Rugby giant wins one more honour

By PATRICK GOWER

New Zealand's greatest rugby player, Colin "Pinetree" Meads, has been named in the New Year Honours list as a distinguished companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

The honour would have brought him a knighthood under the old system, but at his Te Kuiti farm this week, he said he did not mind missing out on the old title.

"I've read the letter and I still can't say exactly what it's called," he said.

"But it means I won't be known as Sir Colin, and I'm pretty happy about that."

He joins 170 other New Zealanders honoured today for their contributions to sport, the arts, culture, health and education.

Lloyd Geering, emeritus professor of religious studies at Victoria University, heads the honours list. He is made a principal companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Joining Meads as distinguished companions are Court of Appeal judge Justice Thomas Gault, National Council of Women stalwart Jocelyn Fish, Catholic nun and nurse Sister Patricia Hook and conservationist Professor Alan Mark.

All would have become knights or dames under the previous system of royal honours.

Meads was honoured for his services to rugby and the community.

This week, the 64-year-old sat down to a cold meat lunch prepared by Verna, his wife of 43 years, after a morning spent mustering sheep on their 40.5ha King Country farm.

She prints off a copy of his CV and slides it across their Formica kitchen table "so he gets his dates right."

Just one line reads: 1957-71 - All Black (133 games, including 55 tests).

Meads was named New Zealand Rugby Player of the Century for his deeds on the football field.

But he is remembered for far more than the way he threw his 193cm frame about the park.

He represents the basic ideals of the New Zealand rugby man.

"I'm humbled to accept this on behalf of the game," he says.

"Rugby opened a lot of doors for me, and you feel like you've got to put something back into the game."

Putting something back has involved 37 years of administration, working for his club, Waitete, and the King Country and NZ Rugby Unions.

He has also spent 18 years as patron to community groups such as the IHC, the Transplant Games Association and Child Heart NZ.

"Being Colin Meads, these groups would come and ask me to be a patron, and I would gratefully accept."

He said charities did not often make such requests to rugby players today, "but then again these guys aren't having half the fun we used to have either."

Meads gently urges the need to bridge the divide between glitz and grassroots in the modern game, with his plea for moderation and a return to core values tempered only by an acceptance of the inevitability of change.

"You see this evolution of life on the farm as well," he says.

"A lot of the hard work is gone, and it is a sad but true fact of life now that it is harder for a lot of young fellas to get into farming."

Once renowned for training by carrying sheep under each arm, Meads has been slowed by the passing of time.

The grandfather to 13 children now has to pick a couple of flyblown sheep out from the yard, admitting that as a younger man he would have collared them in the paddock long before.

But only so much will change - he still expects the swarms of journalists, fans and wellwishers that have been hovering at the door of the family farmhouse since 1957.

"You'd start to worry what you had done wrong if no one turned up."

"Piney" has now joined Sir Wilson Whineray and Sir Brian Lochore at the very top of our rugby elite.

"It's the first purely New Zealand award, and that is a real honour to get," he says. "But ... I don't think it will change Colin Meads."