This was a contribution to a book about growing up in a rugby-playing country.
In Palmerston North in the winter of 1959, I sat down and wrote to an All Black. I was ten years old and the letter was in my best handwriting.
The letter was to Terry Lineen, the All Black second five eight who could float through gaps which he identified using radar. He was elegant and gifted and as Red Smith once said of a pitcher in American baseball ‘he could throw a lamb-chop past a wolf’. The next player who combined strength and subtlety in this same way was Bruce Robertson, who drifted upright past opponents who seemed to accompany him and offer whatever assistance they could. It was ridiculous and it looked easy and no-one else could do it.
In those days there were four tests a year rather than one a week and they actually mattered. Nobody sang the national anthem and if a player scored a try he returned to his position in solitude and waited until the fuss died down. Nobody got paid. The players all had other jobs. Like Ed Hillary, who climbed the highest mountain in the world, but was really a beekeeper.
The only way to watch rugby at that time was to be at the game or hope that a few seconds of a Test Match appeared in newsreel footage at the pictures.
For the kids of Palmerston North, however, there were the All Black Trials, matches between the Possibles and the Probables, imaginary sides made up of real players. Squadrons of us primary school kids would fill the Manawatu Showgrounds and watch our heroes before sprinting into no man’s land after the match and getting everyone’s autograph.
The national selectors should have paid more attention to us at these fixtures. We were good. We went for balance in a side but we rewarded flair and our selections stand up well to this day. Basil Bridge and I picked Kel Tremain a year before the selectors did. Kel ran flat; nothing deceptive but he processed things fast and he was up on the opposition like a writ. The selectors ignored him until the Lions scored four great tries against us in the first test in Dunedin and the NZRFU referred to our notes and popped Kel on the side of the All Black scrum for the next eight years. That first 1959 Lions test match was the Dunkirk of New Zealand rugby. On the one hand firepower, élan, tactics and quick thinking. On the other hand (ours) Don Clarke kicked 6 penalties. As Churchill said at the time ‘We must be careful not to assign to this deliverance, the attributes of a victory.’
Observant kids on bikes who had been in attendance at the Manawatu Showgrounds had sensed this would happen. We’d made a few changes but they hadn’t been introduced. We’d picked Red Conway for example. How he’d missed selection for Dunedin we couldn’t understand. He’d come down from Taranaki and he’d taken the Trial match apart. He was all over the paddock and was one of the first forwards we’d ever seen turn up among the mid-field backs looking for part-time work.
We’d also earmarked the big Waikato lock Pickering. I was so confident I got his autograph twice. He said ‘You’ve already got mine’ but I wasn’t convinced and he gave it to me again. I may be the only 60 year old kid in the world with E A R Pickering’s name signed twice, one above the other because he was right and because he was genial, in my autograph book (I’ll leave it to the state. It’s an important record. It’s not just mine. It belongs to the nation).
A lot of people think selection is easy. It isn’t. We had our difficulties. We were troubled by the Briscoe/Urban question at halfback and we didn’t spot Ralph Caulton, the Wellington winger who looked as if he’d arrived to check the gas meter and then zipped over for two tries in a dream debut in the second test at Athletic Park (I was there that day and Keith Quinn was a ball boy. After the match Keith got the ball from the final kick and returned it to the kicker, Donald Barry Clarke, the famously accurate porpoise from Morrinsville whose brother Ian was still propping the New Zealand scrum at 112. Don thanked Quinnie very much and, recognising a good keen man, gave him a pie).
Terry Lineen wrote back to me.
John Clarke,
18 Milverton Ave.,
Palmerston North.
The letter thanked me, encouraged me and thought perhaps I might be interested in the signatures of the All Blacks who played in the third test against the Lions (which we won 22-8). These were all on a separate sheet. Each player was named and each had signed next to his name.
I still feel good about this letter.
When Fred Dagg first appeared on television in the 1970s, he got letters from kids all over New Zealand. Every kid who wrote to Fred Dagg received a reply. The reason Fred wrote back to all these kids is that Terry Lineen wrote back to me.
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