Māori All Black halfback Richard Dunn makes the play, followed by Frank Shelford. Photo / Haka - The Maori Rugby Story
Covid alerts willing, 1981 Springbok Tour protests leader John Minto and Napier tour-opponent Toro Waaka will get to do something neither they nor most of the protest supporters were able to do 50 years ago when McLean Park staged possibly the greatest of the 14 matches on the tour.
On the game's anniversary, they will be at the park for a gathering in the Pettigrew Lounge, a facility that also wasn't there when the Springboks and the Māori All Blacks drew 12-all on the grey Tuesday afternoon of August 25, 1981.
The lounge has been hired for a 40-year anniversary commemoration of the 1981 Springbok Tour anti-apartheid struggle, which is part of a national tour of cities that hosted the 1981 tour and doubles as part of a Free Palestine campaign, protesting "apartheid" in that region.
Each will speak, Minto as chairman of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa and Waaka as a member of 1970s Māori rights activist group Nga Tamatoa. Also at the rostrum will be Jamie Wall, author of the recently published book "The Hundred Years' War – All Blacks vs Springboks."
There's a bit of irony, in that both Minto and Waaka had lived as near-neighbours of McLean Park. Minto highlights his parents' home, on the corner of Morris and Latham streets, was probably "inside the cordon".
Waaka lived in nearby Nelson Cres, and might have struggled to get home just as much as he tried to get past that cordon of helmeted and baton-carrying police squads and the rubbish skips used as barriers to help prevent protesters getting too close to the rugby ground.
Minto, who played rugby as a lock at Napier Boys' High School and watched Magpies teams defending the Ranfurly Shield at McLean Park in the late 1960s before going on to a teaching career, did not come back to Napier for the game.
The protest strategy of HART, the Halt All Racist Tours organisation he led - having joined after a meeting at a home in Taradale in 1975 in opposition to the All Blacks' tour of South Africa, which ultimately went ahead in 1976 - was to make the tour difficult to police, so on match days protests took place throughout the country.
Besides, he didn't want any intention focused on family still living in Napier - who had already copped some of the outfall simply because of their connection to the protest leader - so he joined protesters elsewhere on the day.
Having triumphed by gatecrashing Rugby Park in Hamilton exactly a month earlier, leading to the abandonment of what would have been game number two of a tour scheduled to have 16 matches at that stage, the movement was confident it could stop the tour by playing cat-and-mouse with the massive police resources deployed to maintain law and order.
The issue was singly that protesters objected to sporting contact with South Africa, which practised the racial segregation known as apartheid, and the "No Māoris, No Tour" opposition had festered for at least 60 years, with another match at McLean Park right at its centre.
It was there in 1921 that the Springboks, on their first tour of New Zealand, beat the Māori All Blacks 9-8. The match was one thing, the aftermath another. It erupted when the Napier Daily Telegraph, which merged with the Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune in 1999 to create Hawke's Bay Today, reported the text of a cablegram despatched from Napier.
The work of South African journalist and tour correspondent Charles Blackett, it read: "Most unfortunate match ever played ... Bad enough having to play team officially designated New Zealand natives, but spectacle thousands [of] Europeans frantically cheering on [a] band of coloured men to defeat members of their own race was too much for the South Africans [who were] frankly disgusted.''
Despite the "No Maoris, No Tour" opposition and the continuation of apartheid racial segregation in South Africa, tours continued, the 1981 protests buoyed by opposition that had blocked a South Africa tour of New Zealand scheduled for 1973.
In 1985, 11th-hour High Court action blocked another tour to South Africa, but a year later a "rebel All Blacks" team known as the Cavaliers went instead. The apartheid system in South Africa was dismantled in the early 1990s and in 1994 Nelson Mandela, who had for many years been imprisoned, was made president in a democratic election.
The 1981 match in Napier is more than any other on the tour remembered for the rugby, played inside a barbed-wire boundary and with numerous police around the ground to make sure the game was not disrupted.
It was a grey day, with rain threatening throughout, and McLean Park was still years away from the changes that would bring about its current appearance and status as an international-level rugby and cricket stadium.
The Harris and McKenzie stands, opposite each other along the sidelines, have been replaced, and the Centennial at the western end remains, looking towards the embankment and the coast at the other, separated from the now concrete Harris Stand by a cornerpiece, the Chapman-Taylor pavilion.
The barbed wire was possibly the first barrier used in the 70 years of sport at the park to separate the spectators from the playing pitch, other than boundary ropes.
Reports of the game are dominated by the events of the last moments, when South African five-eighth Colin Beck kicked a dropped goal at the embankment end to tie the scores. Most except referee Brian Duffy were sure the ball had not gone over, that it had swung out to the right.
Duffy confused everyone by not apparently physically signalling the awarding of the goal, and when he headed back to the 22-metre line for the restart, he kept going for a kick-off at halfway.
The other eternally memorable aspect of the game was the performance of flanker Frank Shelford from Bay of Plenty, at the time not even thought of as an All Blacks team contender, with the likes of Mark Shaw and Ken Stewart the first calls, Graham Mourie having made himself unavailable for the series.
Shelford was called in for the last test to replace the injured Shaw, and over five seasons he would go on to play 22 tests for the All Blacks, plus the Cavaliers' tour of South Africa in 1986.
The Hawke's Bay Rugby Football Union capitalised on the McLean Park match by luring Shelford to play for the Hawke's Bay Magpies, which he did for 12 games in 1983.
One spectator in the Centennial stand was Patch Grant, whose father Don played for Waikato when they beat the Springboks in the first match of the Boks' 1956 tour.
He confesses no longer recalling much of the day, other than seeing the dropped goal being "nowhere near over", and that he and a mate were searched before entry. "We both had beards," he said.
Toro Waaka recalls he and other protesters gathering around the Soundshell, and
marching through the main street, copping abuse from hecklers, and even some punches as someone came "flying out of The Pro [the Provincial Hotel]."
"I knew him," Waaka says, "but I won't say who it was."
There was reported to be one confrontation with police, in Latham St near the ground. The police cordon was not breached, but Minto says that, as with other matches on tour, there were protesters as ticket-holders in the ground ready to stop the game if the opportunity arose.
Minto believes anger related to the tour has long subsided.
"I've only been abused twice in the last 10 years," he says. "I remember both times."
The opening words of rugby journalism legend Bob Howitt's review of the Napier game in the 1981 Rugby Annual said it all: "Some matches leave you cold. Twenty-four hours after the final whistle, they're forgotten. But not this one. This was a classic contest, and one that the near 20,000 spectators at McLean Park will talk about for years to come."
Firefighters responded shortly before 9am on Friday.