Greg McGee is off to Europe next year. Photo / Supplied
Greg McGee, the Auckland writer who co-authored All Black captain Richie McCaw's best-selling autobiography The Open Side, has been awarded the $75,000 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in the south of France.
But he almost turned down the chance to write the McCaw book. McGee recalls that when Hachette New Zealand
asked him if he'd be interested in writing a "sports biography", he thought, "No, I'm not, really."
"But then I thought maybe it's him [McCaw] because I had done an interview with him back in 2006 so I sent an email back saying, depends who it is. I thought if there is one I want to do, it's that one."
It was a canny choice. Within hours of the book's launch eight weeks ago, the first print-run of 60,000 copies sold out and the book remains at second place in the NZ Bookseller's non-fiction list. It has also become New Zealand's best-selling sports biography, streaking past Colin Mead's 1974 biography.
McGee, who was an Otago rugby representative and All Black trialist in his youth, began his writing career with the 1980 play Foreskin's Lament, an expose of the rugby culture of the times. He says one of the things he learned during his eight-month partnership with McCaw was "to see how much it has changed - not just physical, but the psychological preparation and the self-knowledge. It was an eye-opener".
