Heart of the country: Still Going strong on the farm

By BRIDGET CARTER

Sid Going remembers how hard rugby training used to be when he was a young All Black.

Before a big test he would dig drains, cut teatree, milk cows and jog behind the tractor.

Training was not about gym workouts, personal trainers, dietitians and certainly not about big salaries, flash cars or cellphones.

It was old-fashioned, back-breaking farm work. Such as the summers baling hay across rolling hill country on neighbouring farms with the rest of the Going boys from Northland.

"The young ones would not know what that is like, digging drains by hand," he says.

"Now, everyone is in the gym."

Sid Going, one of 13 children, grew up on a large farm at Maromaku, north of Whangarei, where he still lives.

He was an All Black halfback, a member of one of the most prominent rugby families in Northland, a star in a bygone era of the sport.

Like many players from the 1960s and 70s such as Brian Lochore, Colin Meads and Don Clarke, Sid Going represented his country while trying to run a farm in provincial New Zealand.

And, when he was away on All Black tours up to four months long, his wife ran the operation.

"It was extremely hard," he says. "My wife has to take credit. She ran the farm and raised the kids. Wives today would not do that."

Despite the hard work, the heartbreak and the frustration that goes with farming and rugby, Sid Going, 59, and his wife Colleen, 53, have a life devoted to both.

The couple, who married in 1970 after meeting at a Whangarei dance, have 243ha and 300 dairy cows.

They have spent endless hours on sidelines watching their sons play rugby. And they have cut a track to the famous Mid-Northern rugby club, where they have established a strong association over the years, both on and off the field.

Then there are the extra things they squeeze in, such as the community committees and the local Mormon Church, which Sid's grandfather and most of his family have long belonged to. Sid was bishop for seven years.

Among the family currently living on Sid and Colleen Going's farm are son Logan, 23, daughter Lea and her husband, who farms with Sid, and Sid's mother, Mary Going, aged 95.

The farm includes a slice of the original Going property, owned by Sid's grandfather, Percy, that consisted of hill country and a beautiful old homestead. These days, there are eight Goings all living on Marlow Rd.

Traditionally, the neighbourhood meeting place has always been the lawn next to Sid and Colleen's sunny, modernised farm house and neatly kept, brightly coloured garden.

Fiercely competitive matches of tennis, rugby and games involving grown boys thumping a basketball still unfold between cousins, brothers and friends.

When asked if he would ever want a life as a television rugby commentator or a life in the sport's corporate world, Sid Going says he has never felt that comfortable in the limelight. He likes the life he has now.

It is a busy one.

"It is a really nice way of life," he says. "Farming was something that I was born with."