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.

Kevin Skinner's legacy is more than just his play in 1956

It would be a great shame if All Black great Kevin Skinner, who died on Monday, aged 86, was to be remembered only for his 'policing' work during the 1956 series win over South Africa.

The details are part of rugby mythology and have often been greatly exaggerated.

It must have caused some frustration to the front row prop to be forever associated with the so-called 'sorting out' of the South African front row when he was recalled from retirement for the third and fourth Tests of the series which inflicted the first series loss on South Africa in the 20^th century.

Before that Skinner had won fame as part of the great Otago rugby team of 1947-50 that played under the control of coach Vic Cavanagh. He toured South Africa in 1949 when New Zealand's scrum proved so dysfunctional in comparison to the Springboks that they called in South Africa liaison man with the team Bo Wintle and Danie Craven to help them.

But, in spite of that, Skinner made his mark on the South Africans in the three Tests in which he played.

He played in the four-Test series against the British and Irish Lions, including the third Test where due to replacements not being allowed, New Zealand played with only six forwards as a result of injuries during the second half, and still won.

While selected as All Blacks captain against the 1952 Australians he did not get the job on the 1953-54 tour to Britain and France. But he did play 27 of the 35 matches.

So to 1956. For all the talk of how he used his punching power to sort out the Springbok scrum, Skinner maintained that there were only two incidents in the third Test and the talk was so bad afterwards about what allegedly went on that Skinner let it go for a while then wrote a letter to the editor of the Auckland Star saying that they had had a fair go with the subject and it was about time they looked at something else.

Skinner did tell author Bob Howitt in his book New Zealand Rugby Greats that his whole approach was based on not backing down.

"We had found in 1949 that the Boks would always try you on. If you showed them what you thought, and didn't back away, they settled down and played rugby," he said to Howitt.

Winston McCarthy in his book "Rugby in my Time" claimed to have the inside story on events in Christchurch.

"Skinner had his first hit in the second lineout in the Christchurch Test. Chris Koch stepped across him [in the first lineout] which blocked him from coming through, and Skinner warned him: 'Don't do it'.

"I think they're about the only words he spoke to them the whole of the tour. The ball went into touch and Koch did it again. So Skinner clocked him. Otherwise it would have just kept on happening. He was cheating, so Skinner said, 'Don't cheat'. There was no trouble in that front row."

McCarthy also related a conversation he had at the Test dinner after the Christchurch match with Springbok Jaapie Bekker.

"Jaapie said, 'Winston, wasn't Kevin Skinner the heavyweight champion of New Zealand?' I said, 'Ja, that's right. Back in 1947 I think it was, Jaapie. Heavyweight amateur champion'.

"He said, 'Does he still box in the right?' 'Oh no,' I said, 'Gee, Kev hasn't been in the ring since 1947'. Jaapie said, 'Well, tell him to take it on again. He's bloody good.'"

But putting it all into context was veteran New Zealand journalism J M Mackenzie who said what Skinner's return had done was give New Zealand 'sorely needed equality in hooking the ball from set scrums and definite supremacy in other aspects of scrummaging'.

South African tour correspondent Reg Sweet summed up the impact of Skinner's inclusion in the Test side when he said: "Skinner was an instant success in the front row, changing positions to oppose Bekker and Koch in their turn and stabilising the New Zealand scrum in a manner not achieved before.

"Skinner was tough, very tough. But he achieved the object of his recall to test rugby, and he walked off Lancaster Park at the end with sleeves rolled up as he always had in South Africa, looking as cool and unruffled as if he had been on a training trot."

In choosing the 30 best international players outside South Africa in his autobiography South African supremo Danie Craven said both Skinner and Johnny Simpson would be his props.

"Here we have two strong and heavy props who can take and give it, whose backs never show any signs of the strain they have to endure. What is more, they not only can stand the strain, but they have that little bit extra which makes the strain of their opponents wellnigh unbearable."

Skinner's place in rugby history is assured but it needs to be remembered for more than just the 1956 series. He was a key contributor to New Zealand finally ridding itself of the aftermath of the 2-3-2 scrum and developing the technique and power that would be the cornerstone of later generations of All Blacks packs.