Pinetree: Please stop reminding me I'm 70

Legendary All Black captain Colin Meads at home on his Te Kuiti farm. Picture / Stephen Barker

Just in for lunch on his Te Kuiti farm, Colin "Pinetree" Meads can't understand why anyone even cares that today is his 70th birthday.

After all, New Zealand's rugby player of the 20th century is happily retired, the No 5's mauling days a memory and his lingering fame a "constant surprise".

"No, I really don't know about all this carry-on, but it's an honour and humbling that people are still interested in an old fellow like me," the former All Black captain joked yesterday.

"You know, I never thought people would've wanted to know about me five years after I stopped playing, let alone all this time later, it's very surprising.

"I'd have thought that I'd have been allowed to slip into obscurity at my age, but that's obviously not happened. I just wish people would stop reminding me I'm turning 70. You only get older from here, don't you."

Meads played 133 matches, including 55 tests for New Zealand in a career that spanned 15 seasons. He was the epitome of an All Black - hard, unbending, and staunchly proud to play for his country.

Just shy of his birthday, the still-physically imposing grandfather of 14 spent a day supervising the shearing on his 100ha farm. He used to do it himself but, with his ageing knees, "doing that sort of work ... it'd kill me".

Meads celebrated his milestone with a "bit of a family reunion and do" at Te Kuiti's Riverside Lodge last weekend, so he could enjoy his Waitete Rugby Club's 75th jubilee today.

There, he expects to enjoy a few beers with a few good mates, and remember an era when All Blacks went home to their clubs and their jobs, and when only their partners carried handbags.

"It is funny, when you get to my age you do have those conversations about what it was like back then, and compare what it is like now," Meads said.

"It used to be that the match programme would say something like Colin Meads, farmer, King Country, or schoolteacher, or whatever. But these days, rugby is really the job."

That sort of nostalgia may be why newspapers and fans have not let him slip into obscurity: "Things can always look better when you look back on them. That is why we do it," he said.

Meanwhile, members of the Colin Meads fan club - the No. 5 Club - have planned a celebration of their own at the Dunedin Rugby Club's Meads Bar. The group that formed at Otago University in the 1970s intend to toast their mate with a limerick, a song, and with five, five-ounce glasses at 4.55pm, 5pm, 5.05pm and 5.55pm, member Paul Dwyer says.

Proudly showing the white rugby jersey Meads wore when his president's side beat the All Blacks in 1973, Greg O'Brien explained the mystique of a man they, as students, used to ring at 3am for a "yarn".

"Colin Meads and [Sir Edmund] Hillary represented a lot of what was good about being a New Zealander ... that is why he is still known as a legend."

Biographer Brian Turner said Meads was still considered "a New Zealand icon". He was wry, droll and reticent - except on the field - and that was still "looked upon quite fondly, and seen as things that are distinctly New Zealand".

And in a world where "down-to-earthism" was in short supply, said Turner, that sort of figure was worth pining for.

- OTAGO DAILY TIMES