Sir Brian Lochore’s early ambitions of being a jockey were sidelined as he grew into one of New Zealand’s greatest All Blacks. Phil Gifford shares the story of how a humble farmer became an icon of world rugby.
Sir Brian Lochore, the ultimate 20th-century All Blacks icon, as both a captain and coach, wanted to be a jockey when he was a primary school kid in Wairarapa.
His parents used to stand his Shetland pony, Winkle, in the back seat of the family car, and drive Brian and Winkle, the horse’s head poking out an open window, to the local pony club.
As Lochore started high school and began to shoot up to his adult height of 1.91m, he switched his attention to tennis.
While he was in Auckland on September 1, 1956, he wasn’t in the crowd of 61,240 people at Eden Park that sunny Saturday watching the crucial fourth rugby test against South Africa. He was waiting to catch a train home after attending a national junior tennis training camp.
The All Blacks would be forever grateful that the Eketāhuna farmer finally turned all his attention to rugby in his late teens.
Sixty years ago, on January 4, 1964, as a 23-year-old No 8, Lochore played his first test, a 14-0 win over England at Twickenham. From 1966 he then captained the team in the three golden, unbeaten years the All Blacks were coached by Fred Allen.
As an All Blacks coach, Lochore was a key figure in two of the most historic events in New Zealand rugby. In 1986, he took a team nicknamed the Baby Blacks, which had 11 test newcomers, and beat a French side that had just won what was then the Five Nations championship, 18-6.
The following year he coached the All Blacks to a resounding victory in the first Rugby World Cup.
What made him so special was how such a big, powerful man had such a gentle manner and patent decency. As one of his players once said to me: “He’s someone you never want to let down because you just want him to think well of you.”
His genial public persona, which actually mirrored the real man, made him universally admired.
Lochore’s greatest mate in the All Blacks, Sir Colin Meads, used to joke that “I could say something, and people would say, ‘There’s that bloody Meads spouting off again. I never liked him’. Then B.J. [Lochore] would say exactly the same thing, and they’d say, ‘Aw, he’s a lovely man, that Brian Lochore’.”
Lochore, who died in 2019, was a quiet, but effective rugby revolutionary.
On his first international tour to Britain, Ireland and France in 1963-64, there was a rigid hierarchy amongst the players. The back seat of the team bus was strictly for the veterans, and Lochore would later say he wasn’t the only newcomer who generally felt isolated from the more experienced men.
Appointed captain in ′66 as a 25-year-old, he decided it was important to seek out players who might be struggling a little on tour, to “put your glass next to theirs”, and have a quiet, but open, discussion.
Coach Allen chose Lochore as his leader ahead of some vastly more experienced forwards, who were also provincial captains, like Meads, Kel Tremain and Ken Gray.
Allen, an Army Major in World War II, would tell me in 2006: “I’m no academic, no Rhodes scholar, but I’d had a bit of experience about how to manage men. The experience I had as a soldier certainly helped me to judge men.”
A few months before he died in 2017, Meads recalled a discussion Allen had with him in ′66.
“‘Tremain talks too much’, Fred told me, ‘and you’re too rough to be the captain. So I’m going with a good farming guy, Lochore’. And you know what? Fred was right.”
When the All Blacks toured Britain and France in 1967, Allen had the side playing a brand of brilliant, attacking test rugby that was then unheard of. He trusted Lochore enough that at intense 70-minute training runs, Allen, the only coach on the tour, would hand over the forward drills to his captain, while Allen ran the backs.
It helped that as a player, Lochore was a world-class No 8. To a huge work ethic he added a touch not many forwards of his era possessed. He was a terrific runner of the ball.
At Eden Park in 1965, in the last test of a series against South Africa, Lochore gathered in a poorly directed Springboks kick 30 metres from the Boks’ line.
He accelerated into an angled, evasive run Will Jordan fans would recognise. He slipped one tackler, twisted past another, and then a third. By now the Boks’ defence was frayed. Lochore passed to centre Ron Rangi, who fed wing Ian Smith, who scored. The All Blacks would eventually win 20-3.
Sadly the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU), driven by jealousy and spite over Allen’s success, fame and independence, drove Allen out of coaching. Lochore was always at pains to note what a likeable man Allen’s replacement, Ivan Vodanovich, was. But he would also say that if Allen had been coaching, the 1970 test series in South Africa might have been won.
There was a strange postscript to Lochore’s test career. He retired after the ′70 South African tour. But in ′71, there were frantic phone calls on a Friday, from All Blacks coach Vodanovich, begging Lochore to fill in at lock for an injured Peter Whiting in the second test against the Lions in Wellington the next day. Lochore, concerned he’d be “considered a bastard” if he let his country down, reluctantly agreed to play. The All Blacks lost, 13-3.
It would have been little consolation to him, but, in the days before mobile phones, he wrote a message that every Kiwi who has ever pulled on a rugby jersey would have loved to have penned.
His wife Pam was in town, so he wrote a note and left it on the kitchen table of their Wairarapa farmhouse. “Gone to Wellington to play test. Back on Sunday.”
