The good, the bad, & the booze

Graham Thorne toasts his selection for the 1867 All Blacks. Photo / File

Twenty-four years ago, Buck Shelford prepared for a Rugby World Cup triumph over a couple of beers with his teammates. Plenty of people knew. No one cared.

These days, when All Blacks have a few drinks, it's front page news.

Cory Jane became the second All Black of the current campaign to have to front the media on his drinking habits after being caught out on the tiles in Takapuna 72 hours before New Zealand's quarter-final match with Argentina last weekend. He was in the company of injured Israel Dagg. Fellow backline member Zac Guildford had already discussed his alcohol issues after indiscretions during the Tri-Nations.

It was a different story when the first World Cup was held. Then Shelford, the man who went three years unbeaten as All Black skipper before being dumped, and his teammates stayed in the Poenamo, their regular hotel those days. It's a $10 cab ride from there to the Mac's Brewbar in Takapuna central, where Jane came unstuck.

The attitude to players drinking, however, is a world away between 1987 and now.

Shelford, who believes we need to cut the players of today some slack, concedes he and his fellow players probably had a few beers the night before the 1987 final, when they beat France. Drinks in the week building up to a test were regular.

"Sometimes we had it in the hotel, or house bar - or another bar down the road. You'd sit down and have a beer with dinner - some guys would have a wine."

Back then, a couple of drinks before a game was one way for players to relax and bond.

"In hotels you get under each others' skin. The best way is going out, having a couple of beers, relaxing, talking about things not concerned with sport or playing.

"These kids have got to have more balance in their lives. If they continue to worry about what they're eating and drinking, they miss out on a big part of their lives. They've got to be able to chill out somehow."

Of course, the difference in the latest case is that Jane, from several reports, was badly affected by the booze and was out past 1am. He also has the weight of a nation's expectations on his shoulders after a 24-year Cup drought.

But Shelford is not sure there is anything that would have changed attitudes towards alcohol back in the 1980s.

"We knew no different. It wasn't until the game went professional that science came into the game and the whole attitude of not drinking came to be."

And it's not as though results were affected. "The era I played in was pretty successful. If you like a couple of beers before a game, have a couple of beers. If that's part of your preparation so be it."

All Black winger-turned-commentator Stu Wilson, out of the game by the time 1987 came around, remembers players of his era drinking the night before the big matches, like the British Lions series in 1983, because they were amateurs.

"There were no employment contracts. We actually had real jobs in the real world," Wilson says.

"You had to take responsibility for what you were doing. If you're still getting the results on the field of battle after 80 minutes, why change?"

He says today's players face a totally different situation, with high-priced contracts on the line if they make a mistake. Not to mention social media and the potential for anyone to be caught out on camera.

Another former big name, Andy Haden, says a major difference between now and the amateur era is that everyone had the same habits. It partly explains how they got away with it.

"In retrospect it probably didn't [help]. It's safe to say you weren't on your own though - if it was affecting you, it was affecting others as well."

But Haden jokes that in the amateur days, the amount of training expected was far less and thus the pressure on the body nowhere near what it is today.

"Bear in mind that a warm up was three laps. The first two were slow so your cigarette didn't go out."

He points out the game has changed significantly since he retired in 1985.

"You didn't need to be terribly fit when the opposition weren't terribly fit. As the bar gets lifted, you have to try and find all the little edges you can.

"[Drinking] was even less of an issue in the days earlier than ours. These guys are bigger, stronger, faster and fitter."

Haden says the game needs characters like Jane and Dagg and the focus on a night out - where their worst piece of behaviour was apparently smoking in the bar - is unfortunate.

"What's very important is to have lively characters in the makeup of a rugby team. You don't want to be poking people with a stick to perform.

"You're better off to try and dampen them down a bit rather than looking to fire them up."

The further back you go, the more liberal the rules around drinking.

Another star, Grahame Thorne, says: "Fred Allen [the coach] was adamant, if you had a beer on Friday night before a club or rep game, why change it - everything in moderation."

Thorne well remembers there wasn't much drinking on his first All Black tour of the United Kingdom in 1967 because the team was travelling all the time.

It was a much different scenario on the tour of South Africa three years later.

"We were able to [drink] because of the length of the tour - three months. In South Africa, on occasion, we gave it a real nudge."

But he says alcohol wasn't the main vice on tour.

"I was very young and more interested in chasing skirt than having a few beers."

Thorne has little sympathy for the attention Jane has received since the Herald on Sunday revealed his drinking indiscretion.

"It's a different game and different pressures, but there's no excuse before a quarter-final to go out on the drink. I think it was just stupid."

With science much more advanced, the experts know exactly the effect alcohol can have. Massey University Associate-Professor Steve Stannard says the Jane/Dagg drinking would have affected their ability to recover from prior training sessions; and put them at risk.

"It's madness to go out on some sort of drinking binge in the middle of a World Cup," Stannard says.

"I know the NZRU tries hard to prevent these things occurring. Ultimately the players are adults and decide whether to listen."

A number of studies he's been involved with over the past five years show drinking even a moderate amount of alcohol undermines the recovery process of muscles.

Alcohol Advisory Council chief executive Gerard Vaughan says it's hard to separate alcohol from sport in New Zealand, with many people drinking at sports clubs after a grassroots match.

He says high-profile sports people who have a problem with alcohol need to realise drinking to excess is not what the public expects of them.

Certainly the All Blacks of tomorrow are having that drilled into them.

Mt Albert Grammar headmaster Dale Burden says the way young rugby players view alcohol has changed since he played sport 30 years ago.

"It's quite interesting that sort of [drinking] culture doesn't seem to be around at all. When I was at school the 1st XV used to have a party every Saturday night."

Drinking during school events is banned no matter how old the student is, he said.

But Burden says many of the school's 1st XV choose not to drink outside of school for religious reasons, while others are serious about their study and sport.

Wilson, one of the characters of his All Black teams, says there are hundreds of thousands of reasons the players need to be more serious these days. "If the bosses said 'no drinking' I wouldn't have been drinking at all - if someone was paying me that money."