The terrifying Gordon Tietjens

Sevens coach Gordon Tietjens confesses that sometimes kids are too scared to ask for his autograph. Picture / Alan Gibson.

Gordon Tietjens, Sevens nut and food fanatic, arrived back from London late on Wednesday afternoon. At 7.30pm he played some tennis.

This means he played tennis for two hours, hard out, because he doesn't do anything any other way. At 8am on Thursday he was at work at Bay Engineers Supplies in Tauranga, where he is the general manager and chief annoyance. At a guess, he'd been in the place two minutes before he started driving people absolutely spare.

Warwick Talbut is, for his sins, Tietjens' boss. They are great mates and Talbut, you can't help but think, has had to put up with a lot in the 22 years Tietjens has been working there.

Not all rewards for great acts of kindness come in heaven. Talbut gets his thanks early. Along with dedicating his book Titch: Sevens is My Game which must be one of the most ridiculously under-stated subtitles ever) to his no doubt equally long-suffering wife and children, Tietjens dedicates it to Talbut and his wife. This is a kind gesture.

In the book, Talbut reciprocates. This is how he describes the effect Tietjens has in the workplace. "He is an absolute shocker and he drives us absolutely spare. He hovers over people and makes comments about what they are eating until they tell him to bugger off so they can eat their food in peace. He'll dismember any sandwich that has got either egg or cheese in it. He's practically a vegetarian."

On Thursday afternoon I'm having lunch with him. He's picked the cafe, in Tauranga, having laughed politely at the idea of going to McDonald's. He'd probably rather eat cheese than go to a fast-food joint. He decides he'll have a vegetarian wrap, but it has feta in it. He asks if could have one without the cheese.

"Would you like us to take it apart and pick the feta out?" the woman behind the counter asks. She obviously hasn't read the book, otherwise she'd know he is quite capable of dismembering his own sandwiches.

"Sometimes," says Tietjens, sounding hopeful, "they'll make one up for me." They do, in the end, and so they should. This is the great coach Tietjens, local hero, oh, all right, national hero. This is Tietjens who made Sevens - an obscure game, little brother to what he sometimes calls "15s" - a sport which won six World Series and gold at three consecutive Commonwealth Games.

I'm winding him up from a safe distance because he gets a bit shy, and wriggles uncomfortably in his chair, should you suggest any such thing.

He will concede that in Tauranga at least, everyone knows who he is. As for being a local hero, that does make him wriggle. He says, "You know, you can't say hello to everyone. They know who you are but you wouldn't have a clue who a lot of them are. But I shy at those terms."

He is, too, possibly a bit tender just now although he's putting a good face on it. If he is gutted at being beaten by Fiji in the semi-finals at the London Sevens, he has had time, on those long flights home and by thrashing himself on a tennis court, to come to terms with not winning. But he is used to winning. "As long as you know that your players have given everything they possibly had."

In Tietjens talk this doesn't mean giving it 100 per cent; he'll be happy enough with "200 per cent" or "having emptied the tank".

He says, "I suppose it's coming to terms with realism. I've lost so many players all at once. We just had to try to build a new team and we haven't had the experience we've had to call on in the past."

Training ground

Well, yes, and that's the bugger of Sevens. The coach of the national team gets the lads in, trains them to within an inch of their lives and those left standing at the end of the Tietjens regime go on to that other game called 15s.

It is a training ground, he says, "NZ Rugby Union see it as a big part of development and I accept that." And, he says, "the other day they named 39 All Blacks, a New Zealand Maori side, a New Zealand colts side and a junior All Black side and we had 28 Sevens players in those four caps. I counted them."

And the players quite possibly counted themselves as fortunate to have survived him. After all, he has been known to shout a bit.

"Yeah but you shout at them because positivity is huge in Sevens culture." He shouts, then, in a positive way. "Yeah, you're only trying to assist them."

"Tell me about Death," I say. "Death is a name that the players gave it. It's just a rugby game based on continuity and it's done continually for seven minutes."

This is not quite right. Here is Eric Rush on Tietjens' little training game. "We played this game of nonstop touch with Titch making up his own rules, we just played and played and literally everyone was walking by the end of it, no one could run despite the fact that he was still screaming his head off at us."

One other little thing Tietjens has to add about Death - "It drives the players mental."

To say he has a reputation for being tough is as much of as an understatement as the subtitle of his book. "They obviously know that I work my players very, very hard and you develop a reputation for being a hard taskmaster. And I have that." He thinks this is a useful reputation but he says, a little plaintively, that sometimes kids are too scared to ask for his autograph.

He knows about discipline, having been raised by very strict parents who never had much money. They lived in railway settlements - his dad worked for the railways - ending up in Rotorua.

The four kids walked or biked or took the train or the bus. They were fit kids (this will end up being the adult Tietjens' favourite word) and they didn't answer back. "You never had a say in what was right or wrong in those days and if you said something you got a whack."

He thinks his upbringing was too strict; he says he's soft as anything on his own two kids, but I think he might have had to work on that one.

Particularly when it comes to diet. You really should not get him started on this. Once started he can talk, or lecture, for a very long time about food and mood swings and energy levels. His diet gives him a lot of energy and he uses up quite a bit of it attempting to convert others. He denies that he drives around fast-food places to make sure none of the players are sneaking forbidden fried food when the team is away. The rumours persist anyway.

"Oh, no, I'm not too bad," he says, should you accuse him of being a food fanatic. No, he's not too bad despite the accounts of a near panic attack caused by some pork fat on a tour and a confrontation with a player, and then the chef in Dubai, about whether the chicken was grilled or fried. Players have been reduced to hiding their lollies under blankets. "I've never raided a room, put it that way," he says.

If you asked most people in what other areas of their lives they're obsessive, they'd deny being any such thing. Tietjens, despite not being even the tiniest bit a diet fanatic, gives this question serious consideration.

"I suppose in terms of being tidy. I can't stand mess. I mean, I daren't walk into players' rooms on tour. They just throw things everywhere. I couldn't bear that."

He thinks for a bit then says, "Oh. Look, I'll sometimes enter one of my sales rep's cars and check it. Because a customer might ride in that vehicle. And if I get into his car and see all these cans, it might be beer cans or whatever, just chucked down. Some people can live like that but they're driving a company vehicle and they're representing the company. It's about image."

No, it's not, I say, it's about your obsessive character.

"Oh. Well, it could be,'' he says. He's spent the hour of the interview poised on the edge of his chair, answering questions very earnestly and seriously. He is not good at sitting still for long periods of time and his idea of relaxing is to go to Fiji, as he did once, find a tennis coach and play, hard, all day. But now he smiles that big Tietjens smile, the one you see when, his team have won and nobody has eaten anything naughty.

Because, you see, he takes being called obsessive as a compliment. It means he's committed, which takes discipline. Why on earth they didn't subtitle the book Sevens is One of My Obsessions strikes me as a lost opportunity.