Man who recorded legends of the ball

TP McLean. Photo / NZ Herald

For 40 years Kiwi rugby fans devoured Sir Terry (TP) McLean's prose. This extract from a book by Herald on Sunday sports editor Paul Lewis and McLean's son Jock portrays TP as a wily and trusted commentator.

There was a train hurtling along the tracks somewhere in Britain. The All Blacks were on board, headed to another town, another hotel, another match, yet another training session.

It was during a tour which lasted a staggering four months in 1963-64. At neighbouring seats, a game of cards was under way. In one group, All Black greats Colin Meads and Kel Tremain were taking on Mac Herewini and Waka Nathan; a classic Maori versus Pakeha encounter.

The game was Five Hundred or euchre. In another group, All Black skipper Wilson Whineray was playing with coach Neil McPhail, Terry McLean and others.

In the Meads game, the usual hi-jinks were afoot. "We used to play for Smarties - the little chocolate lollies," said Meads. "There were all sorts of things went on in those games - some great cheating.

"Tremain and I discovered that you could, on the right angle looking at the reflection in the window, see what someone else was holding in his hand.

"And there was Terry [McLean], trying to play cards like an officer and a gentleman."

No other rugby writer has ever been quite so much a part of the All Blacks' inner sanctum.

Whineray said that, while playing cards, talk would inevitably turn to the last game, other players, issues and the like. All of it, he said, was dealt with by McLean as if it was "nothing to do with him as a journalist".

Maybe not straight away and maybe not directly but it was more likely that much of it was filed away for use at a later time. Some of it would find its way into a column or a news story or match coverage. It would never be blurted out in a story the next day. McLean was too subtle for that.

There has possibly never been a journalist so skilled at dissecting the game of rugby and expressing it to others.

McLean was a powerful networker, to use modern jargon. Mixing with the famous and the privileged had its advantages. He had an enormous network of contacts. Many of them became genuine friends and he socialised with them often - golf, dinners, meeting for drinks, soirees at Ladies Mile (McLean's home), gatherings at major sporting events where McLean kept the notebook stashed away.

This wasn't arduous labour for McLean - he loved it. He had a touch of the snob about him, although that was always balanced by his journalist's instincts and his loyalty to his employer(s) - and to the story, whatever it was. He genuinely enjoyed mixing with the famous of the day and was rarely ensnared by the hidden dangers.

McLean's was another era, a different time - long before the current All Black set-up where the sheer number of journalists and news organisations reporting rugby means, inevitably, that fences have been deliberately erected between players, coaches and media.

Access to All Blacks these days is strictly controlled and even the most mundane requests have to go through the New Zealand Rugby Union public relations people. McLean would never have stood for it in his day - but, then, he didn't have to.

Former All Black captain Sir Wilson Whineray, captain of the All Blacks from 1958 until his retirement in 1965, toured with McLean several times, in Australia in 1957 and 1962, the All Blacks tour of South Africa in 1960 and the wonderful tour of Britain, Ireland and France in 1963-64.

"He had a good understanding of the game and, look, it was different then," said Whineray. "People respected each other's positions. There were also very few media on tour with you and there was time and opportunity to develop a relationship."

If there is any doubt about McLean's influence, it might be allayed when greats like Whineray and Colin Meads talk about McLean's rugby smarts - and it becomes clear why so many people reached for the New Zealand Herald to find out what was really going on with the All Blacks. It also disappears when Meads tells of his first moments as a new All Black in 1957.

He had been selected and, a shy country boy, had to report to Wellington for a medical. Meads knew a lot of people expected him to go out on the beer that night but "no one invited me anywhere so I stayed put" and he reported for breakfast the next day, bright and early and chipper.

"So I go into breakfast and there's a table full of NZRU bosses - Jack Sullivan, Tom Morrison and others - and I don't want to sit with them so I keep my bloody head down.

"But one of them calls out to me and says, 'Come and sit with us'... pretty much the first thing they said was that if I wanted to be an All Black, I was not to talk to that bloody McLean. They called him a 'poison pen'.

"Terry and I had never really met at that stage and, when we went to Australia in 1957, I was always early for breakfast and so was Terry and, bugger me, if he doesn't sit down with me at the table one day.

"Here was this bloke I'd been warned against, to the point of death of my career. Terry said: 'Good morning'. I didn't say anything. He tried to make conversation. I said 'yes, no' and mostly only grunted.

