- Steve Tew, former NZ Rugby chief executive, discusses his role and the challenges of leading rugby in New Zealand.
- Tew shares insights on managing controversies, including financial losses and scandals, and highlights the Respect and Responsibility Review.
- He reflects on the evolution of professional rugby, New Zealand’s rugby culture, and his administrative achievements.
- Tew recounts anecdotes from his career, including signing Richie McCaw and handling major rugby events like the Bledisloe Cup and World Cup.
When stripped to its bones, the prime role of New Zealand Rugby chief executive is brutally simple: you take the blame when things go wrong.
That’s a salient observation from former rugby boss Steve Tew, these days director with High Performance Sport New Zealand, but best known as chief executive of New Zealand Rugby from 2008 to 2019, speaking on the latest edition of the award-winning Between Two Beers podcast.
Tew has been careful to stay away from commenting on rugby since leaving his pressure post and even during this rare public foray, declined to opine directly on hot-potato issues of the day such as New Zealand Rugby’s governance spat or the future shape of professional rugby competitions.
But as someone who sat in the hot seat during two periods when New Zealand held all four World Cups (men’s, women’s and two sevens), guided the code through the 2016 Respect and Responsibility Review, inked critical sponsorship deals with adidas and AIG, as well as a five-year broadcast deal, Tew has a huge administrative legacy to reflect upon.
On the debit side, he was of course also at the helm when NZR suffered its worst financial result, in 2009-10, losing $15.9 million (due to a global recession) while having to stick his thumb in the dyke with a host of other problematic rugby issues, right down to player assault and sex scandals, as well as the All Blacks bugging mystery (of lineout calls) in Australia in 2017.
To some observers, Tew was always ultra-Kiwi-authentic, whip-smart, understanding of others, and as comfortable in the All Blacks dressing room as he was in World Rugby’s boardroom. For others, he could be a polarising figure — gruff, stubborn and borderline unapproachable.
Either way, having first joined New Zealand Rugby as general manager in 2001, then deputy chief executive in 2003 — having been Canterbury CEO before that — Tew is better placed than almost anybody to reflect on the historic bumps in the code and emergence of its leading personalities from the past 30 years.
In the podcast, Tew observes rugby is “still relatively young as a professional sport” within a global context, and that perhaps needs to be taken into account as the code sometimes struggles to figure out a pathway forward.
At the same time, rugby has significantly helped shape New Zealand as it is today and remains a huge part of the country’s identity overseas.
Of his role in this, Tew summarised it this way: “Well, you know, other people can judge me, but at the end of the day, it’s always about the people, right? I mean people always come back to he tangata, he tangata he tangata. (Maori proverb: It is the people, it is the people, it is the people).
“I’m a really proud New Zealander. I think we’ve got a lot to be really proud about as a country. We’ve got some things we could do better, for sure, and we’ve got some social issues which are now getting to be intergenerational, which are not things to be so proud about. And they’re quite hard to fix, actually. It’s easy to be critical.
“It’s not so easy to come up with solutions. But as a nation, we punch well above our weight in a variety of things. We’ve taken stands, I think, in big issues in the past ... which have been important.
“And in the sporting context, we just are very, very good at what we do. And we’re very good at the way we do it. I still get that.
“I think one of the things that I reflect most on around my time at rugby, and I’ve heard it again in this high performance role, is that our people, win or lose, are very gracious competitors, very competitive.
“You know, no stone unturned, never give an inch on the paddock. But afterwards, win or lose, do it with grace, do it with compassion. And we’ve had some great moments where New Zealanders, I think, have stood up and done the right thing. We’ve got a great reputation.”
For all his rugby career highs with Canterbury and New Zealand, the thing Tew is most proud of as an administrator was getting the 2016 Respect and Responsibility Review completed and acted upon.
That review had its origins in the Chiefs’ 2016 “stripper-gate scandal” after an exotic dancer alleged she had been inappropriately touched and licked at the team’s end-of-season celebrations.
It led to much navel-gazing regarding attitudes to women and changing rugby’s macho culture, given it came at the same time as All Blacks halfback Aaron Smith’s disabled toilet sex scandal and Wellington’s Losi Filipo being discharged without conviction after an attack on four people.
“It was an awful time,” Tew said. “That was a really, really terrible time.
“But, ultimately, the culture of the game was exposed by the Chiefs. They weren’t the problem. They were just the catalyst for the conversation. And we got a few things wrong. With a bit of hindsight, we would have gone back and reviewed those incidents in a different way. And I think some journalists took an opportunity to really hammer some points home, which might’ve been fair, might not have been fair. It’s a matter of judgment.
“But, ultimately, we took a deep breath and said, right, there’s an opportunity here. We could learn.”
There were times when Tew even suspected he might himself become a casualty of that review.
“Someone needed to take some blame at some point. Not sure what for exactly.”
The NZR comms team had a strong intuition about when it was time for a coach to front or a player to front, or Tew himself to front.
“I’ve always believed that no one wants to see the spokesperson for Air New Zealand when a plane doesn’t work. And therefore, no one wants to see the spokesperson for New Zealand Rugby when the Chiefs have a stripper. So, you know, I always fronted when it was appropriate to front.
“That’s how we worked our way through those sort of things. But if, yeah, people often ask what you do as a chief executive, you take the blame. That’s your job.” This really dawned on Tew following an All Blacks management meeting on tour in Hamilton one night, where he had ducked out.
“After dinner, and on the team whiteboard, they had the key things for the day: ‘Someone check on Tew’. I don’t remember anyone doing that, but anyway, at least they’d thought about it.”
