grant Batty when you reach the one-pub village of Wallabadah amid the prime cattle and grain properties of northern NSW.
The bloke who runs the general store played a bit of rugby in his day so he’s your best bet to point you towards the acreage on the creek just out of town.
It just so happens his son is best mates with the son of 1970s Wairarapa Bush halfback Laurie Karatau. Rugby’s six degrees of separation is still a better GPS than any phone navigation when you want to locate something.
The grateful faithful 15km down the road at Quirindi Lions Rugby Club might happily pass on Batty’s phone number too after the locals were coached by rugby royalty in 2014.
It takes a lot to make Batty’s home town of Greytown, in the heart of the Wairarapa region, look like a bustling metropolis but Wallabadah, with its population of 350, does just that. Walla-where exactly?
“It’s between Currabubula and Murrurundi,” Batty tells inquiring friends with a grin.
The trademark Batty moustache still twitches with a life of its own when you prod him with rugby topics he wants to dive into. That mischievous, rumbling chuckle when he likes a joke hasn’t changed at all.
Batty is thrilled that Damian McKenzie has had such a brilliant start to 2021 because it means speed and skill in a slight, quicksilver frame of just 81kg can still torment the giants of the code.
Batty built his own renowned reputation as a try-scoring wing in the 1970s playing at 1.65m, 5ft 5.5 inches in the old tongue.
He scored four tries in his 15 Tests in an era when each was treasured like a gold ingot. And he scored 41 tries in the same number of matches to give him 45 tries in 56 games for the All Blacks.
He scored them in bunches...four against Cambridge University in 1972 and the only two the All Blacks scored on that memorable January day in 1973 against the Barbarians at Cardiff
Arms Park.
It was how he competed too that added to his status because crowds loved the tightly-wound energy and abrasiveness that uncoiled to dazzling effect. David often slew Goliath in matches Batty played.
A 70kg frame flashing down the sideline with urgent, staccato footfalls or a sidestep past desperate cover defenders is not a size that has a place in Rugby 2021. We’re poorer for it.
“Fans want to watch guys like Damian McKenzie. They want to see speed, elusiveness, space and something special,” Batty said.
“The little people come into the game when the big boys tire but even fatigue has been removed from rugby with the number of replacements you can now run on.
“I never have or will think that rugby prowess equates to body size.”
Batty is a contented grandfather of five these days. He’s finished a stint as president of the local Chamber of Commerce and will celebrate 48 years of marriage to wife Jill in July. Daughter Jane, a primary school principal, lives nearby with kids Harry, 10, and Pia, 8. Son Sam, a former Queensland half back, is still playing rugby, at 42, in Darwin where wife Jenon is a past club president. Isabella, 21, and rugby-loving Noah, 15, and Eli, 12, complete the grandkids.
Jill rides horses and is an office bearer for the Australian Trail Horse Riders Association. Batty prefers to jump on the tractor and help with a bit of soil testing for son-in-law Peter, an agronomist and former bush rugby player.
Good rugby people. Yes, there's a thread.
With the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa ready to come to life, Batty recalled his own brief, memorable tilt against the Lions in 1977.
His right knee had been giving him hell for more than a year.
Even ligament surgery early in 1977 didn’t give him the pain-free movement he’d hoped.
“I couldn’t train properly and was in a lot of pain but I wanted to play the Lions as we all did as All Blacks,” Batty recounted.
He clinched the First Test when he ran in an intercept from halfway much
to the roaring delight of his home crowd at Athletic Park.
Lions fullback Andy Irvine was eating up the metres in pursuit and even prop Graham Price was keeping up.
It was a glorious high but the end wrapped up in one moment.
“I’d actually said I was not available for the First Test but a couple of teammates and the coach
(Jack Gleeson) got on the phone,”
Batty said.
“Driving back from Wellington to home in Tauranga, I worked out the knee wasn’t up to it.
“I didn’t want to be caught out for a lack of pace or let down the All Blacks.
“As All Blacks, we were on the princely sum of $1.50 a day back then, Jill and I had our first-born Jane and that was it...I retired from international rugby.
“Forty-five tries for the All Blacks... not bad for a short-arse from Greytown. I’d had a great run and enjoyed it immensely.”
The man once voted the strongest All Black, pound for pound, still had a long-forgotten athletic detour to make. Remember New Zealand Superstars?
Between 1977-79, Batty won three years running taking on the likes of Kurt Sorensen (rugby league),
Brian Fairlie (tennis), Rod Dixon (athletics), Peter Snell (athletics),
Bruce Robertson (rugby), Bryan Williams (rugby) and Simon Dickie (rowing cox).
Wood-chopping, a 100m swim, 100m and 800m on the track, an obstacle course, weightlifting...it was a unique decathlon-style event.
“I earned a trip to the Bahamas for the world event in 1978 and I’m sure I rowed against (Olympic decathlon gold medallist) Bruce Jenner,” Batty said. And beat him.
“I was up against guys like NFL running back Greg Pruitt, who went on to win a Super Bowl. Everyone except me seemed to have an entourage and a film crew,” Batty said.
Batty won US$1800 for 11th but, comically by today’s standards, was banned by the New Zealand Rugby Union for infringing his amateur status. The call was overturned.
Batty moved his family to Australia in the late 1980s to explore new horizons after “an unfortunate business experience.”
Rugby was in his blood and it didn’t take long for him to link with the Maroochydore Swans and later the Easts club in Brisbane.
Batty was at the helm as club general manager and coach for 1997 in a fruitful partnership with Mike
Thomas, a wonderful rugby man with roots in Hamilton.
The Tigers roared, with soon-to-be World Cup-winners Dave Wilson and Jeremy Paul in the pack, and won their first-ever title in their 50th year. Batty turned the Gold Coast Breakers into Queensland’s top club side as well.
Sandwiched between those club highs, he was a popular assistant coach of the Queensland Reds in 1999-2000. Missing out on the head coach job for 2001 hurt because he was ready.
Coaching the Australia Under-19s to the World Junior Championships in Chile in 2001 was not his last foray to a rugby outpost because he tested himself in Japan in 2004 when All Black Leon MacDonald was his star player at Yamaha Jubilo.
“It’s more than the game itself, it’s the players and people you meet along the way that make rugby for me,”
Batty said.
Batty relishes winning but it’s always been the people who have given him the greatest enjoyment. He always says that if winning is all you get out of rugby, as a coach or player, you are seriously short changing yourself.
When he moved to Wallabadah, he put his hand up to help the bush lads at Quirindi.
“They were a good bunch of young people having a crack, farmer’s sons and local workers but without experienced players in key positions,” Batty said.
“It was a lot of fun but quite challenging. We never had the 15 players to play on the Saturday for a team run at Thursday training the whole season.”
The Quirindi boys didn’t win a game just as they’d fared when renowned Wallabies coach Alan Jones was in charge for a season. The nadir in 2014 was being gored 167-0 by the Moree Bulls.
“It took three and a bit hours to drive to Moree for the game and eight hours to get home. You can imagine the state...the only fully-dressed and alcohol-free person on the bus was the bus driver,” Batty said with that chuckle.
The late JJ Stewart, his All Blacks coach between 1974-76, simply called Batty a freak.
He scored 21 tries on his first tour of the British Isles, France and North America in 1972-73 with crossings from
Vancouver to Lyon and Murrayfield in between. In those days, radio reports and newspaper articles filed from the other side of the world zealously spread stories of an exhilarating wing playing like he was 10-foot-tall.
If you made an epic entrance to Test rugby in the 1970s, the cathedral for the All Blacks was Cardiff Arms Park when the Welsh were in their pomp.
“Playing Wales was the biggy for a Kiwi in those days. The noise was unbelievable on the field and to hear a word you had to get within a metre of each other,” Batty said.
If Batty had a possible weakness, it was how he would stand up in defence. It was answered emphatically.
“JPR Williams had perfected coming into the Welsh backline outside his outside centre. Bryan Williams and I knew it and we had our plan,” Batty said.
“I was to come off my wing and nail him. I did. And so did Bryan belt him 10 minutes later. We didn’t see JPR again that afternoon.”
The 19-16 victory was one to celebrate.
This became the infamous 36 hours in All Blacks’ history when prop Keith Murdoch was banished from the tour because of a late-night scuffle with a security guard in the Angel Hotel and the high-handed pressure of the Home Unions.
Batty may have been making his Test debut beside All Blacks greats Ian Kirkpatrick and Sid Going but even a 21-year-old knows injustice when he smells it.
“I can see it still...Keith briefly poking his head on the team bus and saying ‘I’m off’,” Batty recalled.
“If we hadn’t found out on the bus, if we’d been told of Keith’s fate in a team meeting, I think things would have unfolded differently because there is no way he should have been sent home.”
Batty will be 70 in August and he’s planning a trip home to NZ for 2022.
“The guys I speak to most of all are still my All Blacks mates from those early tours in the 1970s. The camaraderie was sensational over what was nearly a four-month tour to the British Isles and elsewhere in 1972-73,” Batty said.
So Kirkpatrick, Sir Bryan Williams, Hamish Macdonald, Ian Hurst,
Peter Whiting, Graham “Moose” Whiting, Lawrie Knight,
Graeme Crossman and another former All Black, Mark Sayers, and Marist St Pats pals Kevin Horan and Mick Robbers had better buckle up when Batty reaches Wellington.
It will be one heck of reunion.