Touring Lions

My mum’s dad was a hell of a rugby player. 

He played for Waikato in New Zealand in the 1920’s and 30’s and gained his blazer for number of appearances, no mean feat back then when games were few and far between. The badge from the jacket sat in a frame on top of the upright desk in his office, at home on the farm.

There was a little open sitting room next to the dining room, with armchairs and a small alcove where mum remembered her dad having his papers and bills, chequebook and what not. 

The walls of the room were lined with framed photographs of the teams he had been part of as a player, and then as a selector after he retired. 

I would marvel at the pictures whenever I visited, the men so big and powerful, and my grandad always somewhere near the middle of the middle row where the biggest of them all stood. 

I remember the ones where he would be in his suit and hat, somewhere off to the side, as the selector. He was there in one for the team which had played the British Lions, in 1959.

The Lions toured New Zealand again in 1977, it was the first time I had really payed attention to sport although I do remember being amazed by Henry Rono when dad let my brother and I watch a little bit of the Olympics coverage in 1976. 

Rono won some of the middle-distance running events at the Montreal games and I vaguely remember going to bed and falling asleep dreaming of running that fast.

The ’77 Lions were a decent team, they beat the hell out of almost all the provincial teams they met in between the four test matches, those were the days of tours which went on for months and I think they played something like thirty matches in all. 

I had a rugby ball dad had got me from his work, and I used to run around the park at the back of our house re-creating the matches move for move, always getting the final scores exactly right as the Lions beat Marlborough, Wanganui, Poverty Bay, on and on.

There was an old gentleman who owned the big sprawling place next to ours and backing onto the same park, he would potter about in the huge gardens he kept, weeding, pruning while I ran about. Hamilton got a lot of rain, and he had dug a shallow moat all the way along the outside edge of the fence at his boundary and I loved him for it because that seemed to mark the edge of the grand football fields I imagined myself running across. 

I kicked goals over the gate in our back fence, and I had to kick a lot of them because Phil Bennett and Andy Irvine were smashing them over from everywhere for the Lions. My feet would be red raw by the time I finished. 

The old boy told mum he had no idea how I hadn’t smashed the windows in the outside room just over the fence, but every time the ball somehow bounced off the window sill or the bricks of the wall, and I’d retrieve it and kick off again.

I only remember watching one game of rugby with my grandad, at the farm. I think it would have been the next year, 1978, not long before he grew ill and passed away. 

Grandad didn’t like the commentator, Keith Quinn, and we watched with the sound turned down and the radio on. Quinn was rubbish.

I have a feeling the match was a test between New Zealand and Australia. 

I loved the All Blacks winger, Bryan Williams, but he wasn’t having the best of matches. He dropped a pass or a high ball and Grandad said something like ‘that’s not good enough Williams’, and I was so torn between these two men I absolutely idolised.

Afterwards I remember Grandad letting me stand on one of the armchairs in the sitting room so I could see his rugby photos properly, and him describing some of the games, and pointing out certain men. 

He had played a game for North Island vs South Island in 1930. He pointed to George Nepia, and Herb Lilburne. Bert Cooke was sitting in the front row. 

Grandad said to me something like ‘those were some players’, and I had no idea who any of them were. 

He told me Bert Cooke wasn’t a very nice bloke. Cooke is seen as one of the very best All Blacks of all time. Lots of those men had been part of the Invincibles, who went to the UK in 1924 and came back undefeated.

The last time I saw Grandad, not too long after that, I knew he was going to die.

He’d always taught me that men stand up to shake hands. He was in hospital for chemotherapy, the same hospital my mum spent so much of her working life in. 

He was in bed, in his pyjamas and I had no idea what to say. I held out my hand, and he rolled very slowly onto his side and shook it, and I knew how very sick he must be.

He was 72 when he died.