On the other side of the coin, during his time at New Zealand Rugby, Tew made a point of celebrating the moments that needed to be celebrated and he recounted how his administrative staff kicked up their heels after one of the earlier Bledisloe Cup wins at union headquarters:
“The players have got a tradition. They fill it [Bledisloe Cup] up, right? Forty-eight cans of [Steinlager] Classic. Sometimes they weaken and they put [Steinlager] Pure in it, but 48 cans it holds, and you can’t drink out of it.
“It’s impossible to hold it up without making a hell of a mess, and I’ve seen a few famous people try to do that.
“When it first came back through the office at the end of that first campaign, I said ... ‘We should celebrate. We’re part of this. We can’t pretend we’re All Blacks because we’re not, but we’re part of the machine that helps the All Blacks get to the Bledisloe Cup in Sydney and win it’. So we got it out and filled it up, and it is impossible to drink out of it. Jock [Hobbs, NZR chairman] turned up quite late one night in his pinstripe because he was a banker, and he was adamant that he’d be able to finish it off.
“Picked it up, and probably the best thing he did in terms of the staff getting to know him quickly, he learnt about gravity and liquid in a hurry, and so he didn’t get much in his mouth.”
The administrative wing also operated what it called “a balanced scorecard” that similarly tied its fortunes closely to those of the All Blacks.
“Every year we would work out what was important for the organisation to achieve and that would represent a proportion of everyone’s KPIs for the season and that would determine your bonus. And so you could be on the front desk or on payroll of the council, wherever you worked. And if we didn’t win the Bledisloe Cup, you would get less of your bonus.
“So there was actually a connection to everything, not just the spiritual thing.”
In 1995, Tew landed his first major rugby post, as chief executive of Canterbury Rugby, having previously worked for the Hillary Commission.
These were early days for professional administrators in rugby, during a serious transition from amateur rugby, and here Tew started from scratch, appointing “new coaches, new manager, new everything”, and was when Steve Hansen, Robbie Deans, Wayne Smith and Peter Sloane came into the system.
“We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we made a lot of mistakes. And I always reflect on the generation of players that we had.
“So that first group we had the Todd Blackadders and the Matt Sextons and Mark Hammets of the world, who’d actually had jobs before they became rugby players. There was a group who came in at that time, more the sort of [Andrew] Merhtens and [Justin] Marshalls of the world, that hadn’t.
“We had a real mix, the next lot. So they kind of dealt with it a little bit better because they were used to work in the realities of life.
“Then the next generation came straight into the game as professional rugby players, and they didn’t have the same lessons. And it took us a while to get that right.
“But one of the things I’m sort of most proud of is that we did a lot of work on that whole player development area that’s ended up being an important part of what the Players Association now run for New Zealand rugby.”
Tew is able to reflect on all the major rugby talking points of the past three decades, including the reappointment of Graham Henry as All Blacks coach in 2007. It was the first time that an All Blacks coach had been reappointed after a World Cup defeat, and securing the post ahead of Canterbury’s Robbie Deans was a decision that spilt the country:
“It was difficult, but in the end ... the best candidate through that process presented himself as Graham Henry with Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith still committed,” Tew said.
“And that is the package that was chosen. And Robbie didn’t come with a confirmed package, which was an interesting approach. And I think that counted against him to a point, but other people have their own reflections on it. So yeah, if we hadn’t have won that final in 2011, would people have said it was a good decision or not? Who knows?”
Hosting and then winning the World Cup was one of the pinnacles.
“The whole country had hosted successfully an event that a lot of people thought we couldn’t deal with because we were too small ... So we got to that final day and I was just hugely proud of the whole country, actually. And then, it’s a hell of a game of rugby. Yeah, you wouldn’t want to sit through that 80 minutes.”
On female rugby, Tew admitted they had been slow to give the women’s game the opportunities and credit it deserved.
“And we’re now seeing the benefits of people perhaps with a bit more vision than we had when I was there.
“We used to always lean back and say we don’t have the resources for it, but actually, if you’d have done things differently, you’d have found some more money.
“But, notwithstanding that, the Black Ferns and the Black Fern Sevens in particular had very strong records during that period.
“I think all the Black Fern Sevens speak for themselves. Probably the best, consistently best sports team this country’s produced in the last couple of decades. And the Black Ferns, I think in my time, won two or three World Cups.
“So not all bad, but we could have done a lot better. And it’s great now to see the women getting the recognition they deserve. It’s interesting, isn’t it? There’s opportunities for them to play offshore, there’s opportunities for them to play league. They’re mixing and matching a little bit, and I think that’s fantastic.”
Meanwhile one of Tew’s more legendary anecdotes was on how the Crusaders came to signing Richie McCaw during his Tew’s time as CEO there:
“Steve (Hansen) was in charge of talent ID, and he’d identified this kid down at Otago Boys’ who he reckoned was going to be as good as anybody he’d seen, and he came into my office. There was a quadrangular tournament on at Lancaster Park, and our office was just out the back. And he said, ‘Oh, this kid McCaw’. I said, ‘Steve, you know we had an agreement with Otago and the Highlanders that we wouldn’t poach each other’s players because if we’re going to get players into the South Island, they had to come from somewhere else’. No point beating the crap out of each other.
“So we had this agreement. I said, ‘You know, we can’t do that’. He swore away and he’s back about three hours later. ‘You know what’s happened’? I said, ‘No’.
“He said, ‘they’ve pinched Sam Harding’. I said, ‘Who have’? He said, ‘Otago have pinched Sam Harding. Now we can go and get McCaw’.
“So, sure enough, they had pinched Sam Harding because Sam was actually ahead of Richie at the time ... and so we talked to Richie, got him up and went down to Lincoln and met the chancellor. The rest is history.”