Fever still burns for putting stories to shield scores

Historian and journalist Lindsay Knight, whose Shield Fever came out in 1980, has been dubbed 'Mr Ranfurly Shield'. Picture / Paul Estcourt

Lindsay Knight is defender and challenger when it comes to the Ranfurly Shield.

Ardently, he defends its place in rugby and importance to the country. Yet like a feisty challenger - and as a distinguished veteran among rugby journalists - he rails against the belittling of the shield through the absence of All Blacks from many domestic matches.

"There's that terrible word those buggers use these days - window," he says at his home in the North Harbour heartland.

"The Ranfurly Shield, the NPC and club rugby are given no windows. I don't blame the players, but something's got to give."

Any journalist on a serious Ranfurly Shield trail is bound to end up at Knight's door.

Even if his byline isn't so evident now, the work of the former Christchurch Star, Auckland Star and Dominion journalist with snazzy shield credentials - born in Waikato, raised in Christchurch, worked in Auckland - appears in the articles of others, whether subconsciously or because his books are at the ready.

On the eve of tonight's clash in Christchurch, this logger of the log still hopes against hope the prized trophy will keep its proud place.

"I think a lot of people would love it to be what it was, and I'm one of those," says Knight, 62. "It still has fascination and mystique, but pressures are undermining it. I've got a terrible feeling."

Pundits have been writing Ranfurly Shield obituaries for decades, sentiments that helped send Knight on his first major shield dig 25 years ago.

Until his 1980 book Shield Fever (with a 1985 update and 2002 centennial rewrite), the written history was stolid rather than revealing. Knight sought anecdotes.

His work has led the venerable Keith Quinn to call him "Mr Ranfurly Shield", a title he winces at with embarrassment, pleading the heroes are players, coaches, supporters.

Yet where would the Ranfurly Shield be without the marvellous stories? And where would the stories be without Lindsay Knight? Mostly buried with old heroes or hidden in shoeboxes.

Shield Fever was a response to the doomsday prophecies in the 1970s, after North Auckland and Manawatu ducked challenges from powerful opponents. This was hardly new, but the public was tiring of the shenanigans.

Knight's juices were stirred when Auckland held off a 1979 challenge by Counties, the NPC title holders, in a cut-throat season finale before a massive Eden Park crowd in the days before NPC finals.

Eight months of frantic effort produced the first book, a solo effort even though Knight believed the job too big for one person.

His own shield passion had been fired in 1953, while recuperating from a serious illness as a kid in Christchurch. Radio brought the drama of Canterbury scoring a crushing win over holders Wellington.

"It was absolutely riveting," he recalls.

The following year, he was at Lancaster Park as his then beloved red and blacks overturned an early 10-0 deficit to retain the log o' wood against Southland.

As a dedicated journalist he naturally accumulated shield lore. Research for Shield Fever took him back, to eras that involved the two men central to the shield story.

The first was Norman McKenzie, coach of the dominant 1920s Hawkes Bay team.

"He made the shield what it is," says Knight. "That Hawkes Bay team were close to being professionals and were in huge conflict with the New Zealand union. Guys were clearly getting slipped a few bob under the counter."

In those amateur days, Hawkes Bay had lured Bert Cooke from Auckland and set him up in a menswear shop.

Another Magpies great, George Nepia, may have farmed just outside the Hawkes Bay boundary. And, horror of horrors, McKenzie prepared his team at weeklong training camps.

The high point of this controversy was the 1927 Battle of Solway, when Hawkes Bay's successful challenge against Wairarapa - who had just ended the Magpies' record 24-game streak - was rubbed out by the New Zealand Rugby Union. A recently-returned Hawkes Bay player, Wattie Barclay, was ruled a week shy of the three-week shield residential rule when he played at Solway Showgrounds in Masterton.

The match was already controversial, with drunken crowd behaviour at an over-packed ground and orderings off. The NZRFU, no fan of Hawkes Bay's ways, were implicated in fostering the complaint against Barclay. There were vitriolic post-match speeches, threats of a Supreme Court injunction, and provisional defences were played by each union.

