Bob Graham (right) was an Auckland loose forward who offered great leadership skills. Photo / NZME
Most Kiwi rugby fans will have a player they believe was desperately unfortunate to have never worn the All Blacks jersey.
My list of local heroes who missed out on donning the black jersey doesn’t include any of the horde of gifted men who, not wanted by the All Blacks, built their international careers elsewhere. Think Bundee Aki and James Lowe with Ireland, and shortly with the Lions in Australia. Or Tony Marsh in the midfield for France when they won the 2002 Six Nations. Or Sean Maitland playing in two World Cups, in 2015 and 2019, for Scotland.
This list is for the truly unlucky ones, the six players who I consider drew the shortest straws when it came to All Blacks selection.
First five-eighths Brian was one of the famous Going family from the Maromaku Valley, north of Whangārei. Fullback Ken was the oldest, then came legendary halfback Sid, and Brian was the youngest. They played together for Northland and the New Zealand Māori side, but only Sid and Ken were All Blacks.
There were better individual first five-eighths than Brian in the 1970s (think Bob Burgess), but Northland coach, Ted Griffin swore that all three Goings behind an All Blacks pack would have ripped international defences apart. They hit the field with a list of more than 30 brilliantly polished moves, with every single one named, and Brian, as granite hard as his brothers, was a key man in them all.
In the early 1960s, Graham was an Auckland loose forward who offered not only tremendous ability in all areas of the game, but also great leadership skills. How good a player and captain was he? When Wilson Whineray, who had been captaining New Zealand for three years, returned to Auckland from leading the 1960 All Blacks in South Africa, Fred Allen, just starting his stunning coaching career, retained Graham as the captain of his Auckland team ahead of Whineray.
In 2006, Allen told me: “I had the job of deciding whether I kept Bob Graham, a wonderful footballer who should have been an All Black, as the Auckland captain. Bob was a bit like Richie McCaw, always at the bottom of a ruck, always doing the hard yards. It was a question of loyalty. Why would you drop a man who’d been doing a great job all season?” Whineray made no waves and, in fact, he and Graham were vital to Auckland setting a record of 25 successive Ranfurly Shield defences in 1963.
An institution at Counties Manukau, where between 1976 and 1989 Dawson played 201 games for the province, he was the pride of Waiuku, where he played all his club rugby. A blindside flanker and No 8, famous for never taking a backward step, Dawson’s misfortune was that during his career, he was competing at All Blacks level with the likes of Murray Mexted, Buck Shelford and AJ Whetton in those positions.
In 2013, Dawson provided one of the greatest quotes in rugby. Counties Manukau had just won the Ranfurly Shield for the first time and Dawson, then 58, was celebrating at the Kentish hotel in Waiuku. He told the Herald‘s Andrew Alderson: “I’m so proud. I’ve got half a bottle of beer in my hand and I’ve just topped it up with tears.”
Monkley played 135 games for Waikato as an openside flanker, at a time when the Mooloo men were good enough to take the Ranfurly Shield from the great Auckland side. A true product of the amateur era, Monkley somehow managed to fit in his rugby training and playing with an exhausting fulltime job as a truck driver out of Morrinsville. His days would sometimes involve 500km of driving delivering kegs of beer to pubs and clubs across Waikato, Thames Valley, and the King Country.
The cross that Monkley had to carry in rugby was that his glory days for Waikato, from 1987 to 1996, coincided with the All Black careers of Sir Michael Jones and Mike Brewer.
Auckland lawyer Denholm was a hugely powerful prop who heaved massive weights while training with 1974 Commonwealth Games discus champion Robin Tait.
Denholm has a unique position among New Zealand rugby players in that he turned down a chance to play for the All Blacks not once but twice. In 1976, the All Blacks touring South Africa needed a replacement for injured prop Brad Johnstone. Denholm had just started a new law partnership and had to turn down the invitation.
The following year, when the Lions toured here, the New Zealand scrum struggled. Denholm was approached by All Blacks management and asked to make it publicly known that he was available if needed for the end-of-year tour of France. A story duly appeared in print saying just that. But when the team was announced Denholm was not included.
He told me the weird story at his University club’s annual dinner late in 1977. I had to ask: if there was an injury and he was asked to join the team in France, what would he do? “I’d tell them to get stuffed.” Just days later, Canterbury’s Vance Stewart was injured at training in Auckland. Sure enough, Denholm was asked to be a replacement. His reply? “I told them,” he’d later say, “to get stuffed.”
In 1981, all the stars aligned for David Halligan. A graduate of King’s College in Auckland, he was studying for what would eventually be a double degree at the University of Otago. Playing at first five-eighths in the University A team, outside another student, future All Blacks captain David Kirk, Halligan, who could also play fullback, was soon a star in the Otago side.
That year, he had his massive breakthrough. Halligan was named at fullback in the All Blacks team to play Scotland at Carisbrook in Dunedin.
At the time, I made the foolish mistake of arranging a live 7.30am interview with the new All Black on the breakfast radio show I’d just started working on in Auckland. It was the morning after the announcement of the All Blacks side. There had been a massive celebration party the night before. Co-host Chris Barnes and I filled in time on air while a flatmate tried to wake the new All Black. When Halligan finally came to the phone all he could croak out was a scarfie mantra: “Speights is great.”
So far, so jolly. But at the first training run two days before the test Halligan felt a small tear in the quad muscle of his left leg, the one he used for kicking. In 2019 (sadly only two years before he died), I spoke with Halligan about that day. “If I’d kept it quiet, I probably could have started on the Saturday. But that would have been dishonest. And I was only 21. At that age, you never dream that there won’t be another chance. I wasn’t really that upset at the time.”
But a second chance never came. Allan Hewson took his place at fullback and would hold the spot throughout the fraught 1981 Springboks tour. In 1982, Halligan sat on the bench for three tests against the Wallabies as a reserve to Hewson. He never got to wear the All Blacks jersey in a game.
Happily, talking to Halligan in 2019, it was clear his life was full and worthwhile. He was then living in Tauranga, where he’d established a private trust, Rongoa Whānau (which translates as peaceful families), working fulltime to try to stop the scourge of domestic violence.
As for his brush with All Blacks rugby? His laugh was full and genuine. “Here’s the good news about that: I’m now a Trivial Pursuit question.”
Phil Gifford is a Contributing Sports Writer for NZME. He is one of the most respected voices in New Zealand sports journalism.
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