Легендарный тренер «Алл Блэкс» Сир Кэлин Мидс скончался в возрасте 85 лет

The walk is the thing. It is the afternoon of Saturday 2 December 1967, at Murrayfield in Edinburgh. The sky has the bruised look of an east-coast Scottish winter and the ground is the heavy black-green of a pitch that has held up but only just. The All Blacks are leading Scotland 14–3 with three minutes to play. They have, on the same tour, beaten England at Twickenham and Wales in Cardiff and France in Paris, and a win here will close out an unbeaten tour. It would have closed out something greater. The Irish leg of the tour was cancelled because of a foot-and-mouth outbreak, and with it went the chance to complete the first Grand Slam any touring side had ever achieved. Brian Lochore is the captain. The referee is an Irishman, Kevin Kelleher, in daily life the headmaster of St Conleth’s College in Ballsbridge, Dublin, and one of the most experienced officials in the game, a man who would take charge of twenty-three Tests between 1960 and 1972. The crowd has settled into the satisfaction of a beaten home side watching the cleanest tourists of the post-war era close out a tour. And then, between the Scottish twenty-five and the halfway line, a loose ball squirts from a ruck. The Scotland outside-half, Davie Chisholm, stoops to gather. The largest man on the field, six foot four and seventeen stone in the playing weight he has held for a decade, is closing on the ball at full pace. He is thirty-one years old. He has been an All Black for ten and a half years. His name is Colin Earl Meads. He is, that day, the most respected forward in international rugby and he has, ten minutes earlier, been formally cautioned by Mr Kelleher. The caution has not been heard by most of the crowd. Meads stretches for the ball with his right boot. The boot finds the ball. The ball goes into Chisholm’s body. Chisholm goes down. Mr Kelleher sees what he sees. Lochore arrives at a run. So does Ken Gray, the great loose-head prop from Wellington, and Chris Laidlaw the half-back, and they form the small protest that has no chance because Mr Kelleher, who has refereed the match like the schoolmaster he is, has already decided. He looks Meads in the eye. He says, in a voice not raised, the words that go into the New Zealand sporting imagination for the next fifty years. You’re off. Meads said later, to the interviewers who asked him about it for the next fifty years, that the only thing he could think to do was to walk. He walked from the halfway line to the tunnel without looking up. He sat in the dressing room with his head in his hands. The match ended 14–3; the tour finished unbeaten; the rest of the team came in and the room went quiet. He had been, before that ball ran loose at Murrayfield, only the second All Black ever sent off in a Test match, after Cyril Brownlie at Twickenham in 1925. He said more than once in later life that the memory never left him. This is a profile of the man who took that walk. It is an attempt to set down, plainly, the figure who carried the All Black jersey from 1957 to 1971, who in his own country was simply called Pinetree, who on his King Country sheep farm at Te Kūiti raised five children with his wife Verna, who supported the cancelled 1985 tour to apartheid South Africa and the following autumn coached the rebel Cavaliers tour that broke the country in two for a season, and who gave more than four decades of unpaid work to the IHC and died on a Sunday in August 2017 with most of New Zealand putting a rugby ball on the front doorstep. He was, in 1999, voted New Zealand Rugby’s Player of the Century. He is, in any reasonable accounting, the most important All Black of the century in which the All Blacks were a kind of small national religion. He was also, by the standards of the international game even of his own time, an aggressive, sometimes violent, sometimes badly disciplined player. The two are not separable. They are the same man. The hagiography that has accreted since his death – the rugby balls, the bronze on Rora Street, the children’s books – is in danger of softening him into something he was not. He was harder than that, and in the small things kinder than the public understood, and the two things are the same man. A King Country boyhood Colin Earl Meads was born on 3 June 1936 at Cambridge in the Waikato, the elder of the two Meads boys, to Vere Meads and Ida, née Gray. Vere drove a cream lorry for the dairy company and ran a small block of land. The family moved south, before Colin was at school, to a hill-country sheep and dairy farm near Te Kūiti in the heart of the King Country, the limestone country of deep gorges and hard ridges. The farm at Waitete was rough country – tomo holes, blackberry, the ridges hard work even on a horse, the back paddocks accessible only on foot. Vere was an austere, undemonstrative father. Ida ran the house and held the family together, and there were two boys close together in age – Colin and his younger brother Stan, born in 1938 – who from the time they were ten were a working unit on the place. Colin played in the Te Kūiti High School first fifteen at fifteen and was taller than every master on the staff by sixteen. The Meads boys did not train, in any modern sense. They worked. They