“Fitzpatrick, I hate you,” a pleasant-looking South African woman said to the All Blacks’ 1995 World Cup captain, Sean Fitzpatrick, in the foyer of the team’s hotel in Johannesburg. “But if you played for us, I’d love you.”
Why does South Africa remain our greatest rugby competitor? The answer lies in a century of intense rivalry that’s been forged in blood on and off the field.
It’s meant so much that for four decades we bowed to the racist demands of apartheid-era South Africa and turned our backs on Māori players. We toured there knowing a resulting boycott against New Zealand would rip apart the 1976 Olympic Games. And we allowed a tour here in 1981 that led to such violence a senior policeman would say: “It’s a miracle nobody died.”
Why has South Africa stayed the most prized scalp for the All Backs for so long? One obvious reason is how often they’ve got the better of us. We lost four successive series, here and in South Africa, from 1921 before we finally beat them in 1956 in New Zealand.
Former All Black lock Richard “Tiny” White would tell me in 2006: “In the build-ups to the [1956] tests, we were basically told that ‘if we don’t win, the whole country’s going to collapse and go bankrupt’.” Hooker Ron Hemi remembered coach Tom Morrison saying that “losing would put the game in New Zealand back 50 years”.
The brutality of the series hit a peak at Eden Park in the last test, won 11-5 by the All Blacks, when White was deliberately kicked in the base of the spine by Springbok prop Jaap Bekker. “I didn’t realise how close I was to becoming a paraplegic,” said White. “I was told later by a doctor I was probably only a couple of millimetres away from being paralysed.”
In a truly bizarre postscript, in a 1999 television interview with Keith Quinn, Bekker admitted kicking a man on the ground was planned.
The night before the test, he’d discussed it with fellow Boks forwards Butch Lochner and James Starke. The brutish plan was hatched as revenge for All Blacks prop Kevin Skinner, a former New Zealand heavyweight boxing champion, punching Becker and fellow Boks prop Chris Koch during the third test in Christchurch. Skinner and White both wore leather headgear and Bekker confused White for Skinner.
“I’ve carried this inside me for 53 years,” he told Quinn. “If I met Tiny White again, I would apologise to him.”
If what happened in ‘56 sounds like madness, that’s because it was. I was still at primary school but even as a kid could sense the feverishness that swept the country.
After the All Blacks lost the second test at Athletic Park, Tom Pearce, the chairman of the Auckland Rugby Union, stormed down to Wellington and demanded the selectors make changes. An administrator telling the selectors which players to pick had never happened before and has never happened since.
Pearce, a former prop still built like the amateur wrestler he had been, was a fierce but eloquent speaker, who would later use his oratory skills as chairman of the Auckland Regional Authority in the 1970s.
The NZRU buckled and into the side came fresh talent including Waikato farmer Don Clarke, a fullback so strong he could boot goals with a heavy leather ball from 60 metres, and a Northland fisherman, Peter “Tiger” Jones, a giant No 8 who retained the speed that had made him a schoolboy sprint champion.
For the last test at Eden Park, a stunning 61,240 people crammed into the ground. Half a dozen deciduous maple trees grew then in the middle of the standing-room-only grassed terraces. Photos show agile spectators perched 20 metres above ground in the limbs of every tree.
The rest of the country listened to the radio commentary of Winston McCarthy, as famous at the time as the players. How crazy were we about rugby in ‘56? A long-playing record of edited highlights from McCarthy’s match calls was issued for Christmas and outsold Elvis Presley’s debut album.
Jones scored an amazing try five minutes after halftime to seal the test, which the All Blacks won 11-5. At a lineout 40 metres from the Boks’ line, All Blacks hooker Ron Hemi kicked a loose ball infield. Jones tore after it. “On the other side of it I could see [Basie] Viviers [the Springboks fullback] waiting for the ball. His eyes were bulging. I could have taken him and bowled him for a row of ashcans. But I’d always liked to get hold of the ball and run.”
