Legendary sportswriter TP McLean is the subject of a warts-and-all biography, writes Andrew Stone
Terry McLean hid his secrets where he threw much of the rest of his notes and typewritten copy - on the floor of his tiny home office.
McLean - "TP" to generations of readers of the Herald's sports pages - spent countless hours in the cramped lean-to, pounding away on a battered typewriter on yet another book chapter, a rugby story for one of his South African or English newspapers or, occasionally, something more intimate.
For years his liaisons have remained "on tour", that special place filled with betrayals, awkward truths and inconvenient admissions. That is about to change with the revelation that McLean, the most exalted of New Zealand's sports journalists, had an affair with the South African politician Helen Suzman, a fearless crusader against apartheid.
The disclosure fills a chapter in the new biography, TP: The Life and Times of Sir Terry McLean. Its veracity is based partly on two letters the family found in McLean's chaotic files and on what his son Jock says he knows for certain about his late father.
Towards the end of 1970, Jock McLean went to South Africa, just after the All Blacks had returned in defeat from an unrelenting tour.
"It was made very clear to me by a number of South Africans just what had gone on," Jock McLean said.
What had gone on, it now appears, is that Suzman, 52 at the time, and the 57-year-old McLean had a fling. Beyond that, the diminutive, courageous politician had a profound impact on Terry McLean's views on rugby, apartheid and the complex relationship between New Zealand and South Africa.
TP first went to the Republic in 1960, sent by the New Zealand Herald to cover one of rugby's great odysseys. The tour went ahead in the face of protests against the exclusion of Maori from the All Blacks.
In Beaten by the Boks, his account of the tour, McLean wrote that he thought the Rugby Union's decision to leave Maori out of the touring party was the right one.
He went on: "Having now been to South Africa I now feel certain that Maoris could have been included in the team without embarrassment either to the All Blacks or to the South Africans."
A decade on, and influenced perhaps by Suzman, McLean began to peel away South Africa's comforting layers. He movingly described an encounter with a black woman, a Mrs Sobetha, who wept as she told how the state had ordered the return of her children to the Transkei.
"I do not know that I have ever seen a more affecting spectacle of human misery," he wrote in Battling the Boks, his book of the 1970 tour.
In that account, the "tiny, lucid, immensely gifted" Suzman appeared to McLean as "The Lady with the Lamp" who, by exposing misdeeds and injustice, "was giving the non-privileged ... faint cause for thinking that some day ... a light would begin to spread".
Inclusion of TP's relationship with Suzman in the book - the chapter is titled "An Affair of the Heart" - did not meet with approval in the McLean clan. Jock McLean admits his sisters, Jill - who died last Sunday, aged 66 - and Sally, were uncomfortable and he concedes he never told his mother, Carol, what he had learned in South Africa.
"It's not an easy thing to find out about your father."
Besides, says Jock, his parents had a firm, enduring marriage. Their correspondence on Terry's trips abroad was warm and loving and when his Carol died, in 1997, TP wrote, "I miss her very much."
But Jock McLean felt he had no choice about including the family secret in the book. Before starting out he discussed the biography with Tim Arlott, son of the cricket commentator John Arlott, who had written with distinction about his father.
Jock McLean recalls Arlott's advice: "If I was to do it at all then it had to be warts and all."
The Suzman affair is the only one mentioned in the biography. Jock McLean says: "She was one of a number."
McLean, who is 62, allows another wart to surface in the book - the fact that he has a disabled brother, David, whom his father barely acknowledged.
Now 60, David McLean has spent his life in care. From time to time he saw Carol, his older sister Jill and his brother. Sally did not know he existed until a chance remark at a party. Terry McLean revealed his fourth child at a gathering to celebrate his 90th birthday. "Some of you may know ... " he began.
Says Jock: "You could have heard a pin drop."
Of his own relationship with his father, Jock McLean says it got better as he got older and had a family of his own. As a child, his father was away an awful lot, overseas with the All Blacks or down in Wellington for rugby or golf meetings.
But the old man wouldn't forget his children. From one trip abroad, TP returned with a transistor for his son, the kind which picked up stations from the other side of the world. His daughters got dresses from Macy's in New York, which made them the envy of Remuera.
TP, says Jock, had a fair bit of the soldier in him - he enlisted in 1940, got assigned to the Security Intelligence Bureau and helped supervise the German surrender in northern Italy in 1944 - but deferred to Carol the task of raising the family, while he buried himself in work.
By any standard McLean the journalist was indefatigable. He wrote 32 books, 29 of them on rugby. He bashed the typewriter in his home office in Ladies Mile so hard that he smoothed away the embossed keyboard letters.
For four decades he met his deadlines at the Herald while churning out yarns under bylines such as Johan Van Deventer, Phil Allan or Terry Power - all assumed names for his work in other newspapers and rugby magazines. McLean, as they say in the trade, was a "king ratter" who wrote stories for swags of foreign mastheads.
And he always went the extra mile for a yarn. Of his many scoops, he is best remembered for two involving bad boy All Black Keith Murdoch.
McLean beat the press pack to the sensational expulsion of Murdoch from the 1972-73 All Black tour of Britain following a brawl with a security guard after the Welsh test in Cardiff. Photographer Peter Bush recalled seeing McLean at breakfast without his customary tie.
"You knew something was up if you found the old champ in his shirtsleeves," remarked Bush. While his colleagues were sleeping, the "old champ" had filed a front page exclusive for the Herald, which trumpeted it on billboards declaring "Murdoch might be sent home".
In the end Murdoch never made it back to New Zealand. He disappeared into the Australian outback, where McLean found him in 1974.
The Herald's headline caught the moment: "A journey's end: Mr So and So, I presume?"
The report began: "It would be absurd to describe a meeting, far out in the wilderness, with the self-exiled All Black, K.A. Murdoch, as containing the politeness implicit in Mr Stanley's 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'."
Murdoch was unfriendly. "Just keep moving," he cautioned, before turning to McLean's driver and demanding: "Who brought this so and so up here?"
Wrote McLean: "The 'so and so', inaccurate as to gender, was a most offensive term."
Jock McLean says he misses his father: "I've got hundreds of questions I'd ask him now. But at least I've done this."
Brothers offered a sporting chance
The byline was always, quite simply, TP McLean.
The full name was Terence Harold Power McLean, but along the way the "Harold" got dropped.
According to his son Jock, the Harold went because, as a youngster, his father got teased about his initials - THP McLean.
Pupils gave Terry the name "Ten Horse Power" McLean. He went for the shorter version.
TP was not the only journalist in his family. His brother Gordon, 12 years his senior, worked for the news agency Reuters in New Zealand, edited a lively magazine called the Observer and may well have had a word in the odd ear to get his brother his first reporting job on the Auckland Sun.
Dorothy, McLean's oldest sister, worked on the Freelance, while another sister, Kit - Kathleen - wrote a books column for the Daily Post in Rotorua.
McLean's career was given a lift by another brother - Hugh, a loose forward who won nine test caps for the All Blacks. His first test, in July 1930, was at Eden Park against the Lions.
Hugh scored twice, Gordon covered the match for Reuters, Terry, at his first test, ran Gordon's copy to a telegraphist - and their proud mother, Lillian, watched from the stands.
* TP: The Life and Times of Sir Terry McLean, by Paul Lewis with Jock McLean. Harper Collins, $42