shore sheep all day in the cold woolsheds at Waitete, ran behind the dogs through the back blocks, lifted fallen pines off the fenceline, and trotted the four miles into town. Bill English, as Prime Minister, told the press in August 2017 that he remembered hearing the stories of the King Country lock who sheared all day and ran in the evenings. The story was true. The running was up the hill behind the woolshed, in the dark. He was nineteen, in 1955, when he played his first game for King Country, a senior side that was at that point at the bottom of the second division and short of physical men. He was a number eight and a flanker; the lock’s position would come later. The 1956 trial matches for the All Black side to play South Africa – the great series of that year, won by the All Blacks 3–1, the country in a state of total absorption – brought him to the selectors’ attention. He was, in their estimation, a year too young to be picked against the Springboks. The selection had a certain rough mercy about it. He went home to Te Kūiti and the woolshed and shore through the off-season, the brother Stan now alongside him in the senior King Country pack, and waited. The Australian tour, 1957 The 1957 New Zealand tour of Australia carried two Tests against the Wallabies. Meads was twenty, with a single year of provincial rugby behind him, the youngest forward in the squad. He made his Test debut against Australia at Sydney on 25 May 1957, on the side of the scrum at flanker. The All Blacks won 25–11. A week later in Brisbane, moved to the wing after an injury in the backline, he scored his first Test try. Wilson Whineray, then twenty-one and on the same tour, became the close friend who would the following year be the All Black captain. The nickname came on the 1958 under-23 tour to Japan, given to him by the Taranaki half-back Kevin Briscoe. Meads in the Japanese hotel showers, six foot four with the long pale legs and the heavy upper body and the shock of dark hair, was Pinetree from that day on. Verna Laing and the farm at Waitete He met Verna Laing, of Te Kūiti, at a King Country dance. She was a calm, watchful young woman with a strong practical streak; she had grown up on a farm herself, knew the country, knew the men, and had no time for any of the nonsense that the rugby had begun to attach to him. They were married in 1957, when he was twenty-one. Five children followed – Karen, Kelvin, Rhonda, Glynn and Shelley. The eldest son Kelvin would farm. Glynn, the second son, would play for King Country and earn the inevitable family nickname Pinecone. Rhonda would represent New Zealand at netball; Shelley, the youngest, at basketball. The farm at Waitete grew through the 1960s into a working sheep and cattle property, with Verna running the office, the children running between paddocks, and Colin away on All Black tours for ten weeks at a stretch in the southern winters of his playing years. What this meant in practice was that Verna ran a hill-country farm with five children and a husband who was on the other side of the world for months at a stretch. She did not, in any of the interviews she gave, complain about it. Colin, when asked, said that the farm was his, but the running of it was hers. The marriage lasted sixty years and ended only with his death. The 1960s, and the great forward The All Black side of the late 1950s and 1960s was the closest thing the country has had to a continuous national team across three coaches. Whineray became captain in 1958. Fred Allen took the coaching chair in 1966. Brian Lochore took the captaincy in 1966 when Whineray retired. Through all of it – the 1959 home series against the Lions, the 1960 tour to South Africa, the 1963–64 tour to Britain and France, the 1965 home series against the Springboks, the unbeaten 1966 home series against the Lions, the unbeaten 1967 tour to Britain and France – Meads was the lock the side was built around. He played 133 matches in the All Black jersey across fifteen seasons, 55 of them Tests, and 361 first-class matches in total, a New Zealand record that stood for forty-two years until Keven Mealamu passed it in 2015. The 1960 tour to South Africa, the great unfinished tour of his early career, was lost 2–1 to the Springboks across four Tests in heavy heat. He was twenty-four. He played all four. The 1963–64 tour to Britain was won and the team came home unbeaten in the Tests. He had become, by the time of the 1965 home series against the Springboks, the player around whom the lineout was organised. He took ball at two and at four. He locked the scrum with his brother Stan in eleven Tests between 1961 and 1966, and the Meads pairing became one of the most stable and most feared second rows in international rugby. Stan, two years younger and slightly lighter, was the quiet one of the pair. Colin was the talker, in his Te Kūiti drawl, when there was talking to be done. He was, by the standards of his era, an athletic forward. He was 192 centimetres and 102 kilos. He was, by the standards of 2026 international locks, slightly built and rather short. He played the game on the assumption that the man on the other side of the lineout was as tough as he was and would have to be persuaded otherwise. He punched. He stamped on hands at the back of rucks. He