Vale Ray Harper - a true rugby man

You're lucky in life sometimes when in your everyday working life you come into contact with people like Ray Harper, the former New Zealand Rugby Union councillor and life member of Southland Rugby, who died on Thursday after a lifetime of devotion to the game.

For 10 years as sports editor of The Southland Times, it was my privilege to work with Ray in his role as Southland's representative on the NZRU of the day and as member of the Southland Rugby Union's management committee.

Ray Harper, right, showing off Rugby Park's readiness for the 1987 Rugby World Cup games played in Invercargill to the tournament boss John Kendall-Carpenter while the writer tagged along for a few words for The Southland Times.

He was a terrific representative for the province who never held back if the province needed defending and ensured that every time a North Island rugby team was in town for a game with Southland, and the sun was shining, he would enquire if their travelling reporter ever needed sunglasses in order to cover the game.

There was none happier on the July day in 1977 when Bay of Plenty visited and the ground at Rugby Park was so dry that dust was raised whenever a high kick fell to ground. It helped that Brian McKechnie completed the feat of scoring in each possible way in Southland's win.

But there was a much stronger connection to the province. He was well known and respected in the commercial sector for his carpentry business.

It was at one SRFU management committee meeting around about 1980-81 that Harper said it was only a few years until Southland was due to celebrate its rugby centennial and he thought a committee should get together to start preparing for the occasion which would be in 1986. From that arose a relationship with Craigs Publishing which saw me commissioned to start working on a book to celebrate the occasion that became Something to Crow About. The luxury of five years to research the subject was typical of Harper's thinking.

It was while interviewing Ray about his own extensive playing and coaching involvement with the province in which his side beat the touring British & Irish Lions in the opening game of their 1966 tour and which a year earlier went within an ace of relieving Taranaki of the Ranfurly Shield when they drew 6-6, that he revealed how much rugby had helped him recover from the loss of his father as a youth when the pair of them were cycling on a street in Invercargill and his father had been killed.

He worked through a tough period in the New Zealand game around the 1981 Springbok tour which created so much division while running into him on the 1986 morning it was realised that the country's best players had flown out the evening before on an unofficial tour to South Africa he was mortified that such a thing should have happened.

The game was always the thing for Ray and it was fitting that he should have been given the job of managing Graham Mourie's side on their centenary tour to Wales in 1980. He revelled in the opportunity and carried his style into the international league with a memorable speech at the centennial dinner in Cardiff. He said he knew he could never hope to match the eloquence of the speakers who had gone before him, but as he listened to them and gazed above to the intricacies of the woodwork in the ceiling of the famed establishment they were in he wondered aloud how many of them might have been able to construct something like that they were seated under.

He was also a good guardian of the significant financial resources the SRFU had carefully built up over the years and anyone seeking to spend some of that money had to have a pretty good case to get it past himself and the SRFU treasurer Fred Ward.

So it was with some interest, having been forewarned, when the late Peter Tait suggested the SRFU needed to do something about further developing the all-weather grounds at Oreti Park that Ray's reaction was slightly less than muted when ballpark (excuse the pun) figures were thrown around about what it might cost. But it was decided to form a committee to look into the venture.

This resulted in the specific advancement of what became the Les George Oval with its own small grandstand and superb turf as a back-up playing surface to the often water-logged grounds in the city. Ray became one of its firm supporters and once again it proved a timely development.

Behind it all was his Pirates Rugby Club, now but all a distant memory in the wake of inevitable club mergers. However, throughout fair weather and foul, of which there tended to be plenty in Southland, Ray Harper was a constant attendee and there can be no greater measure of his commitment to the game. All the trappings that came with his subsequent appointments were just that, trappings. Ray Harper was your true rugby man.

Frank Oliver - One of the hard men of All Blacks rugby

Lynn McConnell began his sports journalism career in Frank Oliver's last days in Southland but that was plenty of time to observe the legend in action. He pens some memories on the occasion of Oliver's death, aged 65, in Palmerston North on Monday.

