TV broadcaster Phil Gifford and his fictional character, Loosehead Len, modelling one of the bras. Photo / Supplied
OPINION:
Fifty years ago this weekend the first column featuring a character I’d invented called Loosehead Len appeared in print.
It was an attempt to hopefully be both amusing and satirical about rugby. At the time to joke about the national game drew much the same reaction from the NZRU as heretics did from Jesuits during the Spanish Inquisition.
Loosehead was so far to the right, he would have regarded failed National candidate Stephen Jack as a pinko, left-wing, wimpy snowflake.
Loosehead was a mean-spirited, violent, bigoted, xenophobic, homophobic, money-hungry, cigarette-sucking, beer-swilling rugby freak. On his right arm was tattooed “South Africa Mon Amour”. As a child he’d been expelled from Herne Bay primary school for punching the son of an English immigrant. The only thing I shared with Loosehead was that I’d always loved rugby.
Who wrote Loosehead was initially a secret. I was a 26-year-old newspaper reporter with hair to my shoulders covering a strange mix of Auckland Regional Authority meetings, wool sales, crime stories, natural disasters, and rock music.
So I had to stay silent when a senior rugby writer at the Herald said he gave the column “six weeks at the most” when Loosehead first emerged. Happily, in various publications, it would run for 32 years.
He wasn’t universally popular. The NZRU tried to get him banned after he suggested a visiting Italian team might not be too brave, because he understood the country’s army was the only one in the world that “had tanks with a reverse gear”.
I knew the game was up for Loosehead and me in 2006, when I was offered a spot in Rugby News magazine, if I could find a sponsor to pay for it. A very affable promotions man from Speights basically retired Loosehead by telling me that “we’d love to be involved, but he’s a bit too blokey for us”.
Weirdly, Loosehead changed my life. Without Loosehead I would never have started 25 years of work in breakfast radio. There would have been no after-dinner speaking, at rugby clubs from Kaikohe to The Bluff. No leading supporters’ tour to Argentina, France, and Britain.
Most precious of all, Loosehead paved the way to meet rugby players I’d idolised as a kid.
In 1977 I walked into the breakfast room of a Hutt Valley hotel, after speaking at a local club the night before. Only one person was in the room, Colin Meads, the most revered player of his generation.
I walked to his table. He looked up. I tried to keep my voice from squeaking. “Colin Meads?”
“Yes.”
“We haven’t met, but I write a thing called Loosehead Len.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.’
A hard look, and a pause.
“We like that down our way. Sit down.”
I stayed, basking in the light of the legend until lunchtime. For the rest of his life he was always jovial when we met.
Initially, I also tried to use Loosehead as a vehicle for social satire. Unlike him, I was strongly opposed to sporting contact with South Africa.
In one of the early columns in the 1970s Loosehead said (because I naively thought the absurdity of the statement would change hearts and minds) that “the only thing wrong with South Africa is that 14 million blacks had the cheek to be born there”.
In Queen St two days later I ran into a policeman I knew from club rugby. He was unaware I was the writer behind Loosehead.
He said, “Did you see what Loosehead wrote about South Africa?”
“Yeah, outrageous wasn’t it?”
“It certainly was,” he said. Pregnant pause. “Mind you, he has got a point.” I rarely tried to undermine South Africa with irony after that.
There were six Loosehead books that helped cartoonist Darryl Kirby and I - at the time both young fathers feeding mortgages - keep financially afloat.
One of the books, 1977′s Last Tango In Te Kuiti, was briefly unavailable for sale at a major chain of booksellers, when a group of women working there objected to the inclusion of a character called Susan of Herne Bay, who specialised in single entendre remarks. For example, she would compliment a diminutive halfback by saying, “You often find smaller guys produce the big one when it counts.” An All Black flanker was praised for “keeping it up for 80 minutes”. As John Cleese might say, it was a different time.
I now picture Loosehead propping up the bar during happy hour at the RSA, complaining that rugby was ruined by professionalism, that the All Blacks wearing brightly coloured boots was the first step to them playing in tutus, and that an All Black coach who break-danced was a sign the rugby Apocalypse was at hand.
Susan of Herne Bay? I’m guessing she’s now terrorising the male residents at a Mt Roskill twilight home.