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.

Sir Nick Shehadie never forgot his rugby mates

Having only met Sir Nick Shehadie once was no impediment to understanding the stature of one of the great men of world rugby.

Under the circumstances, and having heard of his reputation from some of his opponents, there was something of a feeling of already knowing him. 

Two men specifically helped in this regard.

One was Southland player, coach and administrator Ray Harper who went on to become a New Zealand Rugby Union councillor and manager of the All Blacks in 1980 who spoke often about playing against the big Australian forward, and then meeting him several times during the 1980 All Blacks tour of Australia.

The other was a little more personal but involved another Southland rugby identity, C.E. 'Eddie' Robinson, a flanker from world rugby's southernmost rugby club Bluff who was an All Black in 1951-52 and who should have been on the 1953-54 tour to Britain and France, but that's another story.

While researching my history of Southland rugby, Something to Crow About, I rang Eddie to see if he would be available for an interview about his experiences with Southland. I knew he was pretty crook with cancer and said to him I was aware he wasn't well and that I would understand if he didn't feel up to it. He said, "No Lynn, come on down, it will be great to chat."

He was fantastic and had some great yarns. We talked for ages.

He said when he was selected for the 1951 tour to Aussie, Bob Duff took him under his wing. He thought it was because they were both prematurely bald. Duff and Shehadie were mates and so when Robinson came on the scene Shehadie always called Duff and Robinson 'Dad and Son'.

Robinson made a big impression on both sides on his first tour, having arranged for a significant number of Bluff oysters to be sent to Sydney for both teams to enjoy after the first Test.

Anyway, early on the return trip to New Zealand in 1952, Australia played Southland just before the first Test of the tour. Southland beat them 24-9, the only provincial side to win against the tourists.

At one of the first lineouts Shehadie went up for the ball and Eddie hit him. Shehadie ended up flat on his back in the Rugby Park mud. He looked up at Robinson and said ' Your bloody old man put you up to that didn't he?" 

The loss to Southland could not have been too off-putting, Australia won the first Test 14-9.

It was all part of the banter the trio enjoyed and Robinson recalled they had some great times together.

Anyway, 40 years later as a guest at the NZRU centennial  dinner in Wellington,  Sir Nick's and my paths were about to intersect. He and Tony O'Reilly were the guest speakers.

At the end of the speeches all the knobs gravitated to O'Reilly and Sir Nick was left sitting on his own.

I went over and sat beside him and said "Sir Nick, you don't know me from a bar of soap, but I wrote the centennial history of Southland rugby and one of the people I interviewed for it was Eddie Robinson."

He said, "Dear old Eddie, how sad it was when he died."

I said to him that Eddie had been very sick when I spoke with him, but that "when he talked about you and Bob Duff and the fun you had his spirits really lifted." 

And at that Sir Nick broke down and said "Thank you very much for telling me that, it means so much to me." I spent a few more minutes with him and then headed back to my seat.

For all that happened to him in his subsequent rich and fulfilling life, Sir Nick could still be moved by the memory of his rugby mates.

He was a man who defined the spirit of rugby at its very best.

That was evident when in 1983 he was asked to open the Golden Oldies rugby festival in Sydney, the third staging of the event. He was 57 then and when finishing his speech he said he would see everyone at the banquet at the end of the festival. But someone in the crowd shouted, 'Ave a go mate'. So he stripped and played a game.

He said to his new-found team-mates that he would be seeing them. And he turned out on both the second and third days to play.

"This is what rugby is all about," he said. "To start with it brought me out on the paddock again and I had three runs. I enjoyed myself immensely.

"The way in which the 16 nationalities involved here played the game and mixed off the field is a lesson for all the world. Surely, there would be no more wars if we all played rugby like the Golden Oldies," he said.

Australian, and world, rugby has lost a great man.