drove with the head and the elbow into mauls in a way that, by the law of even his own period, was at the edge of the legal. He was warned for foul play more than once. He punched the British Lions half-back David Watkins during the 1966 home series. In Sydney in 1968, in a Test against the Wallabies at the Sydney Cricket Ground, he wrenched the leg of the Australian half-back Ken Catchpole as Catchpole was pinned in a ruck, ending Catchpole’s career and starting a controversy that followed both men for decades. In 1969 against Wales he broke the jaw of the Welsh hooker Jeff Young. None of these incidents was prosecuted. New Zealand rugby, internally, treated them with a complicated reticence. They were, at one level, things that happened in matches; they were also things that did not happen to most other forwards. He was, in the on-field language of the era, a hard man. The phrase covered an old code about not retreating, never going second, accepting whatever was sent and sending it back, and in fairness to him he applied it equally to himself. He played a tour match in 1970 in South Africa, against Eastern Transvaal at Springs, with a lower left forearm that had been broken by an opposition boot in the sixth minute of the match. The first five-eighth Earle Kirton remembered asking him, as Meads stood holding the arm at an unnatural angle, “Aw shit, Pinetree, you haven’t broken it have ya?” Meads played on to the end. The All Blacks won 24–3. An X-ray after the match confirmed the break, and Meads said, in the line that his country has remembered ever since, “At least we won the bloody game.” The Catchpole incident sat differently with him. The instruction, as he told interviewers later, had been to stop the Wallaby half-back burrowing back into the pack. He grabbed a leg and pulled. The other leg was pinned by another player, and the result was a ruptured groin and torn hamstring that ended Catchpole’s career at twenty-eight. The two men were eventually reconciled. Years later, warned before a Sydney testimonial dinner for Catchpole that he was going to get booed off the bloody stage if he showed his face, Meads replied, “Well, all the more reason why I should bloody come.” He went, and he was not booed. Catchpole died on 21 December 2017, four months after Meads. Murrayfield, December 1967 Which brings the story back to the long walk. The 1967 tour to Britain, France and North America was the high point of the Lochore-Allen years. The team played seventeen matches, won sixteen and drew one, 3–3 with East Wales. The cancellation of the Irish leg, because of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, took away the chance to complete the first Grand Slam any side had ever achieved. Meads, by then thirty-one and the senior forward in the side, was the player around whom the pack worked. The Murrayfield Test on 2 December was the last of the four Tests. The All Blacks led 14–3 with three minutes left, the result long settled, when the Chisholm incident occurred. What it cost him is hard to overstate. He had been raised, on the Te Kūiti farm and through Vere Meads’ blunt code, on the principle that the worst thing a man could do was let his side down. The sending off, in his own accounting, was exactly that. Kelleher’s own verdict was matter of fact. “As I saw it, it was a matter of indifference to Meads whether he kicked the man or the ball”, the referee said later. Fifty years on, Meads could still hear the words. “He said ‘you’re off’,” he told the broadcaster, “and once they say that, you’re gone.” He did not, in those terms, ever recover from it. He went on to play another four years of Test rugby. He captained the All Blacks in his final international series, against the Lions in 1971, having waited his turn behind Whineray and Lochore. The series was lost 2–1, the Lions becoming the first British team ever to win a series in New Zealand. The final Test at Eden Park on 14 August 1971 ended 14–14. Meads walked off the field at thirty-five. He was awarded the MBE that year. At the end of 1971 a Land Rover accident on the farm left him with a serious back injury that ended his All Black career. He played on for King Country, captained a President’s XV against the All Blacks in 1973, and then retired. The numbers, written down: 361 first-class matches, 133 in the All Black jersey, 55 Tests, 7 Test tries, fifteen seasons at the top level. The numbers do not, in the way numbers never do, explain him. King Country, the council, and the long second career He went home to Te Kūiti. The farm was the centre of the next forty-four years of his life. He coached King Country, joined the New Zealand Rugby Football Union council in 1992, and managed the All Blacks in 1994 and 1995, including at the 1995 World Cup – the tournament of the food-poisoning episode in Johannesburg and the lost final to South Africa. He stayed close to the men he had played with: Whineray, Lochore, the Going brothers, Bryan Williams the great Auckland wing. He also became, in the slow accreting way of public figures in a small country, a kind of national property. He gave after-dinner speeches and fronted advertising campaigns. One Te Kūiti local, Jean Hitchen, remembered that his greeting for her never varied. “Gidday girl, how’s it going.” He