“We had some good young players. They were very, very keen.”
Practice sessions were held on Sunday mornings at Patutahi.
“Being a country team, we did our training individually. Once we got together we would talk tactics.”
Mike Cotton arrived in Gisborne from England the same year, joined Ngatapa and has remained friends with Maxwell.
Maxwell worked at Tangihau Station and Cotton said the manager, Laurie Cooper, made sure he and several other workers were able to travel to practice each week and available to play on Saturdays.
“Bill Maxwell as a captain was one of those people who always seemed to be in front of you and was usually first to any breakdown,” Cotton said.
“He and Jumbo Kingi were great scroungers of the ball and often seemed to come up together with it from a ruck.”
Playing for Ngatapa was a whole new world for CottonPlaying for Ngatapa was a whole new world for Cotton.
“I was used to going to the local pub in England for a quiet pint after a game,” he said.
“Imagine, after a game in Gisborne, six of us climbing on the back of an old flat-deck ute, driving to the off-licence to pick up a couple of nine-gallon kegs of beer, then clutching the kegs driving out to Patutahi to the Kirkpatrick farm, where we met the rest of the team and usually their wives and girlfriends for a team party — team bonding at its best.”
Maxwell said they played hard, and drank hard, but “12 or 13 chaps ended up being ministers of various faiths”.
Mike Sherriff played three or four games on the wing for Ngatapa at the end of 1957. He was 17.
“You’ll be all right, boy,” Maxwell told him.
The wing three-quarter threw the ball into the lineout in those days.
Sherriff said: “It was a wet day and Bill said that would be the only time I’d touch the ball.
“He was like a father figure. Everybody looked up to him.
'He just had that mana'“He just had that mana.”
Sherriff remembered Maxwell telling the players they would have a training run at Tangihau Station.
“They came in their football boots, so he sent them back to put their hobnail boots on and they went for miles up a steep gully.
“He said ‘that’s the way you get fit’.”
Maxwell returned home to the family block at Torere near Opotiki in 1963.
“With his (late) wife Mana, Bill was known and respected in Torere and the wider community, eventually becoming the kaumatua at Torere Marae,” Cotton said.
“Although living most of his life as a member of the Catholic Church, he was persuaded to become a member of the Anglican community and was ordained priest much later in life (in his 70s) and served his local community for years.
“Bill is still active in the community and at his marae.”
He was a justice of the peace and was awarded a Queen’s Service Medal.
Former Maori All Black Bill Carrington, a brother of Maurice — Olympic kayaking gold medallist Lisa Carrington’s grandfather — was Ngatapa coach in 1957.
Coach Bill Carrington 'used to drive pretty hard'“Most of us were farming and did a lot of heavy manual work, so we were all reasonably fit, but Bill Carrington used to drive us pretty hard anyway,” Cotton said.
“Apparently, Bill Carrington, after the first couple of games, called some of the other forwards together and said that I wasn’t a bad player but needed some fire in my belly.
“He told them ‘whenever he goes down on the ground, kick him and then maybe he’ll fire up’. Which is exactly what happened, but it took me 48 years to find out it was my friends who were kicking me.”
Sherriff has a tale about Cotton, too.
All Black great Tiny White, a High School Old Boys supporter by then, had come back from England with a white ball that was meant to be good in wet weather.
“Mike Cotton got sprig marks and he complained that the ball looked too much like his bald head.”
Family and friends will gather at Torere Marae to celebrate Maxwell’s birthday on Saturday, and his good friend Cotton will be there.
