One hundred years ago, the All Blacks embarked on their legendary 1924-25 tour, earning the moniker “The Invincibles” after winning all 32 matches across Britain, Ireland, France, and Canada. Among them was the fearless 19-year-old George Nepia, who played every minute of every game. Phil Gifford’s story delves into Nepia’s extraordinary journey from an unknown teenager to a rugby legend.
A hundred years ago this month a largely unknown 19-year-old All Black called George Nepia walked down the gangplank of the passenger ship, RMS Remuera, in Plymouth, stepping on to English soil after a seven-week voyage from New Zealand.
Six months later he’d be heading home a legend.
The fearless, hugely skilled teenager from Wairoa played the full 80 minutes of every one of the 32 unbeaten games the All Black team that became known as The Invincibles had on their 1924-25 tour of Britain, Ireland, France, and Canada.
At the time, weighing 83kg and 1.75m tall, Nepia was a big, powerfully built man for his position. He was the heaviest back in the squad and outweighed six of the 15 forwards.
How good was he? Four years after the tour the English captain, Wavell Wakefield, wrote that “one member of the team, Nepia, deserves special mention”.
“His perfect catching of the ball, his kicking, and his amazing power of whipping the ball off the ground, and charging into and through oncoming forwards, marked him out as a player of a generation”.
Fifty years ago, I had the huge good fortune to spend almost an hour with Nepia, and his teammate, a genius, will-of-the-wisp, 56kg midfielder, Bert Cooke, as the side assembled in Auckland for their golden jubilee reunion.
They were both humble and hugely likeable. A prime example of their mutual respect came when Cook headed off to the toilet. Nepia leaned in, almost whispering, and said, “See that man? He was so brilliant that sometimes in a game I’d have to remind myself that I wasn’t a spectator, and should stop staring in amazement at what he could do.”
The tour had the potential for disaster if the players hadn’t all got on, Nepia said. “But by the time we got to England after that huge boat trip we were like brothers, as tight as a club team. A club team where every player is very good.”
His stunning form on the ‘24-25 tour brought Nepia enduring fame in Britain and in New Zealand. In 1982, when he toured as a guest with the New Zealand Māori team, a packed crowd in Swansea stood and cheered him when he was introduced on the field.
After his death in 1986, TVNZ repeated a This Is Your Life programme on Nepia. The audience, of 1.6 million people, represented half our population at the time.
His story is as extraordinary as the talents that made him stand out, even in The Invincibles, a team packed with great players.
Bizarrely, two of his special strengths, a devastating head-on tackle, and a massive spiral punt, were coached into him by an American Mormon teacher, who had never played rugby.
At 13, Nepia had left Nuhaka Māori School to work on a farm and then joined a labouring gang building the railway to Gisborne. After a year working as an adult, he’d saved enough to pay his own secondary school fees.
He planned to go to Te Aute College, but a close friend persuaded him to instead go to the Māori Agricultural College, set up by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints at Bridge Pa in 1913.
One of the teachers, Elder Erwin Moser, who had played American football before coming to New Zealand, coached MAC’s rugby team. “He didn’t know much about rugby tactics,” Nepia would say, “but we respected him a lot.”
After a school game, Moser took Nepia aside. “When you tackle,” he said, “keep your eyes open.” In his 1963 book written with Terry McLean, Nepia says, “It sounds funny, but that is the most important of all the bits that go into a good tackle.”
Moser soon got into more detail.
The first time he tackled an opponent, Moser said, Nepia had to speed up, “and crash into his stomach with your shoulder”.
“You’ll knock him backwards, and all the air will go out of his lungs. You might knock him out.”
For the second tackle, Moser changed the particulars. “Go below his knees. Move in from the same distance as before, and hit him hard. You’ll knock his legs from under him, and he’ll come down hard.”
What about the third tackle, asked Nepia? “There won’t be a third time. If you’ve made the first and second the right way, the third time he will kick.”
Nepia became fascinated by how far Moser, who seemed ancient to a schoolboy but was actually still in his 20s, could spiral pass a football.