Many of the scorelines recorded by that 1920s Hawkes Bay team, which contained legends such as Cooke, Nepia and the Brownlie brothers, were staggering.

Among the vanquished were Wellington, beaten 58-8 in 1926. It is said that the clackety clack of the train trip home sounded like the scoreline to their humiliated players.

The other key man - in Knight's view - was the charismatic Otago coach Vic Cavanagh, whose team owned the shield in the late 1940s.

Cavanagh was pivotal to Knight's research, providing old newspaper articles he had written.

"They were absolutely brilliant pieces of rugby writing. He has to be one of the greatest brains our rugby has ever had," says Knight.

"He was such a clear and logical thinker. They reckon his recall of games was virtually photographic. He'd ask guys, 'Why did you do this, this, this' and it would be extraordinarily accurate."

But if two men can be pinpointed as dominating the early legend of the shield, the stories that built its fame are endless.

The controversies and skulduggery were so common that one story alleges a malcontent begged the new holder to throw the trophy in the Cook Strait, such was the trouble it caused. The reply, it is claimed, was "so long as your neck is attached to it".

Knight's journey of discovery took him around the country. The most famous of commentators, Winston McCarthy, was "an absolute goldmine of anecdotes" at his Rawene home.

Knight also spent a morning in Waitangi with the 84-year-old Barclay, the central Solway figure, who told him: "I just loved playing football, and I found it stupid and disappointing that a game would create such a fuss".

Knight himself had been a kid among controversial crowd behaviour at Lancaster Park in 1956 as Wellington ended a Canterbury reign. A Wellington player was attacked that day by a woman wielding an umbrella and handbag and needed rescuing by a policeman.

"You bloody well deserved it," the red-and-black copper told the player, who was trying to thank him.

The whistle can even be blown on referees in days when they were hometown helpers.

A referee from Southland called North was told by an Auckland player to change his name to South, and a Hawkes Bay referee jumped up and down yelling "our ball". Another famously told an Auckland player: "You leave Mr Brownlie alone".

A Hawkes Bay radio commentator also makes the grade, for exclaiming: "We've won 12-all".

For a shield oddity, it's hard to beat Wellington in 1963. After ending Auckland's record run of 25 defences, Wellington set a mark for the shortest tenure of one week.

Knight believes the closest the shield came to actually being lost was in the early 1990s, after Auckland lent it to Waikato.

Auckland chief executive Murray Wright was convinced Waikato lost all trace of the precious trophy.

Knight says: "Waikato refused to corroborate it, but Wright was utterly convinced and had nightmares for a couple of days. He wasn't one to make things up.

"He said, 'How am I going to go on TV and say we've lost the shield?' He was fair dinkum and sweating."

The 61-game Auckland shield team from 1985-93, with wall-to-wall legends, was the greatest provincial side says the man who should know, although the Canterbury/Crusaders of nowadays make a re-count worthwhile.

As for the outstanding shield game, no contest: the 1985 classic, when Canterbury's fightback from a 24-0 halftime deficit just failed against Auckland's challenge.

"It's the most stirring game of rugby I've ever seen," says Knight.

"It was one of those rare games that actually lived up to the hype."

The hype for tonight's match, it must be said, is lacking in comparison even though Canterbury and Auckland still represent the peak of shield contests.

Which leads to another conundrum: while they deserve the kudos, the Canterbury-Auckland domination has posed another threat to the shield's future.

Which returns us to where Lindsay Knight's Ranfurly Shield search began: the sports obituary column.

He says: "The shield has a human element ... What it's done for so many communities and how so many people have developed a passion for rugby because of it. Just ask Bay of Plenty and Taranaki recently.

"But it may be an anachronism, as people are saying, because of the way things are going in rugby. It doesn't lend itself to the anecdotes so much any more ... maybe because things are so sanitised and controlled.

"But you can never write it off. It has an extraordinary ability to suddenly prove people wrong."