hated being called Sir. 1985, and the cancelled tour This is the difficult middle of the story, and it cannot be glossed. By 1985 the relationship between New Zealand rugby and South African rugby had become, in international and domestic political terms, the dominant divide in the country. The 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand had been the most divisive event in post-war national life. The Hamilton match had been abandoned mid-pitch by anti-tour protesters; the Auckland Test had been played under flour bombs and barbed wire; hundreds of New Zealanders had been arrested and the country had spent two months arguing with itself in the streets. The New Zealand Rugby Union had nonetheless, in early 1985, accepted an invitation from the South African Rugby Board for a return tour to South Africa later that year. Two Auckland lawyers, Patrick Finnigan and Philip Recordon, took action in the High Court. On 13 July 1985 Justice Casey granted an interim injunction halting the tour on the ground that the rugby union’s constitution required it to act in the interests of the game in New Zealand and that touring an apartheid country was contrary to that interest. The tour was cancelled. The country, depending on which part of it you stood in, breathed out or felt betrayed. Colin Meads was on the record as supporting the tour. He believed, as he said publicly more than once, that rugby and politics should be kept separate. He believed that an All Black side should be free to play the best opposition the world could offer, that the South African players were not personally responsible for the policies of their government, and that the cancellation of the tour was a disservice to the players on both sides who had trained for it. He did not, in any of his statements of the period, defend apartheid as a system. He thought, in his own framing, that he was defending the game. This was, in 1985, a position held by a substantial minority of New Zealanders. It was also, in the assessment of most New Zealanders since, a position whose moral arithmetic did not work. Apartheid, in 1985, was a system that classified human beings by skin colour and confined them by law to separate amenities, separate education, separate residential areas, separate political existence. South African rugby in 1985 was, in its formal selection, a white sport; the integration of black and brown players into provincial sides had begun but the Springbok itself was a settler emblem of the Afrikaner state. Touring South Africa as a national rugby side was, as the international anti-apartheid movement and the United Nations argued, conferring a kind of equal-state legitimacy on a regime that did not deserve it. The Lange government, elected in 1984, had taken the formal New Zealand position that the tour should not happen. The High Court had agreed. The country, on balance, had agreed. Meads disagreed. And the following year, the second decision came. The South African Rugby Board, faced with a cancelled official All Black tour, invited a replacement side under the name of the New Zealand Cavaliers – an unofficial team, sanctioned by no national body, made up of most of the All Black squad of the period. Two players declined to go, John Kirwan and David Kirk. The All Black captain Andy Dalton went, and captained the Cavaliers until his jaw was broken early in the tour, when Jock Hobbs took over the captaincy; Kirk became All Black captain in the aftermath. The Cavaliers played four unofficial Tests against the Springboks in April and May 1986 and lost the series 3–1. The coach, who took the job after Fred Allen declined it, was Colin Meads. He had been elected to the national selection panel earlier that same year. He went, by his own account, because he had been asked and because he believed the players had the right to make the trip. He went knowing that the New Zealand Rugby Union had not sanctioned the tour. He went knowing that the Lange government opposed it. He went knowing that the High Court had ruled that an official tour was contrary to the interests of the game. He coached the side. The tour ran for two months. The country, watching from home, divided as it had divided in 1981. He did not apologise. He was, on his return, sacked from the national selection panel; the players were stood down for two Tests of the 1986 home series against Australia. The 1987 Rugby World Cup, the first of its kind, was played the following year in New Zealand and Australia, and Meads was outside the official All Black setup for the tournament. He did not hold office in the game again until his election to the NZRFU council six years later. It is impossible, in 2026, to write this paragraph without putting a clear stake in the ground. The Cavaliers tour was wrong. The High Court had ruled the official tour contrary to the interests of the game in New Zealand; the Cavaliers tour was the same tour with the formal label removed, an attempt to evade by paperwork what had been ruled out in substance. It conferred on the apartheid regime the legitimacy of hosting a New Zealand side in a year when Nelson Mandela, by then moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison, was in his twenty-fourth year of imprisonment. It cost the men who went the trust of a