The last time his life didn't revolve around rugby, Grant Fox was boarding at Auckland Grammar.
On the weekends the students had leave, Fox would jump in his friend Marty's Toyota 800 and head for Titirangi, where the Crowe family played host while the boys played cricket in the hallway.
Fox has rarely gone long without rugby in the decades since, bookended by spells as first five-eighth and selector of some of the greatest All Blacks teams.
But with his last ball long ago kicked, and with his last team now picked, Fox is ready to finally call time on an esteemed sporting career.
Once the All Blacks settle their series against Ireland on Saturday night, the final whistle sounds for Fox. He plans to swap stadium visits for the family's Waihi Beach bach, and rather than scrutinise the nation's top rugby players, he'll be watching son Ryan battle the world's best golfers - starting with this week's Open Championship.
"I need to give this game up, because I need my weekends back," Fox tells the Between Two Beers podcast. "Since I left school I've been engaged with this game for 40 years with nary a break. It's time now for me to make sure that I've got more time on my hands to be present elsewhere.
"Is there emotion? No, not really, because it's not about me; it's about the group and their performance. I'm in my 11th season doing this and it's been a great ride and a hell of a privilege, but it's time to stop.
"It's time for me to spend more time at home and at the beach place, and to spend more time with the grandkids. In that regard, it's actually looking forward to what's ahead of me, rather than reflecting on what's been."
When Fox does allow himself a wander down memory lane, one figure inevitably races in front, competitive to the end.
He first met Martin Crowe in the third form at Auckland Grammar in 1976, delighted to discover a likeminded soul in a city where he was otherwise alone.
Fox grew up on a sheep farm in the rural Waikato settlement of Waotu and before school had visited Auckland only once, sitting in the Eden Park stands at the infamous Water Polo Test against Scotland in 1975.
Being one pupil among a thousand could have been an overwhelming experience for Fox, if not for the one-in-a-million classmate with whom he would develop the greatest friendship in New Zealand sport.
"It was daunting for me," he says. "But I was sitting beside a kindred spirit with a strong interest in sport, and we just hit it off."
The friendship was forged with hallway cricket on weekends away at the Crowes' place, battling for ascendancy with a miniature bat and squash ball.
School soon became what the pair did while awaiting the chance for more sport. They played doubles tennis together, and sensing his mate was a "cricketing genius" in the making, Fox would spend his Friday nights giving Crowe throwdowns in the nets.
"I was the fodder who had to chuck the ball," he says. "I don't think I got a bat."
Then, in their final year at Grammar, having previously played in the football first XI, Crowe decided to instead see what his friend had been doing in the winters.
"At the end of sixth form he said, 'Oh well, I'll play rugby'," Fox recalls. "The next year he was in the first XV rugby team and scored a bucketload of tries.
"We had almost a bit of ESP going. He was a big man at school, six-foot-two and he was quick and competitive. We had these little calls about going down the blindside, in the days when I was a much more effective runner than I was when I got older. And we won a championship that year."
It was clear that both boys boasted the potential for much more sporting success in the years to come. In fact, Fox and Crowe would wager on exactly that.
"Marty and I had this bet about who would play the most test matches for our countries in our respective sports," Fox says. "It was brash, arrogant schoolboys, and he was much more likely to achieve that than me.
"We were both lucky enough to do that, and Marty played a lot more tests (77) than me (46).
When I'd finished, there was this function I went to where Marty was doing a book or something, and I brought an All Blacks jersey that I'd signed and said, 'Marty, you won'.
"But he gave back to me a pencil drawing of Lord's, which was a very special place for him, and he just goes, 'We both won'. That hangs at home in pride of place. He was a good man."
"To Foxy, we both won".
— BetweenTwoBeersPodcast (@BeersBetween) June 30, 2022
Grant Fox on the schoolboy bet he made with Sir Martin Crowe.@TheACCnz pic.twitter.com/vJA2dhlTE3
A year before earning the first of his 46 caps against Argentina in 1985, Fox experienced the honour of hearing his name included in an All Blacks squad.
"I was at my girlfriend's parents' place - now my wife - in Waterview on a Sunday afternoon after an NPC game," he says. "I remember being there with a few other people and listening on the radio. That's how it was in those days. Now it's very different."
Fox would know, spending the last decade as one of the men responsible for bestowing that same honour after almost stumbling into the role.
He initially followed the familiar retired-player path into coaching but experienced the familiar retired-player struggles over a lack of influence once the ball had left the tee.
Next was broadcasting but that, too, held little long-term interest. "I'd been doing some commentary off and on, then after the 2011 World Cup I was done," Fox says. "That's it, time to get rid of all this from my life and leave rugby behind for a little while."
