By TERRY MADDAFORD
PAPEETE - At 64, and spending time with Kiwis and Warriors rugby league teams and New Zealand soccer sides, Tom McKeown is a winner - as an All Black.
McKeown, the popular kit man with the Ken Dugdale-coached All Whites in Tahiti for the Nations Cup, joined four other members of the squad in dressing up as All Blacks for the team's quiz session - an antidote for some long, sometimes boring days between games.
Complete with black shirt, shorts and socks and with pillows hidden across their shoulders and wads of tissue stuffed over their teeth to give the effect of mouthguards, McKeown and his team-mates were judged the best-dressed team.
The experience was yet another chapter in McKeown's sporting life, which along the way has earned him life membership with the Ponsonby club and the Auckland and New Zealand Rugby Leagues.
He has also managed the Auckland and Kiwi league sides and served as treasurer of the ARL for 15 years.
Taking early retirement from the Bank of New Zealand after nearly 43 years' service, McKeown was approached by the Warriors in 1994.
He was the club's kit man for the inaugural 1995 season. Two years later, after seven-day working weeks comprising up to 70 hours, he was named club man of the year.
A year later, a change in management and hard financial times ended McKeown's stint at the club. But his work had not gone unnoticed by one-time chief executive Bill MacGowan.
On his return to New Zealand Soccer after successfully staging the world under-17 championships, MacGowan saw the need for such a person within his organisation. He called McKeown.
Already this year he has been with the under-23 Olympic team at matches in Auckland, Palmerston North, Japan and South Africa.
The Nations Cup is his first contact with the All Whites - and he is loving it.
"I find little difference in the players whatever the sport," McKeown says.
"The biggest difference here is I don't have to wash the players' boots after the games like I had to on our regular trips to Australia with the Warriors.
"With the amount of gear the players are given I have to keep a watch on things.
"Unlike, say, the All Blacks, who get to keep theirs, all the kit that is handed out to the soccer teams has to come back at the end of the tour.
"No one has ever tried to have me on.
"They know the gear has to be used again by the next team."
Already McKeown, who spends as much time sorting through the laundry as the players do on the field, is looking ahead to the next tour - "as long as they don't get sick of me."
Fat chance, such is the respect he commands from a team who see him playing a key role within the structure.
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