generation of New Zealanders who had, in 1981, stood in front of horses at Hamilton. And Meads went anyway, and coached the side, and stood on the touchline at Newlands and Loftus Versfeld. He did not, in subsequent decades, repudiate the decision. He said he understood why people had been angry and had thought, at the time, that the rugby came first. He said in his last interviews that he had perhaps not understood the politics as fully as he should have. He did not say he had been wrong. The same private code that had taken him on the long walk at Murrayfield in 1967 was the code that took him to Newlands in 1986. He believed he had a duty to the side, and the duty exceeded everything else, and the wider judgement of the country was secondary. It is possible to admire the consistency and to regret, sharply, the conclusion. The Cavaliers tour is now in the textbooks as a moral failure. The men who went paid for it with a two-Test stand-down, and the tour is still argued over four decades on. Meads, by the late 2000s, would speak softly about the era and turn the conversation back to the playing. It was not a complete answer. It was the answer he had. The IHC and the knighthood What complicates the moral picture, and what makes the Meads story refuse to settle into either the heroic or the cautionary, is what he did with the next thirty years. He worked, almost without rest, for the IHC – the New Zealand association for people with intellectual disabilities. His involvement ran for forty-three years. He led the organisation’s King Country sub-branch from 1974, hosted farm walks, auctioned off jerseys and fronted appeals, and he was patron of the IHC Calf and Rural Scheme, which has raised more than forty million dollars across four decades. He took no fee. In 1999 New Zealand Rugby voted him its Player of the Century. He was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2001. The knighthood came in 2009, when titles were restored by the John Key government and his existing honour was redesignated Knight Companion. He hated being called Sir. He was, in his own town, until the day he died, simply Pinetree. Te Kūiti, August 2017 The cancer was pancreatic. The diagnosis was made public in August 2016, two months after his eightieth birthday, with an estimate that ran in months rather than years. The bronze statue on the corner of Rora Street, by the sculptor Natalie Stamilla, had been commissioned by the King Country community. It was unveiled on Monday 19 June 2017, and Colin and Stan Meads pulled the cover away themselves, Colin on his feet beneath his own likeness. He died in Te Kūiti Hospital on Sunday 20 August 2017, aged eighty-one, nine weeks after the unveiling. The funeral was held at the Les Munro Centre in Te Kūiti the following Monday, 28 August. The town closed for the day. Stan Meads spoke, and so did a daughter and grandchildren. Brian Lochore, who himself had less than three years to live, ended his tribute with two sentences the press carried the next morning. “I’ve lost a friend. New Zealand has lost an icon.” Up and down the country, in the days after he died, families left rugby balls on their front doorsteps and lawns. The custom was not organised by anyone. It spread from household to household until there were rugby balls on doorsteps in suburban Christchurch and West Auckland and outside small primary schools across the country. It was a kind of national gesture for a man who had, as much as any New Zealander of the second half of the twentieth century, the country’s permission to stand for it. Lady Verna survived him by four years. She died in December 2021, aged eighty-five, and was mourned across the King Country as he had been. What we ought to remember The hardest job for any biographer of Colin Meads is to keep two truths in the same room without resolving them. He was the best All Black of the twentieth century, and he was a player who broke the laws of the game and the bones of opposing players in ways that would, in 2026, have him stood down for half a season at a time. He was a faithful husband, a steady father, a pillar of his small town, and a tireless fundraiser for one of the country’s gentlest charities, and he was the man who in 1986 took a squad of All Blacks to apartheid South Africa against the wishes of the elected government and the considered conscience of his country. He was an inarticulate man in front of a microphone and a man whose presence filled a room without his having to speak. He was, in interviews, dry, wry, slightly impatient with sentiment. He hated being called Sir. The version of Meads that is convenient to the country – the warm grandfather of the IHC dinners, the kindly Pinetree of the rugby balls on lawns – is real, and it is not the whole story. The version of Meads that is convenient to a certain kind of progressive critic – the unrepentant Cavalier, the foul-play merchant of Sydney 1968 – is also real, and is also not the whole story. The man held both, and his country has, since his death, been working out how to hold both at once. What the country mostly does – in the bronze on Rora Street, in the rugby balls left on lawns, in the IHC fundraisers that still carry his name – is decide that the harder edges are forgiveable in light of the rest. This is