McCaw’s greatness decided by fate
A 14-year scintillating, sporting chapter of a humble immortal
TO drive through the remotest swathes of the South Island is to recognise why New Zealand has been the setting for so many epic films. Every stretch of State Highway 83 from Oamaru to Omarama, past the cascades of the Waitaki River and the St Mary’s mountain range beyond — a kind of Glencoe on acid — brings panoramas of heart-stopping, take-a-picture-in-everylay-by beauty.
At the heart of this highland Arcadia sits Kurow, a service village so tiny that one can flash through it in third gear. There is no sign screaming that it is the birthplace of Richie McCaw, the greatest modern All Black, no statue to celebrate the community’s most cherished son. That is not the Kurow style. The most capped All Black of all time this week drew the curtain on his stunning international career which started in Dublin 14 years ago and ended at the World Cup last month when he hoisted the Webb Ellis Cup aloft for the second time.
Now McCaw says he will work towards obtaining his commercial pilot licence as well as continuing his business and charity work.
A little under two years ago, McCaw made a rare return to his native wilderness, to be honoured with lifetime membership of his local club. Ross Paton, both the club president and the publican at the Kurow Hotel, reflects mistily that it felt like the most natural reunion.
“Richie hasn’t changed a bit,” he says. “It wasn’t as if he was the All Blacks captain. He was just one of us. We sat round the table and had a natter and a beer, and we could have been talking to the guy next door.”
In common with each of Kurow’s 339 inhabitants, Paton is still glorying in the national name-check that the place received last month from Steve Hansen, the All Blacks coach, who acclaimed McCaw on the occasion of his world record 142nd test at Eden Park as an “ordinary guy from Kurow, capable of extraordinary things”.
Moved by the memory, he says: “It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you hear that.”
McCaw left the homestead at
A TRUE LEGEND: Richie McCaw‘s last test was fittingly the World Cup final, which his side won the age of 13 for boarding school in Dunedin, but he has consistently translated the values gleaned as a child into his leadership of the world’s most dominant team.
He would no sooner talk about his own feats then he would demean himself on a celebrity panel show. Humility, in his case, is no mere platitude. In the lead-up to his Bledisloe Cup farewells in Auckland, he had to be press-ganged into any acknowledgement of surpassing Brian O’Driscoll’s 141 tests.
Such is the way of a man who, when offered a nomination for knighthood by New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key for winning the 2011 World Cup, turned it down.
Deidre Senior, the principal at Waitaki Valley School, explains: “Kurow people are tireless, community-orientated folk.
“They also have high expectations of anything they do. There was an expectation early that Richie would become an All Black. Most of our boys at the school grow up idolising him.”
Perhaps the stoutness of the stock in Kurow is owed partly to the harshness of the landscape, where sheep and cattle farming abound. For McCaw forms part of a remarkable tradition of back-row talent in this region.
Two of the flankers playing representative rugby for North Otago hail from Senior’s school of only 107 pupils. Even more eerily, one of them, a red-haired 13-year-old named Locky Collins, is growing up in the same house that McCaw once called home.
McCaw’s parents, Donald and Margaret, have since left the area, but their farm is easily identifiable by the pair of rugby posts in the back garden.
Megan Collins, Locky’s mother and a Kurow native, claims she has scoured the premises for any other trace of Richie’s past but found nothing. It is a similar story throughout the village. There is no McCaw monument, no telltale expression of a noble rugby heritage beyond the fact that the main drag has been christened Bledisloe Street.
About the clearest nod to the past is found in the fish-andchip shop. The young McCaw was, by all accounts, partial to a generous helping of blue cod here, and a modest poster — “McCaw country: grass roots to All Blacks captain” — hangs on the wall in tribute.
That he was always earmarked as a future immortal in the black jersey is a matter of some contention. McCaw has described his first test, a 40-29 victory over Ireland in Dublin in 2001, as a “terrible game”.
But the trajectory to becoming a “GAB” (Great All Black), mapped out by his uncle Biggsy on the back of a paper napkin, was in certain eyes a fate preordained. Barney McCone was his first coach and a gentleman of the old school, one for whom Richie would always be Richard.
“Although Richard was the only loose forward we had, he was extremely tough and a joy to coach,” McCone says. “He was not all that tall, but he was tough and had a great turn of speed. He was the second fastest runner in our team.”
His quicksilver reflexes, scavenging for the ball before his teammates had even thought about it, were in evidence early. They formed the foundation of a supreme tactical intelligence, which has enabled him as an All Black to stay delicately attuned to the latest interpretations of the game’s laws.
Embittered opponents, outsmarted by him too often, would counter that he plays on the ragged edge of legality — “Offside, Richie”, is a standard refrain in Australia — but there is no denying that McCaw is formidably smart. — © The Daily Telegraph, London