Scoring the try was enough to make him a legend to my generation. He cemented his place in rugby history when asked for a post-match radio comment, he beat the Toyota dog to the punch. “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope I never play in another game as tough as today’s. I’m absolutely buggered.”
The Springboks had taken on an almost mythical status before ‘56, and their series loss here didn’t destroy their aura.
To defeat the Boks, especially in South Africa, remained a holy grail for New Zealand rugby. Over the years the obsession led to highly dubious decisions by the NZRU.
Missing from the first All Blacks tour of South Africa in 1928 was the immortal fullback George Nepia, of Ngāti Rākaipaaka of Nūhaka and Māhia, who discovered “at the 11th hour” that it would be considered “unwise for non-Caucasians” to tour South Africa.
It was the same in 1949. Not long before he died in 2012 the ‘49 captain, Fred Allen, would tell me: “We should never have left our [Māori] mates behind. We should have told them [South Africa] to get stuffed.”
There was another all-white All Blacks side in South Africa in 1960 before New Zealand, in 1970, finally refused to tour unless the team could be picked regardless of race.
On the field, an issue that wouldn’t be resolved until 1992 was having neutral referees, either here or in South Africa. In ‘56 the Boks were stunned that Skinner hadn’t been penalised by Kiwi referee Bill Fright in the third test in Christchurch for hitting the Boks’ Bekker and Koch.
Refereeing became a bitter point of contention for the 1976 All Blacks, who came close to tying their series in South Africa by almost winning the fourth, and last, test in Johannesburg. But in the last minute, with the All Blacks ahead, 14-12, referee Gert Bezuidenhout awarded a penalty to the Springboks, saying All Blacks prop Bill Bush had infringed at a lineout.
“I was hopping mad,” Bush would later say. “I’d been nowhere near the ball. But Gerald Bosch kicked the penalty to hand South Africa a 15-14 victory and a 3-1 series win.”
There was a bizarre postscript. Bezuidenhout came and saw the All Blacks off from Johannesburg Airport the following day. Bush says, “We had him on not only about his lineout decision but a lot of others he made throughout the tour. His response was simple. ‘Listen boys. You can go to your home, but I have to live here!’”
The ‘76 tour had led to 28 African countries boycotting the Olympic Games in Montreal, but the mantra of “no politics in sport” was still taken up by the NZRU when they scheduled a Boks tour here in 1981.
They were backed, in a staggering display of hypocrisy, by Prime Minister Rob Muldoon. Muldoon conveniently ignored the fact that in 1980 his National Government had put huge pressure on New Zealand athletes to join the American and British-driven boycott of the Moscow Olympics in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Ultimately just four Kiwi competitors from a selected team of 97 went to Moscow.)
All Blacks captain Graham Mourie and our best back, superstar centre Bruce Robertson, both refused to play the ‘81 Boks on moral grounds, but generally, as one provincial player said anonymously at the time, “I’m against the idea of apartheid. But Jeez, this is the only chance I’ll ever get to play against the Springboks!”
I reported on the whole of the ‘81 tour for the Listener, with the magazine’s former editor Tony Reid. We saw at close range weirdness you’d never dream would happen here. In Christchurch, a fresh-faced young woman in the front line of protesters was within touching distance of a baton-toting policeman.
She smiled at him and said, “Are you still f***ing your sister?” He hit her so hard on the shoulder with his baton she staggered away. The viciousness, verbal and physical, on both sides got worse as the tour wound on.
But despite having been there, watching video clips of the clashes over the years still feels like seeing surreal scenes from a different country.
We had no idea that news of the cancellation of the second scheduled game, in Hamilton, against Waikato, when protesters occupied the ground, would bring unalloyed joy to future South African President Nelson Mandela, then in his 17th year as a political prisoner on Robben Island, off Cape Town. “It was like,” Mandela would say, “the sun had come out.”
Mandela and the other Robben Island prisoners saw hope in support for breaking down apartheid when a game was stopped in rugby-mad New Zealand.
But here, in the ‘81 winter of discontent, it often just felt as if New Zealand had turned on itself. One game, in Timaru, was called off because security could not be guaranteed, but the other 13 matches were played behind police-protected barriers of sand-filled skips and barbed wire.
