Michele Hewitson Interview: Sir Colin Meads

Colin Meads says he reads about the important and famous All Black that's meant to be him and says, 'This is bloody ridiculous!' Photo / Dean Purcell

Here's how you get an interview with Sir Colin Meads: look him up in the White Pages and ring him up.

You'll get Lady Verna, because her husband is usually out somewhere, and she'll ask you to ring back at such and such a time and you do and he says, "Yes."

He didn't ask why I wanted an interview, or what I wanted to talk to him about. (He was in town. He's Colin Meads. I just wanted to meet him.) He mentioned - but only because I had referred to the two biographies that have been written about him - that there is a third, a new book, by Keith Quinn. He certainly made no attempt to plug it.

"Well, it's not really my book. He had the book just about written and came and asked me if I agreed to it." The cheeky bugger. "Yeah! But he's a lovely guy. I had no problem with it."

He had a look at Quinn's manuscript, when asked to, although he wasn't much fussed either way, and found a couple of errors - this he may have rather enjoyed telling me.

He told me, shaking his head at the thought, that somebody once wanted to make a film about him; now somebody wants to make a documentary about him.

I asked: How interested are you in yourself? He looked at me as though I'd just fumbled an easy pass - amazed, and amused, that anyone could be so idiotic. "How do you have an interest in yourself!" What I was trying to get at was: what does he think about this person he reads about? "Yeah, well, you sit at home and say, 'This is bloody ridiculous! What are they talking about?"'

He talks about himself in the third person. "There was going to be a film made on Colin Meads." And, "You can get Colin Meads overkill, can't you?" And, "I just carry on being Colin Meads." This is almost always a symptom of advanced megalomania, usually found in people who think they're important, or famous.

With him, it's the opposite: a way of dissociating himself from that other bloke, the important and famous Colin Meads as opposed to the other one who sits at home and reads about himself and says, "This is bloody ridiculous!"

What people want is to hear Colin Meads talking about Colin Meads. He can tell the old stories, "the bullshit", and the rugby jokes all right.

"Oh, yeah, that's all part of the gimmick." The gimmick is being on show as that person who is by now more myth than real: A joker he recognises, sort of, but hasn't got all that much time for.

You can hire him for a thousand bucks (half that if you're a poor rugby club; and half of the "gimmicks" are for charity and no fee - but it might cost you a bit in beer).

He's cheap. "Very cheap and that's why we get so much work!" He told me, with muted amazement, that the new corporate thing is breakfast gigs. Are they boring? "Well, you have a cup of tea!"

He says he has not the foggiest idea why people want to pay to gawk at him. "That's what I can't understand. I'm just an ordinary country boy. You know, not a well-educated person." This might sound too "gee-shucks, I'm just a boy from the sticks" to be true, but it really is.

He left school at 14 and a half. He has never stopped regretting his lack of education. "Yeah, I do. When you go away with these knowledgeable guys ... and you end up at Westminster Abbey, and they're asking questions and I'm thinking, 'What the hell are they talking about?' I was lost. I felt out of it."

He once said that he felt embarrassed about his "standing". This was a funny thing for the great Colin Meads to say. "I meant our house wasn't flash, you know."

He never really wanted a flash house, and neither did Verna, but he'd have liked to have got one for her. And, "well, some of your mates have really flash homes". He's never been much good at making money, he says, and he got into terrible debt with a loan.

This makes him sound as though he thinks he failed, somehow. "I did: to earn enough money as a farmer. And I've failed because, probably, of my education and I didn't know enough about financial matters."

He fronted ads for Provincial Finance, which failed, and "I got a lot of bad mail". Labour MP Lianne Dalziel took a swipe, calling him a celebrity promoter.

"Yeah, well, and I suppose that's right." Getting abusive letters must have been terribly upsetting, because he is used to almost everyone adoring him, surely. "Oh, well, there's a lot of people who don't adore Colin Meads." Who? "Well, one or two I played against!"

He was speaking at a rugby-star-studded dinner after I saw him. Waka Nathan, Stu Wilson, Grizz Wyllie, Ian Kirkpatrick - and, "that guy there's a rugby nut; he'll want me to sign things" - wandered through the lobby of the SkyCity Grand Hotel.

Somebody said, "Gidday, Pine." I called him Sir Colin. He said that was all right, but only to do it once.

