TOP STORY: Old rugby team-mates still the best of friends

Hamish Bidwell
Tom Johnson first met Bryan Wilson at the Ardmore Training College as a teenager when the pair were studying to become teachers.
They were later team-mates at the Napier Technical Old Boys' Rugby Club, for the Napier sub-union and for Hawke's Bay, before playing instrumental roles as the support staff to Colin "the Fuehrer" Le Quesne during Hawke's Bay's legendary Ranfurly Shield era of the late 1960s.
Johnson went on to successful careers in business and as a New Zealand Rugby Union councillor and talks about Wilson's part in the Magpies' success and the friendship they retain today.
"I first met Bryan in 1956 and he's always maintained contact and he comes round to my house virtually every week," said Johnson.
"He sort of shuffles in and brings his photo albums in with him and struggles like buggery to tell me things.
"When I got to Ardmore, he was already in the senior team and had played for Counties the year before in their inaugural match and then I came back here and he was playing for Tech, which was the club I went to, and then I got involved with him while I was with the Hawke's Bay team.
"The really interesting contribution that he made, in my opinion, was that he was a pioneer in establishing a more scientific approach to fitness and he did what, from a management point of view, would be termed scientific methodology and analysis. "He did all sorts of motion studies and analysis of time and movement and rest periods in rugby for each position."
In those days, Johnson says that kind of approach was totally alien to rugby in this country and Wilson's methods met with almost universal disapproval. But having tried things like Arthur Lydiard's 100-mile a week running regime, and found it didn't work for rugby, Johnson in particular, was searching for something new.
"The big change came in 1961 when Colin Le Quense brought him in and we went up to play Auckland," he said.
"It was a pivotal move in a way, because Auckland was full of All Blacks and they struggled to beat us 5-3. We had a complicated defensive pattern that he didn't play a part in ... but the fitness work we were doing, gave us the means to make the bloody thing work.
"So he carried that on and I got more and more interested and we had an area where he had us running out the back of the Taradale hills.
"There was this old dog trial shed as well, where he set up weight training, and there was also this clapped out old bike that just about gave you a hernia every time you rode it.
"So there were ergometer tests to measure the guys' fitness, which I think was even before the rowing guys were using that stuff.
"Bryan would take us out here over the hills and we'd do a whole lot of interval work and come in on a Monday night and do so many sprints up a certain gradient and back then there was no doubt that we were a lot fitter than any other rugby team in New Zealand."
The training also extended to getting doctors in to conduct blood tests on the players, as every aspect of their fitness regime was measured.
"The guys tended to poo-poo a lot of it because they would go back into their club sides and people would say 'what they hell are you guys doing to yourselves'. But the ultimate test was KR Tremain in a way.
"He might have poo-pooed it on the surface but he would be out there using the hills to train prior to trials or All Black stuff. So it did work for us and I think Bryan had a very good impact on the sport here.
"He was a guy that possibly got very little kudos for it too, because there was no doubt we were ahead of our time.
"We were certainly fitter than our peers from that era and it was often in the final 20 minutes of games that we would begin to dominate games."
In the late 1970s Johnson represented the NZRU at an international conference on exercise physiology and a lot of the things thought to be cutting edge then, were simply a replica of the methods Wilson had been developing since the early 60s.
Johnson later moved to Levin and the pair continued to stay in touch, before Wilson came calling to invite Johnson to come in on one of his new schemes.
"He was the initiator of the Lion Breweries Sport Foundation, which included people like Yvette Williams, Jeff Robson, plus myself, Harry Blazey and Lance Cross," Johnson said.
"They were some pretty high-powered people and for some unaccountable reason I got elected chairman of all these bloody guys and I had two fascinating years as we doled out money on behalf of the foundation.
"And obviously he had an involvement with the Rothmans Foundation with sports guys like DB Clarke, Bert Sutcliffe, Peter Snell, so he's had a pretty diverse involvement with sport."
So how does Johnson find his old mate now?
"I've gotten used to him and while he'll get frustrated to buggery because he can't tell me something, I'll say 'hang on, hang, just ease back'. I think he probably sounds and looks worse than he is."
Not that it's slowed him down. Wilson still drives and is forever at Johnson to get a few of the old Magpies blokes together for a beer or two.
"He's a reunion junkie," says Johnson with a laugh.
"He drives me bloody insane with 'when are you going to do it?"
"Going to do what?"
"Have another get together."