Divisions became so deep and bitter that six years later, when the first Rugby World Cup was held in New Zealand, All Blacks coach Brian Lochore realised that some of his squad wouldn’t wear team gear in central Auckland because it attracted verbal attacks.
In ‘81, it all culminated in the third and final test at Eden Park, the most bizarre game of test rugby ever played.
There were riots outside the ground. On a normally sleepy side street in Mt Eden, a police car was overturned. Rocks were hurled at police lines by protesters.
But the most surreal element of all was provided by a qualified pilot called Marx Jones (his parents had named him after the father of communism) who hired a Cessna prop plane, and flew backwards and forwards over the ground, his single passenger dropping leaflets, flares and flour bombs
“At the end of the test,” All Blacks wing Stu Wilson said 25 years later, “we had to wait for two or three hours before we were allowed to leave the park. Then we saw the carnage outside. It reminded me of what we’d seen when we were in Belfast in 1978 with the All Blacks.
“There were rocks, boulders, rubbish, turned over cars, crap everywhere. You knew there had been a brawl out there, a big one. You started to think, ‘Hell, it’s still only a game. Why did this have to happen?’ Then you start to reflect on whether you made the right decision.
“Rugby-wise we did, because we won [25-22]. Morally and socially, do you think it was the best decision? If I had to make that decision again, perhaps I wouldn’t have played, having seen what it did to the country, and how divisive it was.”
Graham Perry, the policeman in charge of the security operation at Eden Park for the last test, told me in 2000: “If the tour had gone on for another couple of weeks, serious bloodshed would have been involved. Firearms would have come into it. It was mayhem.”
By the 1980s, South Africa was a pariah in world sport. Their teams were banned from the Olympics, from international cricket, from Davis Cup tennis, and the South African Football Association was expelled from Fifa. No Springboks team toured abroad after ‘81. South Africa was even barred from world chess championships.
Amazingly, the NZRU made a final attempt to send the All Blacks to a racially segregated South Africa in 1985. But a last-minute court injunction triggered by two young rugby-mad lawyers, Phil Recordon and Paddy Finnigan, stopped the tour.
In what would be the last gasp of our rugby contact with apartheid-era South Africa, a rebel tour group, calling themselves the Cavaliers, headed to South Africa in 1986. They lost three of their four games with the Springboks, and would basically be quietly consigned to the scrap heap of history.
When the Rugby World Cup arrived in 1987 in New Zealand, there was never a question of South Africa being included, and that continued in Britain and France in 1991.
It would be 11 years and 73 All Blacks tests after the ‘81 tour before the chance would finally arrive to play the Boks again.
In March 1992, white South Africans voted, by a margin of 69% to 31%, to end apartheid. In August of ‘92, after touring Australia, the All Blacks flew to South Africa, to play four lead-up games, and one test, at Ellis Park in Johannesburg.
The game, played in front of 72,000 fans, saw a 27-24 victory for the All Blacks. But what lingered as much as the test in many All Blacks’ minds was the extraordinary public reception they got from the time they arrived at Johannesburg airport.
It was quickly clear time hadn’t dulled the edge of All Blacks-Springboks rivalry.
All Blacks centre Frank Bunce would tell Tony Johnson and Lynn McConnell in the 2016 book Behind The Silver Fern: “You got off the plane and there were thousands of people, hanging off the rafters, comments coming at you thick and fast. You’re thinking, ‘Holy hell, what have we let ourselves in for? They love you, but they wanna kill you. They actually tell you that!’”
Tomorrow, Phil Gifford recounts staying in a dangerous motel in Johannesburg and an armed robbery involving journalist Bob Howitt, while reflecting on the historical significance of the 1995 World Cup final and more.
Phil Gifford has twice been judged New Zealand sportswriter of the year, has won nine New Zealand and two Australasian radio awards, and been judged New Zealand Sports Columnist of the year three times. In 2010 he was honoured with the SPARC lifetime achievement award for services to sports journalism.