New Zealand rugby will lose a special man when Chiefs and All Blacks halfback Brad Weber heads off to Stade Francais in Paris at the end of the year.
Weber’s one of a fairly small list of All Blacks who have taken a stand on moral grounds.
In 1981All Blacks captain Graham Mourie, and their best back Bruce Robertson, refused to play the Springboks. In 1986 David Kirk and John Kirwan wouldn’t join the Cavaliers’ rebel tour of South Africa. In 1995 Josh Kronfeld wore headgear with a No Nukes symbol in protest at French bomb tests in the Pacific.
The more common stance in rugby has been to suggest that sport and politics don’t mix.
On the other hand, Weber didn’t hold back in 2018 when Wallabies fullback Israel Folau posted on social media that gay people would go to hell.
Weber immediately tweeted, “My cousin and her partner, and my Aunty and her partner are some of the most kind, caring & loving people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. To think that I play against someone that says they’ll go to hell for being gay disgusts me.”
He followed up, saying, “kinda sick of us players staying quiet on some of this stuff. I can’t stand that I have to play this game that I love with people, like Folau, who say what he’s saying.”
It was heartening that there was no backlash inside the game for Weber. TJ Perenara quickly backed him up, as did referee Nigel Owens in Britain.
A year later Weber told me, “I’ve seen a lot of teammates and other people in New Zealand rugby speaking out in support of the gay community as well, speaking up for inclusiveness. Probably what I’m most proud of about the whole thing is that it’s given others the courage to speak out as well.”
Fearless on the field, Weber was just as brave off it.
Ian Foster is almost certainly the last of a breed, an All Blacks coach who hasn’t spent his whole working life in rugby.
Foster was a very good first five for Waikato for 13 seasons from 1985. For the first 11 of those years, the game was amateur, and he made his living working in marketing and sales for TVNZ in Hamilton.
An accelerating trend is for all New Zealand’s professional coaches, starting with next year’s All Blacks coach Scott Robertson, to have basically gone from school to a rugby academy to being a full-time player.
By comparison, the last great upheaval in All Blacks rugby was led by two qualified schoolteachers, Sir Graham Henry and Wayne Smith, and a former policeman, Steve Hansen.
Graham Henry, Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith. Photo / Photosport
They formulated big cultural shifts, summed up in the mantra “better people make better All Blacks”, and the All Blacks claimed World Cup wins in 2011 and 2015.
Last year the teaching skills of Smith and his coaching team, which included Henry, were key to instilling tactical awareness in the triumphant Black Ferns.
Talk with Black Ferns players, and they recall how they were never overwhelmed with information and encouraged to work to their own conclusions, techniques that owe more to education than to sport.
Change is inevitable, but managing change in rugby hasn’t always been a strength in New Zealand.
The game had been professional for a decade before Steve Lancaster at the Crusaders became the first manager of professional rugby, a job that involved the welfare of players, including planning for their future after rugby retirement.
Rugby here is fortunate to be loaded with men and women whose technical expertise is huge.
But imparting that knowledge isn’t a given. Making sure extensive teaching skills are part of the training for coaches becomes more important by the year.
