THAT Napier game recalled

Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of the first game of the 1981 Springbok tour. Doug Laing reflects on how it went in Napier. STAR: Flanker Frank Shelford played so brilliantly for New Zealand Maori against South Africa in 1981 that he was called into the All Blacks for the third and decisive test. He later played for Hawke's Bay.IN AUGUST 1982, halfback Paul Blake and first five-eighths Brian Morris were like peas in a pod as Hawke's Bay was beaten by a point in what would have been two of the Magpies' biggest wins, had they gone the other way.
Just 17 days apart they were rugby's most crucial positional pairing when the Bay was beaten 13-12 by the Wallabies at McLean Park, and then by the same score in a Ranfurly Shield match against Wellington at Athletic Park in Wellington.
It seems a little symbolic that the jerseys were black and white, for it was the jersey that brought them together again when, a year earlier, it was an issue of black and white that kept them apart, despite common bonds as rugby players, school teachers, Maori and, as it happens, distaste for the racial politics 20,000km away in South Africa.
Long before the Springboks arrived for the controversial tour, Morris had made a decision that meant they would not play together that year, a decision some might say cost them both the chance to play in one of the greatest games of all time.
It was tour match No11, South Africa v New Zealand Maori, in Napier, August 25, 1981, official score 12-12. Of the eight weeks in New Zealand, the Springboks spent six days in Napier, comparing it later only to remoter Greymouth in terms of the welcome and support they had had amid a tour otherwise remembered most for helmeted police facing helmeted protesters, soldiers ringing fields with barbed wire, the police Red Squad, tour opponents HART (Halt All Racist Tours) and John Minto, formerly of Napier.
Teaching at Hastings Boys' High School that year, Morris had decided his protest would include being unavailable for representative rugby. Teaching at Bledisloe School in Taradale at the time, Blake knew some teammates and family members didn't agree with him, but he decided he would play, ultimately making the reserves for the game.
Morris, a Waipukurau boy who went on to become principal of Te Aute College and who now works for book publishers Huia in Wellington, says one other decision he made was to "stay away". He didn't go to the game, and he didn't go to the protests. He'd made his point.
Another in the middle was now-retired police officer Mick Cull for whom there was some irony about the game in Napier.
He saw two games on tour as part of the uniformed contingent - the match against Taranaki in New Plymouth, and Bay of Plenty's match in Rotorua.
"I saw both games," he said, reflecting on the relatively trouble-free afternoons at New Plymouth's Rugby Park and Rotorua's International Stadium.
"But on the day of the game in Napier, I was running the office," he said. "I was acting senior sergeant in the station, so I missed the game in my own hometown." A police officer for 37 years, playing on the left wing for Wellington, Cull didn't recall any arrests, and reading the pages of Napier's Daily Telegraph confirm his memory isn't too bad.
Before the Napier game, Auckland-based Minto had been charged by police with offences around the opening two venues, at Gisborne on July 22 when the Boks played Poverty Bay, and in Hamilton, where protesters broke through the perimeter fence of Rugby Park, massed midfield surrounded by police, and departed amid mayhem after police commissioner Bob Walton and rugby bosses abandoned the game because of threats that a stolen aircraft might be crashed into the grandstand.
In Napier, up to 400 protesters, made up significantly by out-of-towners, gathered near the Masonic on match day and marched down Emerson St and Kennedy Rd, separate groups taking separate routes towards McLean Park, their ways blocked by lines of police, and the rubbish skips used at venues throughout the country as road barriers. Protest was confined mainly to sit-ins disrupting traffic, or heckling match-goers.
Townspeople were curious and concerned, among them 17-year-old Karaitiana Aranui, now a Napier taxi driver and who was at the time at Napier Boys' High School, and a future Magpies prop seen by many to be on the way to becoming an All Black prop.
"I think I wanted to go on the march," he says, but watched as they passed "The Pro" by the Square, and then he went to the game.
He was on the embankment when Springbok Colin Beck booted the drop-kick that drew the fever-pitched game into the controversy by which the afternoon is most remembered, apart from the amazing performance of Maori flanker Frank Shelford.
Those on the bank knew the kick never went over, and the Maori should have won 12-9, and referee Brian Duffy, of Taranaki, seemed to have no idea, as he went back to halfway, as the Maori restarted play with a 22-metre dropout that was fielded and run-back momentarily by the Springboks before it became apparent Mr Duffy had awarded the goal.
Blake's memory is different from most, because he couldn't see a thing, and remembers standing in the players' tunnel as someone in the temporary stand told him what was happening. He was, after all, just 1.57m tall and jokes: "I couldn't see over the barbed wire."
That it was going to be the match of the tour was always a possibility, because it had history.
On one hand there was a chance for the New Zealanders to play in memory of all the Maori players who had in the past been denied the opportunity to play in South Africa, because of the discriminatory apartheid laws.
A message was sent by a South African journalist after the Springboks beat the NZ Maori XV 9-8 at McLean Park in 1921.
It was delivered to the local Post and Telegraph office to be sent by cable (later known as telegram and now replaced by email), and in the days long before anything was heard of the non-footballing form of whistleblowing, its contents soon became public fodder. It read: "BAD ENOUGH HAVING TO PLAY OFFICIALLY DESIGNATED NEW ZEALAND NATIVES, BUT SPECTACLE THOUSANDS EUROPEANS FRANTICALLY CHEERING ON BAND OF COLOURED MEN TO DEFEAT MEMBERS OF OWN RACE WAS TOO MUCH FOR SPRINGBOKS WHO FRANKLY DISGUSTED."