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.