But while driving down Bond Street, with Eden Park in his sights, his phone rang with an unmistakable voice on the other line: "'Foxy, Shag here'."
Steve Hansen was applying for the job that would make him a knight and wanted to recruit a man on the outside, an independent selector who would form no emotional attachment to the players and be ruthless while challenging the coaches.
"I didn't know Steve really well," Fox says. "He was going to his interview in a few days, and he said, 'Mate, I'd like for you to be a selector'. It was out of the blue - hadn't contemplated it, hadn't thought about it, and straight away it resonated.
"It's a team I love to bits, deeply passionate about, and I was flattered to be asked. So I went home and spoke to Adele and she thought it was pretty cool that it was a team I played for that I could be involved in, without all the time commitment. She said, 'You've got to do this'."
Eight years later, after winning one World Cup and losing another, Fox was once again ready to walk away from rugby. Incoming coach Ian Foster had been keen to retain his services but Fox was adamant.
"I said goodbye to the team in 2019. I was done. Foz did say to me, 'If I get the job, will you come with me', and I said, 'No, mate, I'm done'."
Fox switched focus to his signage business while Foster lined up departing Ireland coach Joe Schmidt, beginning a drawn-out pursuit that eventually led to another pitch on the phone.
"Foz got the job and rang me and said he was after Joe but Joe wasn't available. He said, 'Can you give me a hand for a year?' What he didn't want to do was put a filler in, because he was always after Joe. It wasn't a hard decision to make.
"It turned into two years, because he still couldn't get Joe. Then late last year, he rang me and said, 'Well, I finally got him, but I can't get him till August, so I need a little bit more time'."
That time is now up. Fox has ruminated over his last All Blacks midfield mix and will leave an under-fire Foster to deal with the fallout from Saturday night. Even if he departs in defeat, though, Fox exits international rugby a better place than he found it.
"Other teams are coming forward," he says. "That's good for the game globally. Take your All Blacks eyepatch off and look at that. You want a test match sitting on the edge of your seat? Well, you're going to get more of them."
The third test, even if it's edge-of-the-seat stuff, will settle for second billing in the Fox household.
Adding to a momentous weekend for the family, son Ryan has designs on winning the Open Championship at St Andrews, watched closely by a couple of proud if sleep-deprived parents.
"We religiously follow," Fox says. "The European Tour events are now live on Sky, so when he's at the pointy end of the field and there's a chance he's going to get coverage, we're up. I'm getting older now, so it's getting harder to recover."
There have been a lot of late nights recently, as Ryan has risen inside the world's top 50 by earning four top-three finishes in his last seven tournaments. And the late nights haven't been solely the domain of Mum and Dad, as Grant discovered following Ryan's win at the Ras Al Khaimah Classic in February.
"We talked to him not long afterwards and he went off to celebrate," Fox says. "But he rang me - I was at work so it was about midday the next day - and he had just got to bed. He rang and said, 'Oh Dad, I'm a bit pissed'. And I said, 'So you should be'. And he said, 'I've got to get a car in two hours'. So I said, 'Well, for God's sake, don't go to sleep'."
Fox is well accustomed to passing on such guidance, one athlete to another. From giving his teenage son an "absolute bollocking" for throwing a club while playing in Mt Maunganui - a reprimand the impatient Fox admitted was rather hypocritical - to carrying his bag during Ryan's early adventures on the course, Fox has long viewed time as his most essential parental gift.
"All you want for your kids is to be happy and healthy and chasing their dream," he says.
"No matter how old they are - Ryan's a mature adult now - it doesn't matter. You still want them to be doing that, and Ryan's doing it."
It hasn't all been happy families, however, with Grant the caddie often finding it difficult to separate from Grant the dad.
"You're so desperate to see him do well that sometimes you've got to get the emotion out of it," Fox says. "Ryan would say that, too - we didn't always see eye to eye on the golf course.
"At times it was like, you play this game all the time, how can you hit it that wide? That's where I had to give myself an uppercut and try be the caddie, not the emotive dad. That took some time to get to that point, but it was great to share the fairways with him."
Fox might have been integral in World Cup-winning teams as a player and selector, earning an MBE for services to rugby in 1995, but he described his family as his "greatest achievement".
And now, after a sporting journey that began as Marty's mate, one that reached great heights while first wearing black and then handing out that same jersey, Fox is settling into his favourite role yet.
"I love the fact that Ryan's excelling in a sport that's different," he says. "Inevitably, when they start, they are going to be the 'son of'.
"But as they carve their own way and have their own success, that flips on its head and you become the 'dad of'. I'm really proud of that."
