Haunted by the ghost of rugby past

By MICHELE HEWITSON

They do a superior sort of morning tea at Carter Holt Harvey HQ. Laid out on damask tablecloths are tiny scones with jam and cream, mini quiches with fluted pastry cases, salmon club sammies.

It's a bit rude to go on about the fodder, but you could get quite hungry waiting for the retiring chairman.

There are urgent phone calls. Where's Sir Wilson? "It's the Alzheimer's," jokes a staffer.

Cheeky. Sir Wilson Whineray might not mind.

Former chief executive Chris Liddell gives a speech. He has a good joke about the best bit of advice Sir Wilson ever gave him. Join the New Zealand Rugby Union board? Why not? counselled Sir Wilson. "It'll be a bit of light relief."

Sir Wilson can take a bit of a tease. Tell him about the Alzheimer whisper and he grins widely.

He is famously good natured. His personality was summed up by sportswriter T.P. McLean: "One of the most remarkable and certainly one of the most revealing aspects in the temperament of W.J. Whineray ... is that he does not lose his temper. He cannot remember ever having done so." That was in 1965.

Now, 38 years later, Sir Wilson says over a glass of pinot gris: "Well, no, I don't think I lose my temper too much. I've never found it very profitable." Then he leans across the table and says, poker-faced, "I might have lost it since."

He is saying that, certainly, he can take a bit of a tease, "until I punch you on the nose".

He is also famously empathetic, but when I ask him if he could suggest a pay rise for his interviewer (he is on the board of APN, which owns the Herald) he says, "yeah, well, don't talk to me. I want one for myself."

That I get us stuck on the unfamiliar deserted fourth floor of the Herald's Albert St building where the executive types live might be construed as getting my own back.

He looks fleetingly panicked at the thought that we might have to spend the night. He says, Eeyorishly, that he thinks there's one piece of cake left from the board meeting. Then, rather more brightly, that at least he knows where the bar is.

I have met Sir Wilson here because, despite my attempts to drag him to a hotel for a drink, he is even more dogged in his refusal to go.

Retirement is a tiring business. There was that morning tea, the last CHH annual general meeting, outside which striking Kinleith workers protested on Wednesday, a last dinner, an APN board meeting which dragged on for hours, and he is still jetlagged from flying home from the States earlier in the week.

He is a bit buggered, although he wouldn't put it quite like that.

He has always been rather refined. When I inquired as to the likelihood of asparagus rolls at the morning tea, the PR person handling the arrangements said that he thought Sir Wilson would be more of a "sausage roll man". He isn't.

But despite his MBA, his Harkness Fellowship - and his choice of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill as his book when he was a guest on the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 1964 - he thinks it's pushing it to make too much of his academic leanings.

"I think I was a good, solid, middle-of-the-pack type scholar. I was always so busy with rugby that I had to always make sure I did enough to get through."

You might notice that rugby has made a late appearance in this piece.

The national game made an early appearance in the life of Sir Wilson. He was captain of the All Blacks from 1958 until 1965. He has a move named after him, the Willie Away.

Whether he was the best captain is the sort of thing blokes can argue about for hours. Let's leave it at this: he was bloody good.

The late appearance of that which will forever preface Sir Wilson's name is because a strange thing happens when you talk to him about his rugby career. He gets a little twitchy.

He will happily entertain my girly questions about mateship, and will laugh at long forgotten quotes from yellowed clippings from the 1960s.

But it does bother him a bit that, even on the occasion of his retirement as chairman from the company he joined in 1969, his captaincy is inextricably linked with his chairmanship.

He can see the obit, can't he? "Yes I can and it does bug me a bit. Oh just a little, because you're never not. No matter what Sir Edmund Hillary did he will never not be the first guy to climb Everest."

You can understand why the little bug bites occasionally. Although he is the first to admit that rugby has opened doors, he worked hard to get his degrees while playing rugby at amateur status, has worked hard since and "you've really got to earn it".

Solidly, carefully has done it. In many ways he is the same Whineray as the young man who took up the captaincy at the age of 23. He has always had what T.P. McLean called "a streak of caution".

If he has ever done anything wildly impetuous in his life he can't recall it.

He will admit that "I've certainly done some blokey things and I've had a lot of laughs when I was young. And none of them I'd want to talk about. By the same token, none of them by any extreme would be called anything but young blokes being stupid."

Now he's the oldish bloke (he's 67) who has come full circle, back to rugby.

He's taken on the role of the Patron of the New Zealand Rugby Union, a position traditionally held by the Governor-General.

He is graciously evasive on the issue of the current GG, Dame Silvia Cartwright, having declined the position.

He is quite taken, though, with my idea that he should now also become the next GG - to restore tradition. "I could work my way backwards. It's quite smart but it's not very practical. "

I don't know why not. For one thing, Sir Wilson is a very good speaker. His speech over the scones includes a well-told story about his retirement gift, a painting which was dragged into his office in the 70s by a beach bum as part payment for a bad debt.

The painting had been donated for a surf club fundraiser. Nobody bought it, but the club would like the company to have it. The artist, said the man with sand between his toes, was some guy called Mr Fiddle. Something like that.

Sir Wilson is delighted with his retirement present, a very nice painting by Peter Siddell.

Over the scone crumbs, everyone laughs and claps. He received this sort of reception as early as 1964 when he spoke at the Savoy Hotel at a British Sportsmen's Club luncheon.

His address was preceded by, as the Herald reported, "the well-rounded phrases and the lovely wit of the famous orator" Lord Cobham.

"By gad," a member of the audience was overheard to say of the young All Black, "this fellow's good."

Isn't he just. I think he should be the next GG.