But he was the star attraction. I asked about that Colin Meads, the legendary one. He said, "I'm just Colin Meads who people say had too much to drink."

Do they really? "Oh, people say that all right. Yeah, those are good nights!" Still, there is the fawning. "Oh, men don't. When the ladies do, that worries me! I'm just an ordinary fellow, you know."

Blimey, what do the ladies do? "Oh, the ladies who've had quite a bit to drink, they become, well, embarrassing."

They want their photo taken with him, "and a cuddle or something like that. But I don't mind." Lady Verna might. "She knows me and knows there's going to be no more than that, so, what the hell."

He once said, and his wife vigorously agreed, that he was no angel. He giggled (truly; he's a giggler) and said, "I'd never want to be either, and never will be." I told him I'd read that at a charity do in Opunake last year, he'd had 15 beers. "Oh, ho, ho. The stories get exaggerated."

The story about training with a sheep under each arm? "Oh, well, that's a fallacy too."

He was picking up sick sheep that would otherwise have their throats cut on the spot, but which might have a chance if he got them back to the dipping shed.

A photographer was waiting and "there are these photos of me carrying these bloody sheep. But you try and tell people!" When you think about it, running around with sheep wouldn't be very good for the sheep, would it? "No. No good for anyone - even the fella running with the sheep!"

The most famous story about playing on with a broken arm, in South Africa, in 1970? "That's another fallacy." There was a rule that if you went off injured, you couldn't be replaced. He went to the sideline.

"I knew something was wrong." The doctor said he had a pinched nerve. "And I said, 'I'm not going off for a bloody pinched nerve!"' and he went back on. He must have known it wasn't a bloody pinched nerve. "It was hurting all right!" And, "I didn't know who did it so I couldn't get them back."

I'm not sure that explanation completely demolishes the legend of the toughest bloke in rugby.

I told him what I thought was a funny story, about his legs. In 1969 a rugby writer for the Daily Telegraph wrote that his legs were "the greatest since Betty Grable's". He said, "Oh, that's stupid." No, it's funny.

"It's just ridiculous." It's funny. "It's not funny." Why not? "Well, Betty Grable couldn't have played rugbyif she was paid to, with those legs of hers."

I think this was intended to be a compliment, but perhaps it was a bit of a girly compliment. The Betty Grable writer also said he ran like a gazelle. "Like a bloody buffoon more than anything!"

He is so good-natured and seemed to have got over the legs, so I risked another girly query: about his farm dogs and if he missed them. (He sold the King Country farm in 2007.)

He said, "Yeah," and that two had gone to other homes but "one fella was far too old and I had to have him put down".

I asked if he cried and he gave me a look and said, "No. I didn't cry." Was that stupid question? "That was a stupid question." Because crying would have been soppy? "Oh, I'm not an emotional person."

He said he'd "done one or two things in me life, and I've done it to the wrong person, you know, that sort of thing, and I've felt guilty. But I'm never going to apologise."

I asked another stupid question: Why not? "Because that shows a weakness! That's one thing you don't do as a rugby player." And now? "Probably. But life changes doesn't it? I'm not playing rugby now."

He's such a tough guy. He said, "I want to be everyone's friend."

We had a lovely gossip - well, I gossiped and he giggled - about a mutual, and mutually adored friend, another famous old All Black. This friend is rumoured to have a "new lady".

He's 90, I said. "That'd be nice, though, for him, wouldn't it?" he said, and he really meant it. I said - and I really meant it, because he says I'm his girlfriend - that I hoped for her sake she was deaf, because, as we both know, that old devil never stops talking (you know who you are, Bob Scott.) "Oh!" he said, "you shouldn't say that!"

He must have wondered why the hell he'd agreed to an interview (the legs; the dogs) but he is far too much of a gentleman to have given any inkling. I said, given that he'd spent an hour and a half telling me that the mythical creature called Colin Meads didn't exist, that he ought, then, to be a terrible disappointment.

"But, sorry, you're not." He said, "Oh, good on you, Michele. As I say, I'm just an ordinary old bugger. And I mean that sincerely."

He had to go and be Colin Meads. "Have a good night," I said. He grinned, and delivered a classic Colin Meads-ism as he went. He said: "The bullshit will flow!"