It's ironic that hard man Frank Oliver's type was symbolic of rugby's amateur era yet he played a key role in the game when it went professional as a coach.

He was the first coach of the Hurricanes and while his time as a coach never reached the greatest heights, his reputation as a player was always likely to be his longest legacy. His death in Palmerston North on Monday took the rugby world by surprise.

Oliver, 65, came out of Southland, a policeman, hence the nickname 'Filth', as a young player who quickly made his mark as a tough nut. All Blacks status was hard won from the deep south and Oliver had to serve his apprenticeship in first-class play for seven seasons before finally being welcomed into the highest levels of the game.

It was in 1976, the year he made his Test debut in the fourth Test against South Africa, that his reputation as a player not to get on the wrong side of was obvious.

Ireland were touring New Zealand just before the All Blacks were to head off for a tour of South Africa. After a tough match against Canterbury, the Irish flew into Invercargill for their last game before the only Test of the tour.

The Irish were determined not to be pushed around after their Canterbury game so at the first hint of trouble the famed '99' call was to go up when everyone would rush into the resulting melee.

The game was only a few minutes old when all hell broke loose on the field between the Irish and Southland. Players ran from everywhere to get involved but, as a classic sequence of photos taken at the time show, the only person not involved in the fight was Oliver. He was pictured standing looking for someone to hit but the Irish had done their homework and no-one was prepared to take him on.

Stories abound of scrummaging problems on the following South African tour and when they involved front rowers the story was that a gap would open up between the hooker and prop on Oliver's side of the scrum and he would be given the room to dispense the sort of justice understood only by those in the front five.

In his final season with Southland, in 1977, the provincial team was on a four-match tour of the North Island, the second game of which was a Ranfurly Shield challenge against Manawatu. Oliver was flown up to join the team for that game only. At breakfast on the morning of the challenge he was at a table with Southland flanker, and future All Black, Leicester Rutledge who had broken a rib on the Saturday previous against Wellington.

Rutledge was telling Oliver that he could play despite the pain and Oliver told him that he was silly to attempt to play. He could do himself real damage in playing with a broken rib and he shouldn't play. Oliver had his way.

But three months later on the All Blacks tour of France after the side had been hammered in the first Test by the French, Oliver took part in the marvellous second Test where coach Jack Gleeson and captain Graham Mourie worked out a plan to run the French off their feet. It involved Oliver and Andy Haden taking part in a series of short lineouts which flummoxed the French allowing New Zealand one of the great victories of the era, all of it played by Oliver with a broken rib!

In that same 1977 season, Southland hosted Canterbury at Rugby Park and with time running out an assault on the Canterbury line looked like producing a match-winning try for 16 stone Southland centre Wayne Boynton. He was goal-line bound when corner-flagging Canterbury No.8, Alex 'Grizz' Wyllie in desperation flung out a stiff arm which felled Boynton as if he had been poleaxed.

Coming across from the lineout that had preceded the action Oliver began winding up the only retribution he knew from way back and hit Wyllie square with the most superb punch. The Rock of Amberley's knees shook and he needed to find a goal post to lean on but he refused to go down. There was never a hint of Oliver being sent off on his home midden. That was how business got done in the days before television surveillance. Southland goal-kicker Brian McKechnie landed the penalty goal, but in denying Southland a six-point chance, Wyllie had ensured Southland still lost the game.

Wyllie went looking for Oliver from the re-start but never caught up with him.

In 1978, Oliver had transferred to Otago and it was from there that he was awarded the All Blacks captaincy when Mourie was injured and unable to play and he led the side to Bledisloe Cup success.

Oliver played 17 Tests for the All Blacks, a number cut short after a back injury suffered against France in the first home Test of 1979, and 43 games in total and made 57 appearances for Southland from 1969-77, eight for Otago in 1978-79 and 54 for Manawatu.