a generous national instinct and it is not, in my view, a wrong one. It is also incomplete. The reason it is incomplete is that the harder edges are not separable from the rest. The same private code that produced one of these acts produced all of them. He believed the team came first; the team was the All Blacks, was King Country, was Te Kūiti, was Verna and the children, eventually was the IHC. He served the team. He did not distinguish between the moments when serving the team led him into rooms the country wanted him in and the moments when it did not. The country changed around him. New Zealand grew up, between 1981 and 1990, into a slightly more honest version of itself; he did not, in any visible way, grow up with it on the question of South Africa, and that friction is the thing that makes a writing-down of the life difficult. The rugby balls on lawns are a piece of the truth. The 1986 tour photographs at Newlands are also a piece of the truth. What we are left with is a New Zealander whose stature was earned across fifteen years of brutal physical labour for the national side, who applied to that work the only ethic the King Country had given him, who took that ethic into rooms where it was not adequate to the question, and who came home in the end and was held by his town and his country with a tenderness he had not, by his own admission, ever known how to ask for. He was a man we will not see again, because the kind of New Zealand that produced him – the hill-country dairy-and-sheep economy, the woolshed culture, the unbroken Saturday-afternoon rugby of provincial New Zealand from 1955 to 1985 – is itself mostly gone. If you want a single image to keep, keep the one from the unveiling on Rora Street on 19 June 2017. The bronze is larger than life, the heavy boots set apart, the jersey hanging loose. Beneath it, nine weeks before the end, stood the eighty-one-year-old man it represents, on his feet, his brother Stan beside him, the two of them pulling the cover away together, as they had done most of the work of their lives. He had, in his own way of accounting, only played the game and tried to come home. The country decided that was worth a statue. Sources and further reading - Alex Veysey, Colin Meads All Black (Collins, 1974) – the first authorised biography, written at the end of his playing career; the central source for the 1957–1971 years and the contemporary voice of the man. - Brian Turner, Meads (Hodder Moa Beckett, 2002) – the long late-career biography by the Otago poet; the central source for the post-playing decades, the IHC work, and the late reflections on Murrayfield and the Cavaliers. - Hugh McIlvanney, The Observer profiles – the most penetrating contemporaneous English-language profile work on Meads, written by the great Scottish sports writer during and after the 1967 tour. - NZHistory, Colin Meads – the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s biographical entry. - NZHistory, Colin ‘Pinetree’ Meads born – short biographical summary including the nickname origin. - NZHistory, Cavaliers rugby tour, 1986 – the Ministry’s short summary of the rebel tour. - World Rugby Hall of Fame, Colin Meads – the international governing body’s inductee profile. - Wikipedia, Colin Meads – comprehensive cross-referenced biographical entry. - Britannica, Colin Earl Meads – concise biographical entry. - ESPN, Colin Meads – 50 years on from the Murrayfield sending-off – detailed retrospective on the 1967 incident with the recollections of Meads and Kevin Kelleher. - The Spinoff, An oral history of the time Colin Meads played rugby with a broken arm – Earle Kirton and team-mates on the 1970 Eastern Transvaal match. - NZ Herald obituary, Sir Colin Meads, 1936–2017 – the New Zealand Herald’s August 2017 obituary. - NZ Herald, Sir Colin Meads, a down-to-earth legend of heartland New Zealand – tributes from the Te Kūiti community in the days after the death. - RNZ, Colin Meads – the man who built the All Blacks – the public broadcaster’s career retrospective. - RNZ, Farewelling Sir Colin – Te Kūiti, 28 August 2017 – photographs from the funeral. - Sky Sports, Thousands bid farewell to All Blacks legend Sir Colin Meads – funeral coverage including Brian Lochore’s tribute. - The Scotsman, Remembering the rebel All Blacks tour of apartheid South Africa – the Cavaliers tour in retrospect, including its consequences for the 1987 World Cup squad. - NZ Herald, Lady Verna Meads dies – the Te Awamutu Courier obituary of Lady Verna in December 2021. - Scoop, IHC New Zealand pays tribute to Colin Meads – the IHC’s tribute, including his forty-three years of involvement and the Calf and Rural Scheme. - The Roar, My mate ‘Catchy’ was the greatest halfback I ever saw – an Australian recollection of Ken Catchpole’s career and the 1968 incident. A note for readers This profile is the latest in Newswire’s Great New Zealanders series – long-form portraits of New Zealanders whose lives shaped the country, including in ways that the country has had to grow into. If you have a Meads memory of your own – a King Country club rugby afternoon in the 1960s, a Murrayfield seat in 1967, a rugby ball on a front doorstep in August 2017, an IHC fundraiser the man came to in person – we’d love to hear it. Please leave a comment below.