“I started to think of the possibilities of imitating the way he could throw the ball 40 or 50 metres, sending it spinning like a top. I wanted to do the same with a punt. I used to stay after team training with a couple of teammates kicking to each other. One day, I fired off the perfect spiral punt. I was shocked and so excited I found it hard to sleep that night.”
It took weeks of determined practice, but at last Nepia could spiral punt 50 metres, with pinpoint accuracy, even under pressure. He called it “The Bullet”. It was “the cream on the coffee of good punting”.
After school, he made a star-studded Hawke’s Bay side, as a second five-eighths. But bizarrely, his debut in a first-class match as a fullback was the first All Blacks trial of 1924 in Auckland. It was only the second time in his life he’d played at fullback.
He performed so well in what was then the No 1 jersey, that when an All Black squad of 23 players was named for a four-game warm-up tour of Australia in July 1924, Nepia was the only fullback.
But before they headed for Britain, The Invincibles were roasted by Auckland media in a way Ian Foster or Scott Robertson might recognise.
Returning from Australia they were beaten, 14-3, by Auckland at Eden Park. The 1905 All Black George Tyler said in The New Zealand Herald they were the worst team to ever represent New Zealand. In the Auckland Star, a writer said “it is a disgrace Auckland are not being sent north, instead of the All Blacks”.
Fifty years later, Nepia was still irate about the comments. He told me in ‘74, “We’d got off the boat from Australia at two o’clock in the morning after the roughest sea trip you could imagine. We played Auckland that afternoon! We were all still swaying from the boat’s motion. I waited to catch one high ball, and started to rock so much I fell tail over head before the ball landed.”
By contrast, the tour of Britain and France was an unmitigated triumph.
After beating Ireland (6-0), the All Blacks swept past Wales (19-0), England (17-11), and France (30-6). (Not a single game was played in Scotland, because – I am not making this up – officials there were still sulking because they’d made a poor deal on gate receipts from the 1905 test with the All Blacks at Inverleith.)
As the tour went on, Nepia talked with his captain, Cliff Porter, about the strain of playing match after match. Porter’s solution? “On match nights,” he told Nepia, “drink yourself paralytic if you like.” Nepia took the advice. “I drank enough beer to help me sleep like a child. Porter knew how to get the best out of a man.”
After the glory days of The Invincibles, Nepia’s talent never faltered, but his sporting career took some unexpected turns.
At a time when the NZRU grovelled to South Africa’s racist rules, Nepia was one of several gifted Māori players left behind when New Zealand toured South Africa in 1928. His All Blacks career ended in 1930, when he played fullback in all four tests against the British Lions, New Zealand winning the series 3-1.
Nepia had married the love of his life, Huinga Kohere, in 1926. By the mid-1930s, in a world ravaged by the Great Depression, the couple and their young family were barely scraping by on their small farm in Rangitukia, on the East Coast.
In 1935, he accepted a £500 contract (“It was like a million pounds to us,” Nepia would say) to play league for two seasons for the Streatham and Mitcham club in London. He was a success, but the club owner’s attempt to introduce league to London didn’t work.
Back in New Zealand in 1938, Nepia’s last international game was at Carlaw Park, for the Kiwis’ league team against Australia. In a thrilling finish, the Kiwis won, 16-15.
It’s a measure of Nepia’s mana that, at a time when league was considered the work of the Devil by many rugby officials he was quietly welcomed back into rugby after World War II. As a 42-year-old, he played his last two first-class games for East Coast in 1947.
A revered British sportswriter and author of the 1950s, Denzil Batchelor, would sum up the rugby legacy left by Nepia. “It’s not a question of whether Nepia was the greatest fullback in history. It’s just a question of which of the others is fit to help him on with his Cotton Oxford boots.”
Phil Gifford has twice been judged New Zealand sportswriter of the year, has won nine New Zealand and two Australasian radio awards, and been judged New Zealand Sports Columnist of the year three times. In 2010 he was honoured with the SPARC lifetime achievement award for services to sports journalism.
