SPIRO: Arise Sir Richie, a great All Black

This is the stuff of legends. A young Richard Hugh ‘Richie’ McCaw has been selected for the New Zealand Under-19 trials. The year is 1999.

At a McDonald’s restaurant to celebrate he is told by his uncle, a good provincial player in his day, to write down his rugby aspirations on a napkin.

The chubby-faced youngster hesitates. There is an innate modesty and honesty about his approach to life’s challenges. It is a sort of the humility and toughness that is bred into the farming people who live at Kurow, a small community in the rolling hills of rural North Otago.

But there is something more on the youngster’s mind.

The year earlier, 1998, he was head boy at Otago Boys High, runner-up to the dux and had played in the First XV that drew with Rotorua Boys High School in the 1998 New Zealand secondary schools final.

But the young McCaw loses out in the loose forward selection for the New Zealand Secondary Schools team to Sam Harding, Angus McDonald and Hale T-Pole.

Harding, a No.7 in the same mould as McCaw, is then picked up by the Otago union. The local boy, McCaw, is overlooked.

McCaw enrols at Christchurch’s Lincoln University to study agricultural science. Luckily for him, the New Zealand Secondary School final was played at Christchurch. The Canterbury rugby officials, among them Steve Hansen, sign him up.

“Come on, now,” his uncle urges, “sign the napkin.” There is still some hesitation. “Sign it Great All Black.”

In his wonderful rugbiography The Open Side, McCaw writes: “I couldn’t bring myself to write the words Great All Black, so I wrote G.A.B instead.”

But, and this is the crucial point to the story, the note was kept in a secret place in a rarely used cupboard where only the youngster could see it and ponder on the challenge implied in the letters G.A.B.

We now fast-forward to November 2015 when Richie McCaw, praised as the greatest player ever (forget about Great All Black) by coaches, pundits and players past and present, announces his retirement from Test rugby.

The kid from Kurow – according to astonishing statistics published by The New Zealand Herald – had been on the field for 32 per cent (131 victories) of the New Zealand All Blacks’s 413 Test wins.

He played 148 Tests, 110 as captain.

The All Blacks won 89 per cent of all the Tests he played in and 90 per cent of the Tests when he was the New Zealand captain.

He scored 27 tries in Tests, the third-biggest all-time haul by a forward from any country and 13th on the all-time try-scoring list for the All Blacks.

He was part of 10 Bledisloe Cup winning campaigns, four Tri-Nations tournament wins, three Rugby Championship tournament wins, and two Rugby World Cup victories in 2011 and 2015.

In the 61 Tests he played in New Zealand, only two were lost. He was three times World Rugby Player of the Year.

These statistics, personally and in a team sense, are Bradmanesque. This is a huge call. But the McCaw record stands, like Bradman’s records, as achievements that are so outrageously unlikely that they could only exist in the realm of non-fiction.

No fiction writer could dare write a success story remotely close to the reality of McCaw’s career and hope to achieve a “willing suspension of disbelief” from the readers.

The current All Blacks coach Steve Hansen told the media at the conference announcing McCaw’s retirement that the outstanding quality of his long time captain was his “mindset to learn”.

It is one of the famous New Zealand rugby stories that McCaw carried around a red exercise book in training before matches. Everything was written down, everything noted, studied, remembered and then applied with clinical precision (McCaw has a gift for maths) in the heat of a rugby battle.

Earlier this year, McCaw issued a video on how he managed his play at the rucks. It is so forensic, so insightful and so precise that Aristotle would have been proud to have written it, if the ancient Greeks had got around to inventing rugby.

McCaw explanations of how he summed up the various situations that would confront him during a game made idiots out of his critics, too many of them Australians, who continually criticised him as a cheat.

All too often he was penalised for play that was legal but looked so impossible – except for him – that referees just could not believe what they were actually seeing.

Hansen told the story of how McCaw came into the Canterbury and Crusaders camps as an out-and-out scavenger, with not too much else in his play. But every year, armed with his exercise books, he would ask the coaches: “What can I do better?”

By the end of his career, he was the complete rugby player. He could run with the ball, pass it skilfully, tackle anything that moved towards him, win lineouts, take high balls, and win rucks and mauls. He had what Hansen called “a massive engine”.

He was as full-on at the end of the match, as he was at its beginning.

Most of all, he had the composure – after the disastrous years for the All Blacks of 2007 to 2009 – to remain confident of a victory, even when Ireland, say, had the ball and were five points ahead with 30 seconds of play left.

How many games did the All Blacks in their glory years from 2011 to 2015 win by steamrolling oppositions in the last 20 minutes of play?

One of the qualities of greatness in an athlete that is often overlooked is, for want of a better term, luck. As the saying goes, great players make their luck. Part of their greatness, though, and it was something McCaw possessed in abundance, was that this luck was created virtually every time it was needed.

There was one other quality about McCaw’s play, something he shared with the great Wallaby John Eales, in that he was never rattled. Nor did he ever retaliate to provocation from opponents. We were always told as kids when learning to play rugby, let the other chaps win the fight and you win the game. McCaw lived up to this aphorism.

The list of Test players who targeted McCaw with cheap shots includes: Phil Waugh, Jamie Heaslip, Marcus Horan, Lote Tuqiri, Andy Powell, Dylan Hartley, Quade Cooper, Dean Greyling, Kevin McLaughlin and Scott Higginbotham.

Even when the French gouged his eyes deliberately in the dying minutes of the 2011 Rugby World Cup final, McCaw did not complain, or get distracted aside from a querying look across to referee Craig Joubert and a shake of his head.

He got on with winning the game.

He was angry at himself, though, when he charged at Quade Cooper after one of his cheap shots to his head, forcing his obnoxious opponent to tackle him when he should have passed the ball. This was one of his rare moments of ill-discipline on the field.

Most crucially, McCaw was a much better player at the end of his career than he was at his beginning, and even during the middle years of his prime.

His play in the 2015 Rugby World Cup final was a complete exhibition of his rugby skills. He handled in movements where tries were scored. He hardly gave away a penalty. The All Blacks in fact were penalised only seven times to the 10 penalties conceded by the Wallabies.

The All Blacks back row – arguably the greatest unit in rugby history with McCaw, Kieran Read, Jerome Kaino – outplayed David Pocock, Scott Fardy and Michael Hooper.

Paul Cully made this valid point: “The Wallabies trio confirmed their status as the best ball-fetching trio in the world. But loose forward play has other components: lineout prowess, dominant tackling and continuity in attack. Here Kieran Read, Richie McCaw and Jerome Kaino held all the cards.”

And the ace in this group, in terms of character and play in imposing his will on the Wallabies, was the dominant Richie McCaw.

Here is a final statistic that is a measure of the greatness of McCaw and a hope, perhaps, for the future success of the Wallabies now that he has retired.

In the time McCaw was with the All Blacks, they played 27 Tests when he was unavailable for 19 wins, seven losses and one draw. This 68 per cent winning record compares unfavourably with the 89 per cent Tests win when he played.

I first saw McCaw play as a member of the New Zealand Juniors playing the England Juniors at Jade Stadium, before an All Blacks versus Springboks Test. The young McCaw scored a couple of tries and looked a likely but not inevitably great player.

His jersey hung loosely. It was only years later that he was fill the All Blacks jersey, rather than just wear it.

He came controversially into the All Blacks without playing Super Rugby, replacing Josh Kronfeld, a fine player in his own right, in the Test against Ireland at Dublin. McCaw dropped the first pass he received. He struggled with the faster and more clinical play of Test rugby.

But in the second half, he was dynamic and helped turn a losing Test into an All Blacks victory. Typically, the youngster won the man of the match award.

His journey of becoming a Great All Black growing had begun…