"Finally, I mentioned it to Willie [Whineray] and he looked at me a bit odd and said: 'Oh, he's all right'. Then I realised that Willie and bloody Tremain were talking to him all the time. So I did, too - and I never regretted it."

Far from freezing McLean out, Whineray's intellect had grasped that it was better to work directly with him.

"Willie had a difficult tour of South Africa in 1960," said Meads. "He and TP became very close on that tour. They'd have regular meetings and they became very tight."

"I am not sure, in the early years, I was a great captain," said Whineray. "In the early days, I had a lot to learn and none of it was easy."

Meads again: "I didn't always see it happening but I know that Willie and Terry used to consult each other fairly regularly."

Whineray: "I wouldn't say I consulted him in the sense that I would ask his opinion about players or selections or what tactics we would use in a game but we did discuss other things. I would probably have taken Terry's view on man management or personnel issues - and why not? He was a man of the world with a military background and he knew a bit about people under pressure."

McLean also had influence elsewhere - like with selectors. Meads drolly watched, over the years, McLean's All Black team printed in the Herald, ahead of the official announcement made by the selectors. Inevitably, the team chosen by McLean, supposedly speculatively, would mirror that of the selectors almost exactly.

"He was pretty clever about it," said Meads. "He always got one wrong or maybe more than one."

Nor was McLean shy about boosting the claims of players he liked the look of. McLean went for ability - and, as Meads said, there was no doubt the selectors took notice.

"I wished I'd taken advantage of that myself, in 1971," he said.

Meads was named captain of the All Blacks for the ill-fated series against the revolutionary Lions party of that year - the first and only Lions team to have beaten the All Blacks in a test series.

" The selectors had given us an awful team. A lot of players had retired and they wouldn't pick some, like Hoppy [Alistair Hopkinson, the Canterbury and All Black prop dropped because he had "misbehaved" on the All Black tour of South Africa in 1970].

"Instead we had seven or eight players new to the All Blacks, against a very good side and a coach, Carwyn James, who had the media wrapped round his little finger. James got the media and the referees so fired up over Sid Going putting the ball under his own hooker's feet that Sid was putting it under the Lions' hooker's feet half the time. I should have opened up to Terry and campaigned for some of the older players with more experience - but I didn't."

So McLean had plenty of influence and he used it. But sometimes it was used against him too.

In a previous Lions tour, 1966, the All Blacks were keen that the Lions' captain, Mike Campbell-Lamerton, should play in the tests as the view was he was not up to standard as an international lock. The 1966 Lions were also the last selected with a distinct element of what might be called "old school tie".

The All Blacks determined to see to it that Campbell-Lamerton played. The word went out to the relevant provinces - praise the Lions' skipper after the match.

The word was also given to McLean about how much the All Blacks rated Campbell-Lamerton. Their words fell on fertile ground. Campbell-Lamerton was a war hero and a man McLean admired. He likely knew the skipper was not in the first echelon of international locks but he will have wanted to believe that the opposition respected a man like that.

McLean wrote several pieces on Campbell-Lamerton, although none openly campaigned for his inclusion. Usually, they were pieces which centred on Campbell-Lamerton's life and war record.

"Campbell-Lamerton's contributions to the tour of South Africa by the Lions in 1962 offer irrefutable evidence of the sterling qualities of his character...

"All through the tour... this huge man was committed to the heart of the forward struggle and seldom was he able to rest from his heavy labours.

"Day in and day out he answered every call - and it was the highest recommendation, perhaps too soon forgotten by the critics, that he emerged from the tour as, so to speak, the footballer's footballer..." McLean wrote.

Stirring stuff. Campbell-Lamerton was selected for the first test, lost to the All Blacks by 20-3. McLean called Campbell-Lamerton's dropping "sensational" for the second test. He was reselected for the third test, also lost and dropped for the fourth. The All Blacks won the series 4-0.

"Yes, I heard about that," said Meads when asked if he'd been involved in the Select Campbell-Lamerton ploy. "To my knowledge, Terry never knew what was happening but Willie John McBride did. Campbell-Lamerton was keeping him out of the test team."

However, if you think about it, it was a compliment to McLean. Trying to manipulate him meant one thing - the Lions' management read McLean and they, too, were influenced by him.