Misbehaviour — a timeline of indiscretion
The details of Mark Telea’s curfewbusting indiscretions are not yet known. But in the modern era, the All Blacks have established a rich history of wandering away from the team hotel.
2005: The £300 cab fare
With an All Blacks’ end-of-year tour about to kick off in Wales, non-playing tourists Dan Carter, Piri Weepu, Jimmy Cowan, Aaron Mauger, Leon MacDonald and Jason Eaton did what young Kiwis do in Cardiff and settled in for a good, boozy night.
Still going strong at closing time, the group decided to ditch Cardiff and head to The Church, a London institution that opens on Sundays and is popular with a certain class of amped-up Kiwis and Australians.
“Hitting The Church is a great way to cap off a successful tour but a ridiculous way to begin one,” Carter later wrote in one of his autobiographies.
The want-a-drink players paid a cab driver £300 for the three-hour ride to The Church, where they realised they had arrived two hours before the doors were due to open. Standing in the cold, grey light of a North London morning, they finally made a smart decision and got themselves on a train back to Cardiff, where captain Tana Umaga had a few choice words for them about the wisdom of their decision-making.
2006: Handbags at dawn
A Hurricanes Super Rugby final defeat to the Crusaders is generally par for the course but the events that followed the 2006 final went straight to the front page. In the early hours of the next morning, outgoing All Blacks captain Tana Umaga pulled teammate Chris Masoe into line after an incident at a Christchurch pub.
The midfielder tamed the loose forward by whacking him across the head with a woman’s handbag at a Christchurch pub in 2006.
Another woman who witnessed the incident told the Herald the blow was hard enough to break a mobile phone inside the handbag.
“It looked more like . . . an angry mother smacking a naughty child kind of thing,” she said. “It wasn’t to give harm but to get a message across. There was obviously a bit of force behind it, to break the phone.”
The Roxy bag (originally bought for $30) was later sold at auction on Trade Me for $22,750. 2007: The other winger’s quarterfinal drama
You can say this much for Doug Howlett; at least he had the decency to wait until the All Blacks had been knocked out after their recordsetting quarter-final exit before going out on the rantan.
The Blues and All Blacks flyer was arrested at 3am outside a Hilton hotel in London for jumping on cars in the aftermath of their quarter-final defeat to France in Cardiff.
The winger, then 29, was suspected of causing criminal damage to two vehicles.
It was also reported Howlett and other teammates ran up a $33,000 tab at the hotel’s foyer bar.
Howlett later took responsibility for the drunken damage he caused, and called it “tomfoolery”.
2011: The case of the missing jandal
Quarter-final nerves seem to bring out the worst in the All Blacks. Less than 72 hours before he was due to run on the field in the 2011 quarterfinal, winger Cory Jane was spotted in a Takapuna pub in a state Sir Robert Muldoon’s press secretary once sympathetically described as “tired and emotional” — though others might describe as “pissed, wearing one jandal and lighting a durry”.
Injured fullback Israel Dagg was also there at Mac’s Brewbar in Takapuna.
The wrote at the time: “Stunned bar patrons told how the two backline stars appeared to be swaying and slurring their words.”