In 1985, Lochore was appointed All Blacks coach. It was a time of upheaval in New Zealand rugby after a court order stopped a proposed All Blacks tour of South Africa.
In April 1986, 31 All Blacks formed a rebel team, The Cavaliers, and played 12 games in South Africa. In June, a French team arrived in New Zealand to play one test, in Christchurch, against the All Blacks.
All the Cavaliers were banned for two internationals. So Lochore found himself with an All Blacks squad to face France almost completely bereft of household names. “To be honest,” Baby Black No 8 Mike Brewer would admit 20 years later: “I didn’t know many of the other players. And some, I’d never even heard of before we played a trial in Blenheim.”
There’s probably never been a more nervous All Blacks team than the Baby Blacks, their fullback Greg Cooper says.
Lochore was the unsung hero of the test match.
“With all his worldly and rugby experience, he was able to keep a lid on the emotions in the side. He was just the right man for the job. He was someone you knew you could turn to and talk to, even though he had legendary status.”
Centre Joe Stanley, making his All Blacks debut as a 29-year-old, recalled that, “In the tunnel, waiting to run out, it was a bit scary. These guys are the French, the world’s best, and here we are, a bunch of little ratbags shoved together, trying to do these guys over.
“On the other hand, I guess we were also thinking, ‘What have we got to lose? We can only get stuck in. If we win, it’s a tremendous bonus’.”
The 18-9 victory to the All Blacks remains remarkable, but there would be even greater history to be made the following year.
Despite some strenuous opposition from northern hemisphere unions, the first World Cup kicked off in May, 1987.
Lochore now had the two best provincial coaches in the country, Auckland’s John Hart and Canterbury’s Alex “Grizz” Wyllie, working with him.
It’s a measure of Lochore’s lack of insecurities that he took on board Hart’s fervent advice to include a 22-year-old uncapped flanker, Michael Jones, in the squad. By the end of the Cup Jones was a superstar.
At their first meeting, all three coaches had agreed, Lochore would say, “that we didn’t have big enough forwards to foot it with the French, or the English or the Australians, and we knew we had to use all our skills and rugby know-how”.
“We agreed immediately we had to pick the players to suit the type of game we wanted, rather than impose a style on players.”
To the delight of New Zealand fans, the “type of game” involved running the ball, using a ginger-headed flying Englishman, John Gallagher, to dash into the line from fullback to create overlaps.
Lochore’s man-management skills were perfectly expressed in how he utilised the undoubted talents of his two coaching offsiders.
“When we got back from our first training run [of 1987],” Lochore said, “we agreed it was hopeless. The players were confused, there were too many mixed messages.
“So I said we should split up. John [Hart] would help at trainings in the North Island, and Alex [Wyllie] would help in the South Island. It seemed the ideal solution, and it worked.”
Less publicised was that they were the first, and, I’d bet good money, the only All Blacks to be billeted in private homes.
After flying to Wellington from Christchurch, where they’d beaten Fiji, 74-13, in their second game of the ‘87 tournament, they trooped onto a bus and were driven 90 minutes north to Pirinoa in the Wairarapa.
Privately, Lochore had been horrified to see how some of his players chose to change out of All Blacks gear when they left the sanctuary of the Poenamo hotel on the North Shore.
The wounds of the violent 1981 Springboks tour here, he saw, had been opened again by the unsanctioned Cavaliers tour of South Africa.
“The players were afraid of being abused or accosted, which is what the All Blacks had suffered through the early ′80s. People would come and stand right in front of you and abuse the hell out of you.”
He decided it was time for his men to feel the love in the heartland. At the local Tuhirangi Rugby Club, they were paired off like kids on a school trip, and assigned local farmers as hosts.
City boys like John Kirwan were nervous. A few weeks later, when we worked on a World Cup book, he joked, “You couldn’t see a street light or a McDonald’s for miles”.
But the night away largely served Lochore’s purpose. The players made their own decisions on how they’d use their time. Bruce Deans hot-wired a tractor he and Joe Stanley found on an early morning jog, and Deans took a nervous Stanley on a diesel-fumed joy ride. A.J. Whetton lost it in a farm bike race with Richard Loe, took a tumble, and landed in a pile of cow dung.
By the time they headed back to Wellington, the All Blacks were refreshed and unstoppable. Argentina were beaten 46-15 in the last pool game. Scotland fell, in a Christchurch quarter-final, 30-3. Wales were humiliated, in a semifinal in Brisbane. And in the final at Eden Park, France were dismissed 29-9.
Lochore stepped down as coach at the end of the World Cup, but he was still in demand at the top level. In 1995, he was the campaign manager for Laurie Mains’ squad at the Cup (Sir Colin Meads was the manager), and in 2007 he was one of Sir Graham Henry’s selectors. The titles were different, but in many ways the roles were similar, basically, that of a wise head, who the coaches knew had nothing but the good of the team at heart.
They say you should never meet your heroes, for risk of being disappointed. Sir Brian Lochore was a massive exception to that rule.
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.