Jeff Wilson would be lost in today's summer/winter sporting climate as he was an All Black and a Black Cap at the same time.
I was chatting with one of the forecasting folk at MetService the other day and he made mention of the changeable nature of the weather at this time of the year.
"Oh the changing of the seasons," my late mum would declare as she lamented another afternoon shower after she'd hung a couple of eiderdowns out to dry.
It is traditional...the changing of the seasons as warm air which continues to linger from tropical climes edges down to introduce itself to the cooler air from the Tassie Sea and parts even further south.
The weather patterns can be tricky to forecast due to this changeable time of the year...which is ditto for the emergence of the warming spring in September and October.
While the warmth and the coolness embrace each other, with mixed effects, so too do the sports which used to be attached separately to their respective seasons.
Nowadays, cricket and rugby rub shoulders on the greenlands across the country at the same time, and they stay together, it seems, for a very long time.
You can flick from cricket on one channel to rugby or league or football on the other.
There was, once upon a time, a point where the cricket would be declared finished for the season and rugby would get the green light about a month or so later...which gave the splendid crews who prepare the grounds time to morph them from one to the other.
And to get the rugby posts out to give them a bit of a clean and paint touch-up and get them secured into the earth.
That was certainly the way it was at school back then.
The cricket season would be called to a halt and there would be a sort of down time, a sporting truce, when fields lay fallow, before the rugby and football seasons were geared into place.
There was no merging of what were effectively summer and winter sports.
Today, such a thing is but a memory.
Into the fourth week of the first month of autumn cricket was still being played in this land, and test cricket at that.
Meanwhile, Super Rugby and NRL were already well and truly in place, in fact Super Rugby kicked off during the last official week of summer...so by the time the first official week of winter emerges you can be assured half the combatants will sadly be bound up by injury.
And when it comes to the Mitre 10 Cup, and the arrival of the marvellous Magpies back into the provincial action (which is the best rugby on tap as far as I'm concerned) it is actually late winter.
Just two of their games are played in August and their last is in mid-October.
My old teachers would have been horrified.
"It's not a spring game!" they would have thundered, although in terms of heading along to watch the lads I do see the practicality of staging it in times of potentially more clement temperatures.
Plus of course the Super Rugby players can turn up for their provinces (hopefully) fit and saturated with endurance.
So yep, rugby here in New Zealand, in one form or another, begins in late summer and blows the final whistle just four weeks and two days out from the first day of...summer.
That's quite an innings.
No, hang on, that's cricket.
Crikey, imagine the dilemma for blokes like Jeff Wilson...back in 2005 he was playing both top level rugby and cricket.
The Super Rugby and NRL are huge components of television through these changeable sporting times and it makes me wonder what they would do without it.
Maybe that's what it's all about.
Play longer boys...there's a lot of space to fill, and accordingly potentially more dosh to make.
● Rugby and league and football: All over the place on Sky Sport 1, 2 and 3 and at pretty well any time for months and months and months to come.
Cricket's a wrap for now, but it'll be back before you know it.
ON THE BOX
● Ross Kemp: Extreme World, Prime at 9.30 tonight: I think it would be fair to say the hard-edged looking Mr Kemp would not venture out on some of these visits were he not to have a camera, sound and security crew with him.
He certainly steps into some uncertain occasions - like here where he ventures across parts of Australia aboard a Harley-Davidson to call in on some of the patched biker clubs which the lawmen have declared to be the big players in Aussie's drug scene.
Could be some interesting conversations. I reckon he should have arrived to chat with them aboard a Kawasaki Z10...that would have created a colourful opening exchange.
● 7 Days, TV3 at 9pm Friday: I guess it was a telling factor when comedian Heath Franklin, who pays the rent through appearing on stage as "Chopper" Read, cracked with laughter a couple of times during an appearance on this show last year.
You know you're getting it right when there is laughter from a sound exponent of humour.
Dai Henwood and Paul Ego run their sides of the discussion panel situation and Jeremy Corbett is the ringmaster.
There are some sharp lines and the occasional reason for it to be tagged with the AO sticker. A night earlier Jono and Ben also get the laughs operating and that's good to see.
● Lotto, TV1 at 8pm Saturday: A long-running series of unpredictable short films which always promise much but week after week they fail to deliver. I don't know why I bother to keep watching...