KEY POINTS:
Being Anton Oliver must sometimes be a little tiring. He doesn't do pat answers. You get the feeling that he thinks if somebody has gone to the trouble of asking him a question, it warrants a decent answer. In rugby, that doesn't make him unique, just a rarity.
It can be a double-edged sword. He's quite comfortable using words such as "conflagration", "deleterious" and "idiom" but there are those who prefer their sportsmen plain and unadorned. Critics of Oliver, and there are a few, believe he takes himself too seriously. But to level that accusation is to ignore the fact he is more often than not quite self-deprecating.
When making judgements about Oliver, the person as well as the player, you have to acknowledge you can't always separate the two and Oliver's circuitous and sometimes torturous route to France 2007 would give anybody pause for contemplation.
Put simply, this is a tournament that four years ago nobody, including Oliver, thought he would make.
Picked for the All Blacks at 21, an absurdly young age for a front-rower, Oliver has suffered the pain of defeat in 1999, the pain of being dropped ahead of 2003, a ruptured Achilles tendon and a very public falling out with an icon of the province in which he has made his home.
It was the post-Laurie Mains fallout and post-Achilles injury that led to the admission that in 2004 Oliver was playing rugby only because he was contracted and being paid for it.
"That was a real thud to the chest. If I really looked in the mirror and was honest about it, that was the only reason I was playing at that stage," he says. "I was a bit lost - not making the All Blacks, post the whole Highlanders fall-out. A lot of my mates had left and everything lost meaning for me. I didn't understand. What was my rugby raison d'etre? I didn't have one."
Then he found a reason for playing. Perhaps a surprise selection for the 2004 end-of-year tour, Oliver was handed his All Blacks jersey for the test against Italy against Rome, a low-key fixture in most people's eyes, and couldn't shut down the tear ducts.
"When I got the jersey in my hands again, that's where it all started again. Something still meant something and for me, it was playing for my country. The purity of that emotion - that's what I jumped on to."
Still, 2004 was a long way from France 2007. Oliver's experience was no doubt useful to Graham Henry in the formative days of his reign but the chances of those creaking limbs being capable of international class rugby in three years seemed remote.
"Gosh, I remember sitting down with Tana [Umaga] at an airport - he'd just played the Brumbies somewhere and we'd just played New South Wales and we crossed paths at Sydney. This must have been about 2002 and we were talking about the Lions back then. It was like 'no way, I'm not going to make it through to the Lions'. Well, he ended up captaining against the Lions and I ended up signing up for it, although I was injured for the series.
"It was only after the Lions thing and I came back from that and made the end-of-year tour that I thought, 'shit, there's only two years to go and I've got a chance of making the World Cup, you know'.
"Two years is a long time in international sport, especially when you get to my old, wizened state. Things start to creak and groan. It's more about motivation. You've got to be here for the right reasons and the right reasons aren't just to get x amount of tests or to see if I can get in the paper. You have to be adding something to the collective - that's my view anyway."
Then there's the grind. With annual end-of-year tours and the fact Super 14 seems to start just when families are packing the tents and embarking on a beach holiday, rugby is effectively a 12-month operation.
Oliver makes no bones about the fact he has not enjoyed playing lower level rugby for a number of years now.
"It's been difficult because as my career's got longer, I'm just staying for the juicy bits and that's the All Blacks. It has been difficult to play Super 14 and NPC rugby because I've done so much of that. The purity of playing for your country and singing the anthems is really what has been driving me. It's been an exercise in manipulating myself to get through the other stuff to get here. I don't mean that in any disrespect to the Otago union or the Highlanders franchise. It's just when you've played 14 years, it's what happens," says the 32-year-old.
His refusal to accept The Way Of Mains as gospel led to an epic breakdown. At its heart, Dunedin is a small town and in that small town, Mains has a lot of influence. It's fair to say an unrepentant Oliver earned as many enemies as friends with his stand. The fact the Toulon-bound hooker is leaving Otago rugby in the worst possible shape is disappointing but not his problem any more.
"You try to do the best while you're there and I can put my hand on my heart and say I did the best I could but it's just not my story any more. It's someone else's."
Oliver's charms weren't necessarily John Mitchell and Robbie Deans' cup of tea. After initially picking Oliver for the domestic tests in 2003, they decided Corey Flynn and Mark Hammett offered more as back-ups to the dynamic Keven Mealamu. Oliver was subsequently highly critical of aspects of their reign, including the exposing of what he viewed as a binge-drinking culture within the squad.
So it looked as if 1999 was going to be Oliver's only experience of rugby's greatest showpiece.
"The first time around, I was very naïve. I just saw it as a collection of tests all squished together," he says laughing. "I didn't see it under the banner of the World Cup and the importance it gave it. I've since talked to a lot of the guys who went to 2003 who were about my age and they were the same: they just didn't understand the importance and buzz and enormity of what the World Cup is now."
He understands it now, his place in the scheme of things.
I ask, with his All Black career winding down, whether he is feeling particularly nostalgic.
"Sometimes. I allow myself to do it but I find it's something that has to be controlled," he says. "Because while you say winding down, I think I'm winding up. But every now and then, I'll sit on the bus and people are waving at us and I think: 'Gosh, I'm in the All Black bus. There are lots of people who'd love to be in this bus and I'm in it. Not only am I in it but I'm right down the back.' I can still remember when I was up the front wishing I was at the back. Now I'm at the back."
Clearly there is just one thing missing from Oliver's CV. It's the same thing missing from the CV of all All Blacks since Sean Fitzpatrick became the last of the Class of '87 to retire.
Oliver's first World Cup ended in a blaze of French glory at Twickenham. In 2003, he was watching on TV.
"It was a strange feeling watching that semifinal. I was at a Cure Kids function in Auckland.
"It was really weird watching it because I was disconnected but at the same time connected through the All Black lineage.
"I felt sorry but ... not in that ... it's very hard to describe it."
Just this once, Oliver appears lost for words.
