The Team That Changed Rugby Forever

Description

The 1967 All Blacks is a social history of the great 1967 All Blacks tour and what became of the players. In 1967 the All Black rugby team enjoyed an extraordinarily eventful northern hemisphere tour. It involved encounters with lsquo;Flower Childrenrsquo; and seeing a fatal gun-fight in San Francisco, the cancellation of the Irish games after a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, an opposition player paralysed for life, and Colin, now Sir Colin, Meads sent off for violent play. The 1967 team is remembered today as enormously significant in transforming the national style of rugby from a defensive to an attacking focus, acting as a bridge between the past and the game played today. Thus men from an essentially conservative background paradoxically produced a radical change that seems entirely in keeping with our image of the lsquo;60s as a period of radical change. This well-illustrated book situates the tour within that context, drawing on interviews with surviving team members, diaries, contemporary reports, etc.

Alex McKay attended Whangarei Boys High School and was a young ball-boy in Okara Park in 1967. He is probably the only rugby writer who is also a Tibetan/Himalayan historian, a former NGO worker in Bangladesh, North Sea oil rig worker and Sydney private detective. He lives in rural New South Wales with his artist wife.

"McKay has skilfully woven the individual stories of the players throughout the narrative. Twenty three members of the squad were still alive when the book was completed and the author interviewed all of them bar Tony Steel - sadly the former wing has dementia. As well as being a thorough and well researched record of the rugby played by skipper Brian Lochore and his team the book evokes social context of the era..." Book of the Month, Rugby World magazine, August 2017