Demonising John Hart - the accusers' story

By JAMES GARDINER

When he walked off Lancaster Park after the loss of the Bledisloe Cup to Australia in 1998, All Black coach John Hart was booed. Head down, stony-faced he disappeared under the stands.

Just over a year later, Hart was back in Christchurch, this time at Addington to see his horse Holmes DG narrowly beaten in the New Zealand Trotting Cup. This time people spat at his horse.

You could barely imagine a worse reaction had the All Black coach sprouted horns and a forked tail.

In the minds of many diehard rugby followers, particularly in the South Island, he had.

Hart and his team had failed to bring the World Cup back from Wales. Knocked out by France in the semis, they didn't want the third place playoff with South Africa and it showed. They lost that too.

Some of the players chose not to come home. Prearranged holidays, they said. Hart fronted but his four-year reign as coach was history.

And a further year on, out comes the history book - the The Hartbreak Years by Auckland journalist Paul Verdon. A book that has enraged many commentators and players.

Subtitled "the revealing story behind the All Blacks' failure to win back the World Cup ... and how they have now turned the corner," it could be more accurately entitled "How Hart manipulated rugby bosses, players and the public, undermined other coaches and blew it for everyone ... and he wasn't that good a coach."

Some in the media have already expressed the view that the book is old history, told in a one-sided fashion to suit the thesis of Hart-haters.

Dunedin-based rugby writer Ron Palenski expressed surprise that anyone cared enough to revisit the subject.

But Verdon quotes a variety of (usually) named sources, including administrators who worked with Hart and All Blacks who played under him, revealing that the split was not necessarily along North Island-South Island lines, or even Auckland against the rest of the country.

Who is behind the demonisation of John Hart? Verdon, originally from Christchurch, has certainly joined them with his book that has chapter headings like "Cunning Little Bugger", "The Enemy Within", "Hart Failure" and "Verbal Diarrhoea".

Try this statement:

"Hart had employed divisiveness in his unrelenting ambition to gain the top job for more than a decade."

He accuses Hart of being a sore loser when he missed out on the coach's role after the 1987 World Cup and "hypocritical" because he was happy to coach the Colts while on the selection panel but did not like it when Earl Kirton beat him to the job when Kirton was a selector and Hart wasn't.

Fellow sports journalists Bob Howitt and Phil Gifford are definitely in the anti-Hart camp and are quoted extensively.

Rival coach Laurie Mains is, of course, a key critic. Mains beat Hart for the job in 1992 after the 1991 World Cup failure, where Hart and Alex Wylie were co-coaches, and kept the job in 1994 when Hart challenged again.

All Black Josh Kronfeld is quoted, from his own book, as saying Hart bored players with his 100-minute talks and recalls the way the coach attacked him verbally in front of the team before a test match in Dunedin.

Verdon suggests Hart and his allies, who included rugby union chairman Eddie Tonks and fellow administrators Malcolm Dick and Rob Fisher and All Black captain Gary Whetton, at different stages undermined both Wylie and Mains and contributed to the failure to win the 1991 World Cup.

He blames food poisoning solely for the 1995 defeat and, not surprisingly, Hart for 1999.

In fairness, both Hart and Wylie accept the co-coach experiment was their downfall in 1991. Both are quoted saying they shouldn't have been co-coaches and that one of them should have stood down.

Problem was, both thought it should be the other.

The mistake was therefore the rugby union's for its response to what Verdon categorises as a push by senior Auckland players on the team to get Hart back as coach - the same senior players who - Whetton, John Kirwan and Grant Fox are named - plotted a year earlier to have Buck Shelford dumped as captain.

Shelford, now coaching North Harbour, is quoted as saying "Grizz [Wylie] became the victim of player power from the Auckland faction ... coupled with the ambitions of John Hart. To some extent, so did I."

Haden, labelled the leader of the Hart cheer squad, is accused of heading the campaign to get Mains replaced and trying to warn Verdon and potential publishers off the whole concept of the book.

Haden says that's "crap"; he expressed his views on Hart's merits when he was asked to - and he was often asked.

The 41-test veteran played under seven All Black coaches between 1972 and 1985, and numerous Auckland and interisland coaches in his 351 first class games and says he struck no coach or selector with more ability than Hart.

Haden agrees there is an attempt to demonise Hart and points the finger at Mains, who "fuelled the fire," and journalists like Verdon ("a lightweight") and Gifford and Howitt.

"In the last year of Ian Jones' career he wrote a book called Kamo with Howitt, and Howitt strongly encouraged him to change a number of things and in fact wrote words vilifying John Hart, which Ian Jones was not comfortable with [and removed]," Haden says.

The most capped All Black and former captain Sean Fitzpatrick, a close friend of Hart, has slated the book as unfair and its claim that players believed Hart could not coach as rubbish.

Hart himself was not prepared to be interviewed, saying he did not want to lend the book any credibility by responding to it.