Rob Fisher, rugby head

Rob Fisher is the public face behind efforts to promote the $320 million revamp of Eden Park. He promises significant benefits for Auckland if ratepayers cough up many millions to help. Picture / Kenny Rodger

The last time we met, Rob Fisher was selling rugby. Now he's selling Eden Park. So he's at it again.

He has been at it, really, almost without a break for 20 years -although he is at pains to point out, after I call him a rugby head, that Eden Park is bigger than rugby. It's cricket as well, for example. Which he is also rather keen on. He is the chairman of the Eden Park Development Committee. He was the chairman of the NZ Rugby Union, twice.

He's a lawyer in real life. The chairman of Simpson Grierson, actually, and a specialist in environment law. So what's he doing standing on the pitch at the park in the rain, holding an umbrella with an Eden Park logo on it? He says, "Can you get the logo in?"

That last time, in 2002, when he had just been reappointed chairman of the NZRFU during mutterings about his being a retread and howlings from the provinces about the rugby union, I had asked him if he was good at PR. Obviously he was going to have to be. He said then, "I don't know."

Today Fisher turns up with a folder of press releases and artists' impressions of what the new Eden Park will look like. It is possibly a little unfair of me to say that, from a certain angle, the thing looks like a Zeppelin. He grins and says, "Well, as long as it's not the Hindenburg."

He is obviously good at PR, otherwise he wouldn't have been asked to sell the $320 million revamped park to people like me who live down the road and who will have read in the paper on Wednesday that "it might end up" that ratepayers would be asked to meet the shortfall.

"Might" means "will", of course. Fisher says, "Yeah, it won't work unless we get a contribution." He says much more about how it could well be that the contribution would be made over a long period and that we'll get "significant benefits".

Never mind all of that, the park's seating capacity will increase from 47,000 to 60,000, which means I'll never be able to get up the road to the supermarket. "It depends where you live," he says. Up the road.

"Oh, I see. There's an angle in here." He says I'll get better roads and lots of other good things out of it because "the city gets significant benefits".

I harrumph away about the cost and how it will, inevitably, overrun. "No, it won't," he says. Within the $320 million is a figure of $45 million for contingencies and escalation.

"So, if you'll allow me that tolerance, I'm prepared to have a little wager with you. What would you like? A nice bottle of red? I'd be very disappointed in having to hand it over."

We stand in the corridor behind the tunnel - which is disappointingly short and has sodden grey carpet and is not at all impressive. I say I hope the new tunnel is going to be more exciting than this. He says, "Everything will be better, Michele."

He calls me cynical, just because I may have mentioned that I hate going to the rugby. Except, perhaps, for those battered sausages on a stick. There will be salads and posh things available at the new Eden Park.

Well, honestly, who would want to go to the rugby and eat a salad? Ladies like salad, according to Fisher. But "I think there will always be a place for a sausage on a stick".

There is the proof that he is quite good at PR. He laughs when I say I think he might have got better at it but demurs, a little: "I'm just the once who ponces around a bit and does the media interviews."

Now ponce is just about the last word I'd have come up with to describe him. He's been involved in rugby for so long - he started playing at 5 and has been involved in it one way or another ever since - he has that stony, show-no-emotion rugby bloke's demeanour down pat, in public anyway.

The boxes around the park are full of such faces, which is why, he says, he prefers to sit in the stands where he is anonymous. "Well, you feel less conspicuous jumping up and down and shouting than you do sitting in a box. I think it has a certain constraining effect on people's behaviour. There is that ... staunch element."

I think he could be good fun. I already know he likes to do the Duck Walk after "having taken drink".

He talks in these formally constructed sentences - like a lawyer, I suppose - but then he says "hey" frequently at the end of them. "I must stop saying 'hey'," he says. He doesn't. That is the combination of the lawyer and the rugby head.

The rugby head might be sentimental about the park, at least: "I've got a lot of affection for it." Not that much, though, when he plans to raze it? The level-headed lawyer says, "Oh, no. I want to improve it. It's like grandfather's axe, isn't it? It might have two new handles and two new heads but it's still grandfather's axe."

He asks how he is, compared to the last time I saw him? "More relaxed?" he asks hopefully. Oh, better, I say, which is a lie. He's just the same, which means being deceptively grumpy-looking (that rugby face) and utterly contented with his lot. It does not mean relaxed because his idea of relaxed is working and taking on hard things to do. "Oh, I think a certain amount of stress is good for all of us. If I haven't got enough on my plate I tend to be quite inefficient."

He is, he admits, a combative personality. Although the task of selling the park is not a battle: "This is an incredibly exciting time."

He is an obsessive character who, when he went on a fitness campaign which involved Weight Watchers and walking every day, lost too much weight (19kg) and had to work at putting some back on. He agrees that he did get obsessed with losing weight but when I ask what he thinks this might say about him, he answers: "That I needed to eat and drink a wee bit more."

I was going to ask Fisher if he thought having polio as a boy had contributed to his combativeness but he gets in before I can and says, "I just got on with things, really."

He had one leg shorter than the other, which didn't stop him playing rugby right up until he was 40. In 1998 he had a hip replacement. "They put an extra little bit in to balance me up," he says. "So it's the first time I've ever been balanced in my life, but I know you'll never write that."

No. I won't. Because when I say he is just the same as the last time we met, I mean that he is just as evangelical about rugby. I will write that he is still having a lovely time living his perfectly balanced life of work and the park stuff - which looks like more work but is, he says, a hobby. He doesn't get paid for being on the board at the park and he looks aghast when I ask if board members are supposed to do it for nothing , for the privilege. You do it, he says, for the love of it.

And he looks positively crestfallen when he asks if I would go if he gave me a ticket to a rugby game and I say, "No". You might put this attempt down to him being pretty good at PR, but I think it's mostly the rugby evangelist.

He is unlikely to convince me that I'd really love to pay for the park, but that didn't stop him having a good try at converting me to rugby.

Actually, I might go. If only because I could get him to buy me drinks to the value of